Pejman Yousefzadeh and I talked with Dr. Rosen about his timely and interesting book, how to recognize tech addictions, and how to lessen any unhealthy dependency that we may have on technology.

Listen to the podcast.

Related articles

• Is the Obsession with Devices a Sickness? (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Off the Shelf: In ‘iDisorder,’ a Look at Mobile-Device Addiction – Review (nytimes.com)

Not only is Jonah smart and talented – and really more insightful than he is given credit for – but he is a genuinely nice guy who has been a great friend to me.

Listen to the podcast here.

Look for my review of the book soon.

The book is not a pure biography of Patton.  The first few chapters do chronicle Patton’s career before World War II – with particular attention on Patton’s limited experience in World War I.  However, the majority of the book focuses on Patton’s World War II German opponents – those who fought against him in Africa, Sicily, France, and Germany.

Yeide calls upon a wealth of information from his research in the National Archives.  For instance, during the D-Day preparations by the Allies, Yeide explains that despite Eisenhower’s and others’ claims that the Germans tied down many of their forces in order to counter Patton’s fictitious First United States Army Group, the Germans, according to Yeide, did not mention Patton at all in their intelligence analysis.

Although many Americans believe Patton to be a master strategist who charged across France against German resistance, Yeide concludes that the Germans did not think of Patton as a major strategist, but more of a good tactical armor leader.  Yeide goes as far to say that if Patton was in the Wehrmacht, he would be one of the least experienced armor generals.

The book is 422 pages (including a glossary) divided into 14 chapters.  Yeide includes 34 maps and 52 black and white photographs.

This book brings a fresh perspective to one of America’s most studied and admired generals.

As regular readers know, I’m a big fan of reworked or retold myths and legends and so was excited to dig into The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller.  To understand why, here is the publisher’s setup:

The legend begins…

Greece in the age of heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the kingdom of Phthia to be raised in the shadow of King Peleus and his golden son, Achilles. “The best of all the Greeks”—strong, beautiful, and the child of a goddess—Achilles is everything the shamed Patroclus is not. Yet despite their differences, the boys become steadfast companions. Their bond deepens as they grow into young men and become skilled in the arts of war and medicine—much to the displeasure and the fury of Achilles’ mother, Thetis, a cruel sea goddess with a hatred of mortals.

When word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, the men of Greece, bound by blood and oath, must lay siege to Troy in her name. Seduced by the promise of a glorious destiny, Achilles joins their cause, and torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus follows. Little do they know that the Fates will test them both as never before and demand a terrible sacrifice.

As it turned out this was really a romance – between Patroclus and Achilles – with the classical story mostly as background. It was well done in many ways, and the writing is often excellent, but the classics as romance was not what I was looking for.

More below.

Did the same sex element throw me off? Perhaps. But I think it was more the sentimental and frequently sensual style and tone. Far too much of it is just a coming of age love story between the two boys with lots and lots of focus on just how much Patroclus adores, loves and or is besotted with Achilles. By the time you get to the action of the Trojan War you are tired of it all, or at least I was.

Again, well written in parts and well done in some ways but completely not my style. Not to sound sexiest but this struck me as a boom women would adore. The central characters are feminized and presented as idealized lovers until the very end.

And as exciting and dramatic as the ending was it felt a little like the character of Achillies changed dramatically in the final chapters as the conflict rose to its conclusion.

As I was struggling to capture my frustration with the novel, along comes Daniel Mendelsohn to say it better than I ever could.  Mendelsohn points out the two most problematic elements: structure and tone.

First, structure:

The “Iliad” has focus and weight because it zeroes in on what is, despite its length, a very narrow subject (albeit with vast, rippling ramifications): Achilles’ wrath, what it stems from and what it means. (What are honor and glory? Why do we fight and live?) Because it is cast as Patroclus’ autobiography and concentrates on the love affair, “The Song of Achilles” necessarily has to start much earlier and then catch up with Homer. The result is an odd disproportion. There’s a lot of time and energy devoted to adolescent Sturm und Drang (Patroclus’ early years are a bit Judy Blume-ish), but as the action progresses into the territory of established myth — the abduction of Helen, the formation of the Greek armada, the landing at Troy, 10 years of warfare — you often feel as if this or that famous episode is being rapidly ticked off a list. (The sacrifice of Iphigenia is dispatched in two paragraphs: “We were horrified and angry,” Patroclus blandly reports.) And the fact that Patroclus dies before the end of the story forces Miller into an odd narrative corner indeed.

