'The Tipping Point' - Malcolm Gladwell

Non fiction has crept into my reading habits, seemingly of its own volition. It's partly come from maturing interests - wanting to know more about the social issues I believe in than what comes from media and conversation.

Although it's the medium I mostly write in, I don't always enjoy reading it, and often find it frustrating. The genres of non fiction are just as diverse as those of fiction, and I don't mean only the breakdown between biography, sport, science etc. Tastes and styles bring as much to bear on the reader experience.

I tried reading The Brain that Changes Itself, because it came up so repeatedly in conversation. I couldn't gel with the book's style at all. It seemed to oversimplify, to talk down to its audience, and while that may have been a conscious decision to expand its market, I don't come to the topic of neuroplasticity expecting to be patronised rather than challenged.

I started The Accidental Billionaires, but as recorded it was more about sensationalism than story, and I was after accurate history rather than cobbled conjecture.

I came to Malcolm Gladwell via many recommendations, and his subject matter held a lot of promise. The Tipping Point examines social epidemics and how behavioural trends - whether in retail, business or a neighbourhood - go viral. For a lot of the book I was conscious of that familiar non-fiction malady, wherein the author seems to contradict themselves or not take into account a glaringly important element in the point they're trying to prove. Gladwell always managed to come back by the end of the chapter, however, and correct or explain himself.

Even while Gladwell was frustrating me and I was feeling dubious about his thoroughness, I found I kept bringing him up in conversation. This is part of what has made him such a successful author - he takes parts of society that we perhaps had never thought to analyse, but which are nevertheless familiar and recognisable, and constructs believable, relatable pscyho-social theory around them. The world really is full of Connectors (someone about whom you'd say 'They know everyone'), Mavens (the people you turn to when you need information or a good recommendation) and Salesmen, the three personality types critical for spreading a social epidemic. Some of the studies he cites are fascinating - like the Gore company (manufacturers of Gore-Tex) who have discovered that business camaraderie and effectiveness drastically reduces with working groups of more than 150 people. Sometimes, though, I couldn't help thinking, as apt and interesting as many of his examples were, one or two studies in the history of social behaviour does not a law make. I guess, though, if I wanted proof, I'd be reading his journal articles and academic papers, not a book for the mainstream.

It seems that sometimes in non fiction the author asks you to suspend your beliefs for a little while - just as sometimes in fiction you need to go along with some poetic licence to get the plot and/or character where they need to be. Perhaps, once I learn to read for fiction techniques in non fiction, rather than just using them in my writing, I'll find it less frustrating.

'Crossing to Safety' - Wallace Stegner

Who is Wallace Stegner? He's a twentieth century midwest American writer, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972. He's renowned in Utah, where he grew up, and commemorated at the west-coast university where he taught creative writing with a writing award.

But he's not an author who has received much attention in Australia. Crossing to Safety was his last novel, released in 1987, a full fifty years after his first. According to the book jacket, Australia started at the end with Stegner, as this was his first title to be published here. It carries endorsement from no less than Tim Winton, who calls Crossing to Safety a 'wise and good book...I with [it] was one of mine'.

It is certainly a book of an old writer. (Stegner was almost 80 when it was published.) It's a reflective story, beginning with Larry Morgan arriving at a remote Vermont lake compound with his crippled wife, Sally, to meet their lifelong friends, Charity and Sid Lang. Charity is terminally ill, and, as befits her character, has summoned those closest to her in her final days to farewell her life as she decrees. It's obvious much time has passed since the two couples last saw each other - a gap born of argument or disagreement, or the reality of dispersed living?

Gentle tensions exist throughout the book. Stegner has a storyteller's mastery of suspense. Not edge-of-your-seat, monster-under-the-bed suspense, but rather genuine drama, a level of engagement that makes you care if characters are about to be hurt or disappointed.

What is most apparent in this novel's style is that it is a straightforward story. Yes, there are two timelines, but they rarely intersect. For the majority of the novel we are in the thirties, when pregnant women drank and a hotel cost a couple of bucks. Stegner recounts the relationship between wealthy, effervescent Sid and Charity, and poor, ambitious Larry and Sally in measured tones, taking his time over details. About two thirds of the way through he starts to drop hints of a drama to come, which is duly played out in the novel's last third.

You notice while reading it how rarely a novel these days is able to simply tell a story. Stegner allows himself one trope - Larry, the protagonist, is a writer, and he comments on the process of writing within the story, which, we assume, he is in fact penning in character as a memoriam of a lasting friendship. It's a little cliched, particularly in the beginning of the third act, when we return to modern day and Larry and Sally at the Langs' Vermont lakehouse. The Morgans breakfast with Sid and Charity's daughter, catching up on the events the reader has missed in the many years not recounted in detail. For a few pages, it's straight exposition dressed up as dialogue, and it jars a little. Mainly because up until then Stegner has relied on the poetry of his own prose to reveal intimacies, rather than characters delivering it in straight voice. But perhaps any hint of cliche only comes from so many authors repeating this style in the literature of the last thirty years.

Although the novel is adamant about its time setting - the Depression is a significant backdrop - it resonates more than once with issues that reveal themselves as timeless. Take this dinner-time discussion with 'Uncle Richard', a publisher whom Charity is hoping to woo into taking on Larry's novel:

'Uncle Richard...suggested that publishing was not a charitable enterprise. He named six titles on his fall list that he would be unable to publish if he weren't able to count on the sales of this one that Sid thought shouldn't have been published at all.

Being an academic table, we began deploring the level of popular taste. Only junk seemed to sell. Wasn't there any market for good, serious, intelligent, well-written books? There must be. Couldn't you count on a good book's finding an audience - small, maybe, but enough to carry it?'

e-books face a lot of competition for the role of being the end of the printed word.

'Everything is Illuminated' - Jonathan Safran Foer

A few years ago I gave a presentation as part of a writing and editing course about the linear trajectory from Ernest Hemingway to Jonathon Franzen. Papa is a fave of mine - all that drinking, all that missing dialogue - and at the time I couldn't stop thinking about The Corrections, so I decided to join the dots between them. My theory was that Hemingway's sparsity, coupled with realism, sent literature onto a path that arrived at hyperrealism, of which Franzen was an early proponent. Just as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck et al would have made for a formidable group of scribes about town, Franzen has picked up a posse of 'same breath' writers - Dave Eggers and this review's subject, Jonathan Safran Foer, being but two.

What links them is this post-post-modern re-imagining of what a story is, of what a reader can expect from a novel. While they're messing about with language and chronology, they're also muddying the waters of fiction, giving us tomes laden with backstory and light on action (Franzen), presenting truth as fiction and stories as history (Eggers), and blending narratives to bring the author into the story, as Foer does in Everything is Illuminated.

I loved Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, his second novel, which focuses on a young boy whose father died in the World Trade Centre on 9/11. It's breathlessly emotional. Everything is Illuminated is the work of a wunderkind, a first novel that won as many awards as it has parallel storylines. Within the novel, a character called Jonathan Safran Foer travels to the Ukraine to find a woman in a photograph, who saved his grandfather during the war. He is accompanied on his search by Alex, a young Ukrainian, who will translate for him. Ostensibly, Jonathan is writing a story of the history of the vanished village of Trachim, making up one strand of the book, which Alex is translating and vetting. Alex's letters to Jonathan, commenting on what has gone before, make up another strand.

