I had the pleasure of reviewing Yannick Murphy’s new novel, THE CALL, in last week’s Boston Globe. You can read it on Boston.com or below…

The Call, by Yannick Murphy (Harper Perennial, 223 pages).

Many readers disdain high-concept novels for good reason: they’re usually more fun to write than to read. But if they give it a chance, most readers will find that Yannick Murphy’s remarkable new novel THE CALL succeeds where others fail. The concept? This novel is written in the format of a daily journal; to be precise, the call log belonging to a veterinarian in a small New England town.

CALL: A horse with lameness.
ACTION: Drove to farm. The poorest farm I have seen so far… The owner’s boy sat on the rusted seat of a tractor that did not look like it could move, but grew up from the ground where it was, pushing itself through the dirt and had come to rest…Tall grass grew up high alongside its tires, past the height of the wheel wells.
RESULT: After I felt the horse’s leg, I told the owner about the heat. I told her she would do well to stand the horse’s leg in a bucket of ice water. The woman shook her head. “No ice,” she said…
WHAT I SAID TO THE WIFE IN BED: Am I getting grayer? The children told me I have more gray here…
WHAT THE WIFE SAID: No, you don’t have more gray than usual. It’s just that the children are taller. They can see the gray they have never been able to see before.
WHAT THE NIGHT SAID: Coyotes rule.

THE CALL is a portrait of a family, Dr. David Appleton, his wife Jen, and their three children: Sam (12), Sarah (10), and Mia (6). When Jen says, early in the book, “Be careful hunting, David. He’s still so young. You only have one son, you know,” we can tell something terrible is coming.

“CALL: My son. I can’t get him fast enough… I can see the holes in the cloth of his coat, and the goose feathers sticking out from them, wavering in the wind.”

When Sam is shot by an unseen hunter, he falls into a coma and the Appleton family feels everything that was once stable slip away. And yet… as much as David and Jen fret about Sam’s prognosis (“WHAT THE WIFE SAID I DID IN MY SLEEP: Cried.”), life in all its tiny details goes on. (“WHAT THE TRUCK IS TELLING ME: Check engine.”). As David makes his rounds to the horses with toothaches and pregnant goats his community comes into focus. Aging Dorothy, for instance, with her pet sheep Alice, who lives inside the house. The rich couple with their mansion and Great Dane. Jim Bushway, the careless farmhand who shoots “rock tiger” — chipmunks — and leaves them where they fall. With his son frozen in a coma each member of this small town becomes either a source of information about his attacker or a suspect. The person calling the Appleton’s home and then hanging up, over and over, isn’t helping matters.

What will become of the wounded son? Why is David seeing spaceships in the night sky? And who is calling him and what does he want to say? This is a suspenseful novel; the format demands that much be left unsaid, so the reader is constantly looking for clues wherever they turn up. Just how suspicious is that careless farmhand? Will the tension in the Appletons’ marriage finally explode? (“WHAT MY WIFE CAN DO: Make me angrier than I have ever been.”). Although most of these questions are answered, they’re not ultimately the point of this novel, because no matter how tragic Sam’s condition, daily life still includes things like lunch, and sick cows, and swim meets. “WHAT I THINK WE MUST BE: Crazy to spend an entire weekend waiting in the gym of a technical school, but I know years from now we will look back and say these were good times, maybe the best because we were with our children all the time.”

The truthful evocation of family is the real triumph of THE CALL. “When we are alone we like to tell each other how wonderful our children are, but it is something we do not tell others,” David says, describing a conversation with his wife. “We tell each other with abandon, things we have lately seen in our children that prove how smart and wonderful and cute they are… it’s cathartic, as if we need every once in a while to do this bragging, or so that we remind each other of how right it was for us to have married one another.” There is much love in this novel, and just as much truth about the pain and pleasure of family life. “What is taking place is as layered as something in nature,” writes Murphy of an encounter between two of her characters. She could well be describing her own clever and beautiful book.

Thomas Edison with one of his best ideas – an invention that came to signify inspiration itself: the lightbulb.

