One last time, A Naked Singularity

From A Naked Singularity, by Sergio De La Pava:

--noise background,

My getting out or what?!

That's how the novel opens, page 1 of 688. It's daring, but also engaging--how can you not keep reading after that?

It's been a while since I've written about A Naked Singularity here, assuming you probably didn't want to hear any more about it. But this week brought it back up, and in case you aren't monitoring US book news elsewhere, I want to make sure to share this: on Wednesday, A Naked Singularity won the $25,000 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award as the best debut novel of 2012. The New York Times can give you all the details; the Wall Street Journal offers a good quote from Sergio (alongside a relatively bland one from me):

Mr. De La Pava, reached on his way to a speaking engagement at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in Scotland, said he intends to continue his legal case-load but was grateful to be recognized by an organization with a human-rights agenda. "What I do on a daily basis is very important to me," he said. "[PEN] has a social-justice mission, so it's even more meaningful."

I've been telling this to friends and colleagues all week, but it seems like something I should say publicly: I'm so, so happy for Sergio. He's a pleasure to work with and talk to, and, more important, he is seriously committed to both writing and his job as a public defender--and, above that, to the idea of justice, as his electrifying lecture last month at PS1 MoMA shows.

And the sense I have always gotten is that Sergio is much, much more interested in writing than in being a writer. In Experience, Martin Amis writes about the temporally dislocating aspect of book tours:

It was the late spring of 1995 and I had just returned from a three-week book tour of North America. On such tours, Ian McEwan once said, you feel like ‘the employee of a former self,’ because the book is now out there to be championed and squired, while you have moved on.”

It was three years after he wrote the book that he got an e-mail from the University of Chicago Press sniffing around the idea of publishing the novel; four years after he wrote it that we published it; five years after he wrote it that it won this major award. And yet when I asked him to do something--to talk to a journalist, to answer some questions, to make an appearance--he assented, readily.

The week has also been fun for me, of course. The life of a publicist involves always being careful to walk the line between seeming confident and actually promising anything. As a publicist, you have influence over a lot of aspects of a book's reception, but control over almost none. I suspect most publicists never get to have the experience I have enjoyed over the past year: when you sit an author down and lay out what you think you and your press can do for the book and what will happen--a plan that you saw, clear as day and positively vibrating with possibility, from the first fifty pages you read of his book--and then watching every single thing you talked about, and more, come to pass. To see it happen for a book you believe in this much, and an author you like this much, is, for a publicist, as good as it gets.

So now that you've read A Naked Singularity, what next? (Wait--you haven't read it? I'll wait. . . . Okay, now it's a week later, and you called in sick today to finish it. Worth it, no?) Well, in October the University of Chicago Press will be publishing De La Pava's intense and compelling second novel, Personae--but if you can't wait that long, you should check out his amazing essay in Triple Canopy from last year on boxing and Virginia Woolf.

For now, if I may: a toast to Sergio De La Pava and his wonderful book--and to all of you among my friends who had to listen to me yammer about it in the early days. Here's to many, many, many more books from his pen.

Some disorganotes on the will and willpower

I've been thinking a lot lately, in a completely disjointed way, about the will and willpower. It's something that's never too far from my mind: for twenty years I've been running every other day, almost without fail, and I'm still regularly astonished at the interaction between my will and my physical capacities. I'm just going to keep going, I tell myself, and unless I've been operating at the limits of my abilities for hours--near the end of a marathon, say--my body finds the reserves it needs to obey. The interplay between will and body is as mysterious, and rewarding, as almost anything I know.

Of course one of the reasons we care about sports is because of the hyper-focused lens they offer through which to think about the less clear-cut challenges we face in everyday life. Thus, some jottings on will in sports and elsewhere.

1 It started with Sergio De La Pava, whose stunning essay "A Day's Sail," on boxing and Virginia Woolf, published in Triple Canopy last year, is as much about will and determination as anything. That theme also comes through in A Naked Singularity, taking its most explicit form in the interpolated essay on the career of Colombian boxer Wilfred Benitez. In an interview for the blog of Elliott Bay Books in Seattle De La Pava explained why he's drawn to boxing:

Boxing, when functioning properly, is the best vehicle I know of for the mass representation of a particular human’s naked will; what we gain from that is the result of extrapolation, because we need previews of what happens when your flimsy trappings melt away and it’s just you against unfeeling constants.

In "A Day's Sail," De La Pava broadens that point:

If we’re to then talk about greatness in relation to this pursuit we’ll have to make a perhaps counterintuitive distinction right at the outset. Bach, Gould, Tolstoy, Woolf, are giants so we rightly turn to their work to experience greatness in their fields. Not generally so in boxing. A partial list of the pursuit’s giants is something like Louis, Robinson, Ali, Duran, and Armstrong. All brilliant, all have signature moments, but with the exception of Ali’s “Thrilla in Manila” none can match moments produced by far lesser personages. The reason is that two individuals in a boxing ring are fighting, and greatness there seems less a product of skill and talent than of concepts like will and tenacity—precisely the attributes you’ll need, not skillful intelligence, if diagnosed with cancer for example.