In between these are the peculiarly enunciated, minimally punctuated goings-on of Alex, Jonathan and Alex's grandfather as they hunt out Trachim and the elusive Augustine. Alex's imperfect English is a perennial feature - he feels 'oblongated' to Jon-fen, for example, and 'roosts', rather than sits.

At first, I felt I'd have to skip the travel narrative contributed by Alex. It had every hallmark of too-clever writing, with the messed-about punctuation (running dialogue along single lines), and misused words making the reader do the work to uncover the story. The historical storyline of the inhabitants of Trachim stopped off on the Hemingway-Franzen highway to pay homage to the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I soon settled into the groove of that narrative, and was placated to find that it wasn't merely my lazy reading that meant I missed the relevance of some plot elements - to reveal all the elements of a story chronologically is so last century, after all.

And then some of Foer's better turns of phrase started to leap from the page. The book, for all its twists and turns, narrative voices and timelines, is about love. What love makes us do, whether good or bad, and all the ways it can manifest itself and permeate our thinking and actions. Foer says at one point: 'They reciprocated the great and saving lie - that our love for things is greater than our love for our love for things'.

Alongside the central love story, however, is the story of a war, as the Nazis march across Eastern Europe, bringing terror with them. Most effectively, Foer ends the novel where we started, and closes the circle with all the timelines - the present, an eighteenth century village, and the Second World War - holding hands. The invocation of war and violence as cyclical, inseparable from history, is as chilling as his evocation of love is warming.

'The Accidental Billionaires' - Ben Mezrich

I made it 30 pages into this book. So, this is not a fully informed review, just an impression of the elements that made it impossible for me to carry on.

The Accidental Billionaires is the book on which David Fincher's movie The Social Network was based: the story of Mark Zuckerberg, his relationship with Eduardo Savarin, and the early days of Facebook.

Zuckerberg was working with the formidable Winklevoss brothers: identical twins from serious money who went on to row for America at an Olympic level. The brothers, along with a business partner, wanted to build Harvard Connection, a way of 'putting Harvard's social life online'. The brothers spent most of every day on the water, in class or asleep, and wanted a way to meet girls.

A lot of this story (as told both in the film and in what I read of the book) seems to be about girls. It's testament to Facebook's phenomenal popularity that it's hard to comprehend that the Winklevoss' idea was actually a groundbreaking one, so embedded is what they propose in our current interactions. The flaw in their original idea for me (other than the fact Zuckerberg ended up taking the idea, expanding it and releasing Facebook), was that it wasn't going to increase the time they had available to socialise, at least face to face. Instead they were going to network online, and maintain their schedule of six hours of rowing and as many of classes each day, while their relationships progressed over the internet.

Somehow, the Winklevi (as Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, memorably calls them in the film) had foreseen that we would globally embrace online networking as a replacement for face-to-face interaction.

Fincher's film was superb, deserving its many plaudits (including five stars from David). Its value lay in presenting the Zuckerberg-Facebook story as a front for a far deeper discourse about values, the morality of success, and a world shrunk to a global village of 500 million people who could amend their vocabulary in less than five years, yet know little more about each other than what status updates reveal.

Mezrich's book, on the other hand, is sloppy. He explains in the Author's Note that he 'recreated scenes' based on 'documents and interviews, and my best judgement...[to describe] individual perceptions without endorsing them'. He also uses 'the technique of recreated dialogue' to compress conversations that took place over long periods of time, as recollected by multiple participants.

All perfectly acceptable. Except, he can't even get the facts he does present consistent. The book opens from Eduardo Savarin's perspective. He knows Zuckerberg is 'a computer science major who lived in Eliot House' (p15). On page 17, when Savarin meets Zuckerberg he asks (in a recreated conversation) 'What house are you in again?' Mark responds, 'Kirkland'. Given Mezrich has already told us he's recreating information, I'm unlikely to find much of it credible.

Some descriptive passages are overdone, such as describing the Charles River, pre-dawn and home to the rowing menace of the Winklevoss brothers: 'Dead silence, a moment frozen in time, a single paragraph on a single page in a book that spanned three centuries of pregnant, frozen moments like this.' The brothers emerge from the 'frigid glade', rowing in a 'perfect and complex marriage of mechanics and art'. This purple prose comes immediately after Mezrich has recounted Savarin's assertion that in senior year he swears he will have sex in the library stacks. So you know we're not going to stay on message here - Mezrich isn't restricting himself to Savarin's inner thoughts on business and venture capital.

It was probably expecting too much of this story to think it would be polished and balanced. The ink has barely dried on the deals signing off the court cases. Facebook was only created seven years ago, so the fact that almost a tenth of the world is now part of it, and that the language of it has infiltrated our vocabulary is historical evidence enough of its impact, without this 'recreated' account.

'What is the What?' - Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers launched a genre with his 'memoir' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. By taking a premise of truth and muddling it with embellishment, exaggeration and fabrication, Eggers presented the world with 'creative non-fiction'.

With What is the What, he continues to defy classification. The book's byline is:

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF VALENTINO ACHAK DENG
A novel
DAVE EGGERS

So which is it? An autobiography or a novel?

Well, are the two in fact mutually exclusive? It's perfectly appropriate for Achak to have engaged someone else to write the book - his grasp of English at the time when the project began (2003) was insufficient to produce the book himself. But why 'a novel'? Eggers actually explains this decision in an essay on the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation website: after two years working on the book, including a visit to Sudan, he found the non-fiction narrative too much like oral histories that had already been published to be effective. There was no evocation of place; for Eggers as a writer, no capacity to bring the facts alive for the audience. Eggers realised that he needed to produce a novel, one that replicated Achak's tone, for the book to have effect.

And it works. As much as possible the book sticks to the facts - for example, it's true that Achak's eventual flight to the US to be repatriated was scheduled for September 11, 2001. However, when the story begins, and the murahaleen first attack Achak's hometown of Marial Bai, he was only six years old - his memory of events and locations was not going to be perfect, and it is in fleshing out these details that Eggers the storyteller comes into his own in partnership with Achak, the one who experienced it all.

The book operates on two timelines: a current storyline, when Achak is living in Atlanta, and has been attacked and robbed in his home; and the chronology of fighting, fleeing and refugee life that he experienced in the desert of Sudan and refugee camps of Ethiopia and Kenya. The characters Achak encounters in America, whether they are his assailants, assistants at hospital when he goes for an MRI following the attack, or customers at the gym where he works on reception, become his audience.

For this is a story that must be experienced. Part of the reason Eggers and Achak chose the novel form was because it needed to be a visceral story: primary sources were the stuff of textbooks and news reports. The 'real' Achak and the Achak narrating this novel want people to really listen to what happened. To understand that spending thirteen years in a refugee camp, after months of being hunted in the desert; watching friends join the army in their early teens to escape the camp; being separated from every member of your family and believe them dead from the age of six; being forgotten by the world; escaping to America only to discover that noone thought through the realities of refugee resettlement - all of this is part of one problem, a problem that still exists. Sudan is still at war and in poverty.

It's appropriate that there is confusion over what this book is - truth or fabrication. Achak's story is unbelievable, yet it is the reality for him, the other 20,000 lost boys, the millions killed and the millions more still living in Sudan, or indeed in refugee camps. For Achak, the reality of America was unbelievable - that he could be rejected at a college because the parents of 'nice blonde girls' wouldn't want them running into him in the hallway; that it could take 15 hours for him to receive an MRI; that police could ignore robbery and assault.