In today’s Boston Globe I review the new Steven Johnson book, WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM: The natural history of innovation (Riverside: 2010). The one point I did not have space to make in my review was the unsung debt owed by Johnson (and many others) to the great James Burke, best known for his BBC television series, CONNECTIONS. Johnson’s new book is in many ways a streamlined, sexier book version of CONNECTIONS, a show which traced the incredible paths of various scientific innovations from ancient times to the present. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

My review of Johnson’s book can be found on the Boston Globe site or, for your convenience, below.

MOTHERS OF INVENTION
Since there’s no copyright on book titles, Steven Johnson could have called his new book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions even though Thomas Kuhn used it in 1962. Instead, he went with Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Although indebted to Kuhn, Johnson is interested in much more than just scientific revolutions. This book covers everything from the history of reading to the influence of Brian Eno on hip hop producer Hank Schocklee. But mostly it’s about Charles Darwin.
Where Good Ideas Come From begins and ends with Darwin, the intellectual hero of our day (and yesterday and presumably tomorrow), the genius whose insights into everything from the formation of tropical atolls to the process of evolution underlie so much of modern life. Darwin is the perfect foil for Johnson, both for his creative ideas as well as his creative habits. If that sounds confusing, consider how Johnson describes his book “This is a book about the space of innovation… If we want to understand where good ideas come from, we have to put them in context. Darwin’s world-changing idea unfolded inside his brain, but think of all the environments he needed to piece it together: a ship, an archipelago, a notebook, a library, a coral reef. Our thought shapes the spaces we inhabit, and our spaces return the favor.” [15]
“The space of innovation” is a pretty abstract concept. Johnson knows it and equips himself with an entire ordnance depot full of examples in order to explain. He’s not interested in merely recounting the well-known tale of how seventeenth-century coffeehouses fueled the European Enlightenment; no, this is a rapid-fire tour of “spaces” large, small, mental, physical, and otherwise — we’re talking reefs, webs, brains, networks, platforms, and quadrants. Johnson steps back now and again to remind us of the bigger picture. He’s distilled seven patterns or properties and assigned a chapter to each: The Adjacent Possible; Liquid Networks; The Slow Hunch; Serendipity; Error; Exaptation, and Platforms. “The more we embrace these patterns,”Johnson argues, “the better we will be at tapping our extraordinary capacity for innovative thinking.” [15-16]
Johnson has been interested in these ideas for a long time – nearly every book he’s written addresses an aspect of human innovation or the properties of intellectual networks, from his very first book, Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate (1997) to The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America (2008), and it’s clear that his research on the subject runs very deep. Where Good Ideas Come From may be the ultimate distillation of all his thinking on these issues and at times that’s the book’s challenge: it can read less like a book and more like a series of interesting concepts. Take the first five paragraphs of the Exaptation chapter, for example, in which Johnson leaps from Pliny the Elder and the invention of the screw press (for making wine) to fifteenth-century Rhineland and the bubonic plague to a first-century C.E. Chinese blacksmith named Pi Sheng (the inventor of movable type) and finally Johannes Gutenberg, who “took a machine designed to get people drunk [the Greco-Roman screw press], and turned it into an engine for mass communication.” [151] One admires the intellectual athleticism of Johnson’s maneuvers here, yet one can’t help wishing for a bit more time with each of these fascinating characters and their inventions. Distillation is a fine thing, but it’s also nice to sit back and slowly enjoy a tumbler of whiskey.
Johnson achieves a more pleasing balance of story and factoid in the chapter entitled The Slow Hunch. Here, he constructs a dramatic and chilling set piece about the “Phoenix Memo,” the unheeded July 2001 warning from an Arizona FBI field agent named Ken Williams who tried to alert the U.S. government to the presence of suspicious foreign students enrolled in American flight schools. Johnson threads the tale of the Phoenix Memo throughout the chapter, visiting along the way with (naturally) Charles Darwin’s journals, John Locke’s indexing system, a Victorian England how-to book entitled Enquire Within Upon Everything, Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the World Wide Web, and the corporate environment of Google. Although packed with wide-ranging details, the narrative shadow of the doomed Phoenix Memo is always present, adding weight and a sense of foreboding to Johnson’s larger argument about the power of the “slow hunch.” It’s one of his most important ideas: that great innovations do not usually appear in a flash of inspiration but instead they accrete “by stealth, in small steps. They fade into view.” [79] By the end of the chapter, I was convinced.
Steven Johnson must occasionally wonder why he’s not Malcolm Gladwell; that is, why his bestselling books haven’t become zeitgeisty pop blockbusters in the manner of Gladwell’s. Surely “The Adjacent Possible” is just as catchy a concept as “The Tipping Point”… then again, maybe not. While Johnson and Gladwell write about many of the same issues (they’re equally obsessed, for instance, with “the strength of weak ties”) and bring their ideas to life through the use of capsule biographies, Gladwell lingers on the unexpectedly interesting quirks of a high school basketball coach or a forgotten nineteenth-century scientist (and yes, sometimes he lingers too long, but that’s another review). Johnson, meanwhile, speeds through the connections between the coach, the scientist, and fifteen other seemingly disparate people across time to make his point about creativity, about communication, about idea-making. Johnson’s concepts are strong and his explanations are credible. But after a while one tires of explanation. Ultimately, good ideas come from people. Johnson is most convincing when he slows down to let us spend time with them.

