Present Moment Wonderful Moment

On a cool autumn morning about nine years ago, I was a bit bored of selling books at the Yoga Journal Conference in Estes Park. The conference attendees were all in their yoga classes, and the exhibit hall felt as lively as a deserted chapel. Actually, that is exactly what it was. A dark, dank church on the grounds of the Y.M.C.A. of the Rockies, without a decent view. I practiced yoga, but I had little interest in reading any of the yoga books we had on display. How much can you really say about downward dog or the sun salutation? I also didn't know the brand new bookseller that had been sent along to help us at the booth, and I wasn't in a mood to start a conversation with a stranger.

I grew restless and was upset that I hadn't brought along a book to read. The newspaper, as usual, was filled with talk of impeachment and the upcoming midterm elections. I really wasn't in the mood for politics, and I couldn't bring myself to even open the paper. I sent my buying assistant and the new bookseller off on a break, and I roamed around the booth, desperate for a diversion. I needed to appear engrossed in something, so that the woman from the aura photography booth wouldn't wander over and try to convince me to have my picture taken. The previous day, I'd told her I didn't have an aura, but that hadn't put an end to the hard sell. I also noticed that the woman with the crystals seemed to be sizing me up as a potential customer.

My eyes alighted upon a slender book sitting on our sales table: Present Moment, Wonderful Moment by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. I'm not a Buddhist, but living in Boulder does make you much more aware of Buddhism. The Shambhala Center is three blocks from the store, and several of our employees have been students of the only Buddhist university in America, Boulder's very own Naropa University. One time, the bookstore's owner, a Buddhist, had a monk come in to bless the store by throwing rice everywhere. It took over a year for my computer keyboard to get back to normal. I must admit that I also had developed a passing interest in Buddhism back when I read Herman Hesse's Siddhartha as a teenager. In short, a Buddhist book seemed like a better option than staring at photos of people standing on their heads.

Upon reading the first few passages, I was struck by the simplicity, the clarity and the humbleness of the language. Present Moment is in part an instruction manual for being mindful in your everyday life, and yet Thich Nhat Hanh takes the basic idea of being present and aware at all times and makes it interesting. My favorite section was on washing the dishes. His thoughts on soaking your hands in the warm water and going slowly, savoring the process of this simple task has stayed with me. Often, I think about trying to enjoy this chore because of his words that I read all those years ago.

By the time my assistant and the new bookseller came back, I had read over a dozen passages, and my boredom had fallen away. For the moment, I was the zen master of the bookstore's Yoga Journal booth. When the slow period struck in the afternoon, I took a walk around the Y.M.C.A. complex with the new bookseller. I noticed the breeze against my face, the sound of the wind rustling the aspen leaves, and I made a particular effort to slow down and listen to my co-worker as she told me about her life and how she'd come to Boulder. We poked our heads into different buildings on the grounds, and even saw a herd of elk wandering amid the pine trees. For that afternoon, every step seemed like a discovery.

It was with these thoughts in my head that I drove up to Estes Park, to that same Y.M.C.A. camp, to lead Thich Nhat Hanh down to Boulder for a signing last Tuesday. He had been in Estes to lead a retreat, and at the last minute we had gotten word that he would be willing to do a book signing in Boulder. It wasn't exactly last minute, we had about 12 days to prepare, but in bookselling, with its mapped-out schedules and elaborate author request protocol, it was extremely short notice for such an important event.

Accompanied by my buying office assistant, who happens to be a Tibetan Buddhist, I entered the small lobby of the building where Thich Nhat Hanh was staying and looked around. There were about a dozen monks or monks-in-training (sisters and brothers, as they refer to each other) all dressed in simple brown robes. Most of them were quite young, but there were a few older than me. Many were Asian, but some were Westerners. We were shown the boxes of Thich Nhat Hanh's new book, The Art of Power, that we had dropped off the previous week. He'd signed almost 300 copies for the event. We put "Autographed Copy" stickers on each book, and then we waited for him.

Normally, this would have made me antsy. What if we didn't get back to Boulder in time? We were now in rush hour -- the traffic could be terrible. How were we going to get him into the venue once the doors were open and hundreds of people crammed the entrance? Instead of being preoccupied by all these anxieties, I had quite a different feeling. If not truly peaceful, I was, at least, resigned. The sisters and brothers seemed utterly at ease. So we waited. It was a beautiful late summer day with a storm moving in over the mountains. A few drops of cool rain fell on us as we meandered outside, and I couldn't help but grow nostalgic for that day nine years ago when I'd first read the words of the man I was about to meet.

After an hour or so, Thich Nhat Hanh appeared. Everyone called him Thay, which means teacher. He was bundled up in a heavy brown robe and a simple, but thick knitted hat. He sat in the corner of the room, and I forced myself not to stare. My assistant, who I figured might be able to help me with the etiquette of the situation, was intent on getting a picture taken with him. To be honest, I had thought I'd want one too, but now that I was sitting in the same small room with him, I realized that my camera would stay in my pocket. I didn't want to put anything between me and this moment.

In a few minutes, he got up, and we moved outside to the cars. He moved slowly, yet it was not the walk of an old man, but of a meditative or thoughtful one. He is over 80 now, but he looked barely 60. My assistant managed to get one of the brothers to take a couple of pictures of him walking with Thich Nhat Hanh while I smiled in the distant background.

The event was amazing -- simply one of my most satisfying moments as a bookseller. Almost 600 people attended, and the energy in the room emanated a sense of peace and quietude that is rarely seen in a public place. Before the event even began, dozens of people thanked us for hosting it and giving them a chance to be in Thich Nhat Hanh's presence. As Thich Nhat Hanh walked to the stage with eight of the sisters and brothers, there was complete silence from the standing crowd. As he reached his seat on the stage, he smiled, bowed, and motioned everyone to sit.

His talk was simple. It started with a brief, meditative breathing exercise. He was trying to get the audience into that awareness of the present moment by concentrating on breathing in and out. Deep breaths in and long breaths out. In this exercise, I simply failed. Well, I was not a complete failure. I did not asphyxiate. My mind, as always, was racing. Occasionally, I'd focus and take a few good breathes, but mostly I was just taking in the whole Boulder scene. There were people in nice button-down shirts and there were people in torn T-shirts. There were hippie parents with their kids clinging to them and yuppies who carefully checked their blackberries in the moments before the event. But in this moment, most of them were in rapt attention and focusing on their breath. The room seemed to breathe as one.

