Ball of Wax Audio Quarterly

The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq goes to Ryan Barrett. This is surely the most controversial book of the five, the one that a lot of people will hate. It’s fashionable to dislike Houellebecq nowadays, since Updike gave him a drubbing in some New York book publication or another. It’s easy to hate Houellebecq. He’s the miscegenation of Haruki Murakami and Bret Easton Ellis, with the misogyny level turned all the way up and the knob broken off.

But I stand by the fact that while Houellebecq writes about horrible things and horrible people (and I don’t usually play this game, but I’m willing to bet he is himself a horrible person), he is a gorgeous writer who is taking risks nobody else is taking. Books aren’t always pleasant things you can contain in book clubs and in shop windows next to stuffed animals. Sometimes books scratch at your eyes and spit in your face. And that experience is worth it, sometimes. Never just for the shock value, but when you believe the author has something worthwhile to say. I believe that Michel Houellebecq has something very worthwhile to say.

It doesn’t help, either, that this is his weirdest book, leaping ahead in the future and messing around with science fiction the way you made out with someone that time you got really soused on Southern Comfort. It’s not for everyone. But if it’s for you, you’ll find something inside of it that you can carry with you forever.

Our host, Levi Fuller, is the only one of these musicians I’d met before I started this project. And so I had some extra knowledge I could put toward the selection: I already knew he’s a great reader, and I already knew some of the stuff he’s read. That gave me some freedom to get adventurous.

I have some regrets about these choices. (I would have regrets about these choices no matter what; five books can’t possibly represent all the things I’d want to do and all the voices I’d want to be heard with this experiment. For instance, I regret the lack of international authors, and that most of the books are contemporary. I regret not squeezing Hunter S. Thompson in there, somewhere, just to be a dick. But I’m happy with the choices, by and large.) My main regret is that almost all the books were novels. I know that novels will be easier for the songwriters to respond to, but I thought a book of poetry would make a fine laboratory experiment inside this experiment. And so I know Levi is a big fan of experimentation, and so I assigned him one of the best books of poetry to be published in the last few years: Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.

If I can be tacky enough to quote myself, from a column about the greatness of local publisher Wave Books: “It was Wave that published Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, which is one of those rare poetry books that everyone in the world should read.” That’s all I’m going to say about that.

Joshua Morrison gets another favorite of mine: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. Readers of this book have to overcome a pair of misfortunes in order to discover what a gem it is: First of all, they have to care enough to notice that it bears absolutely no relation to the Tom Cruise white-man-as-savior-of-Japanese-culture movie of the same name.

Second, they have to read the plot description on the back jacket and discover that it’s a book about a genius mother who is raising her son alone. In place of a father figure, she shows her son Akira Kurosawa’s film The Seven Samurai over and over again.  One day, the son goes out to find his father. Of course, there are seven candidates. When I was a bookseller, I would tell customers again and again that they don’t have to have seen The Seven Samurai to enjoy the book; in fact, I hadn’t seen the movie when I first read the book and it didn’t interfere with my enjoyment at all. (I didn’t tell the customers that I felt compelled to watch the film right after reading the book, and then I read the book again after watching the film and enjoyed them both even more that way.)But those two hurdles were enough to chase away the readers it deserves. I dislike the term, but it’s a cult novel, and it deserves a much larger audience.

Genius is a hard thing to write convincingly. DeWitt ranks right up there with Nabokov and David Foster Wallace in terms of creating convincing characters who are geniuses. Like those other two authors, she has the distinct advantage of actually being a genius herself. The characters in this book are so finely drawn, so believable, that you get drawn in emotionally and intellectually. Then it takes over your brain and opens up new pathways inside of you and then you’re a different person than you were when you started reading it.

So I assigned Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls by Matt Ruff to Johanna Kunin. (The first assignment is here.) This is probably the book I feel most connected to; a lot of this book takes place in the cafe under Elliott Bay Book Company’s old space in Pioneer Square, which is where I was working when I read the book. In many ways, the Seattle in Ruff’s novel feels more real than any other fictional Seattle I’ve ever read.

Which is a good thing, because while House isn’t as out-there as many of Ruff’s novels, it’s definitely got a plot that needs to be grounded in a solid world: It’s the story of a young man with multiple personality disorder who has arranged all his disparate personalities into a working system. In his brain, he has built a house, and all the personalities live there together, taking turns to be in control of the host body, time-share style.

House‘s opening scene, set over a breakfast table, is  a brilliant narrative dramatis personæ, introducing each personality in brief, clear language. It establishes the main character’s harmony with himself and the world around him. From there, of course, things go very wrong. It’s one of the most underrated novels of the last ten years.