So, Afghanistan pretty much sucks.

Not inherently, of course. (I’m sure it’s lovely in the springtime.) But it’s had various inhabitants over the past 30-odd years that have made it really hard to kick back and enjoy the scenery. Especially if you’re a girl.

Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns has oft been described to me as “the sequel to The Kite Runner, told from a woman’s point of view.” That’s half true; it’s not a sequel (as I mentioned in an earlier post), but it is told entirely from the perspectives of two women. The novel begins with Mariam, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy man. Forced to marry, Mariam finds herself wedded to a strict husband whose brutal tendencies begin to emerge as she proves incapable of bringing a child to term. After nearly twenty miserable years, Mariam’s husband takes another wife, Laila—a beautiful young woman, newly and secretly pregnant, who agrees to marry so she can save her reputation and protect her absent lover’s unborn child. The relationship between the two imprisoned and abused wives is the essence of the story.

I’m having a hard time pinpointing what I think about this novel. The writing is good; the story is good. And it does an excellent job of exposing the misery and helplessness endured by women in the clutches of an extremist society. But I do think Hosseini veers toward the simplistic in both his books, creating bad men who are too one-sided to be interesting. Of course, his subjects are abusive husbands and Taliban bigwigs: what choice does he have? Still, I would say that at times his “big” stories and “bad” characters undermine the best parts of his novels—those that bypass the inarguable evils and explore simple humanity.

…this is what it seems we can expect from Khaled Hosseini. I just finished the man’s second work, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and will review it here soon. But the book got me thinking about the relationship between branding and creativity, and I just had to share.

Hosseini of course is famous for his super-selling first novel, The Kite Runner, a story about a boy growing up in Afghanistan who later comes to the United States, eventually returning to his native country to fight (one member of) the Taliban and make amends for childhood crimes. Then came A Thousand Splendid Suns in 2007. I can’t count how many people have told me that this was the sequel to The Kite Runner.

But I just read it. And it’s not a sequel. It’s a book that happens to be set in Afghanistan, a book whose cover has the same color scheme and typesetting as Hosseini’s first—but a book with completely different characters.

It may be a simple mistake, yes. But I wonder how much the “branding” of literary authors affects what they write and how readers perceive what they write. It used to be that only genre authors were expected to produce the same kind of book over and over, but more and more I see literary authors being “tracked” in the same way. Oh, Khaled Hosseini writes about Afghanistan. Oh, Mitch Albom writes sappy stuff. So-and-so writes about lonely coal miners. Every book might as well be a sequel because the major characteristics don’t change.

I think it says a lot about our shifting reasons for reading literary fiction. The repetitive nature of genre fiction makes some sense: readers are often looking for a certain kind of repeated experience when they pick up a thriller, mystery, or romance novel. But the reasons for reading literary fiction used to be, I think, quite different: readers wanted a unique experience each time. They didn’t want the same book. They didn’t want the same themes. They didn’t want the book to conjure the same emotions. They didn’t want to look at a novel’s cover and instantly associate it with the author’s fourteen previous offerings.

Maybe it’s just me. I have always admired authors with broad talent, those who tackle varied subjects, characters, and approaches. That’s not to say writers don’t have their favorite themes and trademark styles; that’s always been the case. But today’s authors—at least the bestselling ones—seem to write in a much narrower range than writers of yore. And I wonder if the current obsession with branding is increasingly going to prevent talented authors from branching out, pressure them to remain within one tiny niche for the duration of their careers.

I truly hope not. One of the best things about reading literary fiction—about reading anything, in my view—is the element of surprise. And I don’t mean which bad guy will die first or how. I mean what the book will really be about, the questions and themes it will raise in my mind. For reading to be intellectually valuable, I think it has to be at least somewhat diverse.

So if Khaled Hosseini writes another novel about Afghanistan, I probably won’t read it. Not because I don’t like his writing. But because I don’t want a brand—I want a book.

Sometimes it’s just nice to read a book about people. Even if they are sort of spoiled, whiny people. I liked Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, though for the longest time I thought it was a book about China. You know, emperors…China. And since I’d just read Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, I held off.

But I was so wrong. Instead it’s about a handful of rather self-indulgent New York literati, their neurotic insides entertainingly illuminated by Messud’s witty hand. I didn’t think it a particularly profound book, but it’s a good character novel nonetheless—a great way to disappear for a while in the heads of some charming strangers and their secrets and lies.