My favorite part of the talk was when he discussed going to Vietnam this year and ending 40 years of exile. My wife and I were in Vietnam for three weeks in 2005 and fell in love with its land and people. It was easy to imagine him there, leading thousands of people in healing prayers. He explained that in every part of the country he held services to heal the wounds of the Vietnam war. He spoke with gratitude and amazement about how he was not censored by the Communist government. I found this fascinating. When we traveled through Vietnam, it was almost impossible to talk to people about the war. "It's over," they'd tell us. "Why do you want to talk about such old history?" they'd ask. It was difficult to get a true idea of how they felt, especially older people. It's easy to imagine how Thich Nhat Hanh, with his clarity and humbleness, could break through that and bring out something meaningful.

After his short talk, Thich Nhat Hanh opened it up to questions from the audience. The last question of the evening was one about love. Thich Nhat Hanh paused for a minute or two before answering, as he did with all the questions, and then he gave a beautiful answer that seems like it's worth all of the books in our relationship section combined. "Love is about being there. You must be open and available to your partner. You must be present for their suffering. You must be there emotionally. You cannot be distracted."

As he described his vision of love, I reached over to my wife, sitting beside me, and squeezed her hand. You see, it was in the spirit of those words that we met. She was the young bookseller sent to help me at the Yoga Journal booth in Estes Park nine years ago. She was the person that I made myself available to on that day, as we walked around the Y.M.C.A. camp and got to know each other.

Summer Reading: Part 2

Summer equaled freedom for me, as it does for virtually every school kid, when I was growing up. I remember giddily running home with my friends after the last day of school to jubilantly dive into an endless stream of days spent swimming, playing tennis, and just wasting time, glorious time. I can't remember reading much except for the Philadelphia Bulletin's sports page, Baseball Digest magazine, and just about every Hardy Boys mystery I could get my hands on.

My love of summer disappeared when I started my career as a reporter. Suddenly, summer meant swatting away pesky mosquitoes and enduring near 100-degree heat and humidity as I covered Calvert County's team in southern Maryland's black baseball league every Sunday.

Yes, you read that right. There really were separate white and black semi-pro teams within 40 miles of our nation's capital as recently as 15 years ago. There still may be. I haven't gone back to check it out since I escaped to Colorado. I sweltered with the black team (which, to be honest, had one white player) because the level of play was better, about five times as many fans showed up and the food was far superior to anything going on at the white league's games. Still, despite the feast, it was a grind being out there in the blazing midday sun, trying to blink the salty sweat out of my eyes as I gripped my slippery telephoto lens. Most of the time, I prayed for rain -- a biblical rain.

Once I moved to Boulder, summer became the interminable time between ski seasons. Biting flies appeared every other year, making dealing with the summer tourists nearly unbearable at the bookstore. Try explaining in seven different languages and hand gestures that the flies were all part of the local color, something to write home to Switzerland, France or Japan about. While I was stuck dealing with out-of-town customers and their strange requests ("Where is your Danielle Steel section?" "Don't you have a better map of Aspen?" "How long will it take to drive to Las Vegas?" "Don't they have a place that serves meatloaf in this town?") I prayed for October, when I would take my annual vacation. I wanted to do my sightseeing during the off-season, without the tourist mob.

In short, summer had nothing going for it as far as I was concerned. That giddy feeling of my youth had turned into one of nausea as Memorial Day rolled around. I dreamt of spending my summers skiing in Argentina. A perpetual winter was my fantasy.

All that changed when my wife returned to school six years ago and then became a teacher. Summers were once again about freedom for her. That's one thing I've learned in marriage: your wife's freedom might be worth even more than your own. For me it was freedom from the alarm ringing at 6 a.m, freedom from weekend plans ruined by a knee-high stack of papers waiting to be graded, freedom to actually take a vacation and travel together. And finally, freedom to read a real book together.

My wife and I love to read out loud to one another. She does most of the reading, while I listen until I fall asleep. We've read Vladimir Nabokov, Sherwood Anderson and Guy du Maupassant. We've read contemporary novels, short story collections and even a baseball history. As soon as she started teaching, it became almost impossible to read works of any complexity. She needed to relax in her down time. Instead of Lolita, we read Lemony Snicket. Bye-bye Winesburg, Ohio, hello Snoopy's doghouse. In the last few years, our out-loud reading during the school year has consisted almost exclusively of the collected Peanuts cartoons.

In the summer, we can finally break out a novel or some literary stories. See you later, Linus, hello Richard Ford. Ah, that giddy feeling has returned. Here are some more comments about my summer adventures in reading:

They call this Wildlife: After a week of deliberations and false starts, my wife and I decided to read Richard Ford's Wildlife together. The first line caught us and filled us with a feeling of mystery, anticipation and a sense of nostalgia. "In the Fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him." The next few pages beautifully evoke Great Falls, Montana of that bygone year: the sounds of the crude oil processing and the smell of the wildfires that blazed through that summer.

As we read the book, we were struck with the simplicity and rhythm of Ford's language. The story plays out at a languid pace and is told without much emotion by the narrator, Joe Brinson. Joe rarely shows flashes of anger and is forgiving of his mother, even though she subjects him to many inappropriate and awkward situations. No kid wants his mother to fall in love with another man, but certainly no kid should have to endure witnessing nearly the whole affair. Joe thinks of his father, who is temporarily away fighting the fires, as heroic and wronged by his mother, but he tries to stay even-keeled throughout this tumultuous time.

Reading Wildlife out loud enabled us to slow down and enjoy its meditative qualities. Not much happens, and there are only a few scenes, the entire novel taking place in just three days. Talking about each scene, each scrap of dialogue allowed us to tease out the subtle nuances that are the hallmarks of Ford's fiction. Reading it quickly and silently would have been much less satisfying and perhaps even boring. It was a great way to appreciate one of Ford's forgotten works.

The Joys of Podcasting: Speaking of Richard Ford, one of the most enjoyable experiences I have had this summer was hearing him read John Cheever's magnificent short story "Reunion" on a podcast from The New Yorker magazine. Ford's southern lilt brings out the hopes and disappointments of this story in which a teenager meets his father in Grand Central Station after a long separation. The boy's worship of his father soon turns to keen embarrassment as the father's boorish behavior and alcoholic ways come to the forefront in the brief time they spend together.

