A little more on news play in China

Following on this item earlier:

Front page of today's China Daily, the government's English-language presentation to the world. This is on Saturday, March 15, when news outlets elsewhere are leading with the Tibet news:

You can click on the photo for a larger version, but you're still likely to miss the Tibet news, which is in the very bottom left corner of the paper under the headline "Dalai Lama Behind Sabotage." In its entirety it reads as follows:

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Superior genre fiction: An Ordinary Spy

Some reviewers and blurbers have loved Joseph Weisberg's An Ordinary Spy ("In two words: a masterpiece," from Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan.) A few others have not -- you can go find those reviews yourself.

One of my rules of life is: there are a whole lot of terrible books out there, but many, many books deserve a better shake and wider audience than they receive. An Ordinary Spy deserves attention and a chance. Its immediately noticeable gimmick is that pages in the finished book have passages blacked out, "redacted," as if this really were what the fictional premise holds, the memoir of a CIA agent. The pages look like this:

and even, as the climax to one joke, this:

I found this artifice, and the resulting guesses about what was left out, increasingly interesting as the book went on; some reviewers were bored or annoyed.

But the book's real point is conveying what the craft of spying is like -- now, with all we know about failures of intelligence and America's blundering in the world. Weisberg himself is a former CIA agent. Is his account realistic? Well, the CIA's former chief of counterintelligence says so:

An Ordinary Spy captures perfectly the spy world I lived in my whole career, how we talk, how we think, and how we operate. Joe gets it better than Clancy and is on a par with McCarry.

The McCarry here is of course the sainted Charles McCarry, former CIA agent and author of The Tears of Autumn and many subsequent Paul Christopher novels. (McCarry is a good friend of mine; I have met Weisberg only briefly but do know his wife and brother.)

I have my own minor criticism of one element of Ordinary Spy's finale, which for spoiler reasons I won't mention except to say that the more you've read of Dennis Lehane, the more you'll see what I have in mind. But overall I thought this was a very good book. To be put in Charles McCarry's company, for knowledge of spycraft and for narrative skill, is high praise -- and deserved, I think. Check it out.

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Another very good book: 'China Road'

I am remiss in not having said anything earlier about China Road, by NPR's long-time China correspondent Rob Gifford, which came out last summer.

The book has been widely and deservedly praised for its structure: a narrative of a trip along China's Route 312, a kind of Route-66 counterpart, which runs from Shanghai to the far northwestern Silk Road outpost of the country. Gifford knows the language, obviously enjoys the people, and has a good eye and ear. I have now been to most of the places Gifford describes, and reading his account of them both reminded me of what I'd seen and told me something new.

Gifford's obvious and undeniable love for China and average Chinese people allows him to pepper nearly every page of the book with tart, even harsh observations -- confident that they'll be seen in context of his overall affection for the place. (By analogy: I love America, but I've got a million complaints about my modern America. Although Gifford is obviously not Chinese, something similar it true between him and China.) I'll mention only two here, though there are many I'm tempted to quote.

First, a a small (and accurate) jab at prissy Westerners, which is on my mind as I pack for a quick trip to the U.S. Then after the jump, a jab more directly at China, which also corresponds to what I've seen. For the rest, get the book!

About Westerners:

The DVD is playing several hundred decibels above the level permitted in heavy industrial factories in the United States, though at first I don't realize this. It's only when the child in the seat behind leans over the back of the seat next to me and starts singing that I realize how, over time, I have become inoculated against Chinese noise... China does that do you. You go back to the United States or Europe , and people wonder why you're not jumping up and down with annoyance at some minor noise or irritation, and you look at them and think, What's your problem? We have such low thresholds of annoyance in our cozy Western world. (The danger is, though, that you also forget to fit back into Western ways of, say, road safety or table manners on returning to your homeland.)

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Yet a little more on fiction, genre, and memory

Not to run the topic into the ground, but: following this and this on what makes fiction remember-able (subtly different from memorable) and which "genre" books achieve that goal, a little more.