2 The summer I was twenty-three and first working in a Stateside bookstore, the first job I'd ever had that didn't have a definite end point--graduation, expiring work permit, etc.--I played a lot of basketball. Probably four nights a week I was out on the court, sometimes with friends, sometimes with strangers. Up that point, I'd barely played basketball at all. And I wasn't good at it, by any means. I'm short, first of all, and, second, while it's amazing what a lot of practice can do, you're never going to be skilled at a sport as difficult as basketball if you don't really start playing until your twenties.

But I loved it--and what I loved was exactly what De La Pava's saying about boxing above: more than any other team sport I'd played, it was about willpower and tenacity. I couldn't shoot, could barely dribble, but despite my height I could guard and was a strong rebounder--solely because I was unwilling to give up, unwilling to give ground, unwilling to stop working. Even now, when I don't really play any more, I get viscerally excited when I watch the pros playing great defense. They're so much better than me and anyone I played with that they might as well be playing a wholly different sport--but nonetheless there's a look in their eyes that's familiar, and thrilling.

Tom Ley wrote well about willpower and basketball for Deadspin the other day in an article about how Rajan Rondo was almost singlehandedly keeping the Celtics alive--despite being far from the best player on the floor. Ley writes,

Fans and writers love to talk about players "rising to the moment" or playing their best when the "lights are brightest." All of that talk us is usually bullshit. Nobody really has any idea what's going on inside the mind of an NBA player during the course of a game. Whether he is embracing the moment or scared shitless is hardly ever discernible.

And then he goes on to tell about a moment in the previous night's game where Rondo, facing down the best player since Jordan, made clear what was in his mind--and that it was all fight:

[H]e found himself defending LeBron James at the top of the three-point line as the fourth quarter was coming to an end, score tied at 99. Rondo stared James down and screamed, "Let's do it!" at him.

Willpower = swagger = the Celtics are still alive. Man, I love sports. It's worth clicking through to Deadspin to watch the clip of that moment--the look in Rondo's eyes is indescribable.

3 On the non-sports front, I keep thinking of LBJ. In the second volume of his four-and-counting-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro focuses on the 1948 Senate race. Early on, Caro reminds us of what LBJ drummed into his assistants:

If you do everything, you'll win.

In the 1948 campaign, that meant staying on the trail for weeks while suffering what ought to have been debilitating pain from kidney stones, shaking hand after hand despite his own being cracked and bleeding, and maintaining a schedule that wore out assistant after assistant. Writes Caro,

Dorothy Nichols was to be asked what she remembered about the 1948 campaign. "Three hours of sleep," she would reply. Three hours of sleep--or less.

Johnson slept even less:

Even when he was supposed to be resting, they came to realize, he wasn't. At the noon rest stop, Lyndon Johnson would indeed get into bed. But when someone came to waken him after an hour or so, he would almost invariably be awake--awake and ready with a long list of things to be done, things he had thought of during the hour. He had been "on the phone the whole time," Mrs. Nichols would say, or "he had somebody--local people or somebody on the staff--in there planning."

Aide Ed Clark put LBJ's relentless drive in perspective:

"I never saw anyone campaign as hard as [Johnson had in his 1937 campaign.] I never thought it was possible for a man to work that hard." If that campaign had been Johnson's main chance, this campaign, the 1948 campaign, might be his last chance. Was 1937 the hardest Lyndon Johnson ever worked? Ed Clark would be asked. "Oh, no," Clark said. "In 1948, he worked harder."

There is a lot about LBJ to dislike and disapprove of, and Caro's impressively nuanced portrait doesn't stint on revealing it. But his tenacity and willpower remain awe-inspiring--and just plain inspiring--throughout.

4 And finally to novels. I know of no authors who write better about physical exhaustion, and our ability to will ourselves beyond it, than Stephen King and Dorothy Dunnett. In book after book, their heroes are battered and bloodied and driven to exhaustion, but at the moment when the temptation to give up is greatest, they choose to fight on.

In King Hereafter Dunnett writes of a worn-out King Thorfinn's response to hearing that the day's battle has gone terribly against him:

To weep would solve nothing, or to fall into panic, or to obey the heave of the belly, the sudden gripe of the bowel, that came not only to messnegers.

But above belly and bowel was a controlling head.

Later, in a break in the battle, he pauses:

In action, you felt almost no pain at all. Out of action, you did.

