Take, for example, Allegra Goodman’s “La Vita Nuova,” a story of a very young woman, left by her fiance, caring for a small boy and finding a way back to herself through art-making. Obviously, I loved it.

Or “Dog Bites” by Ricardo Nuila and “To the Measures Fall” by Richard Powers, stories which feature diagrams and bolded, rhetorical questions respectively. I could have cared about each of these stories but their po-mo interventions yanked me right out of the mood.

I was happy to see again all the stories I’d seen before: Jennifer Egan’s brutally beautiful “Out of Body,” Claire Keegan’s “Foster” (I’ll take a sad, quiet little girl protagonist any day), and Nathan Englander’s structurally unusual “Free Fruit for Young Widows,” a story that easily could have gone wrong for me, but pulled though with enough heart to outweigh the philosophy. (Okay, so there was one surprise “like” in here.)

Megan Mayhew Bergman’s “Housewifely Arts” had a talking parrot at its center, which was a bit too twee, and Joyce Carol Oates’ “ID,” which, with its seedy Atlantic City premise, was way over-dramatic. I felt like I got it long before she was done hitting her notes. My friends write way better fiction than these two stories–”Best of” editors, take note!

Two stories that featured towns as their protagonist really worked for me: Caitlin Horrocks’s tale of a community that finds a way to skip bleak unproductive winters, “The Sleep,” and Steven Millhauser’s totally strange, haunting “Phantoms,” a story I wanted to turn fictional in order to visit in person.

I loved Elizabeth McCracken’s “Property,” one of those stories that you think is about one thing until you realize it’s about something else until you realize it’s about something else, and all of those things are so, so sad. George Saunders’s “Escape from Spiderhead” also veered this way and that, through weird sex and weirder prison experiments to unexpected redemption and grace.

My very favorite story in the anthology came courtesy of Bret Anthony Johnston. Here is the first line of “Soldier of Fortune”: “Her name was Holly Hensley, and except for two years when her father was transferred to a naval base in Florida, her family lived across the street from mine.” Now, this sentence may sound fairly to-the-point, there only to deliver background information. By the last page of the story, though, it becomes clear that while it may have been simple, that sentence was anything but direct. The protagonist of the story, a teenage boy, cares for Holly’s dog after a terrible accident befalls the baby of the family and the tender, restrained, realistic relationships that play out from there made this, for me, the obvious winner of the anthology. When I received a Kindle for Christmas, the first book I bought was Bret Anthony Johnston’s collection–watch out for a post on it soon!

The excerpt found Jonathan, a student at the CIA, attending and participating in a chicken-slaughter. The actor performed the passage as poignant, but also funny, particularly a line about Jerry Garcia. It was terrific. Afterwards, when I briefly spoke to Jonathan about it, he said that he didn’t think the passage was funny at all! Reading it for myself, within the context of the rest of the book, I can see his point–it did come off as much more serious.

Because, in this book, the business of learning food and cooking, of learning to be a chef, is serious. Jonathan lays out the stakes: he starts at the CIA at the “advanced” age of 38, far older than most of the other students, after working his way through many other careers, and at the potential peril of Nelly, who bore the brunt of the couple’s financial burdens during the course of the program. He had a lot of stressors to balance, on top of the innate stressfulness of the program. Two things really struck me about Jonathan’s description of the CIA: how different the instructors’ teaching styles were than anything I’ve experienced and how damn early the classes started. Jonathan described routinely waking up between 3:30 and 5:30am to get to class, to be lectured and berated and yelled at once he got there. He makes big distinctions in the book between instructors who yell and those who don’t, although he doesn’t always think that the yelling is ineffective. He also described lectures lasting four hours at a time, where the students were expected to take notes and absorb and regurgitate for tests. As a practitioner of VTS, guided-inquiry, etc., this was so foreign to me. And, obviously!, I would never yell at a student. What a different world; it was so interesting to read about it and to discover, in this environment, what worked and what didn’t.

