Men of the Year in the Penny Press!

Lots of disappointments in GQ's latest "Men of the Year" issue, with only a few pleasant surprises sprinkled in between. Of course they named president-elect Barack Obama (they were given about forty seconds of his time, and considering that either he or his wife seem to be on the cover of every single magazine in the Western world this month, even that much time is surprising), as how could they not? And once again, roasting tobacco addict Leonardo DiCaprio comes across in his interview as a genuinely intelligent and enthusiastic young man (when he says about the paparazzi who swarm around his life "I do not like the way they conduct themselves," you have to just nod your head). And Wil S. Hylton's tribute to Senator Ted Kennedy deserves quoting:

There is today no American who does not owe him a debt. For civil rights and voting rights. For privacy and choice. For clean air and fresh water. In an era of partisan gridlock, he forged alliances and straddled parties, aligning himself with his political nemeses - Hatch, Thurmond, Bush. ... He is a cornerstone of the country we love, a founding father of the nation as we know it. His time draws close, and the gift more precious daily.




But alas, such high point are rare. The bulk of the choices leave the reader confused and frustrated. General Petraeus? Touted as a tactical genius when he's only barely managing to occupy a Fourth World craphole of a country despite being given one of the biggest military tidal waves of reinforcements any modern general has ever received? Aaron Eckhart and Jon Hamm? Touted as era-defining actors because they've played a series (or in Hamm's case just one) chin-cleft nonentities? Gordon Ramsay, touted as a 'man's man' in the kitchen because he atrociously bullies his staff into producing bland, overpriced dishes? To say the least, one looks for more in emblems of a year.

The worst offender among the Men of the Year is probably Olympic wunderkind Michael Phelps, who comes across in Michael Paterniti's profile as a spoiled, pea-brained, douchebag who values all the wrong things, trusts all the wrong things, and prioritizes all the wrong things (in this he's undoubtedly no different from any other twenty-something guy, except his new $100 million dollar price-tag makes it just slightly more noticeable). Paterniti wants to paint a friendly, admiring picture of his subject (as far as I know, GQ doesn't do a 'Douchebags of the Year' issue), wants to tell his readers that Michael Phelps is still the same aw-shucks all-American young guy whose teammates used to call him 'Gomer' for his lack of guile. But an awful, creepy alternative to this person peeks through every vignette:

He just seems normal, except for the furtive glances of strangers and the stalkerish approach of one waiter who hides behind a tree before squeakily asking for an autograph, one Phelps signs without making eye contact, without pausing in his sentence, the diamonds of his watch sparkling as he tells of how, after leaving Beijing, he went to Portugal, where he met up with a group of friends, just to hide out for a while, and there were paparazzi literally hanging in the trees.

Bet you think I'm going to jump on that bit about the diamond watch, don't you? Nope! All young people are idiots, and all fashion is idiotic, so it's a natural extrapolation that a fantastically wealthy young man would think it was stylin' to wear a $100,000 watch to an hour-long interview at a Tex-Mex place. No, the detail that hints not only at Phelps being an asshole but at Phelps always having been an asshole (Paterniti nowhere relates any of the many stories that've cropped up about his aw-shucks paragon since his rise to fame - suffice it to say, he disliked by more people at his alma mater, especially more women, than he was liked) is that bit about signing the autograph without stopping to speak to or even look at the person asking for it. Done in a crowd of imploring note-pads, that's excusable. Done in private, one-on-one? No amount of fame or money teaches you to have that inside you - it has to be there already.

And if Phelps is the biggest disappointment among the Men of the Year, the biggest disappointment among the interviewers of those men is certainly Andrew Corsello, whose profile of morose, talentless American literary lion Philip Roth reads like a sado-masochist's love-letter to the prig who treats him like dirt all during their chat. This is how the piece opens:

Is it disdain? Not quite. Disdain requires more energy, more investment. What Philip Roth is giving me is thinner, a mix of four parts boredom and one part irritation. Here's the word that comes closest: disregard.



In case you're wondering, Corsello's attitude toward such treatment is sincere admiration - for him, Roth is the man, the world's greatest living writer, a literary figure Corsello has read and re-read so many times that Roth's various novels have become personal touchstones for him:

I myself often return to Roth not only for his words but for my own - the fervent conversations I've carried on with him in the margins that, when reread, offer clues to my past selves. When I need to consult the X-rays, I reread The Ghost Writer (the X-ray of my writing soul) and Sabbath's Theater (of my ravening male soul). When I need to reach my dad and can't get him on the phone, I sometimes hook up with Swede Levov, American Pastoral's protagonist, who's got my old man's gentle temperament (if not his savvy and smarts). When I consider the dark scenario of a Sarah Palin presidency, I return to The Plot Against America to see what would become of the country were an evangelical even more dim and anti-other than W. to begin culling the 'real' patriots from those who didn't see "America the way you and I see America."

