The Great American Read--The Book of Books

by PBS

  63

  THE LOVELY BONES

  Alice Sebold · 2002

  In Alice Sebold’s 2002 novel, there are two meanings to the title. One emphasizes the connections among people—we are held up by things we cannot see, and they link us to life and those we love. A second, more literal, meaning concerns real bones: the physical remains of the narrator, a 14-year-old girl in heaven, who was abducted, raped, and murdered by a neighbor in 1973.

  Despite the dark subject matter, Sebold’s fiction debut is an uplifting story. Susie Salmon might be dead, but she nevertheless revels in the joys of life. Readers learn what happened to her at the hands of Mr. Harvey in the first chapter. The rest of the book focuses on Susie’s family and friends as they cope with her death. While some withdraw and drift away, others seek answers and closure. Susie occasionally comes to visit. In one particularly supernatural scene, Susie inhabits her best friend’s body in order to share an intimate moment with the boy she loved before her death. The novel also describes Susie’s growing acceptance of her new state, which includes meeting Harvey’s other victims.

  Sebold knows about the way light does and does not follow darkness. Lucky (1999), her memoir, details an attack she survived at age 18. Walking home from a party as a college freshman, she was brutally assaulted and raped. The title comes from a comment made by a police officer, who said that a young woman had previously been murdered and dismembered in the same spot, and that Sebold was lucky to be alive. Police were not able to identify her attacker until Sebold recognized him on the street a few months later. During the trial, a court official called her “the best rape witness [he’d] ever seen on the stand.” The rapist was convicted and sent to prison.

  In the aftermath, Sebold returned to Syracuse University, studying writing with Raymond Carver, and graduated with a degree in English. Then came a rocky period of drifting, drug use, and alienation. She later earned an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, in 1998, where she started working on a fictionalized account of a young rape victim. She stopped that work to concentrate on her memoir, which was published to little fanfare. A second novel, The Almost Moon, about an artist who suffocates her agoraphobic, severely senile mother with a towel, was published in 2007. But it didn’t reach nearly the heights of reader adoration as The Lonely Bones. Then again, not many novels could. Sebold’s debut may very well be the most successful debut novel since Gone with the Wind appeared in 1936, with bookstores calling Sebold’s publisher directly to beg for more copies to be printed and shipped. Peter Jackson adapted The Lovely Bones for the big screen in 2009.

  The unusual focus of the novel—few stories about a murder reveal all the relevant details, including the perpetrator, at the outset—allows Sebold to go beyond the questions typical of crime novels. Instead of asking who did it or why, Sebold is interested in what happens to people when they lose someone they love, in how an extraordinarily horrible event affects ordinary lives. Carefully avoiding cheap sentimentality or easy moralizing, Sebold presents her story plainly and sympathetically, and the blessing with which the novel ends is as moving as it is munificent: “I wish you all a long and happy life.”

  The hardcover of The Martian, printed in 2014.

  Andy Weir, photographed at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015. His novel was adapted for the film that came out that year, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon.

  The Martian chronicles botanist Mark Watney’s survival as he’s stranded alone on Mars. This is a view of the Martian landscape from NASA’s Pathfinder mission.

  64

  THE MARTIAN

  Andy Weir · 2011, self-published as e-book; 2014

  For researchers and engineers, science fiction sometimes proves tricky to read. In creating their worlds, writers often take liberties with facts, stretching the limits of possibility and aggravating those who might know better. Having experienced this frustration himself, Andy Weir sought to be as accurate as possible in his first novel. “I was writing for this core group of extremely technical, science-minded dorks like me,” he said later. “I’m one of those guys that’ll nitpick every little physics problem in a movie.” As a result, The Martian (2011) is full of precise details and legitimate resolutions to issues that someone might face on the Red Planet—so much so that a special edition of this adventure thriller is being used in schools to teach physics and chemistry.

  A vicious sandstorm overtakes a group of astronauts stationed on Mars in 2035. Presumed dead, botanist Mark Watney gets left behind as the rest of the crew heads back to Earth. Once he recovers consciousness, Watney determines what he needs to do in order to survive in their base, known as the Hab. He writes about his experiences and discoveries in a logbook, and these entries constitute much of the novel. Back on Earth, a NASA team searches images to see whether anything from the mission is salvageable and discovers that Watney is alive. The novel alternates between the NASA team generating and executing a plan to bring Watney home and Watney’s life on Mars.

  Alone in a harsh land, Watney endures. The Martian thus sits squarely in the adventure genre, alongside other contemporary man-versus-nature stories such as Into the Wild (1996), The Perfect Storm (1997), and the Hatchet series (1987–2003). Watney uses creativity, persistence, technical training and knowledge, and plain old common sense to stay alive, and his passages provide readers with extensive details of his solutions for problems like how to generate water for irrigation and what to do with an excess of explosive hydrogen. He doesn’t give up or wallow, making him a quietly heroic, if decidedly pragmatic, figure.

