Shameless self-promotion: my first short story is out at Freight Stories. (I told you it was a good magazine.)

From “Renovation”:

The summer I was eighteen, I helped get a man killed during a renovation job. I’d just graduated from high school, and in the months before college, I worked for my father at the Carolina Research University in the South Carolina piedmont. I’d grown up in Issaqueena, a foothills railroad town halfway between Atlanta and Charlotte, but like a lot of folks I was raised to leave.

Well, this week has been the end of several things I’m a fan of. First, the Twins swept my White Sox out of first place in the AL central, so now they’re about even in the race for the playoffs.

Then, Paul Newman died at 83. Emily told me last night, but for some reason it didn’t compute until this morning. It’s time to get a jar of Newman’s own salsa and put Nobody’s Fool on the Netflix queue.

Finally, my bank collapsed. Wachovia was bought out by Citibank today, which maybe won’t end terribly, but still.

This novel opens with a car accident on an empty, icy Nebraska road, and a woman getting a call about her brother being in a coma. When he wakes up, he gradually develops his mental faculties, but he doesn’t recognize his sister, the only family he has left. She calls in a specialist from New York, a pop psychologist who analyzes the case of Capgras Syndrome and fumbles around small-town Nebraska.

After a compelling opening, the novel bogs down in details about crane migration, but every time I was about to give up on it something happened in the story and I plowed through a fifty or a hundred pages in a sitting, and then it slowed down for thirty pages or so before picking back up. There’s a lot of stuff about the way the mind works, and the tension between biology and psychology, but the intellectual stakes here weren’t that interesting to me. Richard Powers does what he needs to with the material, but none of it was that surprising, and I skimmed through a bit of the psychological digressions about how the mind works. What was most interesting to me, and what I found very very compelling here, was his descriptions of Nebraska (give me flyover country in a novel over New York any day) and the characters. Powers has created memorable people who feel authentic to the place (the sister, for instance, has a reticence in her character that feels Midwestern to me). Overall, it’s a great read, though I might have wished it fifty pages shorter.

I get up and sip coffee and head over to Fark and see this, PETA asking Ben and Jerry’s to change their formula and start using human breast milk. Even though I’ve never shot an animal, sometimes those dumbasses at PETA just make me want to go hunting.

Over at Sycamore Review, Erin Blakeslee has a post questioning the value of negative reviews in a time of declining reading. Why waste magazine space to pan a book when you could praise an overlooked gem? Away from this blog, I wouldn’t waste my time writing a completely negative review, but I think I understand the impulse. First, negative reviews sell. Maybe it’s just me, but I much prefer reading the one-star reviews over at Amazon to the long, glowing praise of the five stars. Secondly, there can be something offensive about a wildly popular book that you know in your heart of hearts is complete and utter bullshit. Thirdly, negative reviews move into critical grounds that scholars later pick up. The thesis isn’t so much that this or that book is bad, but rather this is what actually makes a good book. An effort to define good is probably healthy in a reviewer, though it can be done with a positive review of something obscure as easily as a negative review of something bad.

Finally, I think there’s something in human nature that mistrusts superstardom. The review Erin pointed out was Christopher Hitchens panning Roth’s new novel in The Atlantic. I googled it, and saw where last September, he had the same kind of review of Exit Ghost. I don’t know Christopher Hitchens, but he either really loves the old Roth and can’t stand what he sees as his favorite author’s decline, or he’s got that superstar complex. Who could really say Roth is a bad writer (even if you don’t like his politics or something else about him personally)? He can write a good sentence, and he can compose an interesting narrative, even if Indignation isn’t as good as American Pastoral. The Plot Against America and I Married a Communist weren’t as strong as American Pastoral either, but they’re still good reads. I can’t weigh in on Exit Ghost or Indignation (yet), but I do think the only two ways a reviewer can really approach Roth is by fawning over him (as I might) or by cutting him down completely (as Hitchens might). A half-hearted “meh” just wouldn’t sell any magazines.

I never thought I’d link to the National Review, but Newt Gingrich has an interesting article there where he argues Congress ought to slow down before okaying the big $700 billion payout to Wall Street. He argues that if a Democratic administration were proposing this, Republicans would be asking questions and voting no, but since it’s a Republican administration, those same conservative voices are “silent or confused.” Gingrich has some proposals, including suspending the capital gains tax, that he argues will flood nontaxpayer money into Wall Street. I don’t know anything about the pros and cons of a capital gains tax, but I don’t want my meager taxes subsidizing someone’s giant bonus at the end of the year.

Philip Roth’s new one is reviewed at the NY Times. The first chapter is also published here. At this point, what can you say about Philip Roth? It’s good to know he’s got another novel out there, and it too sounds like a good one. It’s a bit disheartening (or maybe encouraging) that at 75 he has more energy than I do at 25. I get my thousand words a day, but I can’t make myself crank out ten pages in a sitting, which I think Roth’s got to be doing. Maybe it’s just at testament to the work ethic of the Greatest Generation, whose achievement the rest of us squandered.