I went to college very close to the CIA but actually only ate there once, my freshman year, in the fancy French restaurant. There was a fire drill in the middle of dinner, which basically obliterated any other memory of that evening–I don’t remember the food, only evacuating the place! Every now and then a CIA student would show up at one of our parties, and I remember meeting one who also worked at a huge highway liquor emporium; he told me about these exciting desserts he was developing using Lambic fruit beers.

Where I have been more than once is the restaurant Tabla, Floyd Cardoz’s former high-end Indian restaurant in Manhattan. I had two excellent birthday dinners there and thought Cardoz was super charming on Top Chef Masters. But, Jonathan did his externship at Tabla and wow, the poor thing, everyone was super cruel and cold to him, especially Cardoz! Shocking. I’m sort of glad that the restaurant is closed now because I loved it but I would have been torn about going back after reading this insider information.

This book was a really fun read, put a major taste for roasted chicken in my mouth (although I haven’t eaten chicken in more than ten years!) and made me super, super glad that I never have to take any of the classes, tests or trauma that Jonathan did–his book is perfect for living the CIA experience vicariously, and safely, from afar.

MOST MEMORABLE (RIGHT REASONS)

1. IN ZANESVILLE by JO ANN BEARD. Of course. Have I mentioned a list of favorites, ever, that didn’t include a book by Ms. Beard? If you haven’t read this yet–especially if you’ve ever been a fourteen year old girl–you need to get on it.

2. THE MARRIAGE PLOT by JEFFREY EUGENIDES. Ok. So my friend/coworker asked me the other day, “Did he just use Madeline to write about the two men in the book?”  She leaned toward answering “yes,” and although she was emotionally engaged in the book, and like me, felt as if she were reading something frighteningly close to her college experience, she wasn’t totally thrilled by the idea that Eugenides might have used his female character as an excuse to write about the men. I absolutely see her point, especially given that the last paragraph of the book is given to Mitchell, not Madeline, which definitely tells you something about whose story you’ve been reading. But, my thought is that Eugenides’s process was somewhat exposed in this novel. To me, it seemed like Madeline was his way into this world, and she introduced him to these people; I did not feel as if she were “used.” I do think that she was not the most interesting person in this book, but being less extreme of a personality than Leonard or Mitchell, acting less radically, I was able to slip into the book beside her and experience it with her. I’d love to know what others think about this! And, love to think about this. Hence its place on the list.

Also: By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham, State of Wonder by Ann Patchett, Bright Before Us by Katie Arnold-Ratliff, Revolution by Deb Olin Unferth.

MOST MEMORABLE (WRONG REASONS)

1. GREAT HOUSE by NICOLE KRAUSS. This was possibly one of the worst books I’ve ever read. And I was so unsuspecting going into it. I still can’t believe that she got away with this one. Pretentious, boring, complicated, coincidental. Blech.

2. SKIPPY DIES by PAUL MITCHELL. I really didn’t like this book, but it was what it was–not to my taste. It didn’t OFFEND me in its badness, like GREAT HOUSE.

Here’s to reading in 2012!

I read the three novels in the order that Ms. Jones wrote them, starting with Leaving Atlanta, moving on to The Untelling, and yesterday, finishing up with Silver Sparrow. What a treat to read them in such quick, greedy succession.

Leaving Atlanta is the novel that made Tayari Jones famous. It is divided into three sections, each focused around a different fifth grade child in the same class. The setting is Atlanta, 1982, amidst a tragic, true-life episode, the Atlanta Child Murders in which twenty-nine African-American children were kidnapped and murdered. Chilling. The first section is Tasha’s, and is told in the third-person. Not knowing how the book was constructed while I read her section, I was fully invested in her character–not quite an outsider but not one of the most popular girls, not unkind, but not particularly kind, either. Her portrayal was fairly realistic, in this sense–she was right in the middle, not a very special child, but still, because of the careful attention paid to her, special to the reader. Tasha’s life is touched in a terrible way by the unknown murderer and, surprisingly, touched in a positive way, too. 