So the question isn't so much 'what is the truth?', but rather 'what is right' - that these events can happen? - or to take literally the question of the title, 'what is the what'? The 'What' in the story is what Adam and Eve did not take as an alternative when God offered them cattle, which they knew would feed them for many generations. The 'what' is the life Achak would have had if he had not spent 13 years in refugee camps, if he had spent his childhood with his brothers and sisters, if his country had been able to return to farming and self-sufficiency without fear of attack. It's not the life he had, but he is able, regardless, to say with certainty that he remains blessed.

Storytelling stories: 'Oracle Night' and 'Cloud Atlas'

It's a delicate device, choosing to have characters within a novel tell their own stories. At its most overt, the author presents their protagonist as a writer, which can lead to all sorts of wheels-within-wheels scenarios, as you wonder where the author ends and the character begins.

Paul Auster runs visually and virtually parallel stories through Oracle Night. His principal character, Sidney Orr, is a writer, and he talks frequently about his own authoring experience and that of his colleagues. The novel follows Sidney for a period of nine days or so in the eighties, after he purchases a Portuguese notebook from a small Brooklyn stationer, and begins to write for the first time after a long illness.

Sidney gets the idea of a story to write from a snippet in The Maltese Falcon. He takes inspiration from that story to write a tale about a man who walks out on his life after a lucky escape from an accident. Early in the book, large chunks of this 'second-level' story are reproduced. At the first level, Auster presents us with a protagonist who is a writer, creating a story. Within that story, the protagonist is an editor, who is reading a manuscript. And yes, within the second-level story we have a third-level story, as his protagonist reads through and summarises the manuscript (called Oracle Night, as is the novel).

Adding to all of this, when Auster is in his first-level story, he uses footnotes to provide background information. The footnotes are written in the voice of the protagonist, not of the author, adding a layer of complexity and separation from the reader - one starts to question exactly what they're reading. They're not brief, either. Most go across multiple pages, so you have to turn the page(s) to finish reading the footnote, before turning back to where you were in the story.

As I was describing the book's structure to a friend, I found all this talk of second- and third-level stories reminiscent of a certain high-grossing feature film released earlier this year. The comparison came even closer to Inception when Sidney's wife, Grace, described a dream to him (one which resembled the story Sidney was scribbling in his alluring notebook). She ends the description by saying:

People can't die in their dreams, you know...That's how it works. As long as you're dreaming, there's always a way out.

Spinning-top totem, anyone? I wonder if Christopher Nolan is a Auster fan...

Auster's style superficially is very reminiscent of Philip Roth. Both write of men embedded in New York and display an intimate familiarity with the city. Roth too uses writers as protagonists, as in The Ghost Writer (not to be confused with the recent film based on a Robert Harris novel of the same name) and Exit Ghost, and presents stories within stories. Because of that similarity, I felt I was reading a much older book. I was surprised when I realised it was published in 2003 - strange how you can make assumptions about the age of a piece, and how those assumptions affect your reactions to it.

Published the year after Oracle Night was David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Mitchell also takes an unusual approach to storytelling, relating six different narratives, in six extremely different styles, starting in a Pacific colony in the 1800s and progressing to 'beyond the future'; that is, the penultimate narrative is futuristic, and the last is the future of that future. Speaking of totems, too, tiny details travel with the characters throughout time and narrative.

Each narrative stops abruptly, making the transition to a new voice and time even rougher on the reader. The strongest testament to Mitchell's writing prowess is how quickly the reader feels comfortable with each new style.

Now, I recognise that producing a novel with various narrative voices doesn't sound unusual on the surface of it. But Mitchell does something very special (this isn't a plot spoiler, but my enjoyment of the book was enhanced by the surprise of not knowing how it worked overall, so feel free to skip the rest of the post). At the book's mid-point, the 'future future' narrative ends, and segues back to the penultimate narrative. The book then progresses backwards through time, completing each story. It's a genius technique, like returning to half a dozen unfinished books in a row, reminding yourself of missed characters and reaching the catharsis of resolution multiple times.

Where it fits into this post is that each of the narratives use the protagonist as storyteller, whether it's written as a diary account, as an interview with an archivist, as a lost novel, as letter, or around a futuristic campfire. What Mitchell reminds us of is the universality and timelessness of storytelling. Certainly, its written formats might change, but we will always communicate our stories and there will always be room for words.

Changing the climate: 'Solar' and 'Freedom'

Ian McEwan really only has himself to blame for his latest work, Solar, being dubbed a 'climate change novel'. He used the appelation himself a couple of years ago at the Adelaide Writers Festival, while the book was still a work in progress.

It's a climate change novel, though, in the same way that Enduring Love is about hot-air ballooning: in both cases, the named element is a device, something used to manipulate the characters into situations that allow the writer to reveal their message.

Certainly, McEwan's message is focussed on consumption, excess and the consequences thereof. His protagonist, Michael Beard, is in many ways a repulsive character, an embodiment of capitalism, consumerism and hubris. Once an eminent scientist - a Nobel prize winner, no less - Beard admits:

...two decades had passed since he last sat down in silence and solitude for hours on end, pencil and pad in hand, to do some thinking, to have an original hypothesis, play with it, pursue it, tease it into life. The occasion never arose - no, that was a weak excuse. He lacked the will, the material, he lacked the spark. He had no new ideas.

Even someone whose fame and living has been made through intellectual concepts finds themselves more concerned with material acquisition than mental competency. This sentiment echoes our obsession with new technology: online networking rather than meeting face-to-face; satnavs instead of maps; e-readers rather than books. Everything pixelated is but a reworking of an existing idea; they are alternatives, rarely replacements, and nearly always more damaging in terms of the resources needed to manufacture them.

One review of Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom, called it the Novel of the Century. We're only ten years in and such hyperbole goes hand-in-hand with Franzen's own mockery of a society gone crazy for the wrong things, things that will precipitate the downfall of much good in the world.

Having said that, history could prove that reviewer exactly right, since this is an astonishing, genius piece of work. If you want to know anything at all about the craft of story-telling, about presenting well-rounded, believable and empathetic characters, read Franzen.

In Freedom, Franzen delivers invectives against the Iraq war, sub-prime mortgages, abuse of natural resources, mining and corporate monopolies. The freedom his characters crave is not so much liberation from any form of bondage, or even to act out of free-will. It's almost post-freedom, in which we are liberated to fuck everything up - to ruin marriages, sleep with employees, make money from immoral ventures, live off better-natured people.

Environmentalism is a surprisingly strong plotline in the novel, as the main character, Walter, takes over a Trust dedicated to saving the cerulean warbler. Just as Michael Beard ends up being a hateful choice to save the world through the development of a photosynthesising cell, Walter's Trust will save this one bird species by firstly mining pristine land, before 'reclaiming' it. Both authors are sending the message that we are beyond the tipping point, we're already past saving face in the eyes of future generations. They present bureaucracies and systems in disarray, disempowered to make meaningful change. What Franzen is reminding us of is the ultimate freedom: to act altruistically, to live a life of minimal outward impact and maximum internal satisfaction.

