That said, the book is fun and freewheeling, entirely sincere and heartfelt, and a quick enjoyable read. Art it isn’t. Worth reading if you have a long lazy afternoon to kill, it is.

Wray’s novel became one of the few that he made a priority, but still it took him weeks to finish it as his other obligations returned and once again began consuming his time.  Still, the story commanded enough attention that he was able to continue making that time, that he didn’t feel comfortable leaving the story behind, unfinished and abandoned.  He felt that most important of readerly emotions: curiosity about the outcome, anticipation of the ending.  He wanted to know what would happen and how.

He continued reading, then, continued to the end to find out whether sixteen year-old, escaped schizophrenic Will Heller, Lowboy, would lose his virginity and with whom.  He kept reading to discover whether Detective Lateef and Will’s mother, Violet, would find him.  He pressed on to learn Lowboy’s fate and that of his protectors.  He read on to confirm the particulars of the secret that Wray had withheld from his readers, that hides within the folds of this novel.

Our reader knew a secret revelation was coming and did not find the secret, upon revelation, surprising.  Rather he expected it.  His first clue was how uniform the voice remained even through the multiply subjective voiced narration, each chapter alternating between a third person rendering of Will’s escape and one of his mother’s search for him.  Thus clued into the identity, the sharing between the protagonists, he came remarkably close to voicing Wray’s secret out loud very early while reading the story.  The revelation struck him as satisfying because inevitable.  First the writer must make their rendering of a plot credible, then they should try to make it inevitable.  And so our reader found Wray’s tale to be both credible and inevitable.

Until the final paragraph.  Our reader feels cheated by that final paragraph because the events, the action of that paragraph remain obscure to him, uncertain.  He does not feel he knows Will Heller’s fate.  Did he die upon that platform or was Wray simply allowing his story to merge with the wailing of the trains, dissolving into the whitest of noises?  Our reader may never know.

A string of superficial facts.  Paul Auster confesses here to the greatest weakness of his work of the past decade: his stories are summarized rather than detailed.  Readers want to immerse themselves in the details of a story.  The mechanism for that immersion may be the plot, the characters, the setting, the psychology, the ideas, the language, any of the elements of the form.  But merely outlining the contours of a story will never be enough to satisfy the readerly itch.

There is a story told in Man in the Dark, the recent Auster novel in which this scene occurs, about an alternative Earth, one that diverged with our own after Bush v. Gore in 2000, with New York leading a secession from the Union and America going to war to return the wayward states to the fold.  The story, whose main power comes from this scenario, comprises most of the story and, according to reviewers, is the story at the heart of this novel.  But that isn’t true.  The story of the war between the American states is ended abruptly and abandoned in the second half of this book to be replaced by the reminiscences about the dead wife of August Brill, who had been telling himself the story of that civil war to avoid thinking about the past.

The story at the heart of Man in the Dark is Brill’s story, and to a lesser extent, that of his granddaughter, who blames herself for the death of her ex-boyfriend, who was decapitated in Iraq while serving as a contractor driving supplies.  Brill and his granddaughter, Katya, are not simply in mourning for those they have lost but are seriously traumatized by the boyfriend’s vicious and gruesome death, which they witnessed in an online video.  They have spent months trying to drown the image of that death with other beautiful images by watching the finest movies ever made.  One of the best sections of the book are discussions of some of their recent viewings—Tokyo Story, The World of Apu, Grand Illusion, and The Bicycle Thief—and what makes them so beautiful and meaningful.  But this story of trauma and recovery and the meaning of story in our lives isn’t given the same texture, isn’t revealed through detail as the alternative America was, and it suffers from that lack.  That is why so many reviewers claimed the novel was about that other America rather than about the people suffering so much they would tell themselves such a story.

Auster, clearly, recognizes this, knows that contrasting a detailed peripheral story with a sketched central story will put the central story in a bad light.  So why would he purposely undermine his story?  Auster gives us a two-part answer.  The first comes near the end, when Brill considers another memory, “an image from the distant past, perhaps real, perhaps imagined, I can hardly tell the difference anymore.  The real and the imagined are one.  Thoughts are real, even thoughts of unreal things.”  Stories, then, are important, just as important as real life.  But this doesn’t say anything about stories well-told rather than briefly discussed.  This part of the answer comes from that earlier discussion of the great films, when Katya offers this theory of greatness: “Inanimate objects as a means of expressing human emotions.  That’s the language of film.”  Again, Auster points us not toward abstraction but toward specificity as the necessary ingredients of greatness, and greatness in terms of emotional truth, of meaning in art.