Messud does take a bit too long, in my opinion, to bring all the storylines together (about half the book), but once they meshed, I was hooked. I always find it fascinating to read about young East Coast writers, who seem to score appointments at national literary magazines just by flashing their English degrees and tossing their hair. That s*** just doesn’t happen in California, no matter how good you are.

I just knew that something really sick and wrong would happen to me if I wrote Why We Read What We Read. All this knowledge had to come at some serious spiritual cost; and while I knew I looked at books differently than I had before, I didn’t fully realize just how deeply my depraved new mentality had taken hold. Not until the other day when, for absolutely no explicable reason, I found myself checking out Kingdom Come, the sequel to the Left Behind series, from the library.

I am the last person who has any business reading this book. I bitched and moaned through all 12 volumes of Left Behind. I was so happy when Jesus finally showed up in Glorious Appearing, the last book, gutting all the nonbelievers and saving me from reading any more.

And yet there I was with the sequel in my hand.

What I have since come to see is that even when the devil is locked up tight, the world and the flesh still wreak havoc on our tender and temptable souls. (I learned from Kingdom Come that Satan, the world, and the flesh comprise the legs of the “three-legged stool of evil” (51)—a terrifying piece of furniture indeed!) The world got me big time, that’s for sure, taking advantage of the ragingly morbid curiosity that keeps me reading bad books and avoiding my formerly wholesome ways.

But enough on my spiritual decline: A summary/refresher is in order! The Left Behind books are the literary offspring of a minister, Tim LaHaye, and a writer, Jerry B. Jenkins, who teamed up to present their vision of the Rapture—the day that God whisks his Christian faithful to heaven and leaves everyone else to deal with plagues and general persecution. Called the “most successful Christian-fiction series ever” by Publishers Weekly, the Left Behind books have sold about a bajillion copies, converted thousands to Christianity, and pissed off countless others with their hardcore fundamentalist values and unapologetically literal interpretation of the Bible.

The original 12 books of the series detail the events of the Tribulation—the seven-year period between the Rapture and the reappearance of Christ on earth—focusing on a handful of principal characters and a full ensemble cast as they attempt to thwart the Antichrist and turn as many souls to Jesus as they can. Kingdom Come, then—the sequel—covers Jesus’ 1000-year reign of peace after the Antichrist is gone, Satan confined, and nonbelievers snuffed.

You’re probably wondering why a book needs to be written about a thousand-year reign of peace. But the authors have heard this one before and, as always, they have a ready answer:

Do you ever wonder whether this thousand years that precedes the new heaven and the new earth might be boring? Yes, Jesus will be there, He whom we all have longed to see and worship in person ever since we became believers. But with only the like-minded there—at least initially—what will everyone do? Sit around and worship? (xliii)

That’s a good bit of it, but the authors encourage us to “imagine euphoria that shows no sign of abating” as an antidote to the repetition. Still, they seem to realize that endless euphoria does not a novel make. After the characters get settled in the new world—where the rivers literally run with milk and wine, where leopards eat leaves and snuggle with bears, where humans too are vegetarians except for the occasional random festival when Jesus gets a hankering for a hearty rib-eye (38)—the book jumps 95 years later to some (marginally) more troubling times.

Aging works differently in the Millennial Kingdom. Those who were Raptured, or who died during the Tribulation, have “glorified bodies” and forever look their hottest. But those who were still alive when Jesus arrived simply age more slowly. People less than a century old look and act like adolescents, and it is these squirrelly youngsters that cause the book’s main conflict.

See, at this stage God allows all children 100 years to become believers. Anyone who doesn’t will die on his or her hundredth birthday. And yes, even though Jesus is a flesh-and-blood reality for everybody at this point, there are still those who refuse to accept His dominion over their lives. They keep their doubts hidden, forming a secret society called The Other Light (TOL) where they worship Lucifer and hope to pass their message on through the remaining nine centuries—even though they themselves will die—to the day when Satan is released and (they retardedly think) will somehow take God’s spot and bring them all back to life. They spend their remaining few years livin’ it up with drugs and whores.

These are typical Left Behind tactics. Some of the holdouts make good sense, explaining that God offers them no true free will, only a choice that is no choice at all. The authors seem to understand this complaint, but then they can’t resist muddying up its adherents with devil-worship and drug use. Questioning why it’s God’s way or the highway is portrayed as nothing more than teenage rebellion. And, let’s face it, the nonbelievers in this book just look like empty-headed twits. What’s needed here is what’s been missing all along in this series—an acknowledgment that a God who does things like send plagues, viciously slaughter unbelievers, and impose arbitrary time limits for conversion just might not be all that nice a guy. Admitting that doesn’t actually mean one has to worship Lucifer.