'The Easter Parade' - Richard Yates

Revolutionary Road was Yates' first novel, and the one to reignite his career (albeit posthumously), thanks to Sam Mendes' film. The jacket of this re-issue of The Easter Parade is crammed with praise for Yates' work. Given the nature of marketing, however, most of it refers to Revolutionary Road, a disservice to this later novel, which demonstrates similar restraint and unflinching observation of lives that play out less than perfectly.

I've done a little bit of reading on Yates, but I'm unsure why it took the film of Revolutionary Road to bring him to the attention of the twenty-first century, or why he hadn't maintained the reputation of Fitzgerald or Carver. Yates' first novel was published in 1961, was well received and nominated for awards. The Easter Parade came out in 1976. Gatsby therefore precedes him by almost half a century; Carver was a contemporary and certainly took influence from Yates' style of realism.

Looking at the endorsements on this edition, it sounds like many respected, current writers knew about the Yates phenomenon all along. That assertion is diluted somewhat by the quote from Nick Hornby, that Revolutionary Road is 'Easily the best novel I've read this year'. I agree with him, but I doubt he's talking about 1961 - apparently even those in the know came to Yates late.

The Easter Parade is a sparse narrative, recounting the lives of two sisters whose parents divorced when the girls were very young. The elder sister, Sarah, follows the expected path of early marriage, settling down to children and never working. The younger Emily flits through jobs and men, always a long way from contentment but assured that the traditional model was not for her.

Although the novel deals with many relationships, it features very little love. Yates was nothing if not a realist, and he is willing to present us with partnerships of expediency rather than romance.

Perhaps one reason Yates was both overlooked for so long and is now so embraced is his subject matter. The reader must remember that The Easter Parade was written over 30 year ago, by a man, and focuses on two women, one of whom has sequential affairs, without ever marrying. The male characters play supporting roles only. Yates' achievement in delivering such a raw yet engaged narrative of two women is a credit. It may have lost him audiences 30 years ago; now, thanks to paths authors such as Yates forged, it's hard to remember how significant it must have been.

'Revolutionary Road' - Richard Yates

To read Revolutionary Road is to be reminded that brilliance as a writer does not guarantee longevity. Yates' novel is a splendid one, yet it was out of print before Sam Mendes adapted it, and cast his glowing wife Kate Winslet as the acerbic April Wheeler, a woman who procures a drastic end to her angered marriage to Frank.

This is not April's story, however. This is the story of a man trapped into the social expectations of the affluent, post-war America of the fifties. The Wheelers' revolution is to decide to move to Paris where, more shockingly, April will be the main money-earner as Frank endeavours to determine what it is he wants to do with his intelligence, and his good fortune to have been born that most wonderful of things, a man (a title both bestowed on and withdrawn from him by April).

The backgrounds of both characters tell us that they have never been offered, or felt comfortable offering, unmitigated love. Their marriage, while initially affectionate and passionate, is a practical thing. The great, unspoken fear many of us harbour comes true for them, as they grow to hate exactly the aspects of one another that originally drew them together.

Both the Wheelers and their neighbours the Campbells have children, but they are mainly silenced within the story. Shep Campbell at one point walks through his house and is 'halfway across the living room before he realised he had four sons'. Procreation has its own associations with both the genders: a man is emasculated if he cannot bear children; a woman is too often limited by her ability to do so. Both these social constructs are played out in April and Frank's relationships to their children in the novel.

Yates demonstrates an extraordinary connection to words. On just the fifth page, I knew how rewarding this book would be when he described the atmosphere of the amateur dramatics rehearsals April attended:

At first their reheasals had been held on Saturdays -- always, it seemed, on the kind of windless February or March afternoon when the sky is white, the trees are black, and the brown fields and hummocks of the earth lie naked and tender between curds of shrivelled snow.

The language is very much that of a certain style of American literature, where characters drawl things like 'Well, I guess that really is a whole lotta nonsense', with the last word pronounced with equal stress on each syllable. It is Gatsbyesque, but the mirror here is in front of more prosaic social issues: how and where we live, where and why we work, whether or not we love those we have chosen to share our lives with. It indirectly questions what America gained in coming out the 'victor' from its role in the great wars, and how it has squandered it - topics that still resonate, and will continue to for some time.

'Divisadero' - Michael Ondaatje

Divisadero is a Spanish word, and in Ondaatje's 2007 novel it has a brief presence as the name of a street a character lives on for a time. Its meaning - either to divide or to make something out (from a distance) - encapsulates the whole structure and modulation of the book. The narrative is fractured, keeping the reader at arm's distance from the inner sanctum of the characters. It shifts point of view from chapter to chapter, dipping back into the past, changing the narrative voice from first person to third person, and changing tense from past to present. It also follows two distinct paths: a story of three characters in a modern, rural American community, and the background of an early-twentieth-century French poet and author, Lucien Segura, whose work is being translated by one of the modern characters, Anna.

That link between the two time periods is played out only briefly, however. Throughout the book, pairs of characters who significantly affect each other often spend only snatches of time together. In the modern thread, Anna and Claire are false sisters (born in the same week, one is adopted by the other's father) and often confused with one another, not in a 'look-alike' fashion, but instead in terms of mistaken identity. They embody the notion a single spirit divided at birth and shared between two people. Due to the tumultuous events of their past, however, they spend most of their lives apart. Segura, the writer, is ultimately able to admit and express his greatest love only when that woman is, in fact, not there.

Ondaatje's take on the distant past, as an informant or precedent to our current predilections, as well as the power of events in one's own life, is McEwanesque in its take on cause and effect. Ondaatje is perhaps more open about that theme than McEwan: he stresses that we need '...to accept the flawed barrier between cause and effect, how to see that the present continually altered the past, just as the past was a strange inheritance that fell upside down into one's life like an image through a camera obscura.'

With gentle beauty Ondaatje expresses how atuned we can become to the world: 'It was when he felt...most clearly that there was no distinction between himself and what was beyond him - a tree's sigh or his mother's song, could, it seemed, have been generated by his body. Just as whatever gesture he made was an act performed by the world around him.' Hence, while superficially the two story threads have little connection, we know that Anna is channeling this entire, unknown past belonging to Segura as she sits in the places where he thought, felt, watched and wrote.

Divisadero is reminiscent too of A.S. Byatt's Possession, as both books not only present parallel stories in different times, but also offer them equal space, development and importance in the narrative, rather than one buoying or merely supplementing the other. As Divisadero progresses, the time-shifting intensifies, moving forward and back several years within the one segment, sometimes within the one recollection of a character. Again, Ondaatje is aware of the effect he is creating, using a comparison of photos of characters from each timescape to simultaneously remind us of their link, but also to separate them: 'We are much closer to the subject in this [later] picture. Photography has moved in from the middle distance as the century progressed, eliminating vistas, the great forests, the ranging hills.'

To end, Ondaatje presents us with an image of birds over a lake 'flying as close to their reflections as possible'. The whole novel has presented us with these dualities: of the two timescapes, of two cultures, and within each pairing of characters. Anna can only understand what she is reading through the prism of her experience; hence, a current perspective informs the past. We can only re-live our memories and others' from the present: the notion of cause and effect moves both backwards and forwards in what we only imagine to be a linear progression of time.

Hungary in the suburbs; North Fitzroy Arms & 'Prague' - Arthur Phillips

296 Rae St, North Fitzroy; 03 9489 8519

Recently, I've been working through a novel called Prague, set thus far entirely in Budapest. I felt a similar, though far more rewarding, disconnection with expectations this week when I ate a fine goulash at a pub with the distinctly local name of the North Fitzroy Arms. Perhaps both the novel and the pub are living in another time: the former in the tumult of 1989, when capitalism flooded the Danube, and the latter when Fitzroy Lions + Brisbane Bears did not equal one team north of the border.