Rodney’s section comes second. The reader already knows Rodney by this time; he was on the periphery of Tasha’s section. His story is told in the second person, which makes the tragedy of it all the more wrenching. There is no middle ground with Rodney; he is an outcast in school and in his family. He is so put-upon that when he finally exacts his agency, he takes charge of his life in a fully, unspeakably painful way. Ms. Jones scaffolded his story well, though–the “surprising but inevitable” phenomenon could be defined by this section.

The last third of the book is in the first person of Octavia, another child we’ve already come to know through the two other children’s eyes. Also an outcast, in large part because of the darkness of her skin and her poverty, her story, too, is almost too much to bear.

Leaving Atlanta is a gripping, thoughtful novel. I thought about it, and was extremely unsettled by it, for days after reading it. At the risk of sounding condescending, though, it did have a first novel feel (I’m pretty sure I read that it started as her MFA thesis). I think that there was a degree of over-explanation, of too much telling, of hitting notes too hard. I could envision myself workshopping sections of the book and crossing out the second halves of paragraphs, or every other sentence. It had the feeling of being written by a writer who didn’t quite yet know how much work her words were doing.

The Untelling reminded me of a lot of other second novels (Curtis Sittenfeld’s The Man of My Dreams or Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man) in that it was not the best book by a really good writer, and seemed rushed in comparison to the books before and after. Without any research to back this up, I imagine that Ms. Jones probably had a deadline to meet. This is not to say that the book isn’t good–I did like it–but it seemed more one-dimensional than the others. The story revolved around a young woman who works as a literacy coach and, believing she is pregnant, starts to make marriage plans. As you can probably discern from the title, all is not as it appears (to her). One of the central conceits of the book is that it starts with a prologue in which the narrator and her family are involved in a terrible car crash that takes the lives of half of them; at the end of the book, two facts are revealed about this event either to other characters in the book and/or to the reader. In this novel, some of the characters are quite compelling, the portrait of Atlanta’s disparate African-American communities, gentrifying neighborhoods and social plights is interesting, and yet that key relationship between the front and back story just didn’t totally resonate with me. I think if the interpersonal dramas here were allowed to be smaller, yet more closely observed, the story would have been better served.

Last, I read the recently published Silver Sparrow. It was fantastic. I really, really liked this book. About two girls, it was split in two: the first half of the book was Dana’s, the second half belonged to Chaurisse. I am not giving away anything the book jacket doesn’t when I say that these two girls are half-sisters; Dana is James and Gwen’s daughter, Chaurisse is James and Laverne’s. Although James is married to both mothers, Gwen and Dana are a secret and Laverne and Chaurisse are public, legitimate. Dana is in the strange position, since childhood, of knowing about all of this and being forced into complicity. Chaurisse is in the equally strange position of not knowing about her father’s secret family. What is so great about the novel’s construction, though, is how much more the reader knows than does Chaurisse upon arrival into her world. What kind of irony is that? I wish I remembered from high school!

In Silver Sparrow, I felt as though Tayari Jones’s tendency to over-explain and over-write was gone. I also thought that the characters were newer than some of the ones that had appeared in the other books, which, at times, seemed a little too similar to each other. Perhaps every African-American mother in Atlanta says “This is not what Dr. King died for,” but even if that’s true, that same sentence should only appear so many times across three novels. Maybe many, many young black girls in Atlanta obsessed over “Spelman girls” and “Morehouse boys,” and maybe many kids had the experience of going to see Dr. King lie in state, but because these same elements came up many times across books, without being presented from different angles, I had the sense that the books were somehow linked, and now, looking back, have a hard time remembering if some events happened in one book or the other. This happened some in the last novel, but less than in the other two.

Small criticisms aside, Silver Sparrow delivered emotion, drama and surprise, and Ms. Jones wasn’t shy about making a lot of brave narrative calls. The ending felt a bit rushed, but other than that, a truly killer novel.