Second, tone:

The real Achilles’ heel of this book is tone — one made disastrously worse by the author’s decision to metamorphose an ancient story of heroes into a modern tale of hormones … Miller unhappily wobbles between “lyrical” overwriting (“his voice wheedled and ducked, like a weasel escaping the nest”) and a misguided attempt to give a contemporary smoothness to Homer’s antique tale. At the end of the novel, as in the “Iliad,” old Priam secretly comes to the Greek camp to ransom the body of his son Hector, whom the enraged Achilles has slain. “I am sorry for your loss,” Miller has him say. You wonder just which funeral home this took place in.

The problem reaches crisis proportions in the handling of the “love affair,” which begins with an embarrassing breathlessness (“My chest trilled with something I could not quite name”) and climaxes — sorry! — in the long-awaited and, it must be said, cringe-inducing consummation: “He seemed to swell beneath my touch, to ripen. He smelled like almonds and earth. He pressed against me, crushing my lips to wine. He went still as I took him in my hand, soft as the delicate velvet of petals. . . . Our bodies cupped each other like hands.

A lot of other reviews felt differently and Publishers Weekly and Library Journal gave it very positive reviews.  And there are plenty of customer reviews equally positive.  I think one’s reaction is likely to turn on how much romance (near erotica) you want with your classics.  If you enjoy romance and don’t mind an idealized same sex love affair transplanted to ancient Greece you will likely enjoy Song of Achilles.

If, however, you were looking for a little more depth and complexity to the retelling of this classic tale I think you will likely be disappointed.  And I have a feeling anyone with a more serious interest in and knowledge of Homer and Achillies will react like Mendelsohn.  Or see this Amazon review.

As Mendelsohn notes, “there are some very good things here — nice imaginative flights, small details that pop out and make you take notice.”  I did enjoy much of the book.  But the fawning romance of the first half and the compressed nature of the second drained much of the energy out of my enjoyment.  I am sure a good deal of this is simply taste and  style but I do think there are some more literary faults beyond just not being a fan of romance.

But as I like to say, your mileage may vary …

First, a brief bio:

Nick Arvin, American Author (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Nick Arvin is an American engineer and writer. Born in North Carolina, he was raised in Michigan, and graduated from the University of Michigan and Stanford University with degrees in mechanical engineering, and from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has worked in forensic engineering and accident reconstruction.

Now, on to the questions.

1) They say that all writing is autobiographical. What made you decide to tackle forensic engineering or accident reconstruction – something you have direct experience with – in your second novel?

I did work in accident reconstruction; I sort of stumbled into it. I had worked as an engineer for Ford, but I quit that to do an MFA in creative writing, and then ended up living in Denver on some grant money for a year after the MFA. When the grant ran out, I started looking around for a job in engineering. I’d worked in the automotive industry, but there isn’t much of an automotive industry in Denver. Then I realized that there were a couple of forensic engineering companies that did automotive accident reconstruction. So I sent them my resume, and one of the resumes happened to land on the desk of a guy who’s a reader and was impressed that I had published a book of short stories. Soon I had a job.

I knew from the first day that I wanted to write a novel about the work — the work itself was basically a process of creating little mini-stories about the accidents we were working on, and these accidents were dramatic and tragic, and the process of creating these mini-stories was really interesting, but also discomforting in the way that it required applying cold, analytical techniques to examining terribly human situations. So, the work had all these interesting layers of narrative and emotional disconnect, and I knew I couldn’t cover all of it in a short story. So I collected material from the job in a notebook for a couple of years, and then began to try to figure out how to structure it into a novel. Writing the novel took about seven years altogether.

2) Engineer and writer seem like such very different careers – like they would bring very styles, perspective and different world views. True? Did you bring similar skill sets to both jobs or was writing a break from your “day job” (when you had a day job)?

Actually, I still have a day job in engineering. Most writers need a day job. Nowadays I work on the design of power plants and natural gas facilities. I tend to think that my involvement in engineering is good for my writing — it keeps me out in the world on a daily basis, meeting new people, seeing new things. And it’s corner of the world that most writers never see.

As for the first part of your question, I recently wrote a short essay for the Wall Street Journal on the topic of how writing and engineering mesh. I won’t rehash it all here, but suffice to say, I believe there’s more overlap between the two careers than people might think.

3) What is it about car accidents that they seem to touch our lives in such important ways?

Your life is going along the way it always does, and then all the sudden an accident comes in sideways, creating terrible death and injury and remorse. Abruptly, the path of your life is very different. It forces the people who survive these events to look at themselves and who they really are, what is important to them, and who they want to be, for good or ill. It has a huge effect. And it’s happening all the time, somewhere. We all know someone who it has happened to.

4) Why are accidents so hard to explain – why do people have such a hard time getting details right? Do we over-value eye-witness accounts?