Apparently, Junot Díaz is the same kind of reader because he is certainly that kind of writer.  In The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the narrator, who bears a strong resemblance to but should not be equated with his author, repeatedly interrupts his narrative with asides, history lessons, disquisitions, slang-fu, and allusions, lots and lots of allusions to comic books and science fiction, to all of that vast social wasteland that was pre-internet nerdery.  He seems to be doing this to satisfy the two impulses driving his novel: the desire to tell the story of the Dominican Republic in the twentieth century, at least from the rise of Trujillo to the dispersal of the diaspora, and to pay homage to the comics and science fiction that he loved growing up.  The weakness of the book lies in the distance between these two impulses.

Oscar Wao is the nickname of the ultimate nerd whose story this novel relates, with long sojourns into his ancestry.  He also, evidently incongruously, is Dominican.  Before reading this book, I had no idea that Dominican men were so inordinately fly that they spent all their time sexing up any and every available woman.  But that is what Junior, our narrator, suggests, which is why he finds the likes of Oscar, who makes it into adulthood still a virgin thanks to his “Hail! Well met” method of communicating and the unique overeating problem of the nerdly isolate, such a paradox and so worthy of having his story told.  If you don’t find this incongruity surprising, however, you might wonder if Oscar’s life is so wondrous if still brief.

Díaz, too, may have his doubts about the power and interest of his protagonist’s story, because he can’t stick with it.  Through Oscar and Junior’s voice (the latter being one of the two best things about the book) Díaz satisfies his impulse to honor his childhood lifelines.  But because Oscar is so atypical of a Dominican, he doesn’t allow Díaz to fulfill that other impulse, the one to tell the Dominican story.  Instead, he gets into the Dominicana through the story of Oscar’s mother and her father under Trujillo, through the story of the family and how they ended up dispersed from their Island home.  It is quite a tale of woe and superstition and political reality and it offers the best sustained narrative in the novel.  The diasporan Dominican as represented by Oscar, in contrast, gets short shrift.  We learn more about the diaspora through glimpses of Junior’s life and that of Oscar’s sister but since they are peripheral to the novel, the glimpses are incomplete and lack the depth and luster of the sections in the DR itself.

The failure of the novel, to the extent it fails in spite of it’s manic energy and many accolades and strengths, lies in this imbalance: the Dominican story as told here doesn’t do justice to the experience of the Diaspora, as it does for the earlier period, because Díaz’s chosen protagonist is only nominally a member of that group.  I understand why he was chosen, but that choice still weakens the novel.

The novel centers around Akbar the Great, the Mughal emperor of India and his fictional encounter with a Florentine adventurer who has come to his court with a story to tell.  The story this Florentine, who calls himself Mogor dell’Amore, tells comprises the bulk of the novel but doesn’t begin until more than a third of the way through.  Before that story begins, other stories and ideas and beings are created and introduced: we meet the thoughtful Akbar and learn how Mogor came to the emperor’s doorstep; we learn that through the force of his imagination and will that Akbar has created the perfect woman, Jodhabai, to be his Queen; and we learn of the wondrous kingdom, the apotheosis of culture and thought that he created.  And Mogor’s story brings into being a lost Mughal princess, Angelica, Qara Köz, Lady Dark Eyes, whose story and beauty capture the hearts and lives of all she encounters, both those within the story and those who hear it.  For Rushdie, all imaginative acts, especially narrative ones, are generative; they bring things into being, into life.

This profusion of narrative, of story, is an act of creation, even if used for destructive ends.  As Rushdie knows, the most powerful, persistent stories are religious in nature, so the truth of a story has little to do with its power or its resilience.  In many ways, this novel, much like The Satanic Verses, tries to contend with the power of religious stories.  At one point I thought, “This is his book against god,” which would connect this novel with the recent bestseller by his good friend and fellow atheist Christopher Hitchens.  But Rushdie is too respectful of the power of story to capture us, to imprison us, to dismiss religion out of hand.  However much he may want people to abandon these old stories, he knows we will hold onto them regardless of the anachronisms, the untruths, the full brief that the New Atheists level against religious belief.  We are believing creatures, as Rushdie shows in novel after novel.  The novelist may be able to tell a story engaging and moving enough to capture our minds for a moment, perhaps even for centuries, for the length of posterity, but the breadth and strength of that hold will never supplant that of religious myth.

