Southern Bookman

George Saunders, Media Star

As books in general and fiction in particular reputedly fade in cultural importance, George Saunders is receiving a splash of media attention once standard for literary figures.

Saunders' "Tenth of December" has garnered him a New York Times Sunday magazine profile and TV appearances on "The Morning Joe" and "Up With Chris Heys," where he sat with a panel of three other fiction writers, including Michael Chabon. Now, lead New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani pulls out her toolbox of review speak to praise Saunders.

The attention given Saunders is even more astounding given that "Tenth of December" is a short story collection, a supposedly dead form although publishers keep putting them out. Saunders, with his absurdist postmodern take on America in decline, has apparently captured the zeitgeist. How many folks outside of literary insiders like Kakutani really read Saunders is open to question. But the flurry of attention given his book is thrilling, like sighting a bird thought extinct.

John McPhee's Structured Stories

New Yorker nonfiction master John McPhee in the current issue of the magazine discloses more craft secrets. This time, McPhee delves into how he structures his books and articles.

Following rules of a beloved high school English teacher, McPhee prepares an outline before he writes. His blueprints don't necessarily follow the classic form of headers and subheaders marked with Roman numerals. Some of his examples are schematic diagrams, denoting the skeletal movement of plot and action.

He also describes how he rearranges his notes to find the right situation to open a book or serve as its central turning point. For years, he used the old-fashioned scissors and paste method, then found a now expiring computer program.

McPhee designs his pieces as elaborately as an architect does a building. Perhaps that's why I can find his sentences overly controlled, that he should let them breathe a bit more.

Examining Richard Ben Cramer

Richard Ben Cramer's death has brought a chorus of praise from fellow scribes for the writer whose career marked the end of the extravagant nonfiction writing known as New Journalism. I liked Cramer's early pieces in Esquire and other magazines, but thought his work turned self-indulgent and increasingly unreadable.

His big, messy monstrosity of a campaign book, "What It Takes," showed the limits of the behind the scenes political reporting pioneered by Teddy White. The line of decline ran from White to Hunter S. Thompson to Cramer. His next generation celebrants uniformly cite "What It Takes" as a transformative masterpiece, the book that inspired them to want to be political journalists. I'm sure they're sincere but wonder if general readers found Cramer's bloated book so magical.

Cramer's biography of Joe DiMaggio was more controlled, yet still seemed to focus more on the author and his strained writing than on the subject. The book seemed smaller than DiMaggio's large life.

An adherent of the self-advertising preening macho literary persona of Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer, Cramer was an ambitious, free-swinging writer. To me, he overreached and crashed. His admirers see him as taking flight.

Farewell, Ada Louise Huxtable

I'd read about two weeks ago Ada Louise Huxtable's thorough and informative piece about plans to renovate the New York Public Library, so I was surprised to see in The New York Times Tuesday morning that the distinguished architecture critic had died at age 91. Her well-reasoned and trenchant articles in the Wall Street Journal in recent years were a prime example of the Journal's growth as a general interest paper.

Huxtable first gained fame as the pioneering architecture critic of The New York Times, which she left many years ago, a serious loss for the newspaper. She won a Pulitzer Prize at the Times and left after winning a MacArthur grant. The Times cited that, or her age, for her departure, but some wondered if she had grown too acerbically critical of the city establishment's development schemes for the newspaper's taste. She was famous for an essay decrying the criminal destruction of the classic Penn Station on Manhattan's West Side. Puzzlingly, The Times in its obituary doesn't mention her celebrated stance against the rail station's loss.

The Journal gave Huxtable a forum for a brilliant twilight career. I loved reading her sharp pieces in the Journal's Personal Journal section. Huxtable's columns were better than The Times' architectural criticism, if it still exists. I suppose Michael Kimmelman does some meandering, muddled bits from time to time. Huxtable remained the master until almost the end.

"Gone Girl" Reconsidered

Gillian Flynn's strong finish to "Gone Girl" salvaged the novel for me. A series of well-imagined plot twists overcame my problems with the book's first half.

As the novel progresses, Flynn gives her characters sharper definition and creates scenes that have strong dramatic interest. Reaching for outrageous, if at times muddled satire, she targets male-female relations, our sensationalistic celebrity-media culture and the decline of the American economy.

The novel comes to an unsatisfactory conclusion, however. After a series of well-imagined developments, she settles for a predictable outcome for the twisted married couple at the book's center. Her deliciously evil and outrageously inventive main female protagonist is reduced to a conventional 1950s housewife.

"Gone Girl" Goes Short

Gillian Flynn's "Gone Girl" was one of the most fulsomely praised novels of 2012. Call it an aging white male thing, but I'm struggling to finish the book.

Flynn attempts to yolk a crime mystery with a confessional about a recession ruined yuppie marriage. Alternating first person narratives between the increasingly disreputable husband and sympathetic wife, Flynn falters in differentiating the two. The wife, Amy's, side uses the tiresome technique of diary accounts, which flashback to recount the marriage's history. The husband, Nick, narrates the events of his wife's sudden disappearance. Unconvincing as a male voice - too introspective and "in touch with his feelings" - the Nick narrative lacks suspense and dramatic force. Two detectives supposed to be small-town Columbos don't quite make it.

"Gone Girl's" not terrible. From the reviews and blurbs, I was hoping for something closer to "The Lovely Bones" than "Desperate Housewives."