A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

I wasn't quite ready for this novel.  It was harsher than I anticipated.  By "harsh," I mean it involved rather seedy, nefarious characters who, generally speaking, were really not good people.  The novel documented some pretty unpleasant activities, but there were characters one could root for, even though they occasionally let you down.  (So far, these characters sound like real people, right?  That's what I liked best about the novel.)


By the time the title is illuminated--the "goon squad" as a metaphor for "death"--we are ready for it, and it makes much of the book make more sense.  The characters, for all their faults and deficiencies, are very much like us: They struggle, they feel fear, they try to get things right but too often fail, they sometimes recognize their flaws (sometimes not), and they push through the narrative with admirable courage in the face of death.


The novel is told in a series of related chapters, each one devoted to a particular character and written sympathetically from their perspective (in the third person).  The characters' lives interconnect in unusual ways.  Time shifts are frequent in the novel, and as each chapter begins, the first task is to orient yourself chronologically.  Characters introduced as rather minor players in one chapter are discovered to be the main attraction in the following chapter, providing a motif of linkages which illustrates the clever "six degrees of separation" theory.  (Note: Kevin Bacon does not actually appear in this novel.)


This is definitely a character-driven novel.  The events, though at times unbelievable and bordering on fantastic, move the narrative forward and give the characters something to react to, to bounce off while living their sordid lives.  The separate chapters and intertwined lives of the characters eventually do cohere into an overarching narrative with a satisfying, melancholy, and eerily beautiful ending.


This is a gritty novel of life and death that borders on pulp fiction.  The characters are fully developed, round, and differentiated in various ways.  Their voices (unlike those in The Martian) are unique to, and indicative of, their personalities.  Most of the characters were interesting, and while some of the narrative lines remained incomplete, we learned enough about each character to satisfy us.  Well, pretty much.  I would like to have learned more about the young actress who deliberately insulted the General/dictator.  And the overweight rocker who tries to exploit his long-dead career by launching a tour he promotes as a very public suicidal march toward oblivion, but who ends up actually resurrecting himself and his artistic life, ironically.


I finished the book about two months ago, so I can't recall too many specific details.  I enjoyed it, even though at times reading it was akin to slogging through knee-deep mud.  I just felt so dirty...  This was no light-hearted romp through Hogwarts, and though there was humor, it was dark and grim.


Kind of like life, no?

The Martian by Andy Weir

This was an enjoyable novel.  Nothing literary about it, just a great summer read in the vein of Swiss Family Robinson, Robinson Crusoe or the film Cast Away.  The main character--Mark Watney--has a great personality and sense of humor, making him easy to root for.  Highly intelligent, he solves problem after problem (after problem) with creativity and ingenuity, showing a tremendous will to survive against all odds.  Parts of the book stretch belief, like the public's continued interest in the marooned astronaut for many months and the lengths both the U.S. and Chinese governments go to in their rescue attempts.  Weir does his level best to explain these away, however.


The Martian, to quote Bart Simpson, is "like The Swiss Family Robinson, only with more cursing.  Damn, hell, ass cursing!"  This was an aspect of the novel that bothered me.  Okay, before you think of me as a prude, let me say that such elements--when used appropriately in a text--do not bother me.  I've read and enjoyed Anderson's Feed, Grossman's The Magicians, Halpern's Sh*t My Dad Says, and Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (see the adjacent entry), so swearing as a concept does not bother me.  My objection is the appropriateness of it.  It just struck me as excessive and unnecessary in The Martian.  It didn't really serve a narrative purpose, develop character, illustrate some aspect of the society, or advance the theme in some way (the other books I mentioned generally do this).  I kept asking, Why is everyone swearing so much?  And it wasn't just Watney.  It was pretty much every character in the book.  Which brings me to Major Point Number Two.


The characters were generally flat with little to distinguish them, especially regarding their speech patterns.  I said at the top of the post that this isn't Literature.  It's a Summer Read.  Fine.  I still think the characters should be developed (at least some of them), have somewhat recognizable speech cadences, and grow (at least the main character).  It seemed as if all the characters were smart-asses who liked to swear.  None was really round or fully-developed, including Watney.  Also, Watney did not grow, change, or develop as a character.  He was pretty much the same at the end of the novel as at the beginning.  This is not a character-driven novel; it is governed wholly by plot.