Cheever's story is a true marvel in economy. It takes Ford less than 10 minutes to read it and yet it contains a whole world. We see the boy, the child of a divorce, passing into adulthood in this simple encounter, and we see the father spiralling downward, unable even hold a conversation together, let alone a marriage. After he reads the story, Ford answers some questions about it, and his insights truly shed new light on the tale.

I have since subscribed to the The New Yorker's monthly fiction podcast, as well as the The New York Times Book Review's weekly podcast from iTunes. They're free. I've been rewarded with intelligent conversations on books, including lengthy discussions about Joyce Carol Oates and Tessa Hadley, an interview with Stephen Carter, and Junot Diaz reading one of his early short stories. It's a great feature of iTunes that an old musician friend of mine turned me on to. I asked if he downloaded music, and he replied that he was addicted to podcasts, and that there was an amazing array of literary podcasts on iTunes. I scoffed at him, until I heard Ford reading Cheever -- now I'm hooked.

Can't ask Jeeves, Try Baxter: Each summer when I'm in Cape May, NJ, I read one of P.G. Wodehouse's works. Somehow, amidst the Victorian mansions and beautifully tended gardens of that beach town, it seems fitting to delve into the world of British Lords, their wayward family members and their all-knowing butlers.

Wodehouse seems out of favor these days. Hardly anyone I know reads him, and when I mention him to people, they often think he's probably a bit stale and irrelevant. Nothing could be further from the truth. His humor is no more stale than Shakespeare's, and his sense of irreverence towards the moneyed classes has become even more relevant as the income gap continues to grow in this country.

The reason that more people aren't reading Wodehouse is that he is writing in a genre that is largely forgotten -- the farce. On the surface, his tales of mistaken identities, goofy subterfuges, and misplaced love appear to be silly. Even if you get beneath the surface, his plots are still quite ridiculous. But his writing and his wordplay are remarkable. He sets up verbal conundrums and deftly works his way out of them with clever witticisms. No contemporary author, not even David Sedaris or Dave Barry, makes me laugh out loud as often. I am terribly annoying when I'm reading these books because I insist on interrupting my wife, regardless of what she is doing, to read her humorous passages. She always laughs, usually because she knows I won't stop until she does.

This year, I read a collection of stories, Lord Emsworth and Others. These stories don't include his most famous character, the brilliant butler Jeeves (whose name is only known to many people because of the Ask Jeeves website that has since been simplified to Ask.com). Most of the stories in this collection are set in Blandings Castle and feature Lord Emsworth, a complete dimwit, who believes he's an expert gardener (sounds a bit like the current Prince of Wales). The plots usually revolve around the Lord, his butler Baxter -- who actually runs the estate and drives Emsworth batty -- and his bossy, imperious sister Lady Constance.

The Overlook Press has done a magnificent job over the last several years in reissuing Wodehouse's books in small, attractive and very affordable hardbacks. The books are actually the perfect size, smaller but much more sturdy than trade paperbacks. They remind me of the old classic Modern Library titles or of the editions that Algonquin used to put out of Kaye Gibbons' and Julia Alvarez's novels. They just feel good in your hands.

There's no better way to spend a summer day than with a book that feels just right.

After the Summer Hiatus

It's been a long, hot summer here at Kash's Book Corner. We (my wife and I) took a three-week trip to the East Coast to visit, literally, a hundred relatives. During our adventures to my mother-in-law's family reunion, we managed to squeeze in the Maid of the Mist boat ride at Niagara Falls, July 4th fireworks in Washington D.C. and a dolphin-watching trip off of the coast of Cape May, New Jersey.

But the true highlight was the family reunion in Allegany, New York. My wife met dozens of second cousins and I spent the weekend wearing a name tag that said, "in-law descendant of Eugene Martiny." It made me feel a bit like an outcast, and for awhile I tried to float the idea of an in-law escape to a minor league baseball game (with all the other guys stuck wearing in-law name tags) or at least organize an in-law-only softball game, but I didn't get any takers.

Once we returned home, my softball career got going in earnest. I signed up with a slow-pitch team for the first time ever and suddenly found myself back on the mound after a 29-year break. It was an eye-opening experience as I got shelled for about 15 runs a game. At least I didn't walk too many people, and now our team has turned it around and we are winning big. I have learned that you can't intimidate hitters by beaning them in slow-pitch like you can in Little League.

In between games, I was at the store helping with the Harry Potter madness, visiting with dozens of reps shilling their Fall books and pulling returns as fast as I possibly could to make way for the new books. All of this as the temperature soared to a high of 87 degrees in my mezzanine office shared with the other buyers and the promotions staff (we have swamp coolers, not air-conditioners at the store). At least at those temperatures, the reps have to think twice before taking the time to try selling me a lousy book.

Through it all, I have had a book, sometimes two, by my side. In fact, I read incessantly at the family reunion, got sand in the spines of two different books at the beach and was toting a large John Updike tome as the bombs were bursting in air over D.C. on the Fourth. Here are some of my thoughts on my summer reading and experiences:

Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows: I am convinced that we will never again see a scene like the midnight release of J.K. Rowling's last installment. It was complete insanity at the store, with thousands of people participating in activities and waiting for midnight. I spent the night out in front of the store, signing "graduation certificates" to all of the "kids" who completed our various activities. Over 600 people graduated, including several people who were a lot older than Harry Potter.

As midnight approached, we booted everyone out of the store, set up a table at the front door and brought the books out of their secret storage location. The crowd was pushing against the table and people were gazing with a look of savage anticipation at the boxes of books behind the table. The level of excitement was unbelievable. Suddenly, I knew how the Rolling Stones must feel right before they run (or nowadays, limp) on stage. After a raucous countdown of the last 30 seconds until midnight, we began handing out books as fast as possible. We redeemed 850 vouchers in 30 minutes that night, the line nearly two blocks long. Our sales are well over 2,000 copies at this point. All of this at a store where 100 is considered an excellent sale and enough to land a book in our monthly top five.

As a bookseller, it was a thrilling evening, but as a reader, I don't really care too much. I just can't work up any enthusiasm over wizards and school boys. There are enough stories and characters in the real world to keep me occupied. Several people I trust have told me I must read these books, but I just shrug my shoulders and say "someday".

Amy Bloom's Away: I truly admire Amy Bloom's writing. She exhibits a level of craftsmanship and emotional honesty that is rare. Her collection of stories, A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You contains some of the most perfect sentences that I have ever read. After I got a few stellar recommendations, I picked up the reader's copy of her new novel, Away, with eager anticipation. The first 90 pages met my expectations. Bloom tells the story of Lillian Leyb, a Jewish Russian emigre in 1924 New York.

