Eh -- I Don't Need to Snag Smith's Signature

Score The Autograph Man as either a six or a seven based on the Slackers' ten elements of a picaresque novel. Zadie Smith's second novel is set in London, recounting the life of Alex-Li Tandem, a Chinese Jew, and his childhood friends as the age (I won't say as they mature, especially Alex/the naive protagonist) from teens to early 30s. At a wrestling match, Alex meets Joseph who is an avid autograph hound. Although Joseph outgrows this hobby, it becomes Alex's consuming passion/quest, focused exclusively on a reclusive actress named Kitty Alexander whose autographs are non-existent and the subject of many forgeries. Alex's best friend/buddy Adam is an enabler who encourages Alex's drinking and drug habits and tolerates his wanderings/sex adventures with Boot and Honey, betraying his long-suffering, broken-hearted (with a pacemaker) girlfriend Esther. Many bizarre characters populate the novel both from the world of arcana buyers and sellers to a dwarf rabbi (what's with all these dwarfs ... thought I finished them in the Tin Drum!).

Those picaresque elements that are not as apparent or strong revolve around that portion of the plot when Alex meets Kitty, secures her memorabilia for sale, and then profits from a premature announcement of her death. There is no real danger or near escapes here: only opportunities for Alex to learn more about real life. Similarly, there is neither a strong development of his misunderstanding events nor an eventual enlightenment. Alex and Esther argue yet again, Alex perfunctorily recites Kaddish for his dead Chinese father, and Kitty remains in London playing dead. But Smith has constructed the story to foretell such a soft landing, strewing conversations with observations that life is not like a movie and endings aren't neatly sewn up. One of her more clever literary devices is the use of the "International Gesture" as a way to make written dialogue more visual like overhead conversations on the street. OK: now visualize this: my left shoulder curling towards my chest, my head inclining towards my shoulder, in the international gesture of a shrug, the "eh" as my nonverbal book review.

Life's Musical Score

The 2010 list is slow going. I have not really found that many books that I want to gobble up and race through. Most have been efforts and fall short of the ten picaresque elements. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass is picaresque but is also 589 pages long and has consumed weeks of my reading time.

What a complex, ever-echoing story this is. A thorough review itself could run dozens of pages. Theme builds upon theme, character upon character. The only way I can curtail my enthusiastic review from being a thesis is to focus exclusively on my picaresque identifiers. I have been thinking about what to write for a couple of days, and only in the last day or so, did I conclude it was picaresque. Perhaps the clincher was a sentence from Wiki that I ran across: "The Tin Drum is a picaresque novel ... an example of bildungsroman tracing the development of an individual through a series of encounters, occupations, and relationships from boyhood to manhood." With that criteria, some of my previous reviews bear revisiting.

Similar to The Painted Bird's protagonist, Oskar is a child in Poland just before the outbreak of World War II. His quest is an attempt to reconcile the diametrically opposed forces in his life: religion, parentage, geography, art, politics, employment. He is a born old dwarf child. One is never sure whether he is controlling his destiny or interpreting it from an immature vantage. He believes he controls his height; he can determine his father and become a father to his brother; he can create destruction with his voice and his drum and force the course of history, killing friend and foe. So obviously score highly in the misunderstanding of events element.

Oskar really doesn't have a quest-buddy. Several people share his adventures at different points of time; only his drums stay with him through thick and thin. There are bizarre characters galore. In fact, Grass exaggerates all, villains and family alike. Certainly there is near escapes from the war, disease, and criminals. Sex is naive, mythical, and ever-present.

Written as a retrospective of his life at age 30 (close to Grass' age when the book was published) Oskar has reached no denouement. All he can acknowledge is he is faced with more choices, more need to conform. Like his home town, the free city of Danzig, now Gdansk, Oskar seems to remain flexible to change in an instant as circumstances and events demand.

