An Interview With Jeff Gordinier: How Generation X is Saving The World

Below, University of Memphis MFA student Matthew Peters talks with award-winning writer Jeff Gordinier about the benefits of slacking, the poetry of Borges, dining with Britney Spears, and Gordinier's his new book, X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft But Can Still Keep Everything From Sucking.

Q: You wrote an essay called "Has Generation X Already Peaked," how did that turn into a book about Gen X saving the world?

A: The essay was written when my son Toby was a few days old and my editor-in-chief from Details called me at home, and even though I was on Daddy leave and should have been changing diapers, he convinced, or maybe coerced me, into writing the essay. I wasn’t gunning to write about Generation X. I think any X’er would be apt to steer clear of the topic. So Dan and I talked on the phone about what Generation X has accomplished, what contributions have we or haven’t we made to American culture and the essay sprang out of that conversation. When I turned in the essay I started getting this terrific response and you can never predict that. We got a lot of letters to the editor, The Washington Post wrote a column about it, and my Details editor, Pete Wells, suggested it might be a book. So I put together a proposal fairly quickly, turned it in and one thing led to another.

Q: It's essentially an idea book -- an argument for the ways Generation X has saved the world. But it's not an expository argument -- you actually tell a carefully structured story using scenes and dialogue and such ...

A: I tend to think about structure quite a bit. I studied with John McPhee at Princeton as an undergrad. Focusing on structure and mapping that out is a huge part of the McPhee approach. I tended to like a lot of the New Journalism work from the 60’s and 70’s - Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Hunter Thompson of course - people like that. I was spellbound by that and wanted to try my hand at that sort of thing. When I started working on this book I felt very quickly there should be an explicit structure because I intended to bounce all over the place in terms of narrative. I wanted there to be scenes of reporting. So I went to Las Vegas to write about the Beatles Cirque de Soleil show, revisited Woodstock ’94, and went on the road with the Poetry Bus. I wanted there to be action. I didn’t want the entire book just to be a 200 page screed - just a sort of endless polemic. I wanted it to be punctuated with moments of action. I knew it would have a somewhat diffuse narrative momentum and as a result of that I wanted to inflict a fairly explicit structure on it - so there’s an introduction and then there’s a very straightforward three-act structure. I thought that would help hem it in and contain all the tangled threads.

Q: Douglas Coupland says Generation X is more a frame of mind than an age bracket but you map out a general timeline, 1961 to 1977, to qualify Generation X. I miss that by two years. I did pass your Generation X Aptitude Test ... But I also rented the movie Slacker in sixth grade and turned it off after a few minutes because I had no idea what was going on ... so am I a Gen X'er?

JG: You're one of us, but you're on the cusp. I don't know that any sixth grader would understand Slacker. I’m not sure I understand it. It’s a weird movie, in some ways it’s a time capsule. It captures the feeling of a moment for those of us who were drifting around at the end of the ‘80’s and early ‘90’s.

Q: You make the interesting point that Slacker anticipated the keys to success of Gen X.

A: Slacking is underrated. I visited the offices of Google not long ago, the New York offices, and the executives that were taking me around explained to me that there’s mandated downtime if you’re an employee. They want you to take a certain chunk of your week and drift, float around, dream, come up with cool ideas. Maybe you play foosball, flip through magazines, or maybe you just daydream, but you’re supposed to take time away from your day-to-day labor. It’s meant to instigate creative thinking because that’s what happens. If you’re completely stressed and your schedule is over-stuffed with activity, it’s very difficult to come up with new ideas and you probably find this as a writer, that your best ideas come up when you’re taking a break or when you go out to get a sandwich or walk around the block. So it’s interesting that Google, which was founded by a couple Gen X’ers, actually incorporates that ethos into the work week. I think a lot of great songs and music came out of that “slacking” -- so did great businesses that have gone on to change the way the world sees itself and interacts, the way the world consumes media. So I think more people should slack. At the same time the term slacker has stuck to us like a barnacle on the hull of our ship and we can’t scrape it off. It’s become one of these cut and paste media clichés that replicates itself from year to year. I think part of what I wanted to do with the book was validate some of Generation X’s contributions to American culture, whether we’re talking about Google or Being John Malkovich, Lost in Translation and Boogie Nights, or Nevermind and Odelay and the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill - I just thought it was time for us to get credit for these things, these remarkable achievements, and it made sense to acknowledge that.