(A third, related disconnect cropped up coincidentally this afternoon, when I spotted a white Mercedes M-class with the number plate PRAGUE.)

Goulash is Hungary's version of the slow-cooked dish every nation worth its sea salt lays claim to as a national cuisine. The Hungarian offering - a stew of beef and onions in a rich gravy sometimes thick enough to submerge optional dumplings - has a vermillion vibrancy thanks to the addition of paprika. In this North Fitzroy interpretation, the meat, almost melted in its slow cooking, is cuddled around a wodge of creamy mash flecked with spring onion. It was simply divine. The pub's proprietors are named on its website as Volbi and Zorka and they've clearly brought home-learnt skills to spoil those in the inner north lucky enough to stumble upon them.

SG stuck with something a bit more nationalistic, the kangaroo fillets with mushroom risotto and beetroot. The pub is also known as Haskins Restaurant and the folk behind the stove certainly know how to treat their meat, serving up several slabs of pink, seared, juicy roo fillets. The food and wine prices are generous; customers are welcome to order from both bar and restaurant menu in either area of the pub; and they offer a varied, non-Fosters list of wines by the glass.

Arthur Phillips, Prague's author, is an American who lived in Budapest for two years immediately after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The novel features five North American characters, each of whom has found themselves in Budapest for different reasons, although all are unified in feeling it's a place of opportunity thanks to the monumental economic and political changes underway. The perspective, however, is one of an outsider, although it does attempt to engage with locals and deliver, through character histories, an extensive history of Hungary through two World Wars and multiple revolutions. However, with all but one of the protagonists ignorant of Hungarian it is necessary for them to meet English-educated Hungarians in order to progress the story, which to me limits the efficacy of the native perspective (particularly as Russian was far more common as a second language than English in the eastern bloc).

To write such a story with an actual insider's perspective, however, would place it within the Hungarian canon and therefore immediately hinder its entry and acceptability to the readership of Western countries. Think of recent Nobel prize winners - such as Frenchman Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio (last year's winner) and most pertinently Hungarian Imre Kertész (2002), who are virtually unknown outside Europe, despite decades of reputable work. There is, therefore, an inherent dichotomy in a foreigner trying to tell the story, no matter how vital, of a land not his own.

As for the title, it is perhaps an ironic device (the blurb explains that the five American expats 'harbour the vague suspicion that their couterparts in Prague have it better'). Perhaps naming the novel outside its setting represents the cultures that have been imposed - forcefully through war or unwittingly through the embrace of capitalism - upon these small, confused eastern European countries. A simple name is not enough of an identity in the face of such change. However, as when one of the characters questions a Serb as to why he finds it so important to insist he's not Yugoslavian, since 'they're all the same', it is a device that belies its own effectiveness by what it denies: the importance and weight of these countries' centuries of history.

'Naked' - David Sedaris

He's deceiving, that David Sedaris. Not only is he almost impossible to classify (as discussed in an earlier review of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim), it also takes some perseverance to get into the right frame of mind to fully appreciate his essays. He can be outrageously funny, but even while delivering a riposte as sharp as a needle dipped in lemon juice, he can ruminate on deep social questions. Reading for seriousness can mean you miss some humour; reading to laugh can mean missing the provocations that elevate Sedaris above a simple humourist.

In the last, and eponymous, essay in his collection Naked, there is a passage of humour that exceeds even Bill Bryson's awe at the range of incontinence pads he found in an American supermarket. The essay is a lengthy one, describing Sedaris' experience at a nudist camp. He originally requested a brochure for the camp as part of an ongoing joke at the expense of his brother; he later decides to attend for a week, a decision born out of the noble belief that if he can be comfortable being naked around others, he will be better able to accept himself for who he is. That reasoning is a good example of the intellectualism and honesty Sedaris employs in his essays. It's easily missed, however, if, like me, you were still wiping your eyes after reading the previous page:

The brochure [for the nudist camp] pictures a swimming pool...and the inevitable volleyball court, which leaves me to wonder: What is it with these people and volleyball? The two go hand in hand. When I think nudist, I don't think penis - I think net.

Included in the envelope is a calendar of events...In May they held a golf-cart rally, several theme campfires, a chili cook-off, and something called 'Wild West horseback riding'.

Test eye shadow on all the rabbits you want. Strap electrodes to the skulls of rhesus monkeys and shock them into a stupor, but it is inhumane to place a nudist on horseback the day after a chili cook-off. ('Was he always an Appaloosa?')

'Lay of the Land' - Richard Ford

The third in a trilogy of novels about the interior musings and observations of the Frank Bascombe, Lay of the Land follows the same model as the two earlier books: tracing Frank's movements over a holiday weekend - this time, Thanksgiving - involving an enormous amount of driving, a succinct amount of dialogue and a constant stream of observation, and filling in backstory about what has happened in the previous ten years.

At 55, Frank's musings now tend towards mortality and are perhaps more introverted and self-critical than in Independence Day and The Sportswriter. He has entered the 'Permanent Period', a time when a man is old enough and, hopefully, broadly experienced enough, to accept his life as it is, that few grand changes will occur between now and death: 'no fear of the future, life not ruinable, the past generalised to a pleasant pinkish blur'. His life is not without regret, but he now spends more time on rationales and hindsight.

With age also comes greater fallibility. Frank is not as healthy or robust as he was; he falls over on occasions, has mild panic attacks. While still dealing with the death of his son almost twenty years earlier, he finds himself in conversations that he handles badly - as a real estate agent, saying the right thing at the right time, always, has been one of Frank's strongest character traits.

His character traits divide neatly into two headings: those that make him arrogant, and those that make him intellectual. They wouldn't be mutually exclusive lists, however: Frank is often happy to project his intellectualism arrogantly, particularly when wooing women. Frank reflects on a particular platonic friendship in which his conversation made him 'seem as savvy as a diplomat and wise as an oracle, with total recall and a flawless sense of context...at a moment's notice completely ready to change the subject to something she was interested in, or something else I knew more about than anybody in the world.'

Where the previous two novels were lulling, like a long roadtrip taken as a passenger, in the first section of this book accompanying Frank on his litany of errands felt more akin to a dream where, despite constant pursuits, you can never reach your goal and wake up before its resolved. This initial section is highly political in theme. As in Independence Day, a genuine election features, this time George W Bush's infamous 'victory' in 2000. Frank characterises every acquaintance by their political leanings, and in this obsession it feels that perhaps too much of Ford himself has crept into his characterisation.

There are some overtly self-referential moments. Frank says 'Realtors make importance by selling, which is better-paying than the novelist's deal and probably not as hard to do well'. Late on Thanksgiving day Franks sees a cross in the sky and considers it a sign, in the form of 'X marks the spot'. It seems a clumsy, beginnerish symbol, but Ford then lists each of the motifs he has used within the story - in case we'd missed them? Or because he, too, is in the Permanent Period and is comfortable enough as a writer to be blatant about his tools and tricks?

