‘The Green Zone’: Some books aren’t really movies

Matt Damon’s The Green Zone opens today in theaters, and I’ve got to say : This movie looks nothing like Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City, the book upon which it’s supposedly based.

Here’s Slate’s Dana Stevens describing the movie:

As the camera jerked and joggled its way through an impossible-to-follow action sequence late in The Green Zone (Universal), I found myself thinking: “Damn, I’m sick of faux-documentary-style hand-held cinematography. This feels like ersatz Paul Greengrass at its worst.” Then I remembered: The Green Zone is directed by Paul Greengrass.

Wait. This is an action film? With spies and everything? But that’s nothing at all like Chandrasekaran’s book!

There’s very little action in Imperial Life in the Emerald City, to be honest: It takes place almost entirely in the “Green Zone” — the relatively safe area of Baghdad where American and Iraqi officials hid from the insurgents during the bloodiest days of the war therre — with brief forays out into nearby neighborhoods to gauge how “real Iraqis” are affected by the U.S. invasion. It’s first-rate reporting and writing, but it’s not a Matt Damon action thriller.

Bully for Chandrasekaran for selling the movie rights to his book. A more faithful translation of Imperial Life to the screen would’ve had to been done by somebody like M*A*S*H*-era Robert Altman — somebody who could take a cast of thousands and dramatize the not-exactly-front-lines absurdities of life in the Green Zone, where occupation officials were often chosen for their fealty to the GOP’s stance on abortion, say, rather than their knowledge of how to put a broken country back together. It could even play as a dark comedy! But Hollywood knows what sells, I suppose: Robert Altman movies stopped being widely successful 30 years ago (and Altman, of course, is dead) but gritty action flicks will live forever.

JD Salinger is dead. His being overrated, though, is immortal.

I always liked the idea of JD Salinger more than I liked anything that Salinger wrote. Franny and Zooey was ok, I guess, but Catcher in the Rye is massively overrated. Generations of literary hipsters have named their children “Holden” because they saw Catcher’s protagonist as the ideal; an authentic James Dean type, maybe, railing against the phoniness of modern life.

Me: When I got around to reading the book at age 17 — during my year of reading classic novels that were often banned — I simply couldn’t believe what a whiny sonofabitch the kid was. I don’t think it’s because I had the soul of a College Republican; I was reading books like Johnny Got His Gun, Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five that year and they were greatly influencing me. I just think that Holden Caufield was a whiny sonofabitch. Which makes me suspicious of all those who idolize him.

Salinger, of course, withdrew from public life after Catcher. The glimpses we got of him over the intervening decades were not flattering; he apparently had a pretty creepy sex life. But there’s something fascinating and inspirational about an artist who produces One Great Work and gives it to the world, then hides himself forevermore. Too bad the reality of JD Salinger could never, ever live up to the hype.

Rest in peace, you old bastard.

My Top 10 books of the decade

Let me be clear here: These aren’t necessarily the 10 best books of the aughts. Just the 10 best books that I read. I tried to figure out if I should split into fiction-nonfiction categories, but that didn’t really suss out very nicely. I spent the first half of the decade immersing myself in novels and the second half in essays and long-form reporting. We all go through phases, I guess, and my Top 10 list reflects mine.

• White Teeth, Zadie Smith: Smith has proven to be a prodigious talent, and her novel On Beauty is probably more complete in its artistic expression. But this first novel — set among an interracial British family — was imperfect but oh so damned interesting.

• The Road, Cormac McCarthy: I know, Oprah, blah blah. Like Smith’s White Teeth, maybe this isn’t the “best” of McCarthy’s novels — but it is his most accessible: Written less baroquely than some of his other works. I finished it in one weekend. But it stayed with me since then.

• Fiasco, Tom Ricks: The Iraq War has produced a ton of finely reported and written books. But this piece by then-Washington Post reporter Ricks did more, probably, to document and define how the early years of the war had gone so devastatingly wrong — from the decision to invade to a host of post-invasion decisions that exacerbated a tense situation.

• Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace: Wallace was probably best-known as a novelist: His 1,000-page Infinite Jest is a required lit-hipster endurance test. But it was in his non-fiction that Wallace — freed from the demands of experimentation — really shined, and this collection of essays proves it. Covering everything from porn to meat-eating ethics to talk radio, Wallace still dropped plenty of five-dollar words. But he did so in the service of smartly entertaining and informing his audience.

• The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, Robert Caro: If you want to know what power looks like — how it’s accumulated, how it corrupts, how big Texas businesses behind George W. Bush have always been around — this volume of Caro’s indispensible and ongoing biography of LBJ is a great place to start.

• Saturday, Ian McEwan: Atonement was his most celebrated work of the decade, but this novel — set in one day of the life of a London doctor shortly before the invasion of Iraq — has stuck with me longer. I think it’s because — unlike many people who took stark positions for or against the invasion — Dr. Henry Perowne is honestly conflicted: He knows the regime of Saddam Hussein to be terrible, but he also knows the war might well end up being terrible. This novel isn’t about Iraq, but it’s not not about Iraq, either. And in Perowne’s wrestling, McEwan articulated the not-quite-sure attitude that many people felt before the war.

• Pastoralia, George Saunders: I don’t know what to call this collection of short stories. Meta science fiction, maybe? It’s dyspeptic and cynical — and it’s darkest story, “Sea Oak,” about a woman who returns from the dead ready to start doing all the fornicating she’d never done in life, might well be its most inspiring.

• Gilead, Marilynne Robinson: I’ll say the same thing I did about Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois album: I’m not a Christian, but this novel comes as close as any sermon or piece of art ever has to making me reconsider.

• The 9/11 Commission Report: Not only well-reported — as it should be, given that the resources of government were at its disposal — it’s also surprisingly well-written.

• The Dark Side, Jane Mayer: There are many accounts of how the Bush Administration took us down the road to torture in the War on Terror. This is the most definitive.

Kindle for iPhone

Last night, I finished my first entire book — John Derbyshire’s “We Are Doomed,” about which more later — on Kindle for iPhone. Why? Because the book was $9.99 in its Kindle format, and roughly twice that much in paper. I needed not to spend the extra money. But it ended up a very pleasurable reading experience.

For one thing, Kindle recently updated its iPhone software so you can take notes and highlights. That’s baseline-level service, to be sure, but it really makes the reading experience on the phone that much more useful. And it offers an advantage over regular book-reading: I can easily look up every single highlight and note I took — no flipping around, trying to remember important passages — which will be useful, since I’ll be interviewing Derbyshire about the book on Saturday.

But it was also great, when I was done, to be able to slip my reading material into my pocket and move on down the road. What’s more, the Kindle app doesn’t really consume battery power too quickly.

I still don’t know if I’d want to read a novel in this format. But I’ve got a half-finished copy of Neil Sheehan’s “A Fiery Peace in a Cold War” at home that’s next on my list to finish. It’s a big, bulky book. I’m going to see if I can cheerfully return to lugging and grappling with such massive tomes. But an e-reader is looking much more attractive to me. Christmas, here I come!

“The Lost Art of Walking” by Geoff Nicholson

Three thoughts about The Lost Art of Walking by Geoff Nicholson:

• The last decade of literary history has brought with it — along with the rise and fall of memoirs by otherwise undistinguished writers — a flood of popular nonfiction books that purport to reveal the unrealized significance and world-changing history of some seemingly mundane objects or activities. Thus, we have volumes about salt, cod, spices, chocolate, potatoes and so on and so forth. Though those books were about nouns and this one about a verb, The Lost Art of Walking belongs squarely in that tradition.

• Unfortunately, it’s also a rather (ahem) pedestrian contribution to that tradition. Nicholson offers all the notes you’re supposed to hit in a book like this: an overview of literary and pop cultural mentions of walking, a history of competitive walking in 19th century Britain, a series of what can only be described as “stunt” walks that he undertakes … in order to have something to write about. Indeed, Nicholson opens the book by talking about a walk he undertook shortly after signing the contract to write this book; most of Lost Art has the feel of a working reporter doing his job, then, rather than the result of any kind of passion or genuine interest. It’s all very competent, but not terribly interesting.