*Mild spoiler coming...*  But the novel was a cool ride, for all those problems.  I had a hard time believing the final rescue sequence, starting from when he took off from Mars until he was brought aboard the rescue craft.  So many problems occurred that I started saying, "Enough already!  Just get the guy off the freakin' planet!"  Whatever.  It was still cool.  The science was interesting, and Weir made sure to explain everything as necessary, walking the line between glossing the concepts and burdening the reader with excessive detail.  The language was technical on occasion, but I was always able to follow the ideas, and the jargon both enhanced the author's credibility and helped maintain my own suspension of disbelief.  It's a fun book to read, and I recommend it for planes, weekend trips, and beach excursions.

Belated entries

I haven't commented on my readings in a long time--at least not publicly.  Most of my time these past few years have been spent first researching and writing my dissertation, then learning a new job as a professor of education.  I'm going to make an effort to re-establish myself here, for no other purpose than simply to jot down my reactions to some of the books I've been reading so I can uncover my thoughts on them and thereby clear my mind.  (By the way, I haven't been keeping careful track of the books I have read throughout the past few years, so I will forgo the list of "books read" until 2016.)  I'll begin with my Spring 2015 readings.

Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment by Maja Wilson (2006)

I freely admit that I should have read this one a long time ago.  It has been on my shelf for years, and I've just never seemed to be able to get around to it.  I'm glad I finally did.  Not quite 100 pages long, this little book provides an interesting perspective on writing assessment in secondary schools.  Most of the book provides a brief history of writing assessment and rubrics in U.S. education.  The summary is illuminating, succinct, and clear.  Wilson has done a solid job in her research but does not get bogged down in details, nor does her writing suffer from an excessively "academic" style: Her prose is always readable and interesting.  While she does interject various critical comments along the way, the intrusions do not slow the pace of the text.

The final twenty pages of the book is devoted to a re-envisioning of writing assessment without rubrics, though this part is less-well-developed.  She proceeds uncertainly and offers few specific ideas or examples to support her position.  For example, the "grading policy" (prepared by Linda Christensen) Wilson includes by way of illustration is a broad conceptual framework of a grading system for an entire course, not writing in particular.  Christensen (and, by way of explicit approval, Wilson herself) awards credit on an all-or-nothing basis for writing assignments.  While this system is largely aligned with the concepts on which the book is based (i.e., teachers should reward hard work, encourage revision, and support risk-taking), it is pedagogically dissatisfying in its vagueness.  I would have liked to see something more concrete, especially in the way the students reacted to her non-rubric-burdened classroom and the improvements their writing has shown.  Speaking of which, how does a student actually identify quality in their own writing?  In other words, how do they know they are improving?  Wilson notes that English teachers have a general sense of good and poor writing (though she states this as a broad and vaguely-articulated assertion), but for students she offers no specific ideas.  Rubrics, for all their faults, at least give students a starting place, a beginner's definition of "good" writing from which they can grow.  She seems more concerned with arguing against the use of rubrics than for a more effective system of writing assessment.

(Another, minor problem I have with the book is that nearly every example of student writing references narrative writing.  There are exactly two sentences in which Wilson specifically identifies literary analysis--but that's it.  This oversight limits her argument in uncomfortable ways when one considers the amount of writing in an English class that is devoted to literary analysis.)

It is easy for over-worked teachers struggling to keep up with essay-reading and essay-grading to clutch at Wilson's ideas like a drowning swimmer clutches at a life-preserver, and to feel a certain pride (often deserved, sometimes not) when Wilson praises their ability to assess student writing.  These two tendencies, I would guess, will win Wilson a great deal of support among English teachers.  But I was hoping for more substance in her argument.  After she says, "This system of rubrics does not work for students," I expect her to articulate what does work.  But she doesn't really do this in a meaningful way.  Having said that, she has gone far in disrupting the use of rubrics as a tool to assess writing.

Overall, I must applaud Wilson's research into the history of writing assessment and for her bold suggestion that English teachers reconsider how student writing is assessed.  After all, rubrics are a near-ubiquitous method of assessing student writing.  She has some good ideas, and she has started an important conversation that I hope will continue, especially in light of the new work on grading being done by Cathy Vatterott and Myron Dueck.  She has inspired me to re-envision my own writing assessment system as well.  If she had provided a more comprehensive system of writing assessment (she generally points the reader to writing assessment scholars such a Brian Huot for a more detailed approach), or tied in a writing pedagogy that aligned with her assessment beliefs, her book might have been more productive in its goal of reforming teachers' philosophies of writing assessment.