How well has Rushdie succeeded in this novel in his professional rivalry with religious myth?  The story of Qara Köz is as enthralling as everyone in the story claims it is, but the story around feels flat and not simply in comparison.  I think the flatness of his prose can be attributed to the omniscient voice that he adopts.  What has always given Rushdie’s prose its vitality, and what does so in the Qara Köz sections, is the personal, multi-lingual voice bubbling over with the story it needs to tell.  Mogor’s voice is like that, but until he begins his story, so late into the novel, Rushdie employs an omniscient third-person narrator that maintains a great psychological distance from his characters and from his readers.  The question of voice and point of view determines the distance between the reader and the action of the narrative, and this voice as employed by Rushdie is very removed from the events and characters of the novel, a remove that the readers come to share.  This point of view is called omniscient because it affords the writer the most power to shape his story, but it also approximates the view that an omnipotent being would have of human activity: disinterest, even boredom.  While this decision may have been dictated by the structure of Rushdie’s novel, it does weaken it and make it less engaging than it might have been.

Another thing differentiates this novel, and all his recent novels, from his great early novels.  The protagonists in those early novels were characters who had been disgraced or defeated in some way, who told their stories in hopes of posthumous vindication.  History had taught them that they were inconsequential, did not matter regardless of how close they may have come to greatness.  His latest novels, and this one is no exception, are about the unequivocally great.  Akbar means “great” so his name literally means “The Great Great One” or ”His Great Greatness”.  The main characters of Shalimar the Clown are the greatest beauty of her time, the greatest diplomat of the age, and the great assassin who hunts them.  No more does Rushdie write about failures, even ambitious ones, as he once did, and at least for this reader, that makes his characters much less likely to illumine the reader’s self.

Although he starts his book earlier, the typical conflict is that between Schoenberg and Stravinsky, the former intent on moving music forward without reference to past glories through twelve-tone dissonance that turns its back on audiences and the latter cannily culling the history of classical and folk music for ways to carry on and please listeners with beauty.  And essentially the same dichotomy repeats itself throughout the century, with Boulez, Cage, and Stockhausen leading the obscurantist camp, and Britten, Bernstein, and Messian leading the harmonic crowd.  It wasn’t until the final third of the century that such dichotomies became outdated when the minimalists found ways to use dissonant notes to create lyrical beauty and reunited the two sides of musical composition.

It is this post-minimalist world that we now inhabit and that Ross, through his style and even-handed manner more than any other way, puts forward as the best possible state of affairs.  In Ross’s view we live in an ideal time for classical music, for all music.  Recordings are superb.  The internet makes music available to all.  And composers are free of the totalitarian necessity to be only one thing, as they were not for so much of the twentieth century, when dictators, political or musical, held so much power.  In the world as Alex Ross sees it, the composing world today, the past is always present but never restrictive, never limiting.  Composers are free to be atonal or harmonious, avant-garde or neoclassical, serious or popular, or more likely, both and all at the same time.  What a world!

I do have a few bones to pick with the rapturous reception his book has received.  While a book about classical music that is easy and fun to read is a novelty, and a welcome one, that fact alone doesn’t necessarily make it a great book.  I often found myself skimming through the descriptions of the music since with no music training or formal knowledge, they were essentially meaningless.  I would have appreciated a bit more effort to signal the significance of those descriptions.  What does it mean that a movement dances around a diminished seventh?  And more importantly, why does Ross think it important enough to tell me this detail.  Often I didn’t know why he chose the musical details he did.  As for the claims that the book relates the history of the twentieth century through music, that is simply false.  If you didn’t already know a great deal about the twentieth century and who and what the major forces and trends were, you wouldn’t know after reading this book.  Worse, you might not have even been able to follow the drift of its argument.

Still, it is highly readable and does successfully connect the history of twentieth century music to the history of the century itself, which is quite an achievement.  To do so in such an enjoyable package is well-worth the accolades and honors the book and Alex Ross have received.

As a consequence, I was unfamiliar with the picture of a man in a suit and jacket falling headfirst from the Towers after which Don Delillo named his novel, Falling Man.  I only saw the picture after Delillo’s novel was dismissively reviewed by the man, Tom Junod, who wrote the original article about this figure.  I did not read the obituaries about those who died in the attack.  I did not read the story of the terrorists who hijacked and piloted the planes.  I did not read the 9/11 Commission Report.  I didn’t think any of that relevant to how I needed to understand what happened.  I had no duty to the dead but to myself, my country, my world, in short, to the living.  Perhaps it would have been different if I had lost someone close to me or if I had been closer to the epicenter of the attack when it happened.  I did not.  I was not.  I dealt with it in my own way as best I could, as we all did.