But the point of Kingdom Come, ultimately, is not really to explore these questions, or even to tell a compelling story. It pretends to do both, but it honestly offers about half the depth and effort of the earlier novels (and that’s, holy crap, really saying something). On it own, it won’t convert and it won’t entertain. All it can really do is make today’s real-life Christians feel good about 1) themselves and 2) their proselytizing by further simplifying the religious debate, basically eliminating the intriguing emotional struggles that the protagonists experienced in the preceding books. Even Jesus seems lazy this time around: at the end of the Millennium, He vaporizes the billions of devil-worshippers in an instant, rather than spilling their blood by hand as he so enjoyed doing in Glorious Appearing.

So, I gotta say, this is just a book that didn’t need to be written. All of the Left Behind novels lack suspense—mainly because the characters are always telling us what is going to happen—but this one is by far the most wanting of dramatic tension. Nothing happens! Nothing matters! Let’s hope Kingdom Come was exactly what it seemed to be: a final dabble that allowed the authors to say goodbye to these characters and move on. With any luck their future efforts will lie elsewhere, but as long as the three-legged stool of evil is in the world, one can never tell.

(My own closure came in the form of this little parody of “Jesus Loves Me.” Enjoy!)

Much of our recent trip to Madrid was paid by conference organizers, who had booked John to teach a workshop and give a talk the last three days we were there. How exciting! we thought. Four free nights in a fancy hotel!

It turned out to be the Worst Hotel in Europe. By “worst,” I don’t mean shabbiest or scariest. That’s what was so devilish about the Auditorium Madrid. When you pull up, it looks fine. But just a few steps past the respectable lobby and you start to notice the weird decorations and creepy paintings (dead dogs! how inviting!), the looming warehouse feel. After negotiating block after block of stacked halls, you finally turn down the one you’ve been assigned, shards of cheap berber carpet burrowing into your nostrils. Your room holds a pair of mattresses with bulging springs, everything drenched in stale choking smoke and the kind of lighting that makes you want to drink yourself to death.

This place. Man, what can I say? From a distance, it looks like a Soviet prison. From the inside, it looks like The Shining.

But all I had to do was sleep there, right? If only! The hotel is charmingly located off a freeway near the airport in nearby Barajas. You literally cannot walk out of there safely. The hotel has no store (!), no vending machines (!!)—and the city of Madrid is a 15-minute drive away, a $30 cab ride each way. There’s a restaurant in the hotel, but it’s equally expensive and bordering on inedible. Trapped, depressed, and starving, I took to hoarding crumbs in our room, trying to make meals out of tiny oranges and stale bread.

Yet this soul-sucking place turned out to be the perfect location to read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Always on the brink of death, McCarthy’s postapocalyptic protagonist shepherds his young son through a poisoned world. Ash falls constantly from the sky; plants and animals have ceased to exist. And other human survivors are no consolation: most have become murderous thugs, teeth “claggy with human flesh” (64). The man and the boy (their only appellations in the book) must be smart and wily, searching constantly for preserved foods that somehow eluded earlier seekers—and evading the depraved survivors who would kill and eat them.

By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond. (152-53)

Never have I envisioned such an ugly world, yet rarely have I encountered such beautiful writing. McCarthy’s style shifts from spare to breathless and back again, its diction always delightful. His frequent use of fragments upset me at first, but I soon fell into the rhythm of the narrative—a combination of brief dialogue and the man’s stream of consciousness—and forgave the author all his grammatical indiscretions. (This is not an invitation to my writing students, however, to follow suit.)

The writing makes this book. The vision is disturbing; the premise is compelling; but it’s the writing that makes the story a Pulitzer Prize winner. Even at its simplest, it conveys not only the horror, barrenness, and loneliness of McCarthy’s ravaged planet, but the unflinching devotion between parent and child, the struggle to maintain both morality and dignity in a world that rewards only the most inhuman and ruthless.