Leyb has lived through a pogrom and is now trying to survive in the Lower East side tenement houses by finding work as a seamstress for a Yiddish theater. She soon begins an affair with both the handsome leading man and his father, the theater's owner. These scenes bring to life a lost world in a way that would have made I.B. Singer proud. The writing features finely honed description, beautiful language, striking scenes and characters that are revealed in a few deft strokes.

It's when Lillian leaves this rich world of broken New York Jews that the novel falls apart. She decides she must return to Russia to find her daughter, who she believed was dead. A cousin has landed in New York and told her that the four-year-old survived the night of terror at the hands of Russian peasants and is now living with a neighboring family back in Russia. Because of a lack of funds, Lillian decides to cross America by hook or by crook, get to Alaska and walk into Russia over the Bering Strait. Bloom turns Lillian's adventures into a picaresque. After she exits the world of the Yiddish theater, the novel just becomes a series of events. While Bloom might be able to match I.B. Singer, her Lillian is no match for the hero of Saul Bellow's picaresque, Augie March.

An action-packed adventure story does not suit Bloom's skills. We learn very little of Lillian's interior life, and the characters she meets are barely more than caricatures. We even get the tough whore with the heart of gold, for god's sake. It is terribly disappointing that Bloom would hurry a story along like this. I only know of one other person who has reacted to this novel as negatively as I have, so perhaps it will be a big hit. Maybe booksellers will be pushing it into the hands of female readers, but I, for one, will patiently wait for Bloom's next effort.

Sex in the Sixties: Ian McEwan's version of sex in the early 1960s, as depicted in his new novel On Chesil Beach, is bleak. Two lovers on their wedding night are horrendously awkward with each other in a beach side resort on the Dorset coast. Edward is so excited by the thought of finally possessing Florence (of possessing anyone, really) that he can't even manage to get her dress off. Florence is so repulsed by the idea of sex that she hurries things along because she can't stand the feel of Edward's tongue in her mouth.

Much has been made about how 1962 was really still the 1950s as far as sex was concerned. In a short film about the novel made by Powell's Bookstore, McEwan's esteemed editor Nan Talese makes that exact point. People were uptight, little was said about sex and wedding night disasters were not uncommon during the early 1960s.

I was feeling relieved not to have lived during the repressed times of the Kennedy administration, until I read Couples by John Updike later in the summer. This 1968 novel is set between the fall of 1962 and the spring of 1964. It's initial action, which involves wife-swapping, clandestine affairs, and outrageous flirting, occurs at almost the same moment in time that Florence is trying not to puke during her wedding-night French kiss.

Couples is the story of 10 married couples in their thirties living in the small New England town of Tarbox. They party, go on ski vacations and jump into bed with each other. Two couples, the Applebys and the Smiths, are so entwined that that rest of the couples refer to them as the Applesmiths. It all made me wonder if people like McEwan's Florence and Edward really did exist in 1962. Perhaps if Florence and Edward can just survive their honeymoon, the secret world of marital sex and extramarital sex will suddenly open to them.

I've come to think that these two books represent sexual extremes of that year. In Updike's America, where the pill has taken hold, these bored married couples are free to experiment in ways that weren't open to them previously. In McEwen's England, the pill is just a rumor, and in the straight-laced world of Oxford's upper crust, sex is only whispered about.

I found that reading these two books within a few months of each other was a fascinating look at what fiction can do. I realized how it can illuminate the inner lives of people and the complex attitudes of a time much better than history can. My guess is that both of these sexual realities existed. It entertains me to think about Florence and Edward leaving the Dorset coast behind to emigrate to the hothouse of Tarbox.

A World Where Lattes are Offensive: Nathan McCall, the author of the superb memoir, Makes Me Wanna Holler, tackles the issue of urban gentrification in his debut novel, Them, to be released in November. Set in Atlanta, Them shows how young, white, rich couples (gay and straight) come to take over the neighborhood of Martin Luther King's birth home. We see the story through the eyes of Barlowe Reed, a single 40-year-old man renting a home in disrepair with his 25-year old nephew.

McCall's novel does an excellent job of getting in the heads of both white and blacks in this neighborhood. What seem like improvements to the whites (bike lanes, coffee shops) are anathema to what is important to the black residents, who are just trying to pay their next month's rent or mortgage. Barlowe is trying to navigate this world as he begins a wary friendship with his new white female neighbor. They talk through the fence that the white neighbor has put up about the changes in the area and how they feel. As halting and as misunderstood as their conversations are, they seem to represent about the only attempt being made to bridge the gap between the races.

McCall is not the most nuanced of writers. Some of his scenes seem too direct to be realistic, but he creates true characters on both sides of the racial divide. He allowed me to see this issue in a much more human way. Every year, and this summer was no exception, my wife and I visit neighborhoods in Philadelphia and Washington D.C. that have been gentrified in the last 10 years. Sometimes we enjoy our latte at a cool new coffee shop without even considering what might have stood on that spot before the cafe, filled with smartly dressed whites, took over.

McCall makes it clear in an entertaining and interesting way that gentrification has its human toll, and that we need to recognize this before these traditionally black neighborhoods disappear. There is history and life in those ramshackle neighborhoods that whites are scared to even enter, or that they drive through with their windows rolled up tight. There is community and common decency, even if the yards aren't kept up and there isn't a place to get a good cup of coffee.

Chat Amongst Yourselves

Sherman Alexie's new novel, Flight, contains a reading group guide so thorough and meticulously written that you might think you could skip Alexie's own words and get the gist of his work with the guide. The reading group guide, 44 elaborate questions filled with quotations from the novel, even has its own author cited (actually, the credit says "prepared by"), Barbara Putnam. (Personally, I prefer to have my meals prepared and my books written.) It's like buying The Sound and the Fury with the Cliffs Notes bound in.

I must admit I have a love/hate relationship with these reading group guides. I can't tell you how many times a decent reading group conversation at the store has screeched to an abrupt halt because someone pulls out a question from the book's guide. It's usually something absurd: Do you think the narrator's love of cats influenced her decision to strangle her child in the sandbox? Or perhaps just a bit more subtle: The author mentions popular songs in several scenes. What do bands like U2 and The Police mean to the main character? What does music mean to you? I sigh loudly when these questions are brought into the conversation, feeling like I'm back in school with a mediocre English teacher. I really don't want to be back in a high school classroom. I really don't want to feel like the love of literature is being beaten out of me by a bored wannabe poet who is just trying to make it to summer break.