This is nothing if not personal, and it gets more so:

Here it is: I go to Roth for that thrilling voice in my head that responds first with How dare he! then revels in the undeniable proof that Ha! It can be done! and finally arrives at Goddamn! Why can't I take a stab at thinking and writing and living like that?

And the problem with all this earnest if slightly slobbering hero-worship? It's entirely, 100 percent misplaced. In a career that now spans quite a few decades, Philip Roth has never written a single book that was worth reading, not one single work that had more than an accumulated total of three or four semi-good sentences in it. These books haven't affected Corsello because of their literary merits (his own prose is effortlessly better than anything Roth has ever condescended to put on paper), because they don't have any literary merits; they've worked whatever magic they've worked on him in the same way they've managed to win Roth so many male fans who read very few other authors: the books have lots of smutty bits, and they allow misogyny to be draped in writerly affectation. If Roth is a literary lion, he's also a literal one, mirroring the reality of the male African lion: lazy, complacent, sexist, and fond of hogging the kill. Reading Corsello's piece made me want nothing more than to email him with lots and lots of book-recommendations.

But disheartened readers can buck themselves up by remembering one great, glowing detail about this issue, a detail we started with: president-elect Obama gave them about forty seconds of his time - not because he, too, is a prig, a douchebag, or an overrated hack, but because he's just become the busiest man in the world, which is a very, very good thing. That one Man of the Year, smiling courteously at the GQ photographers but really, really needing to dash, is so optimism-affirming he makes up for all the disappointments in the world.

And there's always next year.

The Worst Books of 2006!

We here at Stevereads are as annoyed as anybody (OK, maybe a smidge moreso, but only because we annoy so dang EASILY) by the trite nature of most year-end year-in-books summary pieces. Such pieces only tend (unintentionally, one presumes) to highlight the fact that their writers spent the year doing Sudoku and are only copying the same titles from each other at the last minute. They Google up titles from the last three months and then toss reviewer-speak at each one: 'breathtaking' 'rich and colorful' 'a trenchant commentary on man's inhumanity to man' and so forth.

Of course, SOME amount of phrasifying is necessary when you're only saying a little about a lot of books. And phrases get repeated, there's no avoiding that.

What really bugs us about such lists (the Boston Globe's Gail Cauldwell is by yards and yards the worst offender) is the presumption they all seem to make that literature is a closed and stately procession, where established authors can never be bad, where midlist authors will always be interesting, and where newcomers will never simply outwrite their elders. There's a continuum, these pieces inevitably imply, and we're all agreed on it.

Part of this is, I guess, understandable. Most people - even most smart people - tend to read by herd instinct. Reading time is usually scarce, and reading speeds are usually slow - most readers have neither the time nor the inclination to go foraging much on their own. So they read what's being talked about, what other people are reading.

And sometimes what other people are reading is WORTH reading. But more often than not, it's just CALLED worth reading, with Olympian certainty, since it's easy to be sure of yourself when you're in a like-minded crowd.

Not all of this literary herd mentality is necessarily wrong. Nobody here at Stevereads is going to maintain that, for instance, Irene Nemirovsky's "Suite Francaise" isn't worth everybody's attention, or David Mitchell's "Black Swan Green," or Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma."

But quite a few things that got the clamor were crap. And quite a lot of crap went undetected. And quite a few things that everybody called crap deserves to be called crap again, here at the end of the year.

So, without further ado, we present our first annual Stevereads Worst Books of the Year roundup! Here's our rogues gallery:

Cesar's Way by Cesar Milan - Of course, we all know Rule #4 here at Stevereads (after Steve is Alway Right, Kevin is Always Wrong, and Beepy is Always Sleepy): Only Steve is Qualified to Write about Dogs. That having been said, there are degrees of incompetence, and Milan is right up there. The cover says it all: the dogs looked terrified of this squat creature hunkered down in their midst.

Digging to America by Ann Tyler - America's Laziest Novelist turns in a room-temperature tray of saline in which she'd really like the NAMES THEMSELVES to do most of the writing work, so she doesn't have to be bothered. Let's see: two white people named BRAD and BITSY want to adopt a KOREAN girl. Surely that's all I'm required to do? Wake me when the royalty checks start piling up. Yeesh.

Collected Stories by Amy Hempl - Whining, meandering, plotless, perkily morose amblings about, well, not much of anything at all. The fact that this bloated piece of Wonderbread has made so many end-of-year lists is, we firmly believe, because most Americans like the name 'Amy.'

Only Revolutions by Mark Danielewski - a big book (but 'book' only in the sense that it's a pile of pages bound between covers) that could only be written while heavily stoned, only read while heavily stoned, only liked while heavily stoned and only remembered ... wait, what were we talking about? Dude, I so totally don't remember ...

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose - of all the pompous books written by pompous writers about the wonders of books (their own books, primarily), this one is by a wide margin the most pompous of the year. Prose's fiction never really rose to the level of annoying before, but this chunk of self-admiration takes the cake this year - and then pontificates about the cake. A smart 13-year-old could give you a better idea of how to read prose.

