Review Thursday: It pains me to say it, but...

It's unfortunate when you are the second book to write about layoffs and office life in the first-person plural. Man, would that suck, but such is the zeitgeist. I'm trying to write about fictionalized office life, so I'm interested in books that do it well. Because working is boring, writing about work is boring. When a writer captures the mundane and stifling in a fresh, even inspiring way, it's a truly remarkable accomplishment. When books about work take off, I think it's through capturing some kind of idiosyncratic singularity (like Ferris's book or the underrated Big If by Marc Costello) or the workplaces is a kind of accessory to the an overall commentary they are making to American culture (Palladio).

Another book I'm looking forward to reading is Among Other Things I've Taken Up Smoking, if for no other reason as it has an amazing title. Also, More Than It Hurts You, by a former teacher, Darin Strauss. It's gotten great notices, and I like the is-it-or-isn't-it premise about Munhausen by Proxy, and the attendant satirical tone.

Foodie tour of Chicago

In Chicago last weekend to see my friend Carrie graduate from law school, which ended up being the perfect opportunity to sample Chi-town's range of special regional eats from hot dogs to organic scones. This city seriously doesn't mess around with the food.

The menu at Hot Doug's

Our first stop was the Flying Saucer, which keeps it real by serving breakfast only seven days a week. It's the kind of funky, expansive, laid-back type of place that you just don't see in New York, where everything is small, and creative brunch means a quail egg sitting atop three matchsticks of taro root. This is the Midwest, people, and portions are huge: For breakfast I had a sort of hearty, everything-but-the-kitchen sink bowl of eggs, rice and tortillas. Really good!

Cupcake heaven at the Bleeding Heart Organic Bakery

But our real undoing was when we stumbled upon the Bleeding Heart Organic Bakery. Over the weekend, Josh and I must have spent forty dollars sampling the colorful cornocopia of baked goods. It was like some of New York's best bakery ideas--the cunchiness of Birdbath, the goey comfort food staples of Magnolia, the special diets focus of Babycakes and the culinary insouciance of Baked rolled into one amazing, Willy Wonka-like shop. I mean, where else can you find vegan cupcakes and an Elvis brownie made with chocolate, bananas and bacon? We tried the fruit soup, smores brownies, vegan raspberry bar, and shortbread made with artisinal salts. All amazing--the only miss here were the handmade chocolates. With a price point similar to Kee's fantastic chocolate, these came up short in the flavor department.

Chicago hot dog at Scooter's

We had plenty of opportunity to sample Chicago's famous hot dogs--at Scooter's, with a side of the shop's famous frozen custard in a root beer float. We also hit Hot Dougs, which features a range of weird gourmet offerings named after members of the Buzzcocks and containing bacon infused duck sausage or wild boar sausage with fennel. Our favorite was blue cheese pork sausage with toasted walnuts and fiery apple salsa. We got cheese fries so as not fully embrace snobby foodiness. Chicago makes it easy to bridge high and low.

More of the wares at Bleeding Heart

Our last meal was room service at the Chicago Marriot. Four dollars for two strips of bacon! It was worth it to not have to venture out until afternoon.

My only regret is not getting to my favorite carne asada burrito place, La Pasadita. But Chicago, trust me, I will be back!

More pictures from the foodie tour are on this flickr map.

Review Thursday: Another Dull and Lurid Year

The other day I was in Posman Books at Grand Central Station, where they always have a really great browsable table of fiction. I started talking to this woman who was holding a copy of Joshua Ferris’s And Then We Came to the End. She was shopping for her husband’s fiftieth birthday or something. I was psyched that someone was actually that jazzed about fiction. So from so many great choices, I hand-sold her my two favorite books from the last year and a half or so: the Josh Ferris and Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children.

On Amazon, Emperor’s Children has a couple hundred reviews, and opinion is totally split. I have to say at first it sounded like some kind of hoity-toity bourgeois-fest, a novel of manners, apparently, revolving around a rootless trio of privileged 30something Manhattanites. I had seen Messud speak once at Columbia and it seemed like she wrote super thinky artsy little novels. I was swayed, however, but one of those excellent Slate Audio Book Clubs about it. They called Messud a kind of modern-day Edith Wharton (who happens to be another writer that I feel is severely underrated because she’s female and writes about the subtly of human interaction). Once I got into it, I found Emperor’s Children completely engrossing, a “literary page turner” as some critic said. It was smart and you wanted to keep reading it. That’s not to say that the characters always felt true or that Messud really has an authentic grasp of the environment she’s writing about (I've read a lot of people pointing out how she puts her own British/Canadianism into the mouths of bona fide American characters). But the book did have a lot of power and imagination behind it—and what’s more, it’s one of those books that made me want to write more.

Ferris’s book is so buzz-worthy that you kind of want to hate it—it’s the literary version of “The Office,” it’s written in the third-person plural, it uses the ad world to sort of reflexively comment on Our Times. But once I got past the gimmicks and the jokiness, I found myself thinking about how one of my teachers at Columbia, Richard Locke, spoke about Nabokov. I would always ask Professor Locke how is that Nabokov is so £*$&!*&$ amazing. His answer was that Nabokov was a master of combining pity and delight. And so in the best, most incredible moments of ATWCTTE, you’re totally buzzed on the language, the humor, the inventiveness—delight—and then Ferris will hit you with the revelation of some profound frailty in one of his characters. Those juxtapositions produce a lot of wow moments in the book. I totally agree with a lot of people that this book could have been trimmed like 100 pages, but read it, it’s worth it.

I’m one of the world’s laziest readers, I’m always starting books and then not finishing them, so a book has to do a lot for me to stick with it. These were my wow moments in reading for the last year, but I’m always open to suggestions.

And for all the DeLillo nerds out there (I can’t be the only one), Ferris’s title is the very first sentence of DeLillo’s debut novel, Americana. Neat homage!