The Leftovers is the story of the aftermath of a nonreligious (or, as some factions see it, a religious) rapture. Rapture, I mean, capital R. One day, a huge chunk of the world’s population disappears, never to return. The novel focuses on the Garvey family–the father Kevin, who is a new town mayor, trying to hold it together, the mother, Laurie, who leaves her family to join a cult called the Guilty Remnant, the daughter Jill, who deals with her new life in the way most teenagers know how–sex, drugs, the wrong crowd, and the son, Tom, who finds comfort in a false prophet named Holy Wayne. The other character who gets her own sections is Nora, the town’s most tragic figure–a young woman who lost her husband, son and daughter in the Sudden Departure. These characters’ stories intersect and diverge in sometimes surprising ways. The format that Perrotta works with here–alternating sections from the third person p.o.v.s of these five characters–allows us not only insight into their personal worlds, but advances the plot by playing with what we do and don’t know, what we do and don’t see. It isn’t a new technique, of course, but one that is used to particularly great effect in this novel.

I was fascinated by all of these people. I felt as though the trajectories Perrotta lay out for them felt true to circumstance (as outrageous as that circumstance is) and he was brave enough to follow their arcs through to dismal conclusions in some cases. I found myself wishing, at times, that Perrotta was the kind of junky writer who gives his audience what they want–man o man did the junky part of my brain want to know what really happened to everyone, want the romances to work out right, the families to be healed, everyone’s stars to realign. That said, I think there was one tiny spot where he did maybe chicken out and pull back from the conclusion one of the storylines was heading towards, but the resolution he found there was only slightly less chilling than the one I was, against all decency, rooting for. But, in general, the literary part of my brain thought Perrotta did what he needed to do in this novel by leaving the right questions unanswered and the right scenarios resolved.

As with any speculative or apocalyptic story, Perrotta did not have to stray particularly far from actual reality to find any of this characters or situations. That is not to say, though, that he did not have to imagine into a lot of impulses here and construct an alternate reality that felt believable. From the particulars of the Guilty Remnant to the evolution of Tom’s college-kid to radical-disciple to undercover-hippie journey, he built up and backed up his own terrific roster of invented mythologies.

He is also funny. Take this excerpt regarding some of the celebrity Departed:

John Mellancamp and Jennifer Lopez, Shaq and Adam Sandler, Miss Texas and Greta Van Susteren, Vladimir Putin and the Pope. There were so many different levels of fame, and they all kept getting mixed together–the nerdy guy from the Verizon ads and the retired Supreme Court Justice, the Latin American tyrant and the quarterback who’d never fulfilled his potential, the witty political consultant and that chick who’d been dissed on The Bachelor. According to the Food Network, the small world of superstar chefs had been disproportionately hard hit (51).

The thing about this list, besides its spot-on hilarity, is that it actually gives us a lot of information, too. This is a world that exists right along side ours–these people are famous right now. It provoked a definite unsettled feeling in my stomach to see such specificity and randomness; I don’t know if Perrotta could have nailed that feeling of It could have been anybody so quickly in his reader without this pop culture reference. We know immediately what a grand scope we’re dealing with from this list, that the frivolous and the rarefied were lost, and how everything must have changed. No Food Network stars? Jeez. Of course this list may not serve the book so well in ten years, but we’ll worry about that later.

I recommend you get this book, read it, and talk to me about it. I recommend you do not study the empty shoes (get it?) on the back cover of The Leftovers too hard, go to an Anthropology store, see the same exact super cute yellow and beige flats on the shelf and have a heart palpitation, as I did last week. In Perrotta’s world, even those with great taste in shoes could Depart.

I have to say that I was, sadly, a bit disappointed. The book did deliver on being funny, in a misanthropic, snide sort of way. There were some hilarious characterizations of certain types of people (especially the super-experimental pre-school educators/dairy farmers) and the narrator’s little son was charming, adorable and heart-rending without being too saccharine or precocious. The premise of the book wasn’t bad either: a not-so-great development officer at a mediocre college gets fired, then brought back, although not quite rehired, when a former college buddy is targeted by the school as a potential donor. Hijinks ensue.