And wounded, he fights on and leads his men on, beyond weariness, trying to protect his kingdom and his family.

King's heroes tend to be ordinary people thrust into horrors, Dunnett's extraordinary men driving themselves beyond exhaustion as they take on responsibility for the lives and safety of everyone who comes into their orbit. King aims to shock and surprise and terrify, Dunnett to entertain--but underlying the work of both writers is a simple but powerful theme: the body, damaged and broken as it may be, takes orders from the mind--and so long as those orders are to keep fighting, you haven't lost yet.

Case notes, or, Some disconnected bits on the law and justice

1 When I'm between books, I often turn to John Mortimer's Rumpole stories, through which I've slowly been making my way for the past several years. Usually Rumpole's relationship with and characterization of his wife is a subject of humor verging on whining--he regularly refers to her, in a nod to Rider Haggard, as She Who Must Be Obeyed--but in "Rumpole at Sea," the story I read this morning, he quietly reveals that he has a lot more respect for Hilda than he usually lets on. In telling the story, Rumpole is forced to relate a number of events at which he was not present, but he explains, "I have reconstructed the following pages from [Mrs Rumpole's] evidence which was, as always, completely reliable." Later, he notes:

She Who Must Be Obeyed has a dead eye for detail and would have risen to great heights in the Criminal Investigation Department.

A reliable witness with a dead eye for detail? What higher praise could Rumpole offer?

2 One of the best moments early in Sergio De La Pava's A Naked Singularity--a moment when you begin to realize that you're in the hands of a genius--is on the fifth page, when Casi, the protagonist, informs the reader that there is about to be a digression:

And this is as good a time as any for you, gentle reader, to learn that I can wander a bit while storytelling so that the very imminent digressive passage on the judicial creation of Miranda warnings can be entirely skipped by the uncurious without the slightest loss of narrative steam.

Said digression ensues, explaining in intense and often hilarious language the case and judicial and legal activity that led up to "the kind of decision that makes maybe five people happy" and led to the warning about self-incrimination that TV has made so famous.

With A Naked Singularity on the brain last week, I was surprised to see the following exchange late in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend:

"Don't!" said Mr Inspector. "Why, why argue? It's my duty to inform you that whatever you say, will be used against you."

"I don't think it will."

"But I tell you it will," said Mr Inspector. "Now, having received the caution, do you still say that you foresaw my visit this afternoon?"

So as far back as that, in England, an officer--of a police force that had been in existence for less than forty years--already felt it was his duty to warn a suspect, and it was already known as "the caution"? I had no idea, and neither, it seems, does Wikipedia: the section on similar rights in England and Wales in the entry for Miranda, while noting that the right may have originated there, only traces it as far back as 1912. Any legal scholars want to weigh in?

3 In anticipation of Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (which is one the best books I've read in recent years), I read Ford Madox Ford's treatment of a slightly later period in the career of Thomas Cromwell, The Fifth Queen. Ford, a Catholic, lays his sympathy with Katherine Howard, Henry VIII's fifth queen, and in the process he paints a much darker portrait of Cromwell than Mantel does. Ford's Cromwell isn't the ruthless villain he is forced to play as the foil of the perfectly noble Thomas More in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, but he is driven much more by self-interest than in Mantel's account, and his mutability is seen less as an emblem of his essential--and laudable--modernity than of an essential ethical slipperiness.

Mantel's Cromwell is so well drawn, so memorable, that he's hard to shake even as you're reading Ford, so when we see him meet the downfall we've known since the first page is inevitable, it's hard not to feel a real pang. The moment in The Fifth Queen when his last-ditch machinations fail and he's confronted by the lords who are his bitterest enemies, stripped of his chancellorship, and named a traitor unites the two characterizations and is vividly arresting:

Then such rage and despair had come into Thomas Cromwell's terrible face that Cranmer's senses had reeled. He had seen Norfolk and the Admiral fall back before this passion; he had seen Thomas Cromwell tear off his cap and cast it on the floor; he had heard him bark and snarl out certain words into the face of the yellow dog of Norfolk.

"Upon your life you dare not call me traitor!" and Norfolk had fallen back abashed.

Then the chamber had seemed to fill with an awful gloom and darkness; men showed only like shadows against the window lights; the constable of the Tower had come in with the warrants, and in that gloom the earth had appeared to tremble and quake beneath the Archbishop's feet.

And now on to Bring Up the Bodies!

4 As seems only right on questions of the law and justice, I'll let Kafka have the last word. This comes from Gustav Janouch's Conversations with Kafka (1968):

How often is injustice committed in the name of justice? How often does damnation fly the flag of enlightenment? How often does a fall disguise itself as a rise? We can see it all now quite properly. The war didn't only burn and tear the world, but also lit it up. We can see that it is a labyrinth built by men themselves, an icy machine world, whose comforts and apparent purposefulness increasingly emasculate and dishonour us.