The few times I enjoy the guides are when I'm reading a book on my own and I'm left confused or uncertain about a character or a plot element. Sometimes ruminating on the questions in the back of the book brings me to a point of clarity that I couldn't have achieved if I had just put the book down and moved onto something else. Am I the only one who thinks reading group guides are much better without a group?

My biggest problem with reading group guides, and frankly, with reading groups themselves, is that style and form are almost never discussed. The questions are always about plot, motivation, setting and what the author's opinions might be. Those aren't very interesting topics for discussion.

Instead, I want to know why an author chose to tell a story in first person instead of third person. Can we trust the first-person narrator? If not, where are the hidden clues that make us doubt? I want to talk about why an author chooses certain words, and how that language creates a mood or a setting through its sparseness or volubility.

The best reading group guides, including some of HarperCollins' P.S. titles, contain interviews with the authors, or lists of further reading put together by the author. This was the case with Janis Hallowell's excellent and underrated novel, The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn. My favorite feature was Hallowell's list of recommended movies that are on the same theme as her book. Hallowell came in to speak to our store's reading group about her novel, and when we asked her about the reading group guide, she seemed a little embarrassed by the whole thing. We assured her it was great, and I can only hope that if the publishers are going to insist on including these guides, the authors will be involved in creating them. Somehow, this adds some humor and makes it feel less academic.

Back to Alexie's novel for a moment. I really loved this novel and enjoyed its quirkiness, its shifting time periods and the growth of the narrator, Zits. When I finished and saw that there was a reading guide, I was actually kind of excited. On the surface, this novel seems like a simple tale. An half-Indian boy living in various foster homes falls under the spell of an evil person, goes to a bank with a couple of guns and starts shooting. Just as he is shot dead on the scene, his consciousness is jettisoned out of his body and out of the present day, into an FBI agent in 1975. This time-travel-body-shifting continues, and he picks up a few lessons along the way, until he is reunited with his own body. It's a lark, like Vonnegutt's best work, and it makes you think differently about familiar moments in history.

But I knew that it couldn't be as straight-forward as it appears on the surface, so I turned to the reading group guide. It was a slog. I know that these are well-thought-out questions, but by the fifth one I needed a drink and by the tenth one all the joy I had from reading the book was seeping out of me. I had to stop. These were questions for teachers or professors to use in their classes. These were questions that deserved essays in response, not flippant, wine-soaked, book-club chatter.

Here's an example of one such question: "As in the Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, we are startled to read about people rummaging through Dumpsters for food just to survive, even in this land of great plenty. Zits says, 'I hate my country. There are so many rich people who don't share. . . . They're like spoiled little ten-year old bullies on the playground . . . if you try to get even one spin on the merry-go-round, the bullies beat the shit out of you' (page 26). Do you see any of this in your community?"

So what if I see people dumpster-diving in my community? That doesn't particularly help me to sympathize more with Zits. It certainly doesn't bring me any closer to understanding the depth of Alexie's work.

If Flight had to include a reading group guide, I wish Alexie would have done it himself. He is a funny and insightful person with a lot to say and many interesting opinions about American culture, history and politics. Ironically, this reading guide makes it seem like he's a dead white author, instead of a vibrantly living American Indian writer.

Joyce Carol Oates in Boulder

I can clearly remember my first encounter with Joyce Carol Oates. I was suffering through a hot and humid summer in Calvert County, Maryland, just outside of Washington D.C. without air conditioning. On the days when I didn't have a game to cover for the paper, I would dress up in a button-down shirt and nice pants (to look like a respectable consumer) and sit in the furniture sections of different stores reading a book or the Sunday Washington Post to get out of the heat. One day, I took the new book that I'd discovered displayed at Kramerbooks in Dupont Circle, Oates' paperback Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart.


It was while sitting on a cool, leather La-Z-Boy chair in a mall just south of Annapolis that the intertwined fates of Iris, a white girl, and Jinx, a promising black basketball player who kills a white man to protect Iris, drew me in to the unique world of Oates' writing. I read the novel for hours as the agitated and bored sales clerks periodically asked me if I needed any help. I'd wave them off and say I was just testing out the chair. By the time I got up to leave, the mid-afternoon sun was setting, and the heat of the day was finally dissipating.


My energy was certainly not dissipating as I left the mall just in time to see carloads of high school kids arriving to watch Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Despite sitting still all day, I was completely wired, as if I had lived through a movie thriller. My senses felt heightened, and my mind was filled with thoughts that would haunt me all through another sweaty night. Oates' prose, her diction, her fevered descriptions had entered me like a virus. Reading her was like tumbling down a hill when you are a little kid. It starts out as a fun lark, but if the hill is too steep, it becomes unstoppable, almost dangerous, and it leaves you dizzy. With Oates, the hills are often treacherous cliffs.

After that, I was hooked on the adrenaline rush that her prose gave me. In the last 15 years, I have read over 20 of her novels, some under her pseudonyms Rosamond Smith or Lauren Kelley, and more than 10 collections of her short stories. Among all of these works, only three of her other novels struck me the way the tale of Iris and Jinx did in Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart.


You Must Remember This, another in Oates' line of simply but superbly titled novels, tells a tension-filled story set in a small industrial town in 1950s upstate New York. The model family unravels under the incestuous passion between a niece and her uncle. Felix, the ex-boxer uncle, is one of Oates' most memorable characters. What I Lived For features a minute-by-minute first-person narrative of a small-town politician over a long Memorial Day weekend. As all facets of his life seem to come unglued at the same time, the reader becomes transfixed by Corky Corcoran's rush of thoughts, anxieties, and bad decisions. Finally, her National Book Award winning Them is an extremely satisfying epic that views American life from the Great Depression to the tensions of the Sixties through the eyes of one family.


Given my near obsession with her work, I was extremely excited when the bookstore was able to schedule her for an appearance in Boulder for her new novel, The Gravedigger's Daughter. Before I even knew what I was saying, I volunteered to do the introduction. As the weeks wore on, I began to agonize about what my remarks might be. What could I possibly say that wouldn't sound trite?


