The Eventual Gander: The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs.

If I can't come up with an aphorism to start this review with, at least I can think of one to ignore completely: Alexander McCall Smith's The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs has a fine cover. Of course this doesn't matter in any book you're reading for literary merit, which would have the same intrinsic value whether it was read out loud, Morse'd over a telegraph or even read hunched over a Palm Pilot with a screen too small and too dim for true appreciation. But this is not a book of "literary merit". It is, at best, a good way to feed a habit of pseudo-intellectualism. When I saw this book lying on the table at Kepler's, my mouth started salivating and my neurons releasing endorphins in the same anticipation a junkie must feel at that first call of "Crack rock ho!" (ho, here, in the "Land Ho!" sense, not the Noelle Bush sense).

That I, a pseudo-intellectual on the way up would stoop to the level of paying $9.95 for 128 pages of tripe might seem paradoxical. But this is not a book to be read, it is a book to be consumed. The aforementioned cover has texture, two colors of ink, and no fewer than four well-designed fonts all selected to contrast their roles to one another. Framed in the center is a delightful illustration of a dachshund, sized up in anatomical consideration. If all this detail sounds like pretension, that is only because this is pretension of the highest kind. It is not exclusionary, it is not off-putting. It is simply something that is to be enjoyed.

My editors tell me I should, at some point, get to the book itself. The staff at my local bookorium had placed it in Sci-Fi/Mystery. But this tome eschews such a simple taxonomic view of writing, instead labeling itself "A Professor Dr. von Igelfeld Entertainment." What this means is that it has the same sort of bumbling main character, intrigue, and rich detail that a mystery has, but without any of that pesky murder, whodunit, or actual matter to be investigated. The result is a travel tale without any real root in plot, truth, history, or narrative necessity. It is as if Dr. McCall Smith is asking us to take a vacation not only from our own lives in reading this text, but to take a vacation from what we think an author properly ought to do.

Dr. von Igelfeld, the protagonist, is a hugely compelling character, and I hope to read the other two books starring him to see if perhaps he was developed in something that approached a true adventure at some point. He has the powers of neither perception nor deception. The result being that slights uncommitted are paid back in slights unnoticed. His worldview is, at times, beyond simplistic: he is the author of a scholarly text, "Portugese Irregular Verbs" and that should put him beyond reproach or question. Anyone who thinks otherwise does not understand the way the system works. His administrative prowess is best demonstrated when he asks, of a religious conflict, "If he were the Patriarch, the could he not unilaterally put an end to schism simply by expelling schismatics? That is what von Igelfeld himself would have done."

Sure, I could quibble about the narration (switches point-of-view arbitrarily and not enough to be a true device. A choice made rarely enough is only a crutch.) But why? This is an enormously fun and quick read. The intellectual equivalent of slapstick opens it up as he is mistakenly sent to lecture on the Sausage Dog (the beginning of the intertwined confusions) and, out of a desire not to offend his host, never corrects the impression. Puns in turn lead to surgery on one of the elongated beasts by our Philologist hero with the expectedly disastrous results somehow leading to an interaction between our man and (an extreme farce of) the Bishop of Rome (a caricature felt all the more deeply in this Papal intermission).

It is not hard to see how Faulkner's prose is a deep cigar. Something you sit down with for hours on end, to appreciate its complexities and how its flavor changes as you go on. Hemingway is a pipe: a completely different way of looking at the habit. Sure, you don't inhale and you smoke less less often, but it's a more potent smoke. Which is the more dangerous? Who could ever compare the two? A subscription to The New Yorker is, then, like an addiction to Camel Lights: You remember that you wanted to start, but now it's a chore instead of a pleasure and you can't quite remember *why* you wanted to start. On this scale, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs is a pack of Nat Shermans or Dunhills: you pay more for its luxurious packaging and beneficial image. In short, it can be recommended for everything but its substance.

Jugdgment: Keep one on your shelf, as a rainy-day reading list. To be opened only in times of extreme depression or boredom when even other fare as light on the intellectual scale as an Austen or a Chabon would be cerebral overload.

The Eventual Gander

(Schiavo/PopeWatch 2k5: Mortality always wins)

Here at the Enfranchised, we read a lot. Just... not quickly. So, hitherwith, we introduce our review masthead: The Eventual Gander. That's not to say we'll review anything less than the pinnacle and forefront of pseudo-intellectual circles. As the saying goes: What's good for the prompt goose is good for the eventual gander.

Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons

When Ansel Adams passed away, he willed the negatives of all of his photographs as a tangible possession. Celebrity worship aside (in the current day and age a man of his stature could leave a receipt on a table after dinner and find it on eBay by dessert), he did this because he felt they had value. To him, taking a picture was composed of two equally important steps: first exposing the film to capture an image, and then turning this semi-Platonic abstraction into bona fide hangible art through the process of printing. Writing is like this too, and in I am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe has succeeded admirably at the first but managed to hide that fact beneath severe stumbling in the second.

Without appearing too pathetic, allow me to say that Wolfe is spot-on in many instances. Speaking of that opportunity to slip one's alma mater into conversation, he writes (of the fictional Dupont College), "Everyone, male or female, who was right now, as he was, in the undergraduate division, Dupont College, or had ever graduated from Dupont College knew that feeling, treasured that feeling, sought one way or another to enjoy that feeling daily if at all possible, now and for the rest of his life". If this sounds horribly pretentious and off-putting, well, it is. Which is why, he continues, "no Dupont man... had ever tried to describe it out loud to a living soul." He continues to observe the intermittent cycle of a freshman's life: from the heights of arrogance to the troughs of self -doubt and -pity. This, of course, while the self is trodding through a life of intellectual luxury on someone else's tab with no responsibilities to speak of. Trivial matters such as sides of the room, borrowings of discs compact, unfounded crushes are such stuff as life and death are made during a co-ed's career. Translate to the language of rap, this would best be put, "Mo' Education, Mo' Problems."

He has his other bones to pick, of course. One of the title heroine's suitors is the star of a basketball team. Wolfe has applied his expert eye to the NCAA, endorsement deals, groupies, just about every morsel of the Big Man On Campus Phenomenon. He dissects feelings of parental shame and familial denial. These are all spot on observation, etc. Thus ends the positive portion of my review, such as it is.

The imperfections, on the other hand, are many. And yet, somehow, the critics got them wrong. Many were shocked at the lurid and, quite frankly, unarousing descriptions of intimacy he includes. Wolfe took home an award for worst sex scene of the year. What the committee missed was that it was not the worst scene of sex. It was a great scene of the worst sex. He distorts his writing because that is how it is in the trenches of modern fraternity houses and two-room doubles. But he never lets up. His writing is awkward and the characters stiff throughout the whole novel, as if college is something to be experienced for all eight semesters through a lens of discomfort. The result approximates a really interesting person with bad breath: you force your way through to the end because you know you will enjoy having heard it, even if the experience itself is excruciating.

One of nine-thousand and seventy-three sayings attributed to Mark Twain is "Show, Don't Tell." Wolfe apparently decided to piss on the House of Clemens. Well, okay, you say. Sometimes you just don't have the space to do all that. But in a book that winds through 676 pages and weighs enough to take down a gazelle if the situation arises, you think he really could have pointed out that athletics is a golden ticket with more subtlety than "the sweet irony was that [basketball player extraordinaire but less-than-stellar-academician] had wound up at a better university than Eric [(the smarter but less-baller brother)]."

The bigger issue is that this is Tom Wolfe. At every turn, in every nook of prose and cranny of words, you can see the man in his white suit typing out this introduction to a new world. He shows off, dropping terms as if they were names. He clues in the reader to the lingo: "dormcest" is mentioned by an "RA" as a type of "hooking up". And yet the actual act is still "rutting", which is often preceded by simulation of the "mons veneris" and the "ilial crest". Thanks Tom. Just what I needed: a newly old man to turn his attention to my home to tell me how bad it is, all the while knowing that he really wants to be back there. To be where the culture is being made, where it is being blindly felt in the backseat of an Escalade on the way to a formal. Your criticism would mean a lot more if it weren't compensation for jealousy.


In the end, I am Charlotte Simmons should never be allowed in the fiction section of a bookstore. Instead, copies of it should be relegated to that part of a college bookstore next to a sweatshirt bearing the (trademarked) logo of these cathedrals of learning, money, and semi-anonymized semi-drunk semi-dancing semi-sex. That way, when Mom and Pop come to visit Junior and Juniess, all settled into their dorms, they can pick up a hat or fanny pack for expressing their pride in public, and a copy of I am Charlotte Simmons for abating their curiosity and empty nesting in private.