Q: Your book is choc-full of pop culture references, but you sprinkle literary references in there too. . .

JG: I do? I’m sorry! I’m pretty pretentious. I admit it. I tried to cure myself of that but I fear there is no remedy. Even the title X Saves the World is meant to be comic-booky and ironic, but what I haven’t talked about because I come off looking pretentious -- at least in my mind -- is that it’s a reference to a poem by Jorge Luis Borges called “The Just.” The last line has to do with people saving the world: "A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished/He who is grateful for the existence of music./He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology./Two workmen playing, in a cafe in the South, a silent game of chess./The potter, contemplating a color and a form./The typographer who sets this page well though it may not please him./A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto./He who strokes a sleeping animal./He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him./He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson./He who prefers others to be right./These people, unaware, are saving the world."

It’s a remarkable poem. Much more eloquently than I can, it expresses what I wanted to express in the book, which is that the quiet approach of Gen X’ers is in fact saving the world, even though I’m being sarcastic about it. And what are the people doing in that poem? They’re slacking! They’re hanging out in cafes playing chess and petting sleeping dogs. They’re slackers saving the world, according to Borges.

MP: Yet we hear much more about non-slacking baby boomers than Gen X'ers ...

A: Yes. There's a term -- and I might not be describing it correctly but I hope I am: In medical circles it’s known as synaptic rutting. If you drive home from work the exact same route everyday it’s bad for your brain. If you eat the same meal every single day it’s bad for the wiring of your brain. It actually creates ruts in your synapses. It makes it difficult to think in different ways because you’re not refreshing the engine. I feel as though we’re trapped in synaptic ruts in this country when it comes to boomer nostalgia. It’s endlessly recycled. Every anniversary comes to us as an affliction. Oh it’s the anniversary of the Summer of Love. Oh it’s the anniversary of 1968 – that pivotal year! Oh here comes the anniversary of Woodstock, and it seems as though we’re compelled to revisit these things whether we want to or not.

I’m susceptible to nostalgia as well. Everyone is to some degree and I don’t intend to get all pious about it, but I do think that when there’s this surplus of nostalgia -- a nostalgia epidemic -- it inhibits new growth, culturally. Think of the synaptic rut of Lindsay, Britney, Jessica, Paris, Lindsay, Britney, Jessica, Paris ... that US Weekly rut we’re subjected to. I sound like the most tedious dentist in the world whining about this like I’m the guy at the party saying, “Careful with that, now now, sugar rots your teeth.” I’m a consumer of pop-culture and totally light-hearted about it. It’s not something I tend to get high and mighty about but we seem to have reached a strangely monotonous moment in media.

Q: You correlate John Donne’s poetry to Kurt Cobain’s lyrics and the way they both very much involve organs and bodily fluids and guts. Then later on you get to Stephen Colbert’s speech at the White House Correspondents dinner where he talks how there are more nerve endings in guts than in the brain. What's up with all the guts?

A: That’s an interesting connection. I think if there’s one thing about X’ers that marks their work it’s that they tend not to be squeamish, for better or worse. Think about Quentin Tarantino. I saw Pulp Fiction in 1994 when it was premiering and it was actually shocking. Now it’s transformed itself into an American classic but at the time it was genuinely shocking. As was Reservoir Dogs. God, the scene when the ear was sliced off was revolting. Trainspotting is another good example of a movie that’s awash in blood and piss and shit. It’s certainly unafraid of the body. Boogie Nights, Boys Don’t Cry, even Being John Malkovich – sliding into someone’s brain (laughs). In a way, what do we have but our organs? That’s all we’re left with.

It’s funny you mentioned the John Donne comparison because there are a few points in the book where I’m willfully, transparently pretentious, and I make fun of myself for that. It’s almost like I throw the volleyball up in the air and a couple pages later I spike it. The John Donne comparison is a good example of that. A couple critics have taken me to task for it. It is an incredibly snooty comparison. But a few pages later I say, “Oh my God I can’t believe I was so pretentious as to compare Kurt Cobain to John Donne.”

Q: So if you had to go to dinner with either Britney Spears or Simon Cowell – two people panned pretty hard in your book, which one would it be?