High Lonesome by Joyce Carol Oates - a collection of short stories in which there is accurately expressed not one human emotion, not one thought process, and especially not one line of dialogue. The point of these stories is ONLY who's doing the writing - submitted anonymously to any writing workshop in the country, they'd be savaged by undergrads.

Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai - Watchers of the Booker Prize cried nepotism, and they were right! Oh, not about such paltry matters as who wins the prize - nine-tenths of the time, the Booker goes to crap in any case - but certainly in terms of literary ability. Young Kiran, it turns out, is every bit as frumpy and talky and narratively clueless as her mum. Literary dynasties are built on such creaky stuff...

Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen - this rotten little book has been much-condemned already, but a few more spadefuls of dirt can't hurt. This book is one of a handful of disgustingly self-absorbed feats of authorial whining this year, and in many ways it's the worst of the bunch. Franzen is the worst kind of dorm-floor windbag, the good-looking kid who has everything and never stops complaining about it.

Dispatches from the Edge by Anderson Cooper - another example of the whineography, and a worse one because it's painted on a bigger canvas: the Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, war in the Middle East, famine in Niger ... reading this turgid, awful book, you're constantly reminded of how much SHIT has happened to Cooper, how much INCONVENIENCE he's had to put up with in order to get his dreamy pout beamed into our living rooms on a regular basis. The book leaves you wishing that SOME enterprising sandanista or survivor or simple citizen would interrupt a heartfelt (well, after three takes) interview and POP him one, right in the middle of that oh-so-pretty face. You never know - it could still happen! That would be a LOCK for next year's bestseller list!

Point to Point Navigation by Gore Vidal - surely the Everest of the type of book I'm talking about, the whineography. For the person who's so badly let down Vidal isn't his provincial father, and it isn't a world stingy with its disasters ... no, it's the whole friggin 20th century and everyone in it, ALL of whom would have been better off ... repeat after us here, children ... If They'd Only Listened to Gore. The nominal prequel to this book, Palimsest, at least had the bite of true (albeit demented) desire in it. This thing has nothing but endless self-justification, as well as many anecdotes that struck this reader (and others! my young friend Sebastian commented 'I believe he's plagiarizing HIMSELF' - in a tone that suggested there should be some sort of legal action) as a bit familiar. The deepest sadness here is imagining what Last Memoir Gore Vidal COULD have written, if he'd all along remained in control of his powers and his ego. It would have been a book to reckon with, but we'll never see it now, and 'Point to Point Navigation' is its cartoon.

For two contemptible books we here at Stevereads refer you to another voice entirely. Oh, we could savage them in a sentence or two, certainly - but why should we give you only that when we (well, not 'we' precisely, but surely SOME well-meaning reader) can hot-link you to my young friend Sam's currently quiescent blog-site, What Do We Believe? (right here at blogspot.com) - where you can read truly stellar leave-nothing-out reviews of both books, written with all my sentiments intact, but in what some of you might find a refreshing change of tone (less rabid, more rabbinical, as it were). So look there for full-length condemnations of Philip Roth's "Everyman" and Bernard-Henri Levi's "American Vertigo" - I think these books suck, but I would be far less evaluative about them than young Sam is, so go read him.

Godless by Ann Coulter - oh, I know, I know ... some of you will say that surely SOME books are ENGINEERED to be beneath the contempt of serious readers. But I'd respond that ALL books are books, capable of being handed to anybody, at any time, for any reason. All are capable of enormous good, or enormous evil. And regardless of your political persuasion, this is a deeply evil book, so full of snide, bullying lies that the words themselves cease to resemble coherent English.

For One Day More by Mitch Albom - Once again, it could be argued that such a book should be beneath even our contempt, but we repeat: any book that can foist such treacle on so many people in so many copies must perforce make a list such as this. It's not like this pap is self-published and seen only by the author's family - it's in millions of homes, softening millions of minds like candy-rot.

The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro - In which, for about 700 pages, Hettie and Eleanor argue about who owns the curio left them by their great aunt Flora. Nobody knows how the argument turns out, since nobody has ever finished the book, the latest work from the World's Most Tedious Writer.

And lastly, the single worst book of 2006:

Good Dog by Jon Katz - Those of you who've been reading this blog regularly already know how I feel about this loathesome, contemptible piece of hypocrisy. Katz takes in a dog, windily nominates him his 'lifetime' dog, then has him put to death when he becomes inconvenient - and then goes right on windifying, without the slightest trace of guilt. That this thing could be marketed as a book that would in any way appeal to dog-lovers is proof positive that marketing agencies are fairly soulless covens.

So there you have it, the very lowest of the low for 2006, the surest wastes of your money and reading time. There were many, many other worthless books published, of course, but these were the ones that tried that extra bit harder, that stunk that little bit more.