• The book takes on some life toward the end, though, when Nicholson departs from these usual reference points and turns inward, to the story of his own growing-up in Sheffield, England — and his desperate attempt to (again, ahem) walk away from the bleak life he grew up expecting. He tells a charming story about his father’s casual strolling trespasses on private land, and a darker tale of the hilly blizzard hike that caused his mother’s heart to give out. The Lost Art of Walking is best in these moments, when Nicholson simply tells us a good story instead of trying to present us with The Big Picture. Sometimes a walk is just a walk.

The Lost Art of Walking appears in paperback on Nov. 3.

Chinese food: Why I can’t finish reading Lorrie Moore’s ‘A Gate At The Stairs’

I’d planned to spend a good chunk of this weekend’s free time digging into Lorrie Moore’s new novel, A Gate At The Stairs. So on Saturday, I sat myself into a comfy reading chair … and found myself so distracted by a minor detail on Page 6 that I can’t bring myself to finish the rest of the book.

The narrator is 20-year-old Tassie Keltjin. Like me, she grew up in the rural Midwest. Like me, she had her horizons expanded when moving to a university town — home, in her case, to Troy University — that proclaims itself the “Athens of the Midwest.” Because I share, broadly, a little bit of background with her, I found one bit of her experience jarringly unreal.

Here is the single sentence that ruined the novel for me:

“Before I’d come to Troy, I had never had Chinese food.”

I call bullshit.

Hey: I grew up in Hillsboro, Kansas, population roughly 2,500 people or so. It was not a sophisticated, cosmpolitan place by any means. And there wasn’t a Chinese restaurant in town when I was growing up. But there was a Chinese restaurant in a town 20 minutes away. I grew up loving Chinese food. I’d dare say that anybody in the rural Midwest who has ever wanted to try Chinese food has had the opportunity to do so. Chopsticks aren’t as ubiquitous as McDonald’s in the region, but they’re far from unheard of.

This wouldn’t be so distracting, I suppose, except Moore uses this tidbit as a jumping-off point to demonstrate the narrowness of Tassie’s world before coming to university. The newly discovered love of Chinese food is the lens through which Tassie is discovering the wider world outside the farm where she grew up.

In combination with other details — Tassie’s parents had honeymooned in London, the family made regular trips to Milwaukee to sell potatoes at a farmer’s market — the idea that Tassie had never eaten Chinese food while growing up, with its implication that she’d never had the opportunity, is outrageously unlikely. If Moore had said Indian food or Ethiopian food or even Thai food, I wouldn’t have balked. Chinese food? Bullshit.

And it’s even more irritating, actually, because Moore in real life is a professor at a Midwestern university. I’m sure students come to her with narrow backgrounds and that she does a fine job of exposing them to a wider intellectual world than they previously knew existed. But she might be giving herself a little too much credit if she thinks her university is exposing young minds to Chinese food for the first time. Sorry, Lorrie Moore: I plowed on for 20 more pages, but I couldn’t shake your error. I’m moving on.

The Magicians: A Review

Three thoughts about The Magicians by Lev Grossman:

1. The marketing materials for this novel suggest that it’s “Harry Potter goes to Narnia” — and that’s pretty much what it is, only with lots more drinking, a little more sex and about the same level of violence. And if that sounds really cool to you, then you’re going to like The Magicians. That’s also the book’s shortcoming: The hero is named Quentin Coldwater, and his journeys take him to a magical land called Fillory; he might as well be called Shmarry Shmotter, and he might as well be journeying to Shmarnia. Grossman’s influences are worn so heavily on his sleeve they nearly rip it off. He does a fine job of execution within those confines, but still. It’s not exactly the lit geek version of Gus Van Sant re-filming Psycho shot-for-shot, but it’s close.