Ragtag Rejects, Not Rogues

OK this is clever. Rather than having a single person go on a quest for the impossible, Philip Roth writes of an entire baseball team in pursuit of a winning season. Get a sense this isn't 100% picaresque yet? It is close, I'll admit that. The players on the team, the manager, nay, even the owner seem naive. Because it is the summer of 1943 and their home field has been redeployed as a point of departure for soldiers heading off to WWII, the Ruppert Mundys of New Jersey consist of the best left uncalled to service: a dwarf, a catcher with one leg, a right fielder with one arm, a teenager and an assortment of retirees. Yes, the characters are bizarre and the quest to finish above the cellar insurmountable. In addition to the traditional sports fetishes and charms, Roth has the team's success dependent on a new formula of Wheaties (here are the elements of bizarre and naive).

However, it is all so visibly contrived. Roth assumes the persona of the narrator, Word Smith, a sports writer who writes a 45 page prologue that is nothing but an apologia. Again in the epilogue, he plays the martyred author whose novel is rejected untold times as unpublishable (an accurate insight or false bravado). There are plenty of literary references that in the hands of TC Boyle would have been a seamless marvel but here come across as blatant bragging, like the teenage Jewish "genius" son of the owner of an opposing team.

The writing style is a combination of the compulsion of baseball statistics and hack alliteration. The characters are presented in a string of vignettes, that only goes to reinforce the Ruppert Mundys lack of cohesion. Since the only other Roth I ever read was Portnoy's Complaint (and vowed after that never to read another), this book was better than that first exposure but The Great American Novel it ain't.

C'Est Qui Ton Pere

That's the name of a horse I've been following over the winter meet, and winning a few bucks on. But it also is an appropriate title for this review of Childhood by Andre Alexis, a Canadian author from Trinidad, who lapses into French dialog at many points in this tale of Thomas MacMillan who recalls growing up not knowing who his father is.

Just to be sure that my computer has not been possessed by rogue viruses that have corrupted my thesaurus, making picaresque mean anything but humorous, raucous, racy misdemeanors, I checked book reviews on the Net this morning. Nope, Amazon's top reprise calls this effort picaresque. Am I back in school miserably flunking a graduate course on the picaresque novel because I missed the first lecture and don't have a handle on its standard definition? Or am I, myself, on a quest -- incomprehensible, futile and insatiable -- to find a dozen or so novels that both entertain and mildly scandalize me?

If I had picked "stories about growing up" as the theme for 2010, Alexis employs several literary gimmicks to liven up his novel and most subtly advance themes of coming to terms with never quite understanding one's parents, nor for that matter, wanting to look too deeply into their personal/sexual lives, and of, nonetheless, becoming indelibly imprinted by the characteristics of those adults, so much so, they are apparent only to an observer who knows all the generation's traits and preferences. Alexis gives us enough of Thomas' personality to see the vestiges of his mother Katarina and her mentor Henry living on, if not genetically, than through strong behavioral modeling.

Not for All the Tea in China

Kyril Figlioli explicitly sets out to write a picaresque novel -- the extended title states this clearly: "All the Tea in China which tells how Carolus Mortdecai Van Cleef set out to seek his fortune in London Town; on the High Seas, in India, the treaty ports of China and even in darkest Africa; and how he found it predictably, in a place which has no longitude and precious little latitude."

His protagonist is a young man driven from his home in Holland to make his fortune selling his mother's Delft porcelains. Traveling to England, he befriends another merchant who gets him settled in a shop but who also inadvertently suggests that his china business could flourish if financed through the opium trade. So off to sea.

Okay ... theme set. Now is this a story written in the 19th or 20th Century? Imitation in not in this case high flattery. The book is so formulaic as to be as thin and tattered as a McCall's pattern in a house of six growing girls. Figilioi's introduction of picaresque elements is rote: the seduction of the captain's wife; the duel with the first mate; the encounter with cannibals in Africa. But this is no Mungo Park.

Figlioli writes of Africa: "A trek is like a long sea-voyage but dusty. The dangers are as many but of a different nature: there is little danger of drowning, for instance. The boredom is exactly similar, day follows day in an unchanging pattern, one loses count of time, and after many days on can only recall trivial incidents, small oases in a desert of dullness." An apt summary of the intrigue (or lack thereof) in the entire novel.

All the Tea in China is a prequel to Figlioli's Mortdecai's series of stories. I am not tempted to peruse them. Please, a contemporary picaresque!