I had seen Oates speak once before, at a multi-author breakfast, and it was a truly brilliant performance. Even people who weren't fans of hers, and there were many in the audience that day, sat with mouths agape as she regaled us with tales of her family, a perfect 5-minute exposition on Darwin's theories of natural selection and other asides that left no question that we were in the presence of someone with a renaissance mind. Perhaps most surprisingly, she also had the crowd in stitches with her self-deprecating wit and well-timed bon mots.


Finally, on the day of her talk, I sat down and composed my introduction. I tried to keep it simple; after all, no one would be there to hear me talking. When I was finished delivering the intro, she thanked me and said she was honored by my "gracious" words. I realize that "gracious" does not have the connotation of "brilliant" or "witty" or "insightful," but hey -- to hear one of your favorite authors say your name into a microphone and attach any sort of compliment to it is more than you can hope for, really.


With that introduction to my introduction, here it is:


Joyce Carol Oates is one of the world's most eminent literary authors. She has written short stories, novels, poetry, plays and essays since the early 1960s. Her debut collection of short stories, By the North Gate, was named a New York Times Notable book of the year in 1963. She has followed that up with 38 more books that have made the Times' year-end list. Oates won the National Book Award for her novel Them in 1970. She has been featured in Best American Short Stories 17 times. The O'Henry Awards have twice given her a special award for continuing achievement for her short story writing.


Oates' vivid characters, riveting plots and breathless prose (her writing often leaves me breathless with tension when I'm reading it) are the hallmarks of both her novels and her short stories. In novels such as Them, Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart and We Were the Mulvaneys, Oates' intensely realistic and psychologically rich characters bring to life some of America's most difficult issues, such as racism, sexism, violence and poverty, in ways only great fiction can.


It is in part because of this willingness to tackle humanity's most difficult challenges, and to bring to light the biases that women face, that she was just named the 2007 Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.


I cannot think of a more apt award for Joyce Carol Oates (unless it would be the Noble Prize in Literature) because through her work, one can gain a clearer understanding of humanity in all its various guises. Characters ranging from innocent high school girls to serial killers, from corrupt local politicians to crusaders against corporate corruption, from poverty-stricken inner-city men and women to wealthy suburbanites are all given their due in her work. When Joyce Carol Oates creates these characters, it is never as a stereotype, and we as readers find our sympathies going out to people who on first glance we would revile.


Tonight, she is here with her newest novel, The Gravedigger's Daughter. It is the story of a girl, Rebecca, born to Jewish parents forced to flee Hitler's Germany. After they arrive in upstate New York, they find that the terror that they escaped in Europe still torments their relationships and lives. Rebecca, left orphaned through terribly violent acts, must make her way through an America rife with danger.


Please welcome Joyce Carol Oates to Boulder.

A few notes on the event:

• I asked Oates about the Humanist of the Year award. She seemed pleased but a bit befuddled by the whole thing. She had just received the award last weekend in Portland. "They are kind of an odd group," she said. "Well-meaning, and very idealistic."
• She read several short sections from The Gravedigger's Daughter, setting each of them up with an explanation of the setting and the characters. She called it her most personal novel -- it is based on her grandmother's life -- and one that she found extremely difficult to publish. She wrote it and then threw it in a drawer for several years before taking it to her publisher.
• During the question-and-answer period, she was asked about On Boxing, her book of essays centering largely on Mike Tyson. She talked at length about what drew her to the sport and her experiences in watching Tyson. She approaches boxing from a proletariat point of view. She looks at the waves of immigrants getting involved in the sport over the years and thinks about this in literary terms. She was shocked by Tyson's ear-biting of Evander Hollyfield. "He might have had the talent of a great champion, but he didn't have the heart."
• Oates said that she imagines the scenes of her novels and stories as if they were movies while she walks or jogs. Before she sits down to compose the words, the scene is nearly complete in her head. She also mentioned how important structure is to her. "You wouldn't build a house by putting a board here and then another one on top of it. You have a plan, a structure. A novel is the same."
• Before the event, she signed dozens of copies of books for the store. When she was finished signing the books, she wanted some time to herself before her talk, so she could continue reading Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes. It's the only Conrad she hadn't read yet, she told me as I left the room.

Meeting Philip Roth

Kashkashian's complaint

Book Expo America was held in New York City's sterile and hard-to-reach Jacob K. Javitz Center last week, but the show's real excitement happened in restaurants, bars, apartments, and the rooftops of Manhattan, where booksellers got to mingle with authors, editors and publishers. I'm usually immune to celebrity and consequently manage to get myself into in-depth, interesting and sometimes absurd conversations with various authors at these get-togethers. Heck, two years ago, I ended up talking to Edie Falco (her uncle wrote a book) about women's shoes.

My immunity met its match when I was invited by Harcourt to a fairly small cocktail reception with Philip Roth at Cafe Gray on Columbus Circle. Two weeks before leaving for New York, I gingerly held the invitation in my hands, frightened it might spontaneously combust. I called and R.S.V.Ped immediately, and then 10 minutes later I wasn't sure if the phone call had actually taken place, so I emailed. I was like a lifelong, devout Catholic getting a chance to drink with the Pope (you know, Pope John Paul II, not the current curmudgeon). My religion is literature, and the closest thing to the divine that I will ever get is the mind of Mr. Roth.

Once at the show, I stumbled around the hot, humid show floor in a daze on Friday, glancing at publisher's booths, scrawling incomprehensible observations into my tattered green notebook and greeting friends and colleagues alike with a blank stare. I could only hope that my stare and brief mumblings were written off as the byproduct of being intensely focused on the show. But I was really in a fog, thinking, "I'm meeting Philip Roth tonight. I'm meeting the man who created Nathan Zuckerman in a few hours."

Why this adulation? I first read Roth's Portnoy's Complaint when I was a junior in college, in a seminar on Jewish American writers. I wanted to get in touch with my literary heritage, and since there weren't any seminars on Italian or Armenian writers, I was left with my Jewish legacy. The course list was basically a hall-of-fame of living Jewish writers, including Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, I.B. Singer, Cynthia Ozick and Philip Roth.

Philip Roth's contribution to this class, Alexander Portnoy, made me laugh harder then I ever had in my life. I read passages out loud to my friends at night. The biology and economics majors would laugh until they were snorting and tearing up, not quite believing that this novel, filled with masturbation and sexual scenes, could be my homework while they stared at equations and deciphered lab results. Short of sex, what could be a better assignment for a 20-year-old guy than reading Portnoy's Complaint? It would take me years to see the psychological mess that Portnoy was, the unhappiness that prevailed. In college, we all wanted to be Alexander Portnoy. What a glorious misery that would have been.