  Moreover, Watney is not afraid to express his fear. To cope with his loneliness, he plays his colleague’s disco music, which lends the book a moment of levity. Nevertheless, he yearns for human contact. He figures out how to adapt a rover and takes it on a 3,200-kilometer trip to secure an old probe that contains communication technology. Back at the Hab, he fixes it and manages to email NASA. Overjoyed as he is to be back in touch with others, he occasionally chafes at the micromanagement that ensues, a not-so-subtle nod to the often-stifling effect of bureaucracy on vision and inventiveness.

  The only son of a particle physicist and an electronics engineer, Weir seemed destined for a career in the sciences. He began programming at age 15, and eventually helped code the video game Warcraft II. On his website, he would publish writing for fun and for free, including “The Egg,” a popular short story about reincarnation and divinity, as well as The Martian. He self-published it via Amazon when fans began requesting alternate file formats. From there, it got picked up by a traditional publisher in 2014 and optioned for a movie.

  Ridley Scott directed Matt Damon as Watney in the 2015 film, one of the highest-grossing movies of the year. Like the book, the movie praises scientific endeavor and inquiry, showing the great accomplishments that are possible when people work diligently, creatively, and rationally. NASA has capitalized on the success of the book and the movie to renew interest and funding in its space program. If all goes according to plan, NASA intends to send humans to Mars in the 2030s. It’s a long journey, and The Martian will make the ideal read.

  Cover of Memoirs of a Geisha, first published in 1997.

  Author Arthur Golden, photographed in 2005 at the movie premiere of Memoirs of a Geisha. Golden was inspired to write the book while living in Japan, after meeting someone whose mother had been a geisha.

  Two geisha, photographed in Kyoto in 1929.

  65

  MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA

  Arthur Golden · 1997

  Arthur Golden lends his bestselling novel the gravitas of nonfiction by beginning with a translator’s note. As the fictional Japanese-history professor Jakob Haarhuis recounts, he traveled to Kyoto as a young boy and was captivated by geisha. Decades later, as an adult, he is overjoyed to have the opportunity to tell the story of the famous Sayuri Nitta, the book readers now hold in their hands. The artifice works, and Memoirs of a Geisha (1997) reads like lived history.


  It took Golden two complete drafts before deciding to write his debut novel in the first person. Roughly 15 years earlier, while living in Japan, he met someone whose mother had been a geisha. He was fascinated by her story. Golden specialized in Japanese art as an undergraduate at Harvard and Japanese history as a graduate student at Columbia. Not only did he return to his studies to write his novel, but he also interviewed a former geisha in order to lend the world of Sayuri such verisimilitude.

  Sayuri Nitta’s real name is Chiyo Sakamoto. In Memoirs of a Geisha, readers learn of her humble beginnings as the beautiful, gray-eyed daughter of a poor fisherman, and of her sale to a Kyoto okiya (geisha house) at the age of nine in 1929. Renamed Sayuri, she receives extensive training to become a geisha. In time, she falls in love with Chairman Ken Iwamura, but she encounters many obstacles before getting the happy ending she dreams of several years later. For example, to increase Sayuri’s worth as a geisha in the Kyoto community, her mentor, Mameha, essentially auctions off Sayuri’s virginity, and Sayuri agrees to serve as another man’s mistress in exchange for patronage.

  Memoirs of a Geisha peels back a curtain to reveal the world of geisha culture. The Japanese word geisha loosely translates as “artist,” a reflection of the artistry—and artifice—required for the role. Women are compelled to tamp down their true identities to take on the character of consummate entertainer, musician, dancer, and companion, with elaborate hair, makeup, and dress. Sometimes a geisha would perform sexual acts, but not always. She would, however, need to compete with others in her field to ensure that the wealthiest or best man supported her, rather than a rival. The novel seeks to probe beneath outward appearances to the cutthroat inner workings and maneuverings of a strict hierarchical society.

  On the one hand, Sayuri’s world offers an extremely limited role for women. Geisha cater to men’s desires and embody male fantasies. In this sense, they are not independent thinkers or doers. The men they entertain return home to other wives and mothers of their children. On the other hand, being a geisha saves Sayuri from alternate unhappy fates, such as the poverty of her childhood and life as a maid. Her less attractive sister, sold at the same time as Sayuri, was forced into prostitution, although she later escapes and runs off with her lover. Characters in the novel who leave the geisha house for whatever reason fall into drunkenness and homelessness. Within the confines of geisha culture, Sayuri learns how to wield her feminine power for her great gain, and thus to some extent she controls her destiny.

  Born in 1956, Arthur Sulzberger Golden grew up in Tennessee, where his mother ran the Chattanooga Times. She was a granddaughter of Adolph S. Ochs, who bought the New York Times in 1896, and Golden’s extended family continues to own and control the paper. An Academy Award–winning movie based on Golden’s book came out in 2005. Geisha culture began to wane after World War II, although there has been a renewed interest in geisha life as part of Japanese tourism, and there is a growing sense that geisha constitute an important part of the country’s tradition and culture. Memoirs of a Geisha offers an excellent entry.

  A paperback cover of Mind Invaders. This edition was first published in 2007.

  Author David Hunt signs books for readers at an event. Hunt preached and published his books through Berean Call, a ministry he formed with T. A. McMahon.

  The God Makers, written by Dave Hunt and Ed Decker, looks at the Mormon Church.