A: I’d have dinner with Britney Spears in a heartbeat. It’d be a blast. I’d love to hear her talk. I’d love to hear how her mind works. I can’t deny that I think she’s fascinating. This is the inevitable evolution of things. One moment of pop-culture leads to another. She embodies her generational moment and I’d love to meet someone who has that kind of significance. She also seems to be a lunatic and I tend to love lunatics. They’re great dinner party companions. You know you’re an adult when you can sense that MTV doesn’t love you anymore. The Britney Spears video nailed that moment for me. But you know, she’s got to have fascinating things to say. She’s sort of a Warholian creature. So’s Paris Hilton. Simon just seems as though he’d be a petulant bore. I wouldn’t want to listen to Simon prattle on for five minutes. I’d tire of him and I’d traipse off to a different part of the party. But with Britney I’d be transfixed. I’d just keep my mouth shut and listen to what she has to say.

SMALL PRESS SPOTLIGHT: STEVE FELLNER

Blind Date with Cavafy, Marsh Hawk Press, 2007.

Steve Fellner's debut collection of poems won the 2006 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize and the 2008 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry from the Publishing Triangle. He is currently assistant professor of English at SUNY Brockport.

A mini-essay from the award-winning poet:

"138 Copies"

138 copies. A few weeks ago, when I received my first royalty check of $27.08, I received the news: 138 copies. My first book of poems, Blind Date with Cavafy, sold a total of 138 copies.

My question: was that good or bad?

To me, it sounded like a lot. I had been lucky enough to win the Third Annual Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Book Prize, judged by Denise Duhamel, which resulted in the publication of my book. Marsh Hawk Press' editors, particularly Sandy McIntosh, the late Rochelle Ratner, and the brilliant cover designer Claudia Carlson, were nothing but kind to me. I had no choice but to ask myself: did I fail them by not selling more than 138 copies in over a year?

If I wasn't so self-conscious, maybe I could have scheduled more readings, and then inevitably sold more books. We've all heard about those controversies that flare up from time to time, where certain presses are accused of rigging their contests. But I suddenly felt a surge of empathy for those who cut corners and publish people they already know and love. Would I want to put all the time and effort it takes in producing a book for a total stranger? Who doesn't want to say 'the hell with it' and just accept and embrace the familiar?

But then again, maybe 138 copies really is a lot. I did trade in my prize money of $1,000 for copies of the book, which I diligently sent to literary magazines (about 75), hoping someone would be kind enough to post a short review. I didn't feel like I could ask my family, or friends, or friends of my friends, or friends of my friends of my friends to actually buy one. If I expected them to pay, that would mean they weren't special, and everyone likes to feel special. So, whenever anyone asked, I mailed them a free copy, ruining the best field for many potential buyers.

And, of course, gifts come with their own set of problems. Once you give someone a book, they then feel obligated to claim they read it, and most likely, will offer some vague comment at a later date that it was "interesting" or claim they "thoroughly enjoyed the voice." I honestly never expected anyone to do anything more than skim over a few pages. People have busy lives, and shouldn't be wasting time looking at my poems. They should be going on dates, seeing bad movies, eating food that's way too expensive. The world would be a much better place if people went on more dates.

So by self-servingly trying to make everyone else feel special, did I sell less copies and make my small, hard-working press feel less special? Marsh Hawk Press, to its credit, never made me feel bad about selling 138 copies. The collective has been exceedingly generous in inviting me to readings, and celebrating the kind reviews I have received. But you never know if you're doing enough. I listened to the nice things the collective said to me, but it's a poet's curse, even an insignificant one like myself, to constantly be searching for something behind what people say, beyond their words. Something that will lead to other words. Possibly scary, unwanted ones.

And the poet's mind obsesses as much about the art's form as the distribution of the art itself. Maybe if I didn't give anyone a copy of my book, I would have sold 178 copies as opposed to a mere 138, and more people, like the friends of friends of friends, would have actually read the book, because they would have shelled out their own money.

Then again, I find, strangely enough, I'm more likely to purchase the books of people I don't like, my enemies who don't even know I exist. I'll pre-order their book on Amazon.com and when it comes, I'll wait to open the package until I'm home on a Friday night. I'll invite a friend over, another minor poet. Then the ceremony begins: we'll open up a cheap bottle of wine and read the prize-winner's words aloud, laughing at the dumb ideas, the obvious flaws. We pour ourselves another glass when we are reminded that the judge was the one who we at one time so eagerly dreamed would choose our book.

