2008: By The Numbers

The Wal-Mart Effect - 20 Down, 32 to Go

A birthday gift from a friend who found me too quick to criticize the world’s largest retailer, Charles Fishman’s The Wal-Mart Effect details how the company changed shopping and business in America, then around the world, for better and for worse. Fishman gives the last word to laid off workers at a Peoria-based sprinkler supplier, victims of the ubiquitous, company crippling “price rollbacks” which put Sam Walton’s modest dream around the globe and dozens of competitors into bankruptcy. These disheartened souls see how the world works; they miss their old jobs, and now refuse to shop at Wal-Mart, spending the few extra bucks they’re not sure they can afford so they won’t push other workers toward similar fates.

 Unless you’ve been living on Mars the last couple of decades, you know Wal-Mart’s emphasis on bigger and cheaper at the expense of all else is hugely popular with constituencies both exurban and rural and, more recently, urban and suburban. The company throws its political might around to get its way—here in Chicago, the contentious “Big Box Ordinance” fight was more about what neighborhoods mean than about building a store on the West Side.

Blaming the behemoth is easy, far too easy. We voted with our pocketbook. Turns out we like low prices and convenience more than a total retail experience or long-term solutions. In the early years, Walton’s model was more efficient, his style admirably frugal, and his stores more down home and friendly. Hard to believe, yes, but T.G.I. Friday’s and Bennigans were actually novel once and had to be doing something right to get diluted into its current diluted, semi-bankrupt form.

Behind the sinister smile and the Arkansas hospitality, the Wal-Mart company devised a slew of cost-cutting measures, from the tacky yet harmless practice of displaying merchandise directly on their shipping palettes to the morally questionable pattern of strong arming suppliers into cutting costs by any means possible to meet Wal-Mart’s targets, even if it means sudden death. And quite often, it did. Fishman follows the inventor of the “Makin’ Bacon” microwaveable dish as Wal-Mart’s vast network sells his product at the most razor thin margin, prompting him to crank out a very particular product quickly and at a much lower profit. Buying the appliance for $6.97 at Wal-Mart puts a few cents in his pocket and a few more cents in the corporation’s coffers. Paying $10 for online or mail-order puts extra profit directly into the inventor’s pocket. The story, which Fishman so deftly sketches, makes us think twice about every purchasing decision and how someone somewhere’s always paying, sometimes quite dearly, for our “free lunch.”

 

Zeroville - 19 Down, 33 to Go

Zeroville's "cineautistic" hero Vikar lives in a kind of bubble: an Angeleno with an encyclopedic knowledge of film but no car, who sports on his chrome dome a striking tattoo of Clift and Taylor from A Place in the Sun, and who develops into the most gifted, controversial montage artist of his time. His eccentric profile sure gets him noticed in a city of wackos, but Hollywood eats its own, especially when they can’t and won't play the game. Vikar's an enigma who gets into your head. The man's impressed by almost no one, a recluse who sticks his neck out for his ex-lover's bratty daughter, who uses Cannes' glaring spotlight to let the hot shots and paparazzi know his name before he pisses on their industry. The night before, a hooker visited his hotel room and spent the night discussing classic film.

Author Steve Erickson amps up the surreal effect by putting his chapter numbers in ascending and then descending order, with the final act a countdown to zero. More than a gimmick, it's meant to mimic Vikar's idea that film defies time, at once moving forward and backward into one great mass. His quest to find that once-missing frame of some obscure film and clip it into his own work is a beautiful mess of heroic lunacy. All the while, new releases and evolving film history mark time's passage.

This cine-centered tale got under my skin. It didn't make me want to submerge myself in Hollywood or the auteur lifestyle, but it did make me want to see more classic films.

Winter Queen - 18 Down, 34 to Go

As it should be, whodunit is almost irrelevant in Boris Akunin's period piece mystery. Anglo-Russian relations, class conflicts and a charming young detective's ambitions churn together in this 21st Century take on a 19th Century yarn. I'm not fluent enough in that region's history to vouch for its accuracy, but I'll take this guy's wordthat Akunin gets it right.

He's got to be doing something right, what with millions of copies sold and a worldwide cult following for his ten Fandorin novels. It's a story that reads like a snappier version of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, but wittier and less verbose.

Still, you can't help noticing Aukunin wrote this one for a contemporary reader: every 20 pages or so, he tosses in another plot twist. He opens with a student's public suicide-murder (a bizarre case of "American roulette" turning tragic). Detective and impetuous civil servant Erast Fandorin is on the case, veering wildly off course when our hero's first witness is assassinated before his eyes. Later he'll have to go deep undercover in London, although not deep enough. Then there's the love interest and, well, it's worth keeping mum on the rest, mustn't spoil this one.