- I recognize that what I'm about to say slightly undercuts my point that powerful fiction, of any sort, gets into your mind and won't get out. Still I will confess that I (ahem) forgot to mention unforgettable genre books like Ken Bruen's The Guards and related novels, from the cop-and-criminal world of Ireland. Or, Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen mysteries, set in Venice. Dibdin's unrelated but remarkably creepy (and funny) The Dying of the Light is very much worth finding. Or, The Whispering Wall, by the Australian writer Patricia Carlon. (Premise: a rich old woman has had a stroke and can't talk or move, but she can hear and understand every detail of the plot being hatched by her relatives to do her in.) Or, three Japanese murder mysteries that have nothing in common except that each believably creates a sociopathic monster as the central character: Honeymoon to Nowhere, by Akimitsu Takagi; Out, by Natsuo Kirino; and the recently-released The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, by Soji Shimada. Or, for a monster of a different sort, the "Ripley" books by Patricia Highsmith.

- On remember-ability in general: I am not sure how I feel about the fact that on average I can remember movies more completely and clearly than I can remember books. Take some oddball feature I saw on a Saturday afternoon as a kid --The Cardinal, let's say, an Otto Preminger potboiler from the 1960s about a Boston boy who becomes a prince of the Church.

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An interim mystery/genre fiction update

Thanks very much to the many readers who have sent in lists of the genre fiction they admire and enjoy. That's the problem with offering any list of "good mystery novels." It's like a list of "good things to do with your time." For each one you include, there are a thousand you leave off. I will probably post (and update) a list of suggestions ... although, for the reasons mentioned above, that's an open-ended challenge that maybe I should skip. In any case, three brief points:

1) I kick myself for having forgotten to mention Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, a very short book I defy anyone to forget. (High class endorsement, from Stanley Kubrick: "Probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered.") Also, perhaps strangely, the John D. MacDonald "Travis McGee" novels. "Strangely" because these have been so widely popular, Sidney Sheldon-style. But the character does stick in your mind -- mine, at least.

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Good news: mystery fiction department

Like most people who enjoy spy novels and crime fiction, I feel vaguely guilty about this interest. I realize that crime fiction is classy now, and has taken over part of the describing-modern-life job that high-toned novelists abdicated when they moved into the universities. My friend Patrick Anderson*, who has reviewed mysteries for years at the Washington Post, recently published a very good book to this effect: The Triumph of the Thriller. Still, you feel a little cheesy when you see a stack of lurid mystery covers sitting next to the bed.

So I've figured out a way to tell the books I can feel good about reading from the ones I should wean myself from. The test is: can I remember something from the book a month later -- or, better, six months or a year on. This is the test I apply to "real" fiction too: surprisingly often, a great book is great because it presents a character, a mood, a facet of society, a predicament that you hadn't thought of before reading the book but that stays with you afterwards. Rabbit Angstrom, Captain Ahab, and Clyde Griffiths (of An American Tragedy), to choose the first three examples that pop into my mind from American fiction.

I say that "genre" fiction, like spy and crime novels, ascends into the "real" fiction category when the world it presents can exert the same tenacious hold on your mind. (Meta point: in choosing life activities, I place a high premium on things I'm likely to remember -- new places, new activities -- because otherwise you feel you're just tearing pages off the calendar, in the way that old-time movies illustrated the passage of the years.) As I've thought about it I've been struck by how many "genre" books marvelously pass the test. For example:

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A superb book: Confessions

I've read histories and analyses of the Cultural Revolution years in China, plus some of the memoirs available in English. Still, it's hard to get a sense of what it was like.

Fewer and fewer people can actually remember the 1930s or 1940s, but we all feel we have a sense of what the Nazi era was like in Europe. There are so many novels, so many movies, so many memoirs, so many museums, so much accumulated lore, apart from the histories and analyses themselves. Life under Stalin is not quite as amply rendered for a world audience, but thanks to legions of Russian writers everyone has some idea.

For obvious reasons, there are far fewer public representations and reminders of daily life in China during the Cultural Revolution. Main reason: the current Chinese government is still uneasy about backwards looks at that era. Such documents as do exist, in Chinese, are less accessible to the rest of the world than are the German, French, English, Russian, etc memoirs of Word War II.