  66

  MIND INVADERS

  Dave Hunt · 1989

  Originally titled The Archon Conspiracy, Mind Invaders (1989) is an action-packed story about psychic power, Christianity, and the cold war.

  Ken Inman reaches out to shadowy forces for a living. A computer genius, he’s thrilled to make contact with the alien Archons, who promise to give Ken a mind-expanding gift. The Archons claim to promote harmony and come in peace. But when the CIA and the Russians get involved, seeking to harness the Archons’ psychic power for the gain of their respective governments, violence and war loom. Carla Bertelli is a journalist trying to uncover the true story of the intelligence community’s plans as well as to solve the mystery of the Archons. Although she loves Ken, his newfound fundamentalist Christianity troubles her and causes conflict in their relationship. While she sees the Archons as benevolent angels, Ken deems them to be hellish demons. It’s a race against time, with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance.

  Before his death in 2013, Dave Hunt was well known as a Christian thinker and bestselling author. He wrote numerous Christian apologetics, seeking to defend his view of religion against a world he saw as increasingly hostile to faith. Hunt held to the literal truth of the Bible, and he vigorously attacked not only scientific consensus but also Catholicism and Mormonism, among other religious traditions, for deviating from what he believed was the correct understanding of the world and divine will.

  David Charles Haddon Hunt was born in 1926 in California, earned a degree in mathematics from UCLA, and married his college sweetheart. Before turning full-time to his ministry, he worked as a CPA. In 1992, Hunt and T. A. McMahon founded the Berean Call, a ministry through which he preached and disseminated Christian books, videos, newsletters, and other materials. With McMahon, he cowrote several works of nonfiction, including The Seduction of Christianity (1985), meant to help people return Christianity to what the authors perceived to be its original teachings as outlined in the Bible. They sought to remove what they saw as the dangerous influences of mysticism and holistic approaches, and tried to give their followers tools with which to defend their beliefs from those who might otherwise cast doubt.

  Hunt’s novel serves in some ways as an allegory, and he sought to evangelize through his fiction. He believed that much of modern life, with its emphasis on psychology and ecumenism, made it difficult for people to live their religious convictions. The modern world offers no end to distraction and concerns that might vie for space in one’s mind. On a very literal level, Mind Invaders functions as a reminder that what seems like a benevolent force may in fact be extremely destructive, and the novel urges readers to heed its calls for caution.

  As C. S. Lewis, another Christian theologian, once wrote, “For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.” Mind Invaders might be viewed through a similar lens: while there are those readers who might believe that the Archons exist, others will see in Ken and Carla analogues to their own struggles to maintain their faith in the face of doubt—whether from loved ones, from strangers, or even from within.

  Boring, Strange, and Just Not Good

  SOMETIMES THE MOST LOVED BOOKS DON’T GET ANY LOVE

  IT’S EASIER THAN EVER to offer a scathing review—just have a look at the comments on Amazon for such works as The Sun Also Rises (“boring, boring, and more boring”), The Call of the Wild (“The worst book ever. Who cares about dogs in the Yukon?”), and One Hundred Years of Solitude (“This books [sic] should be banned for 100 years.”) Cringeworthy as such appraisals may be, the worst reviews come from experts—journalists, professional book critics, and other writers.

  Wuthering Heights famously shocked readers upon its publication in 1847, with contemporary critics calling it “strange” and advising that the text be burned. One reviewer thought it amplified the missteps and faults of Jane Eyre (1847) “a thousand fold,” a succinct way of swiping at both novels in one go. But the author of an 1848 review went still further: “How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors.”

  Emily Brontë’s novel isn’t the only now-canonical text to be roundly panned initially. “It repels the reader,” wrote one journalist about Moby-Dick (1851), while another explained that “the idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and a
gain in the course of composition.” The Great Gatsby (1925) was termed “absurd” and F. Scott Fitzgerald deserving of a “good shaking.”

  The New York Times reviewed The Catcher in the Rye not once but twice when it debuted in 1951. Entitled “Aw, the World’s a Crumby Place,” the first review consisted of an extremely awkward attempt to throw shade at the novel using the book’s own distinctive style. The result points to the singular accomplishment of J. D. Salinger in creating such a unique voice in Holden Caulfield—using words like crumby and phony in a natural way is harder than it looks. The next day, the newspaper ran a second review, which praised the text in all its profanity and slanginess.

  Writers may offer the harshest feedback of all. Take Mark Twain’s evaluation of Jane Austen: “I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” However, Twain got a comeuppance from William Faulkner, who called Twain a “hack.”

  Sometimes the sheer popularity of a book or a writer seems to increase criticism or derision. Scholar Harold Bloom hates the Harry Potter series, for example. A critical assessment of the Left Behind series (1995–2007) was titled “When Truth Gets Left Behind,” while The Shack (2007), by William P. Young, was deemed “a load of crap.” And occasionally even readers come in for a licking, as in this review of The Da Vinci Code: “Certainly, the novel’s success can be attributed to those who read Nostradamus and believe that the smoke from the blazing twin towers formed the face of the devil or Osama bin Laden.”