Diary - 17 Down, 35 to Go

Chuck Palahniuk and art school really didn't get along. In Diary, his gifted yet troubled heroine Misty gets caught up in the art world's cliches, is distrusted by the residents of Waytansea Island, and can't sell a painting to save her life. Misty gets by as a waitress while her husband lies in a coma. The story of a life teetering on abject failure shifts smoothly between third person exposition and Misty's second person diary entries, so much that you're likely to be absorbed into Chuck's harsh world before realizing how much he's messing with your head.

Not such a surprising technique from the author of Fight Club. What did surprise was the level of honesty, sympathy and intimacy he brings to his characters, and to a female protagonist no doubt. The same rage against the establishment which smacked us around in his seminal work here quietly hovers in Waytansea Island's apathetic lifers focusing their anger so squarely on Misty they haven't realized their tourist haven is slowly dying. Palahniuk's sensitive side and careful attention to degraded civilization make this story stand out. The extended dissertations on economic oppression and class strife are replaced with even more powerful throwaway moments about art school injustice and awkward opening nights.

Plenty of hope here too, as Misty's talent and inspiration return at the most curious times. How she could be expected to so completely nurture her imagination, her young daughter, and her absent husband is one of the most compelling dilemmas in a book with no shortage of enticing plot points and resolutions.

The Year of Magical Thinking - 16 Down, 46 to Go

I’d doubt I’d enjoy hanging out with Joan Didion, but I have a boatload of sympathy for her after reading this intensely sad Pulitzer Prize winning memoir.  On December 30, 2003, she and husband John visited their flu stricken daughter at the hospital, went home for dinner, when John would collapse and die from a cardiac arrest. Trying to make sense of it all, Didion did what she’s done time and again in her essays and non-fiction work, she asked “Why?” and “How?”

 

The Year of Magical Thinking is an odyssey of the first year of grief and her path to acceptance when, in the spirit of the title, she imagined John would somehow come back and they’d be transported back to their days in Malibu or Honolulu tending to their healthy, innocent daughter. This unplanned transference is perfectly normal, a defense mechanism leading ultimately to acceptance and reconnection.

 

Didion’s greatest strength is constructively talking around the subject, not avoiding it exactly, but approaching it with as much dignity and distance as possible until additional stresses and more unpleasant mental associations prompt her breakdown. For all the intimate, hoity toity details of her days—her daydreams, her diet, the contents of her hard drive—she doesn’t truly let down her guard until around page 160.  Her methods are so meticulous and her narration so damn honest, I sense there's no other way the story would work. She spends the first few months trying so hard to control the situation, to invent a new reality or try to attain that elusive closure via narration. Then she lets go. About a year after the funeral, a sense of redemption and a stable frame of mind just kind of happen:

 

About five in the afternoon on the 24th I thought I could not do the evening but when the time came the evening did itself.

 

For a writer, mother and wife who has tried so hard to stay in control, that evening was a minor miracle.

 

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - 15 Down, 37 to Go

Philip K. Dick's classic AI mindfuck is best known as the inspiration for the movie Blade Runner, which I saw again about an hour after finishing the book. Better on second viewing, it’s an imaginative yet inferior substitute for Dick’s tale of a futuristic bounty hunter terminating rebellious androids. But really, it’s mostly an excuse for chisel jawed movie stars to shoot ‘em up in a cool, futuristic setting. 

 

There’s a sophistication in the book that Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford never quite captured.  Dick understands how in literature, multiple understandings, like the worlds of the android support system and human society, can be easily blurred. Gone from the film adaptation is a chapter where bounty hunter Rick Deckard, a flawed but basically likeable protagonist, is arrested and detained in an android-run shadow police station. Up to this point, Rick, and we, could confidently distinguish between man and robot. But somehow, the robots learned the self-preservation instinct. Can androids be programmed so convincingly as to fool us and them? That confusion is so much more palpable in the book, particularly as we’re wrapping our imaginations around these figures, whether flesh or metal. 

 

Sci fi’s not so much my thing. Neuromancer, considered a classic of the genre, was a chore to get through and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series left me cold. But Mr. Dick’s a riveting storyteller. In Rick Deckard, he’s created a layered, vulnerable, deeply sympathetic character trying to keep his life and marriage together.

