Favorite Fictions

My brother sent me a list of his ten favorite novels, so I sent him mine. Based on that list, I came up with this...

Favorite Fiction Stuff

1. Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
2. The Makioka Sisters by Junchiro Tanizaki
3. The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth
4. Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordecai Richler
5. From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line, and Whistle by James Jones
6. Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
7. The Parker Novels by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake)
8. The Shining by Stephen King
9. Kokoro by Natsume Soseki
10. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
11. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
12. The Bridesmaid & Death Notes by Ruth Rendell
13. Farmer in the Sky (and all the other "juveniles") by Robert A. Heinlein
14. The Tales of Jacob by Thomas Mann
15. The Maigret Novels by George Simenon

I'll probably go back and provide some commentary for this list at a later date. Right now, I'll note that it looks like I'm not a huge fan of short stories: in this case, looks aren't deceiving, although I should also point out that I'm not really a huge fan of long novels, either.

These are all books that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend to (just about) anyone.

Currently...

What I'm Watching: More or less the same as before.

Veronica Mars came back from a break with a particularly bad episode about how discrimination is, like, wrong. It isn't so much that I disagree, but when a show does this kind of thing - see also the recent Battlestar Galactica ep with Bruce Davison which was also about how discrimination is wrong - I have to wonder why they even bother. I mean, do the people who make Veronica Mars and Battlestar really think that their audience wants a little civics lesson? Especially simple, cut-and-dried civics lessons like these? The problem with them is that they make it all so easy that it becomes boring: the characters get to do the noble thing and "doing the noble thing" doesn't really cost them anything. There's no drama because their choices turn out to be either (a) really easy and/or (b) free of consequences. Man, how I hate these "very special episodes".

More problems with Veronica: Scene-by-scene, the show has handled the relationship stuff pretty well, but the problem is that the writers have had pretty lame ideas when it comes to the bigger picture. Veronica Mars should not be The O.C., where characters are constantly jumping in-and-out of relationships every other episode. We already had Logan and Veronica breaking-up and getting back together and breaking-up and getting back together again, so, this season they should have tried to show us Veronica and Logan trying to work through their issues - to dramatize a relationship in progress rather than a relationship always on the verge of collapsing or reforming.

Now, about The Sopranos: I've read a bunch of internet critics complaining that Tony's gambling problem came out of nowhere next week and that Chase et al. should have (a) used something else to dramatize Tony losing his grip or (b) spent more time setting-up the gambling stuff. I don't know: I like to nitpick as much as the next blogger, but I think this criticism is off-base. I mean, would you really like The Sopranos better if it were a "well-constructed" show, carefully setting up all of its threads, developing and resolving them on cue, like, say, E.R.? Not a slam at E.R., a show I like quite a bit, but, even when it resolves things in an unexpected manner, it pretty clearly lays out all the conflicts and issues for you. The last three seasons of The Sopranos have been a lot messier. And almost all of the episodes from Season Six have featured some "out of nowhere" element that a more cautious show would have spent some time introducing. Part of why these elements work, for me at least, is that Chase et al. have already laid the groundwork. I mean, I completely buy that Tony would like to gamble, that he'd respond to stress by gambling more, and that his marriage would be vulnerable to the resulting financial strain.

I like that the show makes these big, bold choices, even though it means that sometimes you just have to go along with it.

My personal Sopranos problem recently has been that I don't think Tony Siricco and Stevie Van Zandt are good enough actors to do what the scripts have asked them to do. Sylvio's play for Tony's position from the beginning of this season fell flat for me because it required Van Zandt to do more than just mug, likewise the recent episode that Tony spends gauging Paulie's reliability. Siricco and Van Zandt are both pretty funny and they're good personalities to have around - they add to the show's color - but they don't bring enough to the table as actors to justify the (relative) importance of their characters. I've always though it was a big mistake that Chase et al. had Sylvio kill Adriana because Van Zandt can't really do anything else with it - i.e., can't turn it into something that comes up - or noticeably doesn't come up - in Sylvio's scenes with Christopher.

Finally, the difference between Heroes when it started - stumbling, badly-paced, erratically-acted, but with some good ideas - and Heroes now - written, directed, and acted with assuredness and a sense of style - is (in the debased context of contemporary pop culture) staggering, mainly because most of the time shows go in the opposite direction.

What I'm Reading: It was a bit of a chore to finish The Flying Inn, which didn't quite work for me, although I'm sympathetic to Chesterton's basic philosophy and what he was trying to do with the book.

I'm still reading A Fire Upon the Deep, which, I have to admit, I like a little less than I did 100 or so pages ago. The main problem I have is that there's really no reason for it to be such a long book. Yes, it's full of ideas, but Vinge spends too much time on narratively redundant details that, I guess, are necessary from a world building POV.