Behold the Naked Singularity!

It's here. The official publication date for Sergio De La Pava's A Naked Singularity is May 1, but if there's a good bookstore near you, they've probably got a stack up front right now, dizzying their patrons.

I've written about the book before,and you are welcome of course to take all my praise for it with a shaker of salt, since I'm also the book's publicist over in my day job. But you don't have to take my word for it that this is a novel worth seeking out. Try Scott Bryan Wilson's praise at the Quarterly Conversation, or Steve Donoghue's at Open Letters Monthly. Or Miles Klee, at Flavorwire, where he names it one of "Ten Malicious Masterpieces," putting it in company with Thomas Bernhard, Martin Amis, and Christina Stead. If those don't convince you, just keep your eyes peeled: the coming weeks should see lots of new readers and critics weighing in on the book.

In the meantime, since presumably you're sitting at your desk right now avoiding work anyway, go check out a venture into nonfiction that Sergio made last year, an essay for Triple Canopy on, of all things, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and boxing. If you like the voice, pell-mell language, and bone-deep empathy you find there, then I expect it'll be worth your stopping off at your local bookstore on the way home tonight and picking up A Naked Singularity. The weekend is ahead of you--hours and hours to spend getting sucked into a strange, compelling, funny, ridiculous, moving account of life, the law, and justice in New York and America today.

A Naked Singularity

For nearly a year now, I've carefully avoided mentioning on this blog one of the best novels I read last year--one of the best novels I've read in a good while--Sergio De La Pava's A Naked Singularity. I read it over Christmas last year, and for nearly a week this 700-page debut novel had me completely captivated, laughing and worrying and being surprised and amazed. Ordinarily, I would have been quoting from it here--like I quoted from it relentlessly to rocketlass as I read--and praising it to the rooftops. But I didn't.

I had my reasons. Or, really, reason: A Naked Singularity was self-published, and I wanted to convince my employer, the University of Chicago Press, to publish it. In May, we will, and I couldn't be more excited.

The whole thing started with a review by Scott Bryan Wilson in the Quarterly Conversation (for which I serve as poetry editor). As editor Scott Esposito pointed out in a note accompanying the review, "This book review tends closer to an endorsement than we would usually publish." It was a rave. Scott called A Naked Singularity, ""One of the best and most original novels of the decade," and he went on from there:

If you like The Wire, if you like rewarding, difficult fiction, if you like literary, high-quality artistic and hilarious yet moving novels that are difficult to put down, I can’t recommend A Naked Singularity enough.

I knew Scott's taste well enough to trust his opinion . . . but still--a 700-page self-published debut novel? That's a commitment I wasn't quite ready to make. So I set a Google alert for the book, to see whether other people might share Scott's enthusiasm. And they did. Lian Hearn, author of the Tales of the Otori series, wrote a long post on her Facebook page titled "A Naked Singularity: Why I Love This Book." Dan Visel at With Hidden Noise wrote, "This is a book that deserves to be read more widely; in a better world, people would be reading this rather than Freedom." Others followed, with similar praise.

So I got a copy, and they were right: it's a wonderful novel. It's linguistically inventive and simmering with anger at social and legal injustice, all told in the unforgettable voice of the protagonist, Casi, a wunderkind public defender in Manhattan who's never lost a case. It's as funny and smart as anything I've read since Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai, and it ranges widely in its concerns, scenes, and style: it offers courtroom drama, media satire, a ridiculously long scat joke, snappy dialogue, immigrant stories, boxing commentary, and even a heist worthy of Richard Stark. It's indebted to Melville and Dante, kin to David Foster Wallace and William Gaddis, and still not quite like anything else I've ever read.

And now I'm going to get a chance to introduce it to the book world at large. You can read more about A Naked Singularity, including the copy I wrote to describe it, at the Press's website. You should be able to pre-order it at your local bookstore or from Amazon.

As I've explained before, I try not to let my work and nonwork lives intersect on this blog any more than absolutely necessary. I won't ever write here about a book that I wouldn't have written about had I come to it through other means. This is a case where the two worlds overlap completely--and where, in the midst of the constant litany of bad news about the death of publishing, the loss of community, the end of reading, and whatever other gleefully masochistic bad cultural news is currently clogging your Google Reader, this is a story where it all actually worked. A writer wrote a singular book that stayed true to his vision, and, because it was good enough to draw the attention of some seriously dedicated readers, it's now getting another shot.

So trust me on this one. Order up a copy and clear your reading decks in late April/early May. Until then, if you want a taste of De La Pava's intense, energetic prose, check out this piece he wrote for Triple Canopy on Virginia Woolf and two brutal boxing matches.