I didn’t have to do that this time around. This time around, NYU came to me with the same certainty as USC; all that’s left is getting in.

Which meant I felt I should familiarize myself with some of the work of some of the faculty members, the stand-outs of whom include E.L. Doctorow and Jonathan Safran Foer. Neither of whom I’ve ever read. Nothing against them, just never seemed like my thing; I’d rather read Neil Gaiman and Harry Potter and Joe Hill, most of the time. For me, the novels whose scope doesn’t stretch much beyond characters coping with ordinary lives have never really excited me so much. I’ve tried reading guys like Tom Wolfe and John Updike, and I generally feel decidedly meh about them. I hate to call it “serious” fiction, if only because it seems to imply that people like Gaiman and Rowling aren’t serious about writing and stories, and I think that’s foolhardy. I’d hate, too, though, to attempt to claim it’s all about marketing, because it’s really not.

Before this becomes a discussion of genre in fiction, though, let’s move on to the reading. Because the first book I picked up was Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

It’s his second novel, after Everything is Illuminated, which I started but never got far into because it felt both too gimmicky and like it was trying to be too clever by half but not at all succeeding; it’s about a writer named Jonathan Safran Foer who travels to the Ukraine to explore his family’s history, and it’s interspersed with letters from his translator/guide or something, whose name I can’t recall, who speaks in busted English and names his dog Sammy Davis Junior Junior. For this, Foer received a giant advance and a breathless blurb from Joyce Carol Oates.

All at the tender age of, like, 25, or something.

(Me, jealous? Well, okay. Maybe a little)

But really, I picked it up originally because I was curious. Having always wanted to be a literary wunderkind myself (I’m probably now too old, alas), I had to see what the guy was doing that I wasn’t (I couldn’t figure anything out, myself). So, eventually, like, 20 pages in, I set it aside (because life’s too short for books you don’t like), filing it away as Not My Thing.

Can’t judge an author by a single work, though, and so now, several years after that fact, I picked up Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which concerns a young boy named Oskar whose father was in a meeting at Windows on the World on September 11th, 2001. The book ostensibly focuses on Oskar’s quest; early on, he finds in his father’s closet a key within an envelope on which is written “black,” and he sets out across New York to meet every person surnamed Black he can find and, hopefully, the lock the key fits.

I say “ostensibly” because it’s obviously not about the quest, as evidenced by the resolution thereof (which I’ll not spoil, but then again, which can’t really be spoiled if only because that’s not what it’s about); really, it’s about a boy whose lost his dad and coping with grief and loss. It’s at least partly about how we mourn; just about every character in the novel has lost someone, and each has learned ways to cope with the loss. Of course, really, it’s about more than that, too, not to mention less than that, because Foer manages something really difficult; he trusts his story.

Still, sometimes too clever. For example, the three pages that are all numbers because they’re supposed to be a long text message, but without spaces or punctuation (and yes, I reached for my cell to see if I couldn’t figure out what it said). Also, some of the text tricks, like when, at one point, a particular character claims to be running out of room, and so he makes his writing smaller and closer, until finally the text starts to overrun itself and becomes just all ink, margin to margin. Which correlates to the character’s words, I guess, except for the fact that it’s set in whatever typeface as the rest of the book, and shrinking a font doesn’t really so much correlate to writing smaller; if anything, I’ve always found that typing allows me more room on the page. And it’s not like the character in question didn’t have access to a typewriter . . .

Also, Oskar’s voice: still a bit gimmicky as the translator character from Everything is Illuminated.

All that said, though, I dug the novel. It might not have come together as successfully as it could have, nor been told in as linear a fashion as I’m used to, but I do give Foer credit both for his ambition and his attempts to follow it. Sure, it’s flawed, and it’s nowhere near perfect, but then again, it seems to attempt a lot more than most books do, and I think that does count for something. Who was it who said that man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else what’s a heaven for? Because this was sort of like that.

On a scale of infinite jest to excellent fancy, I think I’m going to give it a What the?, which I would hope would give both Foer and Oskar light boots.