I do. I visited Edinburgh with my father a long time ago, when I was in fifth grade. What I remember most: Edinburgh Castle; eating baked apples; the story of Greyfriar’s Bobby (a cute and heroically loyal little Skye Terrier – hey! I was in fifth grade!)… you get the picture. I loved the trip and still have the kilt my dad bought for me way back then.

Today I was reminded of just how much I love Scotland when I read this review of my book on the ScotGen genealogy blog. Oh, Scotland, you had me at Greyfriar’s Bobby… and now this?

How nice to read the Boston Globe today and see such a nice review of Shaking the Family Tree. I don’t know who this Chuck Leddy fellow is, but he sure seems like a heck of a wonderful guy.

You can start gold-plating those first editions and wrapping them in that funny acid-free library paper because we’re on to #2!
Thanks, folks, for sending SFT into its second printing. I’m not even tired yet! (Bet that’s what all the young fighters say).

Yep, it’s pretty much what you’re imagining: sheer visual bliss. No pesky text to get in the way, just money shot after money shot of… bookshelves filled with gorgeous books. Some are big, some are small, some are curved, and some are way too hard to describe in words.

My review of T.C. Boyle’s new short story collection, Wild Child, was published in the Boston Globe on Feb. 7, 2010.


The lady and the tiger – The Boston Globe

1. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars. – C.D.

2. It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change. – C.D.

3. We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act. - C.D.

Click to expand…

As a not-as-distant-as-you-might-think relative of William Faulkner, I like to do my part to ensure that the world at large recognizes the influence he’s had. No, not just on graduate students and Cormac McCarthy, but on the wide, heavy world of metal. If you doubt me, look no further than The Flow Chart of Heavy Metal Band Names, compiled by Doogie Horner (another possible Faulkner reference right there).

It’s a straight shot (S/SW) from the core metal principle of Death to Faulkner References, under whose auspices you will find: As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Corncob Rape. That last one might actually be a Cormac McCarthy trope, although perhaps I’m confusing it with Sodomization of Watermelon from McCarthy’s brilliant novel Suttree. Alright then, I’m offering Sodomization of Watermelon as a freebie to all you aspiring metalheads out there.

I know what you’re thinking: Where does The Big Lebowski fit into all this? Glad you asked. I recently learned that Faulkner’s influence on the American geniuses Joel and Ethan Coen extends well beyond the obvious target, Barton Fink (in which the character of W.P. Mayhew, the genteel, drunken, Southern writer is clearly based on Faulkner).

According to John B. Padgett of the Ole Miss Department of English: “In Raising Arizona, the escaped convicts are the Snopes brothers (from Faulkner’s “Snopes Trilogy” of novels), and in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Penny’s fiancee, Vernon T. Waldrip, is the name of a character referred to in The Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem]. And some viewers have even noted a Faulkner reference in the Coen Brothers’ bowling movie, The Big Lebowski: as in the short story “Barn Burning,” a key plot point centers on the issue of a soiled rug.”

There you have it. William Cuthbert Faulkner (1897-1962), perhaps the only human being capable of spanning the aesthetic chasm between Ozzy Osbourne and Jackie Treehorn. That Faulkner. He really tied the room together.