2. There seems to be a growing literary genre of “adult versions of childhood literary favorites.” Right before reading The Magicians, I took on Joe Meno’s The Boy Detective Fails, which imagines an Encyclopedia Brown doppelganger as a suicidally depressed 30-year-old — he runs into the aging Hardy Boys as meth-addicted burnouts — trying to solve the mystery that is life. Grossman’s brother, Austin, got famous a couple of years ago with Soon I Will Be Invincible, which imagined the interior life of a Marvel-style supervillain. It’s a cute conceit, but it’s starting to wear out its welcome. Memo to adult-kid-lit authors: We were all kids once. We enjoyed it too. We even like to revisit old favorites now and again. But, uh, not this much.

3. There’s a hint at the end that Grossman wouldn’t mind this novel becoming a franchise of sorts. And while — again — he does fine within the limits he’s set for himself, all I can say is: I kinda hope not.

The Death of Conservatism

Three thoughts about The Death of Conservatism by Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review.

• The title promises more than the book really delivers (the “death” of conservatism is relegated to the last few pages) but it’s still worth a read. That’s because Tanenhaus’ real purpose is to offer the reader a primer on the history of modern conservatism – doing in 118 pages what Rick Perlstein has needed a couple of thousand (so far) in Before the Storm and Nixonland. (And don’t get me wrong: I love Rick Perlstein.) Call it Conservatism for Dummies.

Conservatism, Tanenhaus suggests, has been split between two impulses: One is dedicated to actual conservation, safeguarding societal order and stability; it even accepts when liberals and the left have created new institutions that have become part of the social order – and thus adapts with the times. (Think George H.W. Bush and all the other Episcopalian-Republicans who seem to have disappeared.) The other Tanenhaus calls “revanchist,” but which we might call simple right-wingery: it hews to an unchanging small-government orthodoxy and contains a revolutionary desire to unmake societal institutions it considers illegitimate, like Medicare and Social Security, that the rest of the nation has long accepted. (Think tea partiers, Rush Limbaugh, etc.) Tanenhaus, it seems, throws his lot in with the conservators instead of the revolutionaries.

• The “revanchist” element in conservatism has long been ascendant, and contains some of its major roots in — wait for it — McCarthyism. Tanenhaus:

(Joe) McCarthy was the author of what would become a staple of GOP politics over the next half century: the raid on government mounted from within government itself. Later practitioners included Richard Nixon (Watergate), Ronald Reagan (Iran-contra), New Gingrich (twice: the government shutdown of 1995 and then Bill Clinton’s impeachment), and George W. Bush (his dismissals of nine U.S. attorneys). Like McCarthy’s crusade, these later insurgencies were conceived in a spirit of hatred for a liberal elite who were perceived to be usurpers and hence subversives. For McCarthy’s followers the New Deal, with its mildly radical reforms administered by Ivy League graduates, was tantamount to treason.

That belief that liberals are somehow treasonous has, of course, survived to the modern era — with constant efforts by Republicans and the right to suggest that the presidencies of Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are somehow illegitimate. But though revanchist folks have dominated the conservative movement (and the GOP) the truth is that the politicians they put forth never deliver: Ronald Reagan, their hero, talked about government as the enemy of the people … but no major spending programs were actually cut during his presidency. George W. Bush actually expanded the Medicare entitlement. The conservative movement really does want to safeguard governmental and societal institutions, it seems — but only if they are the conservators. Otherwise, they evince a desire to (metaphorically) blow it all up.

• It’s not good for America that the right side of the ideological spectrum has come to be increasingly dominated by its demagogues and crazies. Tanenhaus again:

America needs a serious, rigorous opposition. Skeptics and outsiders perform a vital function in a democracy. It is they who ask the most uncomfortable questions, who gaze most critically at the existing arrangements of our politics and culture.