I began devouring Roth's books once I graduated and was no longer fettered to endless reading lists. First, I picked up Roth's newest novel at the time, The Counterlife. My God, it's as good as Portnoy even though it is completely different, I remember thinking. Roth's narrative tricks, his ability to create fiction within fiction was truly illuminating. He was like a complex, ribald Vonnegut. He was an American Milan Kundera (another writer I was reading like crazy at the time). In the end, I realized he was truly like no one else. Like Faulkner and Bellow, he was simply an American original.

Over the years, I have read and reread virtually all of his books, including the complete tales of his literary alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, starting with the Ghost Writer and clear through to his upcoming novel, Exit Ghost. My other favorites include Patrimony, his marvelous memoir about taking care of his father, and Sabbath's Theater, perhaps his funniest novel. Roth has never disappointed me. His work challenges its readers, assuming that they are intelligent, well-read people who are willing to follow him wherever he may go.

It was with all of this knowledge weighing me down that I entered the Cafe Gray. I spotted him standing by the tall windows facing Columbus Circle. I was relieved to see that he has aged better than Nathan Zuckerman, who is incontinent, impotent and somewhat memory-addled in Exit Ghost. Roth was trim, vigorous and engaged in a lively conversation. He looked wonderful for a man approaching his mid-70s. I must admit, my first selfish thought was "he's got several books left in him."

I was approached by two people at once as I started to slowly drift towards Roth. The first was his editor, Janet Silver. I have met her on a few occassions and hold her in extremely high esteem because she, of all the people in the world, edits Roth, and she is a gracious, down-to-earth, patient woman who is willing to answer a myriad of questions from nosy booksellers like me about Roth year after year. The second was a waiter carrying a tray of appetizers. All three of us converged at once and the waiter held up a tray of mushroom risotto balls for us to try.

I bit into one of the fried balls as Janet said hello. The volcanic insides of the risotto exploding into my mouth and searing my tongue, I tried to remain calm and respond to her. She offered to introduce me to Philip Roth. I nodded quickly and we spoke briefly as we crossed the room towards Roth. He was engaged in a conversation with a few other booksellers. I couldn't take my eyes off of him and felt some guilt for staring at him like he was an animal in the zoo. Here is the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author in his native habitat, I thought.

Suddenly his eyes fell on me, and we were quickly introduced. Now was my moment to speak to Philip Roth. Over the past 20 years, I have come up with hundreds and hundreds of questions that I wanted to ask him about his fiction, about his relationships with other writers, about his views on the world. But now, as I stood before him, my mind was a complete void of all of those thoughts. I held his warm, dry hand for a beat too long and said, "Thank you for all of the years of enjoyment you have given me."

He became animated and said, "But I haven't given you years, I have given you books." I mumbled a reply to the books equaling years. He asked me where I was from, and I told him Boulder, which seemingly left no impression upon him. As I was about to speak again, a waiter popped up between us with a tray of raw tuna. I looked down at the tray and when I looked back up Roth was turning to his right to meet another bookseller.

I moved back and sought the solace of the bar. I had gotten one sentence in to Roth and I had been contradicted. I had been faced, in the parlance of my youth. Well, I thought to myself as I swirled my complimentary Scotch-on-the-rocks, it was a damn stupid thing to say. You've got to be precise when you speak to the master.

As the party went on, I spoke to several other booksellers I know. Almost everyone was jazzed-up and a bit frightened to be meeting Philip Roth. Some even seemed more obsessed with him than I was. As the evening wore on, the cocktails took hold and the waiters broke into almost every conversation with their trays of hors d'oeuvres, and I became determined to work my way back to Roth. About an hour later, he was leaning with his back up to the windows speaking to a friend of mine from Arizona. I wandered over to them and gradually entered the conversation.

I asked Roth about his new book, Exit Ghost, which I was only 80 pages into, and whether it was influenced by Bellow, particularly his novel Humboldt's Gift. Zuckerman ruminates and rereads a favorite short-story-writer from his past, who he had a brief meeting with in the 1950s. Roth said it wasn't, although he thought the Bellow novel was a wonderful book and that he could see how I could have that impression in the beginning of his novel. "It goes off in a much different direction. You'll see."

Just as another waiter threatened to come between us with a tray of oversized shrimp, I moved closer to Roth and boxed-out the waiter. "I have always thought that Sabbath's Theater is one of your best books, one of the greatest novels written in the last 25 years, and yet it doesn't seem to get the same acclaim as some of your other works. Why is that?" He took a deep breath, "I agree with you," he said, "but the women didn't like it." I instinctively rolled my eyes without even realizing it, and a smile came over his face. "You roll your eyes," he said. "I do too. But there you have it."

That was it. I thanked him for his time and moved away. It wasn't a great conversation, but I held the great author's attention for a few moments. It was more than I ever got to do with the rest of those Jewish writers that I admired so much in that class. That all-star cast of living writers, with the exception of Ozick and Roth, have all died in the intervening years, and I never got to look any of them in the eye or ask them a queston.

In the end, it's Roth's words straight onto the page that are what has added so much to my life over the years. Even hours of small talk at a cocktail party in New York could never match a single page of his well-written prose for me.

A few days later, as I read Exit Ghost, I came across the following passage. It sums up, in part, how I occasionally feel about all the hoopla that surrounds books these days, including reading groups, author dinners, Oprah and even blogs like mine. It speaks to the heart of why even the greatest of events, like meeting Philip Roth, can never equal the experience of just reading. In it a character rails against the cult of personality that surrounds literature and how to rectify it.

"I'd forbid all public discussion of literature in newspapers, magazines, and scholarly periodicals. I'd forbid all instruction in literature in every grade school, high school, college, and university in the country. I'd outlaw reading groups and Internet book chatter, and police the bookstores to be certain that no clerk ever spoke to a customer about a book and that the customers did not dare to speak to one another. I'd leave the readers alone with the books, to make of them what they would on their own."

I read this passage out loud to my wife and told her that's how I feel. She laughed and said, "You love talking about literature. You do it all the time. Philip Roth probably doesn't even think that."

She was right, of course. The passage is part of a ranting letter to the editor written by a woman suffering from a brain tumor that has made her mentally unstable. Still, it was something to think about. I continued reading the book, and for the next hour I was lost in a creation from Philip Roth's mind -- true heaven.