I guess the big problem is that I don’t really care to read about hijinks. Or, if I am reading about hijinks, I want them liberally interspersed with serious, quiet reflection. Or moments of meaningful communication. This book was too quick and snappy for me. It wasn’t kind enough. I am, of course, all for unkind things happening in books, but don’t generally go for books where the author isn’t kind to his characters. Sam Lipsyte was definitely not kind to these characters, not to any of them. And yet, the book didn’t quite take itself seriously enough to be dark.

Despite all this criticism, I read this book in the South Beach sun and could just as easily have put it down in the sand and taken a nap. But I wasn’t bored by it, not at all–Mr. Lipsyte can certainly write quick, surprising sentences that grab and hook a reader along.  But just like I was exhausted by the relentless satire of Super Sad True Love Story, I was by this, too. I think that satire isn’t for me.

Oh boy, that didn’t help matters. But, we were indeed at the front of the line to get our books signed. And what did we do? We got them signed and bolted. No meaningful conversation. No “I’m a writer and you’ve inspired me!” No “You can make it out to…” It was a crazy amount of build-up for basically zero pay-off.

Until, of course, I read the book. I really liked it. The Marriage Plot has a lot of what one wants in a novel, or at least a lot of what I want in one: subtle but smart action, emotional development, struggle, tragedy, comedy, love. It revolves around three young adults just pre- and post- graduation from Brown. These are smart, interested and interesting kids many of whose problems are born from and cultivated by their studies: the 19th C novel, semiotics, biology, philosophy, religion. I went to a college where students were apt to take their new-found knowledge way too seriously (There was one guy, freshly introduced to Marx, who burst into my room while I was talking on the phone, screaming “Do you even know who made that phone? You are alienated from the means of production!” There were the kids who could talk about nothing but Foucault when they were high. There was the guy who paced and sweated over German politics during lunch).

There are a lot of “first world problems” going on in this book, but the characters were so round, so real, that I cared about them and their issues. Lots of people caution against writing about college students precisely because their problems, so huge to them, are nothing most older people care about. But here, not so. I felt invested in the love triangle at the heart of the book. As Madeleine studies the Marriage Plot in the 19th century novel, she, as many heroines before her, is caught in a push and pull between two men. There are letters written and letters lost, there is foreign travel, disillusionment, tragic mental illness. There are family interventions, once-grand homes and windswept landscapes. There are shades of Jane Austen and Jonathan Franzen all at once. And just when Eugenides needs to tweak the formula, he does. To this end, he employs some winks and nods, some meta-touches, but, being in on the joke, I enjoyed them.

Mr. Eugenides uses verbs to their full potential. He always gets the right one, the best one for the job; he calls verbs into duty in ways that made me stop and gasp. “A ficus tree endured in the corner” (63). What else do you need to know about the person whose ficus this is? Basically nothing. That verb says it all. His prose is so precise–not clinical, but considered and yet still natural–that it exposes a lot of other writing out there as lazy.

Not that the novel needed more, but I would have read more. I don’t usually wish for sequels, but I’d love to know what these characters are doing ten years post-graduation, twenty-years. Maybe next time I go see Jeffrey Eugenides read, I’ll mention that. But, probably I’ll just anxiously avert my eyes and run.

Interesting stuff. But I hope to return to more literary pursuits next month!

And–I mostly liked the book, too! Thank goodness–it would have been so disappointing to have hated it. What I thought was most successful was how willing Rick Moody was to go to the ugly side. These characters are ugly. Many of them are physically ugly, almost all of them think very ugly thoughts; many of them act on that ugliness, too. There is something satisfying about reading about the secret and the interior lives of denizens of our country’s most buttoned-up state, Connecticut. There are some shocking scenes of sexual confusion, depravity and disappointment involving both the middle-aged parents in the book and their teenage children–occasionally in combination. There was one particular item of lingerie that journeyed through the book accumulating ever more fluids and mortifications. I wanted to don rubber gloves, climb into the book and take it away. And burn it. I will say, though, that Moody was terribly successful here because about ten days after reading the book, I’m still viscerally grossed out. That’s powerful writing.