I’m not sure why I never picked it up before; I’m familiar enough with Hill’s family that I probably should have based on that alone. You see, Hill’s real name is Joseph Hillstrom King. He is the son of Stephen (yes, that Stephen King) and the brother of Owen, which means that his father’s Needful Things is the reason I’m a writer, and I’ve shaken his brother’s hand and heard him read. On the other hand, that was probably Joe’s intention; he dropped his surname in favor of an abbreviated version of his middle name to distance himself from his family’s legacy. To which I really only say two things: why?, and mission accomplished.

Actually, that’s a bit disingenuous; I sort of get why he might (though I don’t know how I should refer to him? King? Hill? I’m going to go with Just Joe, if only because I don’t think he’d mind. Also: because this is one of those rare novels that makes you want to have a drink with its author, and for that reason alone it is fine). His brother Owen’s novella/collection, We’re All in this Together, was terrific on its own but markedly different from anything his father might have written; Heart-Shaped Box, on the other hand, is not so much, though that doesn’t mean it isn’t as good. In fact, it’s awesome.

Heart-Shaped Box‘s premise is simple; an aging rockstar named Judas Coyne buys a haunted suit off of an eBay-knockoff site, and chill-inducing story ensues. To tell you many details would be to give too much away; suffice to say, what makes H-SB so truly excellent is that it’s not just a ghost story; it’s a story about haunting, and all the different things that can haunt a person, in as many ways as a person can be haunted. Judas is a haunted man, but he’s haunted long before the ghost shows up; by his former career, by his family, by his past, by his former lovers . . .

The novel is partly confronting the ghost (as any good ghost story ought and need be), but also about confronting the past, and confronting yourself, and that’s why it ends up becoming more than the sum of its words. As I said, I get why Just Joe published away from the King legacy; there are marks of King all over this book, from its pop culture references to its repetition of certain phrases to its ghost itself. When the ghost tells Jude it wants to “ride the nightroad,” well, if that doesn’t conjure early-era Stephen King, you must not have read him back then. Nowadays it’s all “smucking” and lame-o Lisey or whathaveyou, but Stephen King used to be able to write the bejesus out of most stories, and Just Joe has certainly inherited that trait.

The book is not perfect, mind you; the ending, I thought, was particularly flawed, but then again, that’s another mark of Stephen, who can tell stories better than anyone else until he gets to the end. But besides that, there are so many subtle touches, so many graceful notes . . . it really does work. And though it wasn’t a book I couldn’t put down, it was a book whose characters I cared about when I did, and that, I think, is even more important. Just Joe’s descriptions of his characters can border on too spare, but that ends up working because I ended up conjuring them in my head; I’m not sure there ever was a full-on, dead-to-rights description of Judas Coyne, but still I feel like I know the guy. Hell, more than that, I feel like I’ve listened to his music, and that, that, right there, is a sort of sleight of hand most writers simply cannot pull off.

Also, that I can say you totally need to read the Acknowledgements section is another coup. I mean, how often do you say that? “Dude, the book was awesome. And the acknowledgements page? Totally rocked.”

Yes, well done sir. Well done indeed.

I know I’m supposed to rate the book, because I always see book reviews doing so, so, on a scale of Black Rain to Paranoid, I’m giving it a “Crazy Train.”

Click the link to buy the book at Amazon.com:

Heart-Shaped Box: A Novel

For the most part.

(Neil Gaiman muses on his spot at #3 on this list.)

Actually, I think Neil’s right. The list seems a little… off. I mean, J.R.R. “motherfuckers walking, my novel’s are the literary definition of plot coupon” Tolkien at number 2?

I do like Pratchett, though.

My top five, in no particular order, would be Neil, Terry, Stephen King, Jo Rowling, and Jonathan Carroll. With a further five to Joe Hill, Jo Walton, Richard Cox, Will Shetterly, and Audrey Niffenegger.

My only comment is I hope whoever it was found whatever he or she was looking for.

Also, I’ve decided a further use for et cetera: I’m going to keep a running booklog there, with reviews. Put the first one up today: Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box, which I thought was pretty damned brilliant (I ended up rating it a “Crazy Train.” You’ll have to read the review to find out what that means. But it makes sense if you do).

Anyway, probably quiet this weekend; lots of horrible writing to do.