This is a great book, though I’m not sure it’s for everybody. The central character is Binx Bolling, a 30-year-old stockbroker in New Orleans who is living this sort-of boring life in the suburbs, where he subscribes to Consumer Reports (“My armpits never stink”) and takes his secretaries out to the movies. He is summoned by his aunt to help deal with one of his cousin Kate’s episodes. The thing I like about this book is that rather than being a stereotypical southern novel about a wealthy family’s diminishing fortunes, complete with the slatternly and insane young woman and her austere societal stepmother (consider Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides), Percy’s novel is part existential manifesto and part send-up of that old trope. In his later novel, Lancelot, his satire of the Old South is more explicit, but here it is more along the lines of Peter Taylor, walking the line between the genuine and the send-up.

Three things of note. First, this was a welcome follow-up to Landsburg’s book (see post below) because Percy is skeptical of an ultra-rational worldview. Binx drifts around, suspicious of people who are too religious or too emotional, but he also can’t explain away his psychic condition. True to an existentialist worldview, he just is from one moment to the next. Secondly, this book is very, very funny. Binx drifts around fighting off the malaise and making pithy observations about the world. For instance, on the way to the beach with his secretary, he feels the malaise coming on and believes the afternoon ruined, and then an old man from Ohio does an illegal u-turn and rams into them. Binx is elated because the malaise is gone. Something interesting has happened.

Finally, wow, did Richard Ford steal from Percy when he wrote The Sportswriter. I won’t quote side-by-side passages, but early Frank Bascombe is very much like Binx Bolling. I liked the first Bascombe novel and hope to write something like that myself one day, but I’m surprised I’ve never heard anyone comment on the similarity between the two novels.

Landsburg is an economist and mathematician who has written a interesting columns for Slate. He does a good job of taking arcane stuff and translating it into something fun. While this book is sort of pulpy and aimed at 18-year-olds trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives, it’s an interesting introduction to an economist’s cold, rational, logical way of viewing the world. In Landsburg’s analysis, God couldn’t logically exist because mathematics is too perfect and is therefore independent of a first cause or maker. Our bodies are essentially hardware, and our brains consist of nothing but highly complex neural patterns that can theoretically be mapped, the way any kind of mathematical equation can be mapped.

One economic model he offers, that I’ve been pondering, is whether it’s ethical to kill one individual to cure one billion individuals of an ordinary headache. He uses a logical two-step to demonstrate that it might be. First, he posits it’s not worth it to pay $1 for insurance against a one-in-a-billion chance of death (such as being the innocent victim of a utilitarian calculus). Next, he posits that for each of those billion people it would be worth $1 to cure the headache. Thus each of those people value curing a headache (namely by $1) than the individual values the one-in-a-billion chance of death; therefore, his death is ethical in that calculus. Of course that’s intuitively repulsive, but Landsburg’s point is that there is (or shouldn’t be) a distinction between statistical lives and identified lives, and that we implicitly make those kinds of decisions all the time. The book is worth reading, though I’d recommend More Sex Is Safer Sex first.

This is probably the best novel I’ve read all year. Set in New York in 1974 and loosely anchored around Philippe Petit’s famous tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers, the novel is really a panoramic sweep of the city. Reading it, all I can think is that McCann must absolutely love life, because every description is loaded with wonder, and he’ll go off on these descriptive lists like he’s Walt Whitman or somebody. From junkie hookers to monks to artists to computer hackers to wealthy old women on Park Avenue, McCann gives us something epic and full of life. Definitely a must read.

Because I’m always interested in how a book is structured, a few comments. There are maybe a dozen chapters (I’m too lazy to get up and look), each one from a different perspective. Most are in first person POV, but a few are in third. The chapters about Petit are short and are in third person. He’s really just a shadow, but an important way of linking the narrative. The main through-line takes place on the day of his walk, and provides  a way into each of the points of view — for instance, the judge who sentences him. But really, I’d say it’s more of an architectonic story in that there are two main plots. A monkish dude, Corrigan, lives in a Bronx housing project and hangs out with hookers, and on the day of Petit’s walk he goes down to the Manhattan courthouse to support two of the hookers in a trial. Other than being on the same day and in the same courtroom as Petit after his walk, the two plot lines don’t really connect at all. Part of the fun of the novel, as my wife said, is seeing the connections — who is this new character and how does he or she connect to the main through-line? There’s not really a central problem offered at the beginning that needs  a solution. Rather, you’re just drawn through by the language, and by the interest in the lives of these characters. For that, I really don’t think you can speak hyperbolically about the novel. Call it dazzling or panoramic or whatever. It’s truly great.

My review of Tom Franklin’s Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter was published in today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch.

What I’ve read:

Paul Harding’s Tinkers is a quick read with wonderful sentences. This might be a spoiler, but the premise is that an old man is dying, so the novel keeps returning to that: “One hundred twenty-three hours before George died…Ninety-six hours before George died…” etc. You don’t really get great characterization of his living family because he’s got a type of dementia, but the novel spirals back and explores his father, who suffered from epilepsy and abandoned the family, and his grandfather who was a preacher. The novel didn’t sink its teeth into me like I thought it might, but the sentences are marvelous and, if you don’t know the story, a small-press novel winning the Pulitzer is a huge step forward for literary fiction, I think.

On my bookshelf:

I’m nearly finished with Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, which might be the best novel I’ve read all year (and I’ve read some damn good novels this year). I’m also in the middle of The Economist‘s “The World in 2011″ issue, which I highly recommend. Maybe around New Year’s I’ll lay out my own predictions for the next few years. Finally, I’ve got a thick stack of books on my shelf: Percy’s The Moviegoer, Steven Landsburg’s The Big Questions, New Stories From the South 2010, Robert Olmstead’s Far Bright Star, and Dostoevsky’s Demons.

Current writing project:

I’m line editing draft 10 of Issaqueena, now called The Heart of Autumn. I glanced at draft 9 in October and was surprised to see I liked it but just needed to delete the boring parts, which I’ve done.