Three figures, whose names grace the three major sections, haunt Delillo’s novel, all of them ghosts of a sort, terrorists of a sort, but they are not the central characters.  The three central figures are Keith, his estranged wife Lianne, and a member of the terror crew named Hammad, each of whom provide the point-of-view for sections of the novel.  I call them figures because it may not be appropriate to call them characters for they do not seem real in their actions or speech, do not behave as people.  Rather they seem like cyphers, unfathomable to themselves, to each other, to readers, perhaps even to their creator.

Most critics who denigrated Falling Man when it first appeared in 2007 did so for the way that it failed to honor the psychology of character.  Junod thought it disrespectful of the dead and the living to use characters, the victims of this event, in the way that Delillo does here.  I don’t remember if James Wood reviewed Falling Man, but I know why he would have disliked it, dismissed it as less than a novel, as immoral.  He would have been antagonized by the utter abandonment of psychology, of any attempt to understand or portray a human mind from the inside.

That description of Delillo’s writing isn’t entirely fair, however.  I noted a number of places where the narrative voice drifted into the perspective of his characters.  But their voices never shine through; they are subsumed by Delillo’s style with its distinctive cadence and insistent indirectness.  Delillo’s style is daring and beautiful, but it sounds nothing like human speech or human thought.  It, nevertheless, feels real, captures something true about our condition and nature as human beings, as creatures living in this particular historical moment, when fear of death has been overwhelmed by the fear of annihilation, of species extinction.  For this has always been Delillo’s true subject: life in the shadow of Hiroshima and mutual assured destruction; that’s why his greatest works explore the history of the Cold War.  These books explore the free-floating dread and nihilism that characterized the lives of so many in those years.

In Falling Man, Delillo is trying to bring the same insights and techniques he used to illuminate the apocalyptic mind of Cold War America to bear on this age of terrorism.  Delillo recognizes the break with the previous epoch while simultaneously believing that the dread and fear of today’s world is an extension, a metastasizing of the apocalyptic mind.  I believe he is right about both the break and the continuity, and Falling Man is his first, if inadequate, attempt to understand this apparent contradiction.  For me, what makes this book worth reading is precisely that for which others dismiss it: Delillo’s style, which is as engaging a portrait of the human psyche–Delillo’s own psyche–as one gets from full-bodied character development.

Delillo writes here in a flattened, affectless voice, perhaps to avoid sensationalizing or exploiting a raw historical event, but that is only the surface.  Beneath it roils powerful emotions that his characters do not understand and cannot control or contain.  In a more effusive style, his character’s feelings would become maudlin and trite melodrama.  Delillo tries to portray both the sense of withdrawal and despair that many people felt along with the grasping after meaning, the newfound capacity or desire for faith, for belief that also characterized those first years after the attacks.  The portrayal feels true but reading the novel is ultimately unsatisfying because the end of the story lies beyond the end of the novel.  We are still living that story, still trying to come to an end.  Perhaps our recent economic woes has made terrorism feel unimportant again, tangential to our lives.  But none of us, including Delillo, yet have the perspective to know what this new epoch will be like or how humanity will respond, what human life will become for those of us living in it.  So, while Falling Man may not be perfect or adequate to the task of defining our era, it is a powerful novel that evokes much that is true about the moments we first came to recognize that the times had changed.

The perversity of the discussion of mass slaughter is most pronounced in the first of these stories, which details the story of a visit by a group of (mostly unknown) writers to a concentration camp.  The perversity, though, isn’t what bothers me.  Rather, it strikes me as overwritten and overwrought, too enamored with the effort to avoid cliché.  It reminded me of a story from one of my workshops in university in which one writer, who sort of prided himself on his experimental innovations, submitted a story that contained almost no string of five words that had ever appeared together before.  It was almost impossible to tell what was going on in the story, what was actually happening.  When the prohibition against cliché becomes hidebound, the peregrinations that one must go through can be laborious instead of exciting for readers.  This book has a bit of that in it, drawing too much attention to technique at the expense of the story.

The second story, the novel, struck me as better and more successful in terms of the interplay between the morbidity and the comedy.  In this story a woman is besotted with her lover who takes her around the death sites of Paris.  The comedy lies in the ridiculousness of her emotional turmoil, the interplay between her real circumstances and her impression of them.