So many people complain about the perverse oversaturation of the poetry market and what a debacle AWP has become. I agree. To a point. But as a creative writing teacher once told me when he was forced to read rough drafts of my work, "Always remember: creating is better than not creating." And for the most part, people are trying to do good with their words, however warped their idea of good may be. The most wonderful, comforting aspect of the sheer near impossibility of being recognized, the enormity of the market place: everyone becomes like everyone else, clamoring for their little bit of attention, love.

NBCC Good Reads 3 [The Long Tail] John Mark Eberhart's "Broken Time"

NBCC member Jeffrey Ann Goudie had this suggestion for the NBCC Good Reads Spring 2008 list, recommendations by NBCC members, awards winners and finalists:

In the poetry category, John Mark Eberhart's "Broken Time," Mid-America Press. The second collection from Kansas City Star Books Editor Eberhart sends a love letter to music and musicians ("broken time" is a musical term, we learn, for "improvised syncopation") and telegrams from a Midwest marked by dreams pulled up short by reality. The final poem, "The Gospel of the Dirt," about Charles Darwin, is a layered reflection on selection, natural and unnatural.--Jeffrey Ann Goudie

NBCC Good Reads 3: Fiction Also Rans

Here are some other top vote getters* in fiction for the NBCC Good Reads spring list, recommendations by NBCC members, former awards winners and finalists:

Charles Bock, BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN, Random House.

Geraldine Brooks, PEOPLE OF THE BOOK, Viking

Jerome Charyn, JOHNNY ONE-EYE, Norton.

Jonathan Coe, THE RAIN BEFORE IT FALLS, Knopf

Rivka Galchen, ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCES, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Dagoberto Gilb, THE FLOWERS, Grove

Samantha Hunt, THE INVENTION OF EVERYTHING ELSE, Houghton

James Meek, WE ARE NOW BEGINNING OUR DESCENT, Canongate U.S.

Lydia Millet, HOW THE DEAD DREAM, Counterpoint

Jiang Rong, WOLF TOTEM, Penguin Press

Bernhard Schlink, HOMECOMING, Pantheon

Elizabeth Strout, OLIVE KITTERIDGE, Random House

Tobias Wolff, OUR STORY BEGINS, Knopf


*all ties; list in alphabetical order

National Magazine Awards: Caitlin Flanagan for Criticism

The Atlantic's National Magazine Award winner in criticism Caitlin Flanagan's three winning pieces (and pieces that were past finalists) here.

NBCC Good Reads: Nonfiction Also Rans

Here are runners up to the top nonfiction vote getters for the NBCC Good Reads spring list, recommendations by NBCC members, former awards winners and finalists:

Bruce Barcott, THE LAST FLIGHT OF THE SCARLET MACAW, Random House

David Sheff, BEAUTIFUL BOY, Houghton Mifflin

Philip Shenon, THE COMMISSION: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation,

David Shields, THE THING ABOUT LIFE IS THAT ONE DAY YOU’LL BE DEAD, Knopf


*all tied, list in alphabetical order

NBCC Good Reads 3 [The Long Tail] Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Recommends....

NBCC fiction finalist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's pick for the NBCC Good Reads Spring 2008 list, recommendations from NBCC members, award winners and finalists:

In fiction, I would recommend Ceridwen Dovey's "Blood Kin", which I thought to be wise and subtle and true, a fable about power in a unnamed country where a coup has just taken place.--Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

NBCC Good Reads 3 [The Long Tail] Sara Paretsky Recommends...

NBCC autobiography finalist Sara Paretsky adds this to the NBCC Good Reads Spring 2008 list--recommendations from NBCC members, awards winners and finalists.

One novel that stands out for me is Melissa Benn's "One of Us," just out in England from Chatto & Windus. She's Tony Benn's daughter, and it's an insider look at politics and power, but it's a rich and heart-breaking novel in its own right. I can't get it out of my mind.--Sara Paretsky

GOOD READS IN MANHATTAN AND SAG HARBOR

Two panels this weekend celebrate the Spring "Good Reads" recommendations by the NBCC. At 7 PM on Friday at McNally Robinson in SoHo, join NBCC board member Eric Banks and panelists Leo Carey (books editor at the New Yorker), Salon co-founder Laura Miller, Ben Ratliff (author of 2007 NBCC finalist Coltrane: The Story of a Sound), Melanie Rehak (author of Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her), and Owen Sheers (author of the "NBCC Good Reads" novel Resistance) as they share their enthusiasms for recent titles as well as rediscovered classics.