The point of view shifted from character to character throughout the book, or so I thought, until I realized that there actually was one over-arching narrator. For the majority of the book, I’d confused this narrator–who, it turns out, was a character in the book–with the authorial voice. I think that I was supposed to do that, too. The reveal did explain away some of the p.o.v. issues I had with certain sections that were both seemingly omniscient and yet also full of editorializing and judgement:

The bright hues of the sixties had vanished from contemporary interior design. Let me interrupt again briefly here. Where the wives of southern Connecticut in the past might have embraced–carefully, hesitantly–gaudy neons and Day-Glos, they had by 1973 settled into milder pastels and earth tones. (pg. 105)

But, it did also seem gimmicky. I did not totally understand what we gained with this structure.

For a book with so much sex in it, The Ice Storm is incredibly unsexy. It is full of alienation and sadness, and confirms that what we may think, in our least charitable moments, may be going on behind our neighbors’, or our family members’, doors, actually is. But there is some grace, I think, in the honesty and the ugliness.

I had wanted to see Justin Torres and Tayari Jones speaking about writing childhood, but either I read the schedule wrong the other day or some events got changed around because their panel ended up happening at 10am, before I arrived. My back-up choice was not bad, though.

11am: The Good, the Bad, and the Family with Sergio Troncoso, Elizabeth Nunez and Tom Perrotta, moderated by Rob Spillman

These three writers read short selections that pertained to family from their most recent books. Both Troncoso and Nunez’s excerpts struck me as a touch didactic, but their pieces were out of context and they were charming when discussing the way they negotiated their family’s reactions to their work and how they mined their family’s experiences to create stories that, in the end, were fictional, and their own. I really liked Tom Perrotta’s reading. I hadn’t given a lot of thought to his new book because, although I’ve always enjoyed reading him, for some reason I’d gotten it into my head that he was too commercial for me anymore. Hearing him read a passage about a teenage girl in the aftermath of a non-religious rapture in which many people on earth disappeared, I realized that was dumb. The book sounds great. Rob Spillman asked the questions and time ran out before the conversation could be opened up to the audience, which made me very happy because Q&A’s make me cringe!

12pm: Epic Confusion with Nadia Kalman, Chuck Klosterman, Sam Lipsyte and Tiphanie Yanique, moderated by Tiphanie Yanique

This was by far the best event of the day. It started out a little shaky with Tiphanie Yanique’s overly brassy introductions, but the readings were all terrific and the discussion was excellent. I loved Nadia Kalman from start to finish–I can’t wait to read her novel and would like to make her my friend. I always expect to dislike Chuck Klosterman because of his whole persona, but, as has happened in the past, I found him funny. I don’t think I’ll pick up his book but he’s a great person for livening up a conversation. I absolutely loved Sam Lipsyte’s reading from The Ask, which I’m now dying to read, even though one of the passages he read was the same passage he read at the festival last year!

I took a fair amount of notes during the Q&A which, luckily, was not awkward–people asked generic questions that elicited a lot of great answers. When one audience member asked how the writers knew when they were done, Sam Lipsyte quoted a philosopher (I can’t figure out which one–let me know if you do): “You’re never finished, you just turn away in disgust.” Love. Klosterman said, “The end is the second thing I know after the beginning.” That was interesting. It seemed like the bulk of his work was figuring out how to get from A to Z. Kalman said, “You are asking this question of someone who wrote 52 drafts of this book.” The conversation proceeded for a moment before Klosterman interrupted and said, “Wait, what do you mean, 52 drafts?” It turned out that while she hadn’t rewritten the whole book 52 times, she did have 52 distinct drafts saved on her computer. Later, when I was telling my writing group about this, someone said that the crazy thing was that she was still counting at that point. Sam Lipsyte closed out the event by saying that, “Writing fiction, in general, is a bad idea.” A man after my own heart (is that the expression?). It was terrific.