Here is a brilliant addition to the existing evidence: Confessions, by Kang Zhengguo, now a professor at Yale (and with an introduction by Perry Link of Princeton). Kang makes it sound as if he would have been a handful under any regime at any time. He said just what he thought, especially when he thought powerful people were being stupid; and he liked doing things exactly his own way. The book's subtitle is An Innocent Life in Communist China, and in his deadpan, innocent way Kang describes his downward process through the stages of horror as a prisoner and labor-camp inmate in those years. A depressing subject matter but never a depressing or uninteresting book. Very highly recommended.

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Writing, Flying, and Saint-Exupery

I've started reading Stacy Schiff's 1997 biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, about which I've heard only rave reviews and which indeed is wonderful so far. Every good omen that it will join A. Scott Berg's Lindbergh and Fred Howard's Wilbur and Orville on my list of first-rate biographies of fliers. I suppose that list should be extended to include Robert Coram's Boyd, about the military theorist and one-time fighter pilot John Boyd, and The Right Stuff, and....

But on the second page of her book, Stacy Schiff says something that rings completely wrong. Rather, it suggests to me that while she has admirably researched her subject, she has not made the imaginative leap to understanding what flying is about. She notes the obvious -- that Saint-Exupery was both a renowned writer and a career aviator -- and says:

Generally speaking the two are not professions that go well together. The writer lives with some detachment from experience, which it is his task to recast; a pilot works his trade with a fierce immediacy, perfect presence. One may reshape events; the other must nimbly accommodate them.

My experience and observation suggest exactly the reverse.

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Why isn't this book more famous? (Stephen Amidon dept)

I’ve read Stephen Amidon’s Human Capital only now, three years after it came out. My main question is why people hadn’t been telling me about it before. OK, the operational explanation may well be that it got dismissive “not quite up to snuff” handling in the all-powerful NYT. For instance, right near the top of Michiko Kakutani’s “we are not amused” review was: “The novel never lives up to its Dreiseresque ambitions…And those larger aims sometimes clash with the author’s more commercial impulses to write a made-for-the-movies thriller.” Etc.

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A great 'graphic novel': Shenzhen by Guy Delisle

I have been spending a lot of time in southern China, especially in the factory-wonderworld of the Pearl River Delta region. The latest China Southern flight from Shenzhen, in this delta, back to Shanghai was delayed many hours -- "Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to tell you that Flight XXXX to Shanghai will be delayed because of: delay." But the time was more pleasant thanks to Guy Delisle's wonderful comic book -- oops, graphic novel -- about his own journey to the same city, Shenzhen.

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Yet another very good book

China Shakes the World, by James Kynge, for many years the FT's correspondent in Beijing. Given his obvious immersion in and affinity for the culture, it is the more impressive when Kynge takes a hard line at the end: The rise of a power that is in the world trading system, but not really of it, poses problems for everyone else.

This is a line of analysis I am familiar and sympathetic with -- as it applies to Japan. I have not yet reached that point about China. Not sure why, or whether it's just a matter of time. In any case, this is valuable book.

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A mystery of driving explained

In an article in the December issue of the Atlantic, which is published abnormally late for reasons I don't fully grasp, I mention that the traffic-death rate per mile driven is roughly ten times higher in China than in North America. Nothing so shocking about that:

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Another book well worth reading

John Pomfret's China Lessons, mentioned earlier, is a subtle and insightful account of China's political evolution and devolution. Timothy Clissold's Mr. China is a subtle and insightful account of China's political and economic evoution and devolution -- and is absolutely hilarious as well. Two aspects of life that loom larger and larger in my own experience are central themes here. One is what I think of as the "paradox of slipshodness."

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Another book worth reading: Foreign Babes in Beijing

As mentioned earlier, John Pomfret's Chinese Lessons is a powerful and well-structured new book. A weirdly appropriate complement is Rachel DeWoskin's Foreign Babes in Beijing, published last year. Genuinely funny, frivolous by design, and as far as I can tell, insightful.

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