Accidents are by definition unexpected, so it’s not like anyone ever says to a witness: here, watch these two cars smash into each other and remember as much as you can. Instead, something happens at the corner of vision, or you hear a sound and then turn to see the aftermath. And then, in one of these terrible cases where litigation arises, a hundred detailed questions are asked of the witness. And the witness feels maybe just because he was there he should know the answers, and he wants to please the questioner by giving the right answers, so his brain tries to fill in the missing information with a story that makes some sense. None of this needs to happen consciously, of course. Our brains make up all sorts of stuff all the time to fill in for the things we don’t know. Most of the time it doesn’t matter.

There are a ton of studies out there showing that, basically, witnesses suck. They’re polluted by biases and they make up stuff. But to reconstruct events from physical evidence is time-consuming and expensive, and that process too can be polluted by biases. Probably we’re just stuck living with a large degree of uncertainty about the nature of factual truth.

5) It seems there is a little meta-fiction or the very least some literary references weaved into the story. Was this a way to note the influences or just an interesting way to explore the ideas the characters were wrestling with? Or neither?

Or both! Definitely both. I think you’re referencing the way that the character Boggs blasts audiobooks at top volume from his convertible. That Boggs did this came to me very early in the writing process, and it helped me to get a handle on who he is. That being so, I needed to give the reader some idea of the kind of books he listens to; it’s kind of like when you look at a person’s bookshelf to try to figure out who they are. And it also gave me an opportunity to allude to some writers in the past who have touched on the book’s themes.

6) There is an awful lot of time spent driving in cars in the story. Was it a challenge to convey a real sense of what long distance driving is like without obviously letting it unduly bog down the book?

Yes… I wrote a lot of material about driving that I later cut, and there’s still plenty in the book. The nature of long distance driving has always been fascinating to me — it’s at once dangerous and meditative and maddening. I wanted to explore that. And I wanted to explore the roadside landscape, because we spend so much time in that landscape, and yet we hardly look at it. But I was aware, too, of the need to keep the story moving and the characters developing, and I did my best to balance all of those elements.

7) It struck me that you were really trying to depict the interior lives of your characters and how their exterior lives don’t always match up to their interior assumptions and beliefs or how these worlds often collide with unintended consequences. Are novelists like psychologists in some sense? What do you find interesting about your characters?

I suppose that novelists are amateur psychologists in a sense, although I try not to think of it in those terms much, for fear of reducing my characters to psychological constructs. The danger, I think, is that you could lose the contradictory elements of surprise and mystery that make characters feel real.

As for the characters in this book, I think you put it very well. The real world keeps refusing to conform to their assumptions and expectations, it eludes their attempts at analysis. I think we all struggle with this, in different ways. How the characters deal with that disconnect between inner process and outer reality is what’s interesting to me.

8) You have also written short stories. What is the challenge in writing short stories and how is it different from novels? Do you plan to continue to write both?

Yes, I love both short stories and novels and plan to keep working on both — as well as the middle ground of long stories or novellas, which may finally have some opportunities for reaching readers via electronic publishing. The main difference, for me, is that with short stories I feel like I’m always starting at the beginning with a blank page again, which requires a burst of raw creativity that’s sometimes hard to find, while in a novel I follow the same characters and themes day after day, year after year, which can feel like a grind. It’s nice to be able to work in one mode until I get tired of it, then switch to the other.

One of the curiosities of this business is the way that MFA programs tend to push writers to write short stories, because they are easier to workshop; but once you are out in the world, the publishing industry pushes for novels. Write a collection of stories and send it to New York, and the response is almost always something like, “This is lovely, but do you have a novel?” Chad Harbach’s essay on this topic, “MFA vs. NYC,” is very smart.

But there are some writers, like myself, who have day jobs outside academia, which provide a certain freedom from those two pressures. I don’t teach in an MFA program, and to pay the bills I don’t have to make a ton of money off my writing (though, to be clear, it’d sure be nice!). I try to use that freedom to follow my interests and characters wherever they may lead, and let a story find its own form and length.

9) There are some TV or movie type elements in this novel (a sort of CSI subject). Have you been involved in screenwriting? Any interest in trying your hand at that? 

Generally, I tried to avoid making the book feel like it’s made-for-TV, because I tend to think that literature these days is already overly influenced by the conventions of screenwriting. But it’s also simply inherent in the material in this book that it has CSI, police procedural aspects to it, and I wanted to do justice to those parts of the story.

I’ve never attempted to write anything for the screen. Sometimes I think it might be fun to try it out, but to date I’ve never gone any further with the thought. I always seem to have a novel or short story that I’m more interested in. Maybe someday.