1pm: The Writer as Illusionist with Emma Straub, Steven Millhauser and Steve Stern, moderated by Harold Augenbraum

This was okay. It started off in a charming fashion with Harold Augenbraum saying, after a woman snapped some pictures of the panel, “We ask that you hold your photography until the end, but that one was okay because it was Emma Straub’s mom.” They all walked a line with her–she was a young woman at the start of her career, they were all older, storied men–but in the end I found that they were more supportive and sweet than patronizing. Stern joked “This panel should be called Emma and the Elders.” During her reading, when she got to a funny passage that caused Millhauser to snicker, she blurted out, mid-sentence, “I made Steven Millhauser laugh!” Stern’s reading was fine (I’d never heard of him, but I think a lot of other people had) and Millhauser’s was good, particular his reprise of “She Takes He Takes,” this wacky spoken-word-ish poem about a divorce that he performed last year at the festival, too. I found it a little strange that he did it again, but if I wrote something that good, I might recite it every day, let alone once a year… At this point it was really warm in the room and I started to feel terrible so I snuck out to take in some fresh air outside before the next event.

2pm: The Brooklyn Book Festival Honors Jhumpa Lahiri, in conversation with Liesl Schillinger

This event had about a bazillion people crammed into St. Ann’s Church, including people who inexplicably felt like, in the incredibly acoustically challenging space, it was okay to talk during the event, keep their crying babies in the room, rustle with plastic bags, etc. The speakers were on level with the audience, rendering them disembodied echo-y voices. Marty Markowitz kicked the thing off in his usual affable, goofy manner and then Schillinger invited Lahiri to read, for her fans, a small portion of the new novel she’s working on. I couldn’t really focus because I could barely hear over all of the din, and because she spoke very quietly. I had higher hopes for the conversation, but sadly, surprisingly, it was pretty boring. It absolutely isn’t Jhumpa Lahiri’s job to be an interesting speaker–her job is to be a great writer, which she is–but I wish some organizer had realized that this wasn’t the venue for her. When she was asked a question about her process, her answer invariably was, “I don’t know…” A writer friend pointed out that, because she doesn’t teach, she isn’t required to analyze process the way so many other writers do. She spoke a lot about her parents, which wasn’t very enlightening for me because she didn’t say anything that her nonfiction hasn’t already said better. This didn’t change the way I feel about Jhumpa Lahiri or her writing (the way I feel = good), but I wouldn’t go see her speak again.

3pm: Pizza and gossip.

4pm:  Presented by the National Book Foundation and BAM’s Eat, Drink and Be Literary-Defining the Moment: USA 2011: Where are We? Writers Deborah Eisenberg, Fran Lebowitz, and Wallace Shawn moderated by Harold Augenbraum

I was in hell. A good part of that is my fault for not looking beyond Deborah Eisenberg’s name on the bill–I don’t know that I’ve ever seen her on any other one so I was excited and that was that. This panel, though, had absolutely nothing to do with writing, books or literature. I found it highly uncomfortable to be seated in front of a panel of very privileged, successful, white people holding forth on the state of the country (including vast proclamations about poor people…did you know that poor people are uneducated and don’t know to care about politics? Did you know that if we–the rich, smart, comfortable, lefties in the room–cared more about our country and less about unimportant things like gay marriage, we could educate these unenlightened poor people? Jeez–women’s studies 101–there is ALWAYS supposed to be something more important and immediate than civil rights. Fight for them anyway–if you wait for a lull in the rest of the world’s atrocities, you’ll be waiting forever.). Omg. Some of it was funny, a lot of what was said were things I agree with in much more nuanced theory, but in general I found the whole production reductive and terribly obnoxious. I wished I was over at the international stage (or any other stage).

All in all, it was a good day, but as our writing group discussed, the festival might be getting too big. The crowds were oppressive at times, making it hard to get in to certain panels or to hear once there. I’d love to see a bit more diversity in terms of writers–I don’t necessarily mean ethnic or racial diversity, but a more varied selection of writers from year to year so there isn’t so much repetition. And, to paraphrase my writing group friend, “If all those people in the audience were writers, which it seemed like they were, no wonder our writing never gets published! There are too many of us!”