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee (2015)

It's really too bad this was published.  I say this with all respect to Harper Lee who, in To Kill a Mockingbird, wrote a magnificent Bildungsroman about the growth of a young small-town girl in the post-Reconstruction South and a father's love for his children.  I say "too bad" because I believe it sullies the literary reputation of a beloved author, an author who, given the controversies surrounding the novel, is unlikely to have approved of its publication in its current form.  At least, I would like to believe that.  As it is written, Watchman is, to be gentle, literarily unsatisfying.  Really, it's too poor to even publish.  I mean, there was a good reason it was not published when Lee first submitted it, and if it weren't for Mockingbird's success (and the piles of money to be made from the publication of another book by Lee), Watchman would never have been published today.  Simply stated, it is a bad book.

The narrative is disjointed, haphazard, conflict-less for the first hundred pages, didactic, and sloppy.  The writing is not bad in places, though.  It's downright pretty at times, especially when the author is reminiscing or describing the landscape.  But that is not enough to overcome the host of other ills from which the books suffers.

Most of the characters are so different from those in Mockingbird that one could argue that, rather than purportedly being a prequel, Watchman is merely another Maycomb book that uses the same character names and the same setting.  There were a few humorous flashbacks of Scout, Jem, and Dill playing together as children, but these seemed tacked on and self-indulgent rather than illuminating, critical elements of the novel.  Really, the book reads more like fanfiction than the work of an accomplished author.

In addition to characters who have changed in ways that are significant (and sometimes bizarre, as with Uncle Jack), some minor plot elements from Mockingbird were "misrepresented" in Watchman.  For example, the trial of Tom Robinson that Atticus lost in Mockingbird was somehow reinvented as a victory.

Think about that.  The trial was the major plot element, the driving force that illustrates the love Atticus has for his children and his staunch adherence to his principles, and which led up to Boo Radley finally coming out of his house.  Atticus lost the trial in Mockingbird, but Lee says in Watchman that he actually won the trial.  And that's not a metaphorical win, either.  She writes that Atticus "won an acquittal for a colored boy on a rape charge."  She also notes that "Atticus could and did prove consent" on the part of Mayella Ewell.  Which means she and Tom had sex.  And Mayella was fourteen, according to the Watchman text.  How does one begin to reconcile these contrasting accounts?  I don't know, and I'm not going to try.

The ending of the novel is just as crazy.  In several debates (five, I believe, between Jean Louise and three different characters), Jean Louise attempts to understand her father's (and her almost-fiance's) participation in Klan-like activities.  Atticus defends his actions with weak arguments than sound more like rationalizations than logical reasons.  And even after the final confrontation with Jean Louise, in which it seems to be revealed that, rather than trying to win her over to his thinking or to defend his racist actions using antiquated arguments, he argued with her in order to see whether she would stick to her beliefs in the face of a man she loved and admired.  She is ultimately reconciled with him, largely because of that.  Wait, what?!  He's still on the Citizen's Council, still supporting a racist agenda, still providing tacit support to a known Klansman, still lending his good name and reputation to an ugly organization, but she's okay with that.

What most confused me about the ending was how it confounded the themes.  Was this book attempting to argue for states' rights, since at one point Jean Louise rails against the Supreme Court for "telling the South what to do yet again" in its Brown v. the BOE decision?  Was it about racism and prejudice and its effect on people, since Atticus and Henry are presented as racists who intend to intentionally lose a case involving a black defendant (who would certainly be condemned to die for the crime) in order to deny the NAACP an opportunity to use the case for political purposes?  Was it about Jean Louise finally detaching herself from her father and his beliefs?  Was it about nostalgia and the fact that, once she left Maycomb, Jean Louise would forever remain outside of it, even though Uncle Jack tried to convince her to stay in Maycomb and fight the Good Fight?  I just don't know.  The final scenes, with their fiery yet contrived speeches, muddled the themes in my head until I couldn't figure out what Lee was trying to do.

Overall, the book is heavy-handed and didactic, relying more on informing rather than evoking.  We are told many things about Atticus, including his heroism and integrity, but we are shown next to nothing.  Had I not read Mockingbird beforehand, I would have found Watchman even less believable and certainly less interesting.  I would be embarrassed to recommend Watchman to anyone, unless as an exercise in studying the development of a writer.

If Lee is happy with the book as a satisfying sequel/prequel to Mockingbird, an illuminating representation of her political philosophy regarding the South and states' rights, and as a final chapter in her own literary career, then shame on her.  If HarperCollins and Lee's literary executors conducted an end-around or intentionally misled Lee, publishing the book simply for the money and with no regard to Lee's place in the literary canon (which I think is much more likely), then shame on them.  Either way, it's Harper Lee's literary reputation that suffers, and that's the real tragedy of Watchman.