Saturday at 6 pm at Canio's Books in Sag Harbor NBCC President Jane Ciabattari convenes a panel with NBCC member, author/lecturer and John Jay/CUNY professor Mark Ciabattari, poet, photographer, and former KGB series curator Star Black, and poet/novelist/WW Norton editor Jill Bialosky.

NBCC Good Reads 3 [The Long Tail] Ron Slate's Poetry Pick

NBCC poetry award finalist Ron Slate weighs in with a poetry title for the NBCC Good Reads Spring 2008 list--recommendations from NBCC members, awards winners and finalists.

Reginald Gibbons, "Creatures of a Day," (LSU Press).

April brings a pile of new poetry volumes, and Gibbons' tops my list. It's an incredibly ambitious and compelling book, broad in sweep yet personal, socially-conscious yet not sententious. Everything in this book is interesting -- the stories and recollectons, the force of the voice, the struggle to be clear about experience, thought, and value. --Ron Slate

SMALL PRESS SPOTLIGHT: ALISTAIR McCARTNEY

The End of the World Book, University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.

Alistair McCartney teaches creative writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles. His work is widely represented in various literary journals and anthologies of fiction and nonfiction, including Wonderlands: Good Gay Travel Writing. Born in Australia, he currently lives in LA. He is presently working on the next two novels in his trilogy, The Death Book: a Comedy, and The Encyclopedia of Boys.

The End of the World Book defies easy categorization-this "alphabetical guide to the apocalypse" reads like a collection of prose poems or an inventory of every subject made fascinating and worth reflecting upon. This is also a book that blurs the lines between fiction, nonfiction and memoir as it gathers facts and recollections woven into narratives that may or may not be true. Why this complexity of structure? And what are you expecting the reader to take away after experiencing this book?

Well, like most elements in my writing, the structure developed very organically. As a writer I had never felt comfortable in inhabiting one genre, whether it is complying with the truth constraints of memoir, or the at times equally rigid demands of fiction, those imperatives of plot and character and creating one seamless, miniaturized world. Although of course this is a purely personal aesthetic choice, I do feel that writing at the beginning of a new century, the question of representation is in flux and up for grabs. That is, how do we choose to represent this world? Do the categories of fiction and nonfiction as we used them in the 20th century still apply to the historical and aesthetic conditions of the 21st century? Of course I'm not the first writer to say it, but perhaps the complexity of a new century demands a complex literary mirror. However, I would add that what I'm doing is actually quite simple: describing and categorizing the contents of my unconscious in a manner after Rimbaud, both systematic and deranged.

As for what do I expect the reader to take away with them, although I could never predict a reader's response, to paraphrase Flaubert, one hope I do have is that my book will set the reader dreaming, will leave them with that disquieting feeling a dreamer experiences when waking up in the morning.

The tone of this book is interesting because even as it asks the reader directly "Do you fully understand that someday you are going to die?" in such entries as "Question Marks," there are plenty of moments of humor, especially with the pop culture entries such as "Hip-Hop" and "Justin Timberlake." You seem to address different layers of "endings"-the end of life, the end of days, but also, in this age of information overload, the end of trends, the end of public interest and the fickle relationships society has with media and technology: always the search for the new and the better. Is this part of a critique of modern life? ("Death will be more like myspace.") Are today's citizens shaped and defined by these immediate attachments to things of fleeting and ephemeral value? Or is this what makes humans so unique and precious?

I would say my novel is simultaneously a critique of the banality of culture--specifically pop, political and technological culture--and an anarchic immersion in it. Hence, as you point out, the shifting tone of this book, between the deeply frivolous and the deadly serious, the sincere and the ironic, the romantic and the derisive. Within that sliding surface, the main critique is perhaps of the death of the imagination at this point in time in culture here in the U.S., the loss of the unique, a railing against our culture of repetition. I mean it when I write that people will look back on this decade as one in which there was no hope of doing anything original, and that it will be a decade best forgotten.

So TEOTWB is to a large degree satirical, which I believe is unavoidable in an age like ours, but as I also write in my entry on “Satire”, "there are spaces that satire cannot reach."—namely those precious aspects of humans you refer to above. This is where the critical voice in my book constantly breaks down--my eyebrow is no longer arched--and this is what the narrative persistently addresses: that age-old literary obsession with the strangeness of being, and the fact of impermanence.