Agreed. Right now, though, the opposition is largely (though not entirely) composed of Glenn Beck acolytes who think Barack Obama is a Stalin-in-the-making because he wants people to have more and better health insurance. (Tanenhaus suggests Obama is actually quite classically conservative, because his seemingly extreme efforts, like TARP and the stimulus package, were aimed at holding society together instead of letting it fly apart.) There are some conservatives — notably David Frum at The New Majority (Tanenhaus’ example) and Conor Friederdorf at The American Scene (my example) — who are willing to call out the extremists on their side while making principled (and I’d argue wrong, but still) arguments against health reform. Their voices are too few, and too lonely, to make a difference. And that doesn’t bode well for the rest of us.

Why I’m not going to buy a Kindle. Yet.

I love digital media. I love that, while living in Kansas, the Internet made it possible for me to read the New York Times and Washington Post every day, giving me a deeper understanding of the day’s news than could be provided by the heavily chopped-up AP dispatches that my local newspapers carried. (This may not seem like a big deal to you, but in growing up Kansas during the 1980s, it was basically possible only to get the Sunday Times — and then only a few days later, through the mail, when much of what it contained had become stale.) And the iPhone: Where do I start? I love being able to carry around access to much of the world’s knowledge in my pocket. That’s nothing short of miraculous, when you think about it.

So I love digital media. And that love, I think, translated to my recent lust for a Kindle. The idea of being able to carry your library with you everywhere has incredible appeal — especially if, like me, you’ve recently packed up everything you own and moved it 1,000 miles. (Books are the nastiest thing to move. You either have to move lots of small, heavy boxes or a few big, very heavy boxes. Either way, it’s a pain.) The idea of instant gratification is also appealing: “Hey, that book reviewed in the paper sounds good. I’ll turn on my Kindle, buy it and start reading it right now!” The recent introduction of the Kindle 2 built my lust to a fever pitch; I knew I had to have the Kindle, and have it soon.

Thanks to some well-timed windfalls, I recently scraped together enough money to buy the Kindle.

And then I hesitated. Because I am a sentimental fool.

You see, I love books. But it’s more than books I love: I love the culture of books. I love wandering into a bookstore and finding myself surprised by a recommendation from a clerk whose quirky tastes match (and, yes, guide) my own. I love the readings, and I love the time spent idly browsing. When my wife and I got married, we invited the owner of our favorite bookstore. One of the first things we did upon moving here was figure out where the nearest stores were.

A Kindle would allow me — even require me — to bypass that process. I’d get to clear away the thicket of relationships I’ve built up around reading, but I don’t really want that thicket to be cleared. And the truth is, I don’t need to carry around an entire of library of books with me — I can ony read one book at any given moment, and it might as well be the one I put in my bag. Most horrendously, I’d never be able to lend or borrow a book.

Rather than expand my world, as the Internet has done, the Kindle would appear to narrow it. All so I can do the same thing — read books — that I was able to do before, only without a machine.

(Admittedly, there’s also something in me that resists the notion that you should spend $360 to buy a battery-powered reading device. The old technology works pretty well without adding a cent to my electricity bill.)

Don’t get me wrong: After a lot of failed attempts, I suspect that the Kindle is the device that will bring e-reading into the mainstream. And there may be good reasons to go along with the wave. But I can’t escape the sense that riding that wave will turn book-reading into a rote transaction of information. Buying a Kindle would change my life … in ways I don’t want it changed. So as far as books are concerned, I’m staying analog for now. The future can wait just a little longer.

Kindle 2.0 is unveiled today

…and it looks kinda nifty. (Although given its $359 pricetag, I’m a few months — at best — from making a purchase.)

I’m curious about what the actual reading experience is like, though. Not whether I can physically read it — the electronic paper format appears to work in the sun’s glare — but what the Kindle means for the actual experience of reading.

Put it this way: When I get a paper copy of the New York Times, it can take me an hour or more to plow through the various sections and absorb the news of the day. Online, I skim the headlines and glean what’s what in 15 minutes or less. I don’t think my experience is unique.

So my question is this: Is the Kindle more like a web reading experience? A book reading experience? Or something in between?