I imagine James Wood would love these books because the irony of the pieces, what gives them their comedy, something Wood believes should always bear the mark of the human tragedy, is his most beloved literary technique, free indirect style.  Prose writes in the third person subjective point-of-view, which allows her to enter directly into the mind of the character while still retaining some distance, some perspective from outside the character.  The simultaneity of inside and outside perspectives is what characterizes the third person subjective POV and free indirect style.  Wood believes this complexity, this multilayering brings fiction closest to reality of our experience of being conscious beings.  Prose, at least in this book, is a great example of the virtues this technique and this perspective.  I don’t necessarily agree that this accomplishment is the pinnacle of human artistic or literary achievement (as Wood might), but when done well it can be a delight.

One thing that Naipaul and Sontag share, besides a certain haughty austerity, is that they both came from humble beginnings to conquer their respective fields.  Perhaps when you must go against the grain and against tradition, you can’t afford the luxury of the slightest sympathy for the also-ran, lest you allow yourself to become one.  Certainly Sontag would believe so, that one must will oneself to greatness and anything that weakens one’s willpower, any acceptance of softness or mediocrity within oneself, dooms one to obscurity as a minor artist.

In criticism, Seligman claims that provocation and exaggeration are more important than truth and honesty, which goes some way to explaining how he misapprehends Sontag, who might sometimes practice the former but only in service to the latter.  He also writes that critics must narrow their vision to the art about which they write, but the magic of criticism is that reading the criticism may be as heady and rewarding an experience as seeing the art it describes.  Perhaps he is right, although he is too unthoughtful (or considers it a waste of his time) to explain how that might happen, how criticism can aspire to that level of greatness.  Instead, he merely asserts that Kael was a superior stylist, whose skill “deepen[ed]” with age but whose early work was even more rewarding and “human” in its “strain[ing],” to Sontag, whose writing is “narrow” and “constrained” if still “masterful.”

Again, we see that Seligman stacks his deck in order to raise up Kael, even for her shortcomings, while he pushes down Sontag, despite her virtures.  His entire conception of criticism and how it might transcend its subject matter serves to elevate Kael from the station of a reviewer of movies through a film critic to a great writer and critic.  He wants her to be great so he defines greatness in a way that flatters her.  He doesn’t dare argue against Sontag’s greatness, instead he spends his time denigrating her fiction, arguing that in her fiction she is not great.  Only in her criticism can she lay claim to greatness.

When the object of your love is a film critic rather than a film, however, that danger is real, and that is the danger that Craig Seligman faces but never confesses in his book Sontag & Kael.  Seligman is a great lover of Pauline Kael, the once-formidable film critic for the New Yorker who retired in 1991 and died a decade later, but while Kael and her criticism will always be important to those who knew her, as Seligman did, and those who read it as part of their introduction to film as a form, her influence will continue to wane as the years pass and those who knew her and can extol her pass into history.   Kael may have been the most influential movie critic that ever lived but that is a relatively minor accolade since movie critics just aren’t that influential.

What galls Seligman is how much more respect Susan Sontag gets than Kael.  Sontag, almost everyone agrees, will be read for some time and remain one of the great critical voices of this age.  She will be read and admired, if seldom loved, for generations.  While this assessment could turn out to be wrong, Seligman simply can’t understand or abide the disparity between Sontag’s stature and Kael’s.  This book is his attempt to rectify this disparity, and he tries to accomplish it as much by tearing Sontag down as he does by raising Kael up.

The book is organized into four lengthy sections, two of which primarily focus on Sontag and two primarily on Kael, with each section making forays into the opposite character for effect and comparison.  How he chooses to compare them makes his project clear:  he compares Sontag to Kael when he wants to show how strident, joyless, or lacking in sympathy Sontag is, but he compares Kael to Sontag when he he wants to show how Kael is every bit as engaged or accomplished as Sontag.  He uses Kael to make Sontag look bad, but uses Sontag to illuminate and elevate Kael.

At the books midpoint, just before he turns his primary focus away from Sontag and toward Kael, he quotes one of his early readers in an attempt to shut off and prevent this line of criticism.  He friend asked, “Why are you devoting half your book to a writer you hate?” and it’s a good question because it gets at the hidden, probably unconscious, agenda of the book.  Seligman protests that he doesn’t hate Sontag, and I believe him, but he never asks himself why he would write about her so unsympathetically.  He thinks she’s just exasperating so that’s enough.

Sontag is universally admired and respected if never loved (and seldom even liked), while Kael is much beloved by all who know her if often dismissed as mere reviewer by the wider culture.  The question raised by his first reader, and that likely will occur to all readers, can be answered simply by noting this fact and appreciating how devastating it is for Seligman, who so loves his Pauline.