Then We Came to Greatness

It's not easy to recognize or even define artistic greatness. Sometimes it sneaks up on us in a darkened movie theater when we find ourselves glued to our seats at the end of a film, watching the credits roll by, in a daze that we are no longer part of the lives of the film's characters, that we are exiled from the film's world, much as I felt at the end of Children of Men.

Occasionally, we miss greatness entirely, believing what we have read or seen is too strange or too childlike. This was my early reaction in college to Picasso's cubist paintings as I tried to logically put his fragmented figures together in my mind.

Maybe the images or the sounds are too dissonant and jarring, and we don't realize that we are in the company of a true genius because it is almost painful to hear or watch. I still can't get a grasp on jazz legend Ornette Coleman's atonal blaring.

There are even times when we just can't bring ourselves to join the crowd in acknowledging true magnificence. I have a dear friend who claims that he can't stand the Beatles. They are too cloying, in his opinion. When I caught him singing along to "We Can Work it Out," in a restaurant one day, he denied it. I've had conversations with seemingly rational people about "The Sopranos," perhaps the greatest thing in television history, and they are dismissive because of the violence or because the mafia genre is overdone or simply because it is television.

My rumination on the nature of greatness leads me to this: I stumbled upon a truly great novel a couple of weeks ago, yet I didn't realize its greatness while I was reading it. To say I accidentally read Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End is a bit dishonest. After all, it got a glowing front-page review in The New York Times Book Review. A few days after that review, a copy arrived at my house from the publisher, Little Brown.

I began reading a few pages at a time, between weightier tomes and books that I had obligations to plow through. At first, I was humored by Ferris' sitcom-like subject matter (the office of a marketing firm during the late 1990s) and the sense of doom that pervades this novel from the beginning. The first line of the book is: "Layoffs were upon us."

I found some of the goofier tales hard to believe. Do people really play so many practical inane jokes upon their co-workers? Do employees really have hours and hours of time to kill telling silly stories? I told my wife about this believability crisis I was having, and she mentioned a story she'd heard from the husband of a fellow teacher at her school, who worked in a corporate marketing firm. He recently returned from a week-long business trip to discover that everything in his cubicle was gift-wrapped. His keyboard, his mouse, the phone, all of his photos, his pens, his reports -- even his desk, for crying out loud -- were all meticulously wrapped. When I got to an incident in Ferris' novel that frighteningly mirrored this man's life, I suddenly realized that one man's sitcom is another man's reality show.

I was also intrigued by the novel's unique point of view. Then We Came to the End is the first novel I have ever read narrated in the first-person plural, the "we." The marketing firm's underlings all combine to speak in one voice. It's strangely disconcerting and humorous at first, and it serves to keep the reader at an arms-length from the characters in the opening pages. But gradually, through the jocular tone and the unusual point of view that functions essentially as a limited omniscient narrator (with at least one person in the "we" seeming to know everything that happens in the marketing firm) a cast of compassionate and quite complex characters emerge.

What seems to start as a gimmicky literary device develops into an essential backbone of this tale. Ferris completely pulls it off, and you simply cannot imagine this story being told so well in any other voice. It's simply a miracle in style, discipline and imagination. The last time I tried to give myself wholeheartedly to an alternative point of view like this was Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, with it's edgy second-person "you" narrative. That novel didn't end well for me, and I've stayed safely in the realm of first and third person narrations for the last twenty years.

As you get to know the office workers -- the angry Tom Mota, who's wife has left him, the inscrutable supervisor Joe Pope, the insecure pill-popping Carl Garbedian, the grieving Janine Gorjanc, the storytelling confidante Benny Shassburger and the ruthless Karen Woo -- to name just a few, it becomes tempting to guess just which one at anytime is contributing to the "we" narrative. But the story moves so swiftly and develops so compassionately, that it's not worth trying to figure it out.

Slowly, the jokes start receding into the background, while the gossip of their boss' breast cancer and the terrifying realities of the layoffs move to the foreground. Ferris deftly explores so many critical issues of contemporary society in these pages. His sterile workplace of cubicles, desks and chairs and white walls, turns out to be a world of intense humanity where issues of death, illness and love are played out.

What do we owe one another in our work relationships? In one storyline, the rumors of breast cancer reach a crescendo, and the employees finally start to realize that perhaps their boss needs their help to deal with the issue. Maybe action, rather than just simple gossip, is needed. In another, the mother of a dead child is so stricken with grief that she goes to the local McDonald's and sits in rubber balls up to her neck in the PlayLand area during lunch. Her co-workers secretly spy on her for days, until they are caught gawking by their supervisor. When the extent of her grief is finally acknowledged, the craziest, seemingly most unfeeling of the workers does something heroic to alleviate her pain.

Ferris briefly changes the humorous tone of the novel for a chapter halfway through, entitled, "The Thing to Do and the Place to Be." Almost everything about this 35-page section is different from the rest of the book. A measured, limited third-person narrative replaces the previously ubiquitous chorus, and the story is all about Lynn Mason, the boss with breast cancer. It's the evening before her surgery, and she's at a loss about how to spend the time, agonizing between calling her ex-lover and spending the night alone. In the end, she returns to her office, choosing her true love, work.

It's hard to describe the impact that this section has on the novel. From this point on, there is true pathos behind all of the silly humor. We also know, without a doubt, that we are in the hands of a brilliant writer. Stripped of his literary gimmick, Ferris reveals himself in this Lynn Mason chapter as an author of startling prose power, capable of producing conventional scenes as rich as Alice McDermott at her finest.

By the end of the novel, our initial impressions of this world that is dying have been completely altered. The layoffs never stop, bankruptcy is inevitable, and the people in the "we" become fewer and fewer; yet an underlying humanity remains. It will forever be impossible to think about the people stuck in those endless cubicles in the high-rises of every city in the same way, or even to watch the comedy show The Office without the realization that wherever there are people, there is the full breadth and scope of the human experience.

I have not been able to stop thinking about this novel for the past few weeks. That was the first clue that I had read something more than merely good and entertaining. It has only gradually dawned on me that Ferris' work was not just a successful literary experiment, but great literature. For me, it joins a select few novels from that last six years, Atonement by Ian McEwan, Any Human Heart by William Boyd, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, that truly strive for and reach genius. I must note that I have not read Cormac McCarthy's The Road yet and have been told that it too is a singular novel.

I try not to make too many literary proclamations about awards, but I will say that if this novel does not win the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award, they may as well just stop honoring novels.