The boy looked down the road.
I want you to tell me. It’s okay.
He shook his head.
Look at me, the man said.
He turned and looked. He looked like he’d been crying.
Just tell me.
We wouldn’t ever eat anybody, would we?
No. Of course not.
Even if we were starving?
We’re starving now.
You said we weren’t.
I said we weren’t dying. I didn’t say we weren’t starving.
But we wouldn’t.
No. We wouldn’t.
No matter what.
No. No matter what.
Because we’re the good guys.
Yes.
And we’re carrying the fire.
And we’re carrying the fire. Yes. (108-09)

The Road had a powerful effect on me. On the one hand, trapped in the Worst Hotel in Europe with no food and some seriously grim lighting, I related wholeheartedly to the man’s struggle. On the other hand, I actually enjoyed escaping into McCarthy’s fictional landscape, which was so much worse than my real-life one and yet so beautifully rendered that I couldn’t stay away. Still, it was all so dark. Shifting my attention back and forth between hotel and book, I grew increasingly depressed and really started to sympathize with the protagonist’s long-gone wife, who took herself out when she realized that being raped and eaten was not really how she wanted things to end.

Luckily, in the brink of time, a plane came and whisked me out of that hellhole and returned my suicidal depression levels to normal. But The Road is definitely still with me, perhaps even more so now that my stomach is full and my lighting is cheerful. The Road is haunting. It’s wonderful. Look at it this way: it was so good, even staying at the Auditorium Madrid Hotel was worth it.

*

John’s song about the hotel, sung to the tune of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”:

Trapped here in the Hotel Auditorium
Only five years old and strangely drab
Lord I hope the hotel shuttle bus will come
Because it’s 20 euros just to catch a cab.

There’s no doubt gonna shout let me out – BRA!
La la la la let me out
There’s no doubt gonna shout let me out – BRA!
La la la la let me out

Bridge:
In a couple of hours you are feeling negative
In a couple of days you are so depressed
You’ve lost your will to live

(At that point he lost his will to live and couldn’t finish the song.)

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! We’re in Madrid for the holiday. I’d love to say I picked up the #1 Spanish-language bestseller, Ayuda! Hay un perro loco en los pantalones! —but that would require some Spanish skills about 1,800 levels greater than my own. We’re really great at starting conversations—”una mesa para cuatro, por favor”—but inevitably the target responds, dousing us in light-speed syllables that sap us of all hope and self-esteem. “No entiendo,” we finally whimper. At least, unlike John, I have not ordered a goat instead of a beer.

In between gross faux pas I have been reading the books I carted along with me, starting with Suite Francais by Irene Nemirovsky—a woman whose name contains unsettling, multi-directional accents that I am far too lazy to figure out how to recreate. I can honestly say I’ve never read a novel like Suite—namely because it’s only 2/5 of one, the only sections that Nemirovsky was able to finish before she was arrested by the Nazis and murdered at Auschwitz. A Russian-born Jew living in Paris, Nemirovsky was a popular and well-regarded novelist in Europe when the Germans invaded France. Suite Francais was her attempt to capture the events she was witnessing firsthand, to explore the complex feelings and experiences of people in wartime.

Part one, “Storm in June,” follows several characters of varying classes as they flee Paris and the advancing German forces. The more narrowly-focused second part, “Dolce,” centers on a few important characters living in the French town of Bussy, where each family is forced to house a German soldier. Here Nemirovsky explores the relationships between the occupiers and the occupied, the struggle between nationalism and individualism that the French experience as they begin to get to know—and like—and even love—the conquering warriors.

Nemirovsky takes no sides here. She does not vilify either the individual German soldiers or the French women who warm to them. In fact it is usually the most huffily nationalistic and adamantly unsympathetic that serve as antagonists in both “Storm in June” and “Dolce.” Concern for others, openness to emotion, acknowledgment of a shared humanity—these are the characteristics that mark her protagonists.

Nemirovsky’s charity becomes chilling as one moves on to the appendices of Suite Francais. The first contains excerpts of her notes on the novel, showing how the first two parts—somewhat disconnected—were to cohere later on; the second is a collection of letters chronicling Nemirovsky’s steadily worsening situation and eventual disappearance.

I’m not usually one to care about author biographies, but in relationship to the unfinished novel I found the appendices both moving and terrible. They play the part of the unwritten three sections, reinforcing Nemirovsky’s thematic intentions, but also somehow making an even larger, stronger statement about the senselessness and evil of prejudice and hate. Nemirovsky had no illusions about what would befall her; as early as 1941 she suspected her end. Yet she wrote in her notes: “I swear here and now never again to take out my bitterness, no matter how justifiable, on a group of people, whatever their race, religion, convictions, prejudices, errors” (342).

As we’ve seen throughout contemporary fiction, villains are those without empathy; heroes are the ones who maintain the wisdom and grace to sympathize, connect, and forgive. Reading Suite Francais, I see more clearly than ever that such distinctions are not confined to imaginary worlds alone.