 

Small Wonder - 14 Down, 38 to Go

A few lessons learned from Barbara Kingsolver's collection of sharp, often riveting essays:

1. Effective environmentalism involves co-existing with the land. Knee-jerk advocacy, admonishing us to keep our grubby paws off the rarest, most endangered terra firma, treats ecosystems like museum exhibits and adds distance between us and the land. In the village of Calakmal, homes are built into the forest. Far from encroaching or slashing and burning, villagers are fiercely protective of their backyard.

2. Darwinism can be distilled to four basic principles which any of us could observe unfolding if we look hard enough.

3. The Japanese language does not accommodate insults, only infinite degrees of apology.

4. The shadow of 9/11 has made the U.S., on balance a noble and accomplished nation, sink into a troubling morass of provincialism. History, she believes, will not look kindly on our government's actions in the first four years after the terror attacks.

5. Ms. Kingsolver makes prose writing look easy, but poetry intimidates her.

Jimmy Corrigan... - 13 Down, 39 to Go

Every generation of Corrigan men at virtually every stage of their lives has the same face. Whether eight or 80, they look like weathered old men, timidly engaging with the life that's beating them down. Little James was deserted at the Columbian Exposition (expansively jotted by Mr. Ware). Modern-day Jimmy and Jim Sr. barely connect. The younger one toils in a cubicle in downtown Chicago, kept afloat by his daydreams of superheroes and pretty ladies. The elder lives out his days in bad diners and a retirement facility, trying in his own awkward way to bring his scattered family together.

Chris Ware's graphic world in Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid On Earth, is lonely, socially awkward, tiring and frequently bleak. Long winters, long nights and long shadows lead to anxious mornings and tedious afternoons. His panels are achingly beautiful, from jam-packed narrative sections to slow, pregnant pauses, gliding between wish fulfillment and reality's hard thunk. Consider the many times Jr. and Sr. talk around a subject, Jr. looking down at his meal or his fingernails, Sr. going off on a tangent. Or even how the muted browns of the Corrigans' boarding quarters (c. 1890) gives way to the pea green walls of a 1990s hospital. How the splendor of The Midway, site of a sudden trauma, contrasts with the exurban landscape of phone lines, DQs, and courtyard apartments, site of a slow motion tragedy.

Best of all, Ware rarely has to reach to make a point. Changing landscapes reflect changing lifestyles, technological impact, and evolving development patterns. The early century immigrant story gives way to the late century integration story. Childhood seems a little bit brighter, the pre-War years seem extra sepia-toned. But as palpable as the family conflicts seem, Ware lets us indulge in the Corrigans' sense of awe at what may be and could've been possible. Maybe that caped crusader really can fly...

 

Charming Billy - 12 Down, 40 to Go

Charming Billy's first half is comfort food for fans of Irish & Irish-American literature, situating the narrator and the late Billy Lynch's other friends and family at the dearly departed's wake and nearby neighborhood bar. In death, Billy is elevated to near mythic stature-- a regular working class hero with an uncanny charm and a knack for putting people at ease, despite his deep misfortunes. His life was much more complicated than his eulogy of course, and the truth (or something close to it) comes out in an evening's reminisces. It's the ghost stories of Conor MacPherson and Marina Carr meets the fractured family tales of Eugene O'Neill, marinated in booze and dabbed with self-delusion. I'm not and have never been an Irish-American from the outer boroughs, but McDermott gives us enough detail and backstory that her characters feel like estranged friends. Doesn't hurt that she nails the awkward revelations and the meandering road to the truth.

The story meanders more when you're taking it in after midnight under the glow of a sleep lab lightbox (some advice, in case you someday decide to do that...) and I'd probably appreciate this book more from my living room on a leisurely Sunday. Still, the not-quite-predictable twists were handled well and the enigmatic narrator added some depth to a stock situation. Not quite National Book Award depth, although I have no sway with the judges.

 

Tender as Hellfire - 11 Down, 41 to Go

Dough is an undersized boy in an underwealthy family. His brother’s an arsonist, his crush is a few years older and way out of his league, his best girlfriend prospect is too weird and antisocial, even for him. He's a little different, but that, and his unfortunate name, are enough to earn a beating in his trailer park community. Worst of all, he lacks a father figure, a point Meno makes over and over in his debut novel.

These occasional jaunts into amateur psychology and some baffling typos (hello, editors? second paperback edition?) are the only things detracting from Meno's fantastic first effort. His greatest strength--an intimate understanding of the teenage mind--was already evident here. It's not as ambitious or engrossing as Hairstyles of the Damned or The Boy Detective Fails, but he knows his exurban Midwestern turf and sticks to it.