10) You have been involved in teaching writing. What is the best advice you were giving about how to succeed as a writer?

Read as much as possible. Write as much as possible. Work to find your inner voice and be true to it. Listen carefully to the advice of others, and then quietly reject most of it.

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Everything about The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey makes me want to read it. The cover art, the website, the video, the plot, the connection to a Russian fairy tale, the author’s name – everything. Thus begins the rearrangement of my TBR pile …

As the above makes clear, it just seemed like a book that had so many of the elements I look for in a book.  For those of you out of the loop, here is the publisher’s synopsis:

Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart—he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season’s first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone—but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees.

This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.

Well, in April I finally got the chance to read it.  With all the hype surrounding this book – my own above, and many others - there was ample room for disappointment. But despite the fact the book was different than I had expected, there was no let down for me.

It was an evocative and deeply human story with a fairy tale woven in. And like so many fairy tales and folklore – not the Disney versions – this one was touched with sorrow and tragedy. But also infused with love and hope and beauty as they really exist.

Gorgeous prose, a wonderfully developed setting that become a character of its own, and a great cast of characters make this a novel with depth and emotion – a heft belied by the fairy tale at it heart.

What is amazing is how in a debut novel Ivey blends historical fiction, a sense of magical realism and the more traditional aspects of a novel into a wonderful story.  The characters have depth and draw out real emotion.  The land of Alaska become a character itself; fearsome and yet beautiful.  You see the characters grow and change; you see relationships develop and friendships bloom; you see the joys and despair of life.

It is not a fast paced novel by any means but the absorbing and beautiful nature of the story means that you want to savor it.  This one book where the waiting seemed to make it better.  If you haven’t had a chance to read The Snow Child I highly recommend it.

Related articles

• The Snow Child, By Eowyn Ivey (independent.co.uk)
• Author interview: Eowyn Ivey on her début novel “The Snow Child” (rebeccaberto.wordpress.com)

Cover of The Hunger Games

Well, I finally broke down and read the first book in the Hunger Games series – the aptly titled The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I had downloaded the series on the Kindle when they offered a highly discounted version and figured with the movie out and all the discussion that I might as well read it.

And perhaps it was due to all the hype but quite frankly I was a little disappointed. Sure, it is in many ways an imaginative example of world building and setting the stage for some interesting characters and some powerful emotions.

And I don’t mean to say it wasn’t entertaining because it was and I enjoyed it. The story really kept you moving forward and you wanted to find out how all the dynamics would play out.

But from a literary perspective it just didn’t wow me. It was interesting and creative and entertaining but just wasn’t one of those books where you end thinking: “Wow, that was awesome.” Or one where you immediately want to jump into the next book. I am, however, pretty clearly an outlier on this one.

One explanation for this might be my heavy dislike for angst of a certain youthful kind. I hated it in the later Harry Potter books for example and I disliked it here. Granted, Katniss’s angst is not all that over-the-top but the whole “is the love interest between her and Peetra real or not?” aspect just grew sort of old for me.

In case you have been living in a cave or something here is the publishers blurb:

Could you survive on your own, in the wild, with everyone out to make sure you don’t live to see the morning?

In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives alone with her mother and younger sister, regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her district in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before-and survival

And as is the case with so many first in a series books, it seemed surprisingly shallow in terms of character depth and, to a lesser extent, plot. The simplicity of the prose allows Katniss to shine but, outside her relationship with Peetra and a little with Rue, it is a very interior story. It will be interesting to see how this plays out as the series continues.  And it is of course, a young adult novel so I am not exactly the target audience.

This probably seems like nit-picking, and I am sure the hype surrounding the books and movie led to my disappointment, but for whatever reason this one fell a little flat for me.

But it was a quick and enjoyable read nonetheless; with an imaginative world and a fast paced plot.  I am sure I will read the rest of the series soon and hope to see the movie as well.

As luck would have it, if you live in Central Ohio you have the chance to hear Mr. Buckley talk about his new book thanks to the folks at the Thurber House:

What: Thurber House‘s May Special Event featuring Christopher Buckley, author of They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?

When: Wednesday, May 16; A wine and hors d’oeuvres reception will be held from 5:30-6:45 p.m., followed by the reading at 7:00 p.m.

Where: Columbus Museum of Art

Details: A past Thurber Prize for American Humor award winner, Buckley is one of the most beloved political satirists writing today. In his brand new novel, They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?, a Washington lobbyist and his attractive female aid are determined to gain Congressional approval for a top secret weapons system. In order to get passage for this, they start a rumor that the Chinese secret service has plans to assassinate the Dalai Lama … the result: a series of crises taking the Chinese and the United States to the precipice of war.

More details available here.

Listen here.