I also (finally) read Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy. I always see sci-fi fans recommending Have Spacesuit Will Travel when it comes to RAH's juveniles. I think that book is pretty enjoyable, but Citizen of the Galazy, IMO, would be a better choice: it has a more expansive scope, the world building is more interesting, there isn't too much of the "gee whiz rocketships" vibe, and it strikes me as being more in the mainline of the sci-fi that has come afterwards (esp. "New Space Opera" stuff).

And I'm rereading the Russell Kirk edited Portable Conservative Reader. I've just gotten through the opening section of Edmund Burke excerpts and am tempted to start posting some quotes that are particularly relevant to me and to the themes of this blog.

What I'm Listening To: Lots of classic rock, as I'm sure you could have guessed. Still looking for more podcasts.

What I'm Playing: Some Carcassonne with my fiance and a friend of ours this past weekend, plus more NASCAR 06. Still jonesing for RPGing and getting to the point where I'm actually going to have to, you know, do something about it. I was listening to a Durham 3 podcast today at the gym and that reignited my desire to play Sorcerer.

Currently...

What I'm Watching: The Sopranos, of course, and Heroes, now that it's back on. Other "must watch" TV in our apartment: the Food Network programs Throwdown with Bobby Flay and Dinner: Impossible, which is probably my second favorite show right now. My favorite is Tim and Eric's Awesome Show - Great Job!. I liked Tom Goes to the Mayor, Tim and Eric's first Cartoon Network show, quite a bit, but I think the Awesome Show format - more gags, less story - suits them better. Awesome Show seems to have solved the major problem of Mr. Show: it's too short to ever feel like it's gone on too long. Oh, also: trying to keep up with as much televised motor racing as possible.

What I'm Reading: I'm almost done with The Flying Inn by G.K. Chesterton, and, I have to admit, it's been a bit of a chore. I like Chesterton's mystery stories and I love his essays, but the combination of whimsy and philosophy here is almost too much. I'm also in the middle of VernorVinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, which I really like: there are about half-a-dozen "Big Ideas" here, each of which could serve as the basis for a single sci-fi novel. The writing is a little clumsy, but I've read worse novels that have been far less inventive. I'll probably post more about it when I'm done.

What I'm Listening To: Ever since I signed up to Rhapsody 3 1/2 months ago, I've been trying to keep up with "new music". In general, though, I find keeping up with "the scene" to be pretty tiresome. There seems to be so little difference between these new indie bands and the ones that were new when I was in college, and all of them sound like The Replacements (who were derivative to begin with). So, anyway, I have been listening to lots and lots ofLoudon Wainwright III, little bits of the Mountain Goats, and various kinds of film music (Goblin and John Carpenter and the Death Proof soundtrack). I've also been trying to find morepodcasts to listen to.

What I'm Playing: NASCAR 06: Total Team Control on my X-Box. I didn't get the most recent entry in this franchise partly because I'm in the middle of a season in this one and I was a little disappointed that this one wasn't that much better than the one that came before it. Hopefully my schedule will open up a little and I'll get someRPGing in soon. I don't think a regular game is anywhere in my future, but I'd like to try to work something out.

Book Chat: The Brooklyn Follies

The Brooklyn Follies

Paul Auster writes my favorite contemporary American lit-fic, probably because, unlike say Don DeLillo, he never skimps on the story, which he seems to care about for its own sake and not just as a framework for his ideas. The Brooklyn Follies is filled with incident, invention, and interesting characters, not to mention a couple of mysteries and some genuine (if momentary) thrills. It reminded me a lot of John Irving's early novels (especially The Hotel New Hampshire), but it's shorter and lot less heavy handed.

It is an English Major kind of novel though: there are references to Poe, Thoureau, Melville, Whitman, DeLillo; an important early scene revolves around a discussion of one of the character's senior thesis; the book's idea of paradise is being able to have the time to read all the books you'd want to read, and, oh, yeah, spend time with all the people you care about, too.

Like most of Auster's novels, there are stories within stories and a strong sense of approaching literature as a game to be played or a puzzle to be solved, but it's that addition of "all the people you care about" into the mix that distinguishes The Brooklyn Follies from Auster's last two novels. Those books - The Book of Illusion and Oracle Night - were more focused on the po-mo lit-fic gamesmanship and not so much on the larger world. This is a warmer book, almost a "feel good" book.

It doesn't end as well as it starts, not because Auster refuses to provide a satisfying ending a la DeLillo or takes a stab at ambiguity that feels a little bit too much like a cop out a la the recent Philip Roth novels, but because he tries to wrap everything up a little too neatly. I like that the book wears its politics on its sleeve (although at this date and considering Auster's audience, it isn't exactly an act of courage), but sometimes Auster's relatively schematic left-liberal worldview undermines his abilities as a novelist. Or rather, he's always been weakest (IMO) when it comes to creating characters, and so when filling out his casts he often resorts to stereotypes that will be recognizable to anyone who's kept up with American indie movies during the last 10 years. There's a Jamaican drag queen who's essentially a saint and a Southern Evangelic Christian who's the book's major monster. Structurally, the evil Christians show up at end, and Auster's somewhat condescending take on them wasn't enough to sour me on the book as a whole, but I wasn't as an enthusiastic fan of the book as I had been with fifty pages to go. (Also, IMO, the final paragraph was maybe a little redundant: I saw it coming from so far off that I felt a little let down that he made such a predictable move).