Of the two earlier books, The Sportswriter in particular looked at permutations of love. In Lay of the Land Frank has harder-to-resolve issues in his relationships with two wives and his children. He does, however, have this to say: 'there are ideal women in the world...For men, these are women who make you feel especially smart, that you're uniquely handsome in a way you yourself always believed you were, who bring out the best in you, by some generosity or need in themselves.' That all sounds very one way; Frank's opinion of women hasn't improved much. But then again, where he was extremely honest about his problemetic relationship with his son in Independence Day, perhaps here Ford lays men and their version of romance bare.

For a male reader of Bascombe's age, to have grown old with this series would have been revelatory and self-affirming. No aspect of his personality or his circumstance is too inconsequential for digression and description. A favourite way to relax, for example, is to settle into bed and read the Gettysburg address out loud. It's a purely personal response, but by Book 3 Frank has grown into a character too removed from my ken for me to respond as enthusiastically. I don't question Ford's achievement, however, in crafting a trilogy in which each book meticulously captures a time and place, and the themes therein, while presenting a man - already mature at the beginning - continuing to grow.

'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius' - Dave Eggers

What does it mean for an author to give their work such an audacious title? Dave Eggers was in no doubt as to the range of responses it could evoke:

Yes, [the title] caught your eye. First you took it at face value, and then picked it up immediately. "This is just the sort of book for which I have been looking!"...But then you thought, Hey, can these two elements work together?...If the book is, indeed heartbreaking, then why spoil the mood with the puffery? Or, if the title is some elaborate joke, then why make an attempt a sentiment? Which is to say nothing of the faux (real? No, you beg, please no) boastfulness of the whole title put together.

Self-awareness - a feeling that rarely deserts a writer, but which is just as rarely allowed to influence a work, even one as personal as a memoir - is never far from the surface in this work. The memoir may run to more than 400 pages, but the title essentially sums up the joke/irony/conundrum in just six words.

The book is heartbreaking due to two specific events in Eggers' past: the deaths of both of his parents, three months apart, from cancer. Eggers and his two older siblings were in their twenties; his younger brother Toph was eight. After his parents' death, Eggers took on guardianship of his younger brother and they, along with his sister Beth, moved from Chicago to San Francisco. This background, ostensibly, validates the book's existence; validates Eggers' entitlement to publishing his memoir.

It's not what the memoir is about, however. Eggers touches only briefly on the emotional outcomes of the two deaths; its effect on Toph is all but invisible. Instead the book comprises the derisive recollections of a twenty-something bloke setting up Might Magazine in west-coast America in the nineties. Not so staggering.

It's honest, that is undeniable. But have you ever had a friend so aware of their faults that self-awareness became their biggest fault of all, and it actually conversely led them to think they could do/think/say anything and get away with it because they were being honest about it? That's how I felt about Eggers. I didn't find his life particularly interesting. I kept reading because I had heard so much about how this book 'redefined its genre': it certainly uses some pithy techniques, but in most cases they are used to present that honesty in some unexpected way, which left me feeling that Eggers wasn't as comfortable with his actions and history as he was trying to make out, and that the innovative writing style was in fact more about trickery than honesty.

The line between the two is both fine and relevant. Not long after moving to SF, Eggers taunts a friend at a bar, telling her that Toph took a gun to school, shot someone, and has been on the run for weeks. He admits it's cruel, but also explains that what has already happened is so unbelievable that people don't know what else is reasonable to believe about his family. That sums up his approach: everything has a genuine basis, but through faked interviews, invented conversations with his brother, mixing up chronologies and imagined thought exchanges he takes that basis and twists it into something much more akin to fiction. Therein lie the book's claims to groundbreaking, genre-bending literature.

Eggers is honest about his feelings (outside of what he feels about his family): discussing the second edition of 'Might Magazine' he says: 'We have to avoid that kind of cruelly ironic fate - that we, the loudmouths who so cloyingly espouse the unshackling of one's ideas about work and life themselves become slaves to something'. It's not only honest, it's also an example of Eggers' ability to finely turn a sentence (except for the change of perspective).

Contrast that with an example of Eggers' at-times-excruciating self-awareness. For several pages he runs an imaginary interview. The interviewer is the producer of reality TV show The Real World, for which Eggers did audition and was interviewed. He takes the 'real' interview and invents questions and his own lengthy, articulate answers to ruminate on many of his life philosophies. At one point he says he pretends to be the kind of person '...who thinks their personality is so strong, their story so interesting, that others must know it and learn from it'. Did he also 'pretend' to write the book that fully matches that description?

Eggers recounts the story of a colleague who falls off a balcony and is seriously injured. While she's in a coma, he has a date with a sexologist and after they return to the sexologist's flat, he goes through a process of convincing himself that his behaviour is OK, despite his friend's situation: 'Shalini would be wanting us all to be enjoying ourselves, even with - especially with a sexologist in from New York...I'll be adding joy to the world, not depriving it'. It's not the thought process I have a problem with, it's the lack of admission of how stunningly self-centred including it in his book is. Eggers has already muddled around with time and chronology in the memoir - we don't even need to know that the events are closely related in time. Did he talk to Shalini about those thoughts after she came out of the coma? Did he think of the fact that his having sex with a sexologist would not have been a key preoccupation for Shalini whether she was conscious or not? But again, there's that honesty: he did think that, so why not include it?

And therein lies part of the book's distinction. It utilises a technique popular in fiction, particularly in hysterical realism, but unusual for this genre: rather than recounting just events, Eggers will include the minutiae of his thought processes - the crazed things one might think when rushing to a friend's house after a call indicating they're about to commit suicide. Surprisingly or not, Eggers has a cavalier attitude to death. He wonders on the way over 'Do I want a dead friend? Maybe I want a dead friend. There could be so many uses...' Most surprising is when 'Might Magazine' convinces a minor celebrity to fake his own death and Eggers explains the idea to his young brother. For the reader, their parents' death is more prescient (it's perhaps three years later in their time) and presenting such a playful attitude to death comes across as especially callous.

His style is very much of his generation. It's rock 'n' roll stuff, with a grunge riff - the book swings along through its chapters, embracing the multi-page paragraph, crazy streams of consciousness and rhetoric, and that style works with the content. But then there's the conclusion, where Eggers castigates the world as motherfuckers who won't listen to him. There are many who would choose not to, but they are not the ones who have done him the honour of reading through 437 pages of biography, to be told he wants us to sleep and never wake up. I'm sure that in the mire of writing this story, of reliving everything that happened, Eggers would have felt insular in a fashion that only an immersed writer can. The world would have seemed a long way away, isolation a far closer companion. I understand him writing and thinking it; I don't understand its eventual inclusion.

For all that, Eggers' commitment to writing and helping others is genuine. He is a founder of 826 Valencia, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to helping 6-18 year olds develop their writing skills; he also founded McSweeneys, an independent publishing house; and in 2006 published What is the What? (reviewed here), a 'novelised autobiography' of a Sudanese Lost Boy.

'Plenty' - Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon

Around Melbourne, the term 100-Mile is readily associated with Paul Mathis and his soon-to-close cafe in Melbourne Central. But it wasn't really a cafe; it was a high-end restaurant, incongruously placed in the midst of a student entertainment hub (comprising a bar with almost-constant happy hour; a huge cinema; ten-pin bowling with bar; pinball parlour (or whatever they're called these days!); food court with wi-fi) and notoriously hard to spot, with the concealed entrance carried over from the site's previous incarnation as SOS, Mathis' vegaquarian restaurant.