The apocalyptic text has received plenty of attention in the post-911, global warming-obsessed world, especially in movies, but also in books such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road: everywhere a reminder of the damage humanity has done to the earth and how it has secured our downfall. And though these texts (including the Book of Revelations itself) declare that casualties will be many, they also point out that there will be survivors-those left behind to tell the tale. The survivor in The End of the World Book is a gay narrator who navigates the broken world with wit, humor and plenty of street smarts. Sexuality, which has not been addressed in other apocalyptic narratives, is an important layer of this book. Can you discuss how these two elements (queerness and the Apocalypse) came together for you while you were writing this book?

As with the structure, the queerness of this book and its focus on apocalypse developed very instinctively and naturally-perhaps it's my Catholic upbringing, but there's just something about the two subjects that go hand in hand. I also think that in the history of gay male literary and transgressive fiction--which is one of the traditions I’m indebted to, though not the only one-there's a long tradition of doing two things: either unveiling the suppressed erotics of a situation (Burroughs, Genet) or injecting sharp wit into the most unlikely spaces (Wilde, McCourt). So in this sense, I am simply operating within that tradition, bringing out the dark camp of Revelations, bringing to light the fact that the end of the world both horrifies and arouses us.

I would say the other major difference between my literary unraveling of the apocalypse and those you refer to above is that whereas most apocalyptic narratives happen in the future, my apocalypse happens simultaneously in the future, the present and the past. Hence the threads throughout the book of past plagues (The Black Death, AIDS), historical genocides (The Holocaust, Pol Pot,) and present day invocations (Suicide Bombers). I state quite clearly that the end of the world has already happened, and it has, countless times, and it continues to happen, on different scales.

To go back to a point you made earlier, the title of my book is quite literal in that I'm referring not only to the end of the world, but also to the end of the World Book Encyclopedia, the end of the idea that an objective encyclopedia is possible. If you've been following the news you'll have seen that the traditional multi-volume encyclopedia is about to become extinct. I see TEOTWB as a new kind of encyclopedia, more portable, more perverse, perhaps more suitable to these unstable times.

(Author Photo: Tim Miller)

NBCC Good Reads 3 [The Long Tail]: Scott McLemee's Picks

NBCC board member Scott McLemee, winner of the NBCC Nona Balakian award for his critical work, offers these two books as his picks for the NBCC Good Reads Spring 2008 list of recommendations by NBCC members, award winners and finalists:

In fiction: Victor Serge, Unforgiving Years (New York Review of Books Classics)

The final and most wrenching novel by one of the great witnesses to the triumph and the degeneration of the Bolshevik Revolution. A few years ago, NYRB Classics brought back into print Serge's "The Case of Comrade Tulayev" -- arguably a much richer treatment of the nightmare of the Stalinist purge trials than Koestler's better known "Darkness at Noon." It was good to see that novel available again in paperback, but I think the press has really outdone itself by issuing "Unforgiving Years," which is only now appearing in English. (Serge died in 1947; the book came out in France in the early 1970s.)

Set in the 1940s, amidst the cosmopolitan yet claustrophobic world of disillusioned ex-functionaries of the Communist International, "Unforgiving Years" is the most psychologically sensitive of the author's books. It zeroes in on the nuances of secrecy, exile, and shattered idealism; and the shifts of narrative voice and the novel's overall structure make it far more intricate than the expression "political novel" usually suggests. Reprinting "The Case of Comrade Tulayev" was a pretty safe bet; it has a solid if modest reputation. But bringing out a challenging and largely unknown novel like "Unforgiving Years" is the sign of a press that is so committed to the seriousness and quality of what it publishes that it is willing to take some risks.


Nonfiction: Richard Sennett, "The Craftsman" (Yale University Press)

I shelve my books alphabetically by author in part because of books like this one, which would tend to fall through the cracks of the usual disciplinary distinctions. (Come to think of it, that is true of most of Sennett's work.) "The Craftsman" is part history, part philosophy, with a bit of sociology and psychology in there, too, along with some memoir. It is an inquiry into what special qualities are involved in learning and practicing a craft -- whether it be brickmaking, architecture, computer programming, or playing a musical instrument.

The slow tempo of developing the necessary skills; the emergence of communities of practitioners; the experiences and meanings involved in learning to use your tools and raw materials, and to respect the demands they place on you....Sennett doesn't so much meditate upon these things as build up a structure of ideas and historical references that honors a particular way of being in the world. --Scott McLemee