This lack of generosity and sympathy got me thinking about one of the few major American 19th Century Literary types who doesn't get mentioned in the book: my personal favorite, William Dean Howells. One of the things I like about a novel like A Hazard of New Fortunes is that Howells has affection for all of his characters, even if he treats their beliefs and ideologies with a bemused irony. The Brooklyn Follies could use a bit more of that, although, all-in-all, a pretty compelling, entertaining book.

A Fairly Short Post on Gore Vidal's Burr and Lincoln

Gore Vidal's "Narratives of Empire" books are by no means obscure - they're in print, easily available, and Vidal is perhaps America's most prominent "man of letters" - but I can't help but feel that they're a little underrated. At least these, the first two in the series, are among the most impressive (not to mention most enjoyable) "big" novels from the last 40 years or so that I've read. (By "'big' novels", I mean novels that have a great deal of ambition in terms of scope and themes and also have a subject that is a fit match to that ambition).

Lincoln is, understandably, the more serious installment, dealing, as it does, with the most important event in American history. Vidal's take on Lincoln is refreshingly ambiguous. But the book really shines when it comes to its depictions of the other politicians in war time Washington. My favorite: Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury and Lincoln's chief Republican rival. Burr is more gossipy and, through Burr, Vidal seems more interesting in tearing down idols. It's hard to decide who comes off worse, George Washington or Thomas Jefferson (right now I would say Jefferson), both of whom seem to be competing for the title of America's Greatest Hypocrite.

Vidal's take on politicians, in general, is one that I find myself nodding along to. It's certainly cynical: their great ideas and great statesmanship sometimes seem to get lost in the shadow of their even greater ambition. But, at the same time, the cynicism never turns mean-spirited. Vidal's irony is too sure and his touch too light for that. And he certainly seems to have some kind of admiration for these men and an appreciation for the feats they undertook to realize their ambitions.

Michael Blowhard floated the theory that the function of big novels like these was taken over by TV miniseries. I'd suggest that it's been taken over from those miniseries by shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, and Deadwood (which is Shakespearean in the same American way that these books are, but on a smaller scale and with a grungier cast). As much as I like these series, I can't help but feel that pop culture has lost something with the waning of the "blockbuster novel". These books operate on a scale and with a level of detail and intellectual sophistication that remains out of the grasp of even the best TV shows.

A Very Short Post on Elmore Leonard

In most crime novels (even really good ones), the criminals tend to be dangerous because they are smart or wiley or obsessed or possess some other kind of strength that makes them worthy opponents.This is understandable: writers want to give their heroes a challenge. So, if their protagonists are a cut above, their antagonists need to be, too. (A clear example of this is in the TV show Law & Order: Criminal Intent: Goren is always facing off in a battle of wits against some kind of extra-clever killer.)One of the things I like about Elmore Leonard's criminals is that they are dangerous because they are unpredictable and violent - even though they're usually not that bright. This strikes me as being a somewhat clearer-eyed take on the matter.

Blog Chat: Woody, Translations, Super Heroes

Half Sigma posts part one of his take on Woody Allen's Manhattan, a movie he obviously likes, but, refreshingly, isn't reverential about. I really like the commonsense analysis and the way Half Sigma brings the kind of sociological insights that anchor most of his posts to bear on the movie. Favorite line: "Does any woman really want to go to bed with the entire faculty of MIT? Does the faculty of MIT know about this?"

I've always been a little suspicious of the "no translations ever" crowd, so I was happy to see Thursday's very nice post on how translation relates to other interpretive arts. What's interesting to me is that by looking translation in this context, the anti-translation bias seems like a part of the phenomenon of book worship.

I haven't read either of the two comics that Marc Singer blogs about in this post, but I've read enough super hero comics that I completely buy the general point he makes.

Preferences

Commenting on Spengler's recent piece on modern art, Peter Suderman writes:

Really, I think the difference for the modern/abstract art and music lover, or at least for me anyway, is that while most people experience art and music in a fairly surface, sensory manner, and therefore gravitate, quite reasonably, toward art that's comfortable and pleasant feeling, I tend to experience art from a far more argumentative, analytical perspective. Most people prefer stuff that calms the senses; I, and a minority of other cantankerous folks (many of whom tend to be critic-types) prefer material that riles the mind. This is often a source of frustration for critic types who feel that everyone should follow their experience, and although I don't propose a solution, it does seem to me that critics and others of similar disposition should generally refrain from castigating general audiences for not getting something. (Other critics, however, are fair game.) [emp. mine]

I think this points to something that most everyone acknowledges during casual conversations about the arts, but that