In 2005, two Canadians embarked on a smaller-scale, more personal project, which, while grounded in the same principles, was arguably more successful. And they wrote a book about it. Often, when people decide post-experience to turn a meaningful journey into a book it becomes a sappy, frustrating vessel. Happily, Alisa Smith and James Mackinnon were already writers, so they relate their challenge with skill and beauty. James in particular has a wonderful knack for descriptive writing, whether with reference to food and flavours, landscape or emotion.

Their book carries a measured weight of facts of figures, recounting initially the fact that inspired the project: that food frequently travels between 2400 and 4800 kms from farm to plate. Not only is this massively environmentally damaging, it also means we lose touch with the nature around us, with the seasons, with the joy of eating produce at its best and varying our diet according to what we can pluck from the ground.

From their first, princely meal at a cost of $US121, to potatoes done every way known, to the baking frenzy that ensues when finally, after seven months, they find a local source of flour, this book continues to exude the authors' enthusiasm, belief and determination for what they're doing, and keep the reader engaged in the same quest.

It would be a tough call, taking on the same diet. But it can only be beneficial to pay more attention to where your food is coming from. Farmers markets and independent butchers are a great place to start.

www.100milediet.org

'Home School' - Charles Webb

In 1963, there was The Graduate. More than forty years passed before readers were given the opportunity to reacquaint themselves with Benjamin and Elaine in Home School (in the fictional world, only eleven years have passed). What had happened to the author, Charles Webb, in the interim, is telling.

The film version of The Graduate turned the story into one of the most recognisable and quoted of the twentieth century. (The website AV Club has an interesting article discussing book vs film). Webb saw little of the revenue generated from the film, having signed a one-off deal for the rights not long after the book was released. The deal covered not just the story, but also the characters. He and his partner Fred (who changed her name from Eve) have spent the ensuing forty-odd years rejecting institutions (much as Benjamin did): divorcing without separating, educating their two sons at home, giving away most of their possessions and living in what many would describe as poverty.

At the conclusion of my review of The Graduate, I wrote:

'Ben is not a particularly likeable character; his redeeming features are few. However, his apathy and disaffection are presented against some particularly loathsome, self-interested adult characters. This doesn't necessarily absolve him of the effects of his behaviours, but it does emphasise the assumptions made by many about what makes one successful or even worthy. Ben wants to take a better path; for him the 'road less travelled'. We aren't taken far enough along that road to know if he succeeds but wherever he ends up at least he is taking self-awareness, rather than purely self-interest, along with him.'

I was so intrigued to see that as my conclusion! Home School offers us just that chance, to travel further along the road with Benjamin, to see whether his ideals and self-awareness won out in the end.

Firstly, though, has he become any more likeable? He's still frustrating and still misguidedly idealistic, but he is older and has at least had the chance to put his beliefs into action, rather than just parade them as a bourgeois rebellion. The novel's title is as literal, and self-referential to Webb's experience, as it seems. Benjamin and Elaine have two sons, whom they are home-schooling. Ben's hatred of curriculum and institutionalised learning has not dimmed. This negativity is not emphasised, however - at least, not in the case of the Braddocks. Their friends, Goya and Garth - also home-schoolers, who live in the mountains, talk of auras and energies, and breastfeed their offspring well into childhood - are presented as the wacky ones.

Mrs Robinson exists in this novel as Nan, called across the country to help blackmail the principal who has insisted that the boys come back to school. Benjamin and Elaine had revoked all contact with her, and she re-enters their lives as a conniving and destructive force. When Garth and Goya come to stay as well, the Robinsons' lives descend into the antithesis of the domestic bliss they had achieved.

It's a straightforward read: Webb's style has never been verbose, and as in The Graduate, he employs a lot of dialogue. It's wittier in this later book, with Benjamin and Elaine frequently engaging in marital sparring with canny wordplay. It's not a serious book though. Not that it's flimsy - it still has plenty to say and for all its flippancy is still carefully put together - but it is a book written for the author's need for personal closure, not for a publisher to close a deal.

Whether the French film company Canal elect to make a film version of the new instalment of 'their' characters remains to be seen. The Graduate had shock value in its time; the insurgency in this book is perhaps too intellectual to give a film the same punch.

'Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim' - David Sedaris

David Sedaris' work poses a conundrum for those keen to categorise what they read. His writing is of a style that needs a new, multi-hyphenated name to sum it up. Let's start, instead, with what it isn't.

It's not fiction. Sedaris is very clear that his writing comes from real events in his life. His family are his key characters: his four sisters and younger brother have learnt that their idiosyncrasies are fodder for their brother's embellishment, whether it be the over-the-top southerner in his male sibling approaching fatherhood, or his sister's curious phone habits. His parents - those who would choose the fabrics of the title for their brood - flesh out stories of family holidays at the coast, with plans to buy their rented house that are as spontaneously scuppered as they were hatched. His partner of twenty years, Hugh, features sporadically as well, often provoking Sedaris' deeper musings.

It's not short story. While Sedaris is an excellent story teller - building drama, intrigue, suspense and twists that stop short of being outrageous as we trust they are grounded (shallowly or not) in some truth - this is not a collection of short stories in the ilk of Robert Drewe, Nam Le or similar. One piece about a truly bizarre appointment when working as an apartment cleaner would surely be struck out of a fictional collection as too ridiculous.

Nor are they essays (although this is often the preferred label). This often drier, more formal style of writing presents pieces formulated on argument, research and persuasion. Sedaris does on occasion push an agenda - musing on love or on some of our less-spoken-about peccadilloes (such as the need he has on occasion to touch the back of a person's head) - but his writing is anything but academic.

What about biography or memoir? These suggest a linear telling of someone's life, whereas Sedaris' pieces instead sit aside one another like fallen cards, recounting events from childhood (a sleepover involving strip poker), his current life in France (and a busload of lost tourists coming across him drowning a mouse at 3 am), teenagehood and early adulthood.

Humour? Well, he's funny. He has the skill to invoke out-loud laughs through words on a page, a rare gift. But his social observation takes him far beyond the reach of most comedians who swap talking for typing.

So let's create a new label for him. But who else could carry the same label in order to flesh out the genre, make it worth a whole shelf and having new placemarkers printed?

Enough questions. A quick glance at Dymocks' web page sees the words 'memoir', 'essay' and 'biography' used for just one of Sedaris' volume, so that doesn't quite clear things up.

What is does mean is that reading Sedaris can remind us that words can be manipulated infinitely. We don't have to keep re-inventing the one story, to stick with formulas, to pick a style and confine our writing within it. Instead, there are those among us who never switch off their capacity to be intrigued, their ability to see something profound in the ordinary and, to the great good luck of their audience, can then transpose that event into words that engage, interest and amuse.

'The Graduate' - Charles Webb

Before Dustin Hoffman ogled Anne Bancroft, before Simon and Garfunkel wrote one of the sixties' catchiest choruses, and long before Abe Simpson pounded the glass and cried 'Mrs Bouvier!', The Graduate existed only as a slender, debut novel by Charles Webb.

When Benjamin Braddock returns to his commodious family home after finishing college with exceptional results, he finds himself entirely disaffected with his situation. His parents are suffocatingly proud of his achievements, but also excruciatingly out of touch with the thoughts Ben foments over days on the sunlounge and nights in front of the TV. Only two characters in this novel - Ben and Elaine Robinson - are of college age. All others are adults of his parents' age. His mother and father organise dinners and parties where Ben is exhibited in a fashion similar to what they expect him to do with his new sportscar (a graduation gift). Ben labours under a claustrophobic lack of options. For his parents and their friends there is no choice to be made: he will of course take up a teaching scholarship. For Ben, his choices are limited to acquiescence or rebellion. In his narrow cultural corridor of upstanding, upper-class West-coast American citizens of the 1960s, that rebellion needs to be overblown to be effective.

It begins with a concerted effort at doing nothing - sleeping til afternoon, sunbathing for hours, drinking lashings of beer and bourbon while watching random TV shows. Then, enter Mrs Robinson.

The affair between them makes up but a short part of the novel: the crux of the story is really not about their relationship but instead about the challenges of identity that Webb found in his post-college situation. Given that this is a mid-sixties novel, and the relationship is between a 21-year-old man and a much older, married woman, the lack of sordidness in the description of the affair is as good an indication as any of the crispness of Webb's style. Lack is in fact the defining motif of his writing. The majority of questions posed in dialogue, for example, lack a question mark: the speakers lack either enthusiasm or any genuine interest in the answer.

There is a very high proportion of dialogue throughout the novel, and little exposition. Within the conversations one speaker's turn rarely extends beyond a line. The novel maintains a rapidity that lends an urgency to what are often banal, unfulfilled exchanges. This sustained technique tells the reader a lot about Ben's outlook and attitude to the future. So much about his character is revealed through conversation, yet all of his interactions are filled with miscommunications and a lack of understanding. When Ben pursues Elaine, Mrs Robinson's daughter, to Berkeley, their unlikely affection for one another - never presented in any truly romantic setting - is plausible since every other interaction has been so falsified.

Ben is not a particularly likeable character; his redeeming features are few. However, his apathy and disaffection are presented against some particularly loathsome, self-interested adult characters. This doesn't necessarily absolve him of the effects of his behavious, but it does emphasise the assumptions made by many about what makes one successful or even worthy. Ben wants to take a better path; for him the 'road less travelled'. We aren't taken far enough along that road to know if he succeeds but wherever he ends up at least he is taking self-awareness, rather than purely self-interest, along with him.

'Slaughterhouse Five' - Kurt Vonnegut

An American man, Billy Pilgrim, who experienced the Dresden fire bombing of 1945 while a prisoner of war (incarcerated at the town's abbatoir in Slaughterhouse 5) is taken by aliens from the planet of Tralfamadore, who explain to him the infinity of time and allow him to travel back and forth through the events of his life. So it goes. This is the premise of Kurt Vonnegut's extraordinary, seminal novel from 1965.

Vonnegut himself witnessed the firestorm in Dresden. Tellingly, the first few pages of this novel are from a different narrator's perspective. It is clear that this work is in many ways autobiographical, notwithstanding the fact that so many of its strengths come from fictional techniques, most notably those borrowed from science fiction: time travel and alien life. The novel even features a character, Kilgore Trout, who is a frustrated science fiction writer, read almost exclusively by one of the casualties Billy meets in a war hospital.

The novel is extremely satirical, evoking the kind of black humour at the human condition and our preoccupations that is often only created through experience of war (cf Heller's Catch 22). When Billy meets the Tralfamadorians they explain that the human way of looking at time and events is the same as looking at the world through a tiny peephole. They understand that all things that will happen have happened, and when a Tralfamadorian sees a dead creature they know they have simply seen it at a bad moment, since it is simultaneously being born and living every moment of its life.

This concept forms a compelling contrast when it is set against the Dresden fire bombing. (Current historians put the death toll from this event at around 40,000, whereas Vonnegut reports it, as many did in the years after the event, at around 135,000.) Vonnegut employs the refrain 'so it goes' after every mention of someone's death. With World War II as a background for the story it is repeated often. It is most effective for the reader when they have read the refrain before they even realise that the narrator has just described a death: at such moments the Tralfamadorians' belief seems apt indeed.

Humour is slotted into the novel at various levels. The meetings and connections between many of the characters are improbable in our consciousness, but entirely likely to the Tralfamadorians. Having to explain notions in the book through the two perspectives provides ample opportunity to look at human pre-occupations and assumptions with a humourous intent. The zoo set up on the Tralfamdorian planet to house Billy and a porn-star imported from earth as his companion is a less-than-subtle poke at our race's obsession with superiority. One of Kilgour Trout's novels reinvents Jesus as a far less likeable guy, with fewer friends in 'high places', to prove the point that 'before you kill somebody' you should 'make absolutely sure he isn't well connected'.

Frequently, the action or purpose of a passage is filtered through several voices before it reaches the reader. In the above example the novel's narrator recounts what a character tells Billy about what he has read in a book. This technique could be interpreted in any number of ways. It invokes the mess of noise that surrounds so many people in their urban living; it reflects the crassness of the media and their distance from the purity of a story; it enunciates the difficulty in obtaining the truth of an event when every witness carries a different perspective. It is also the technique of someone unable to deal with an event in their past: many characters suspect this is Billy's problem when he pontificates on the existence of aliens, and many have paralleled this with Vonnegut and his difficulty in dealing with what he witnessed in the war.

The plot, with its multiple narrative voices, occasional full page illustrations, and science fiction techniques, is quite implausible. Yet it is set against a true event that, 60 years after taking place, has never been unequivocally explained. The themes of existence and meaning that permeate the book, however, are entirely relevant. These heavy themes are not buried beneath inaccessible prose, though there are undoubtedly many readers who find the novel too fractured to elicit any coherent message. Alternatively, however, one can see this as a novel devoid of artifice; one that, without becoming crass or overblown, disregards niceties and proprieties to tell a pure story.

'Adverbs' - Daniel Handler

It has been some time between book reviews. I would struggle to draw parallels between the last book I reviewed, a novel of teen angst, and this one, Daniel Handler's intriguing, innovative and inscrutable collection of stories, Adverbs.

The book is a collection of explorations on the topic of love. In each story, a way of loving is examined - to love 'immediately', 'particularly' or 'wrongly' - and hence the book's title. The stories are loosely linked, with characters from earlier stories appearing strongly or tangentially in later ones. There is an overarching narrative voice: that of the author. One of the later stories is entitled 'Truly' and in this piece the writer speaks to the reader directly, giving details about writing the book and his personal experiences. Keeping track of each of the characters had been proving a challenge and suddenly, so far in, the author informs us that there are multiple Steves throughout the book, multiple Andreas. Just because two characters have the same name, doesn't mean they are the same character. What the reader should be looking for, he asserts, are the birds.

The stories are all founded on this level of irony. Can one love ironically? I think not, but one can undoubtedly discuss it ironically. Literature is, in fact, full of couples who are in love but spend most of their dialogue saying one thing when the audience knows they mean another. Handler, on the other hand, is masterful at saying exactly what he means in ways that I would postulate no one has thought of before. Why note someone as simply good-looking when they could be 'as handsome as a new truck'?

I am on record as being sceptical of books that come overly recommended. This one does not have international bestseller splashed all over the front, which, frankly, is not a surprise, since it is very far from the poorly thought out, overly accessible narratives that normally top the lists. What it does have are commendations from Michael Chabon and Dave Eggers. It could be a dissertation on the modern relevance of Handler's alter-ego, Lemony Snicket, and Jim Carrey's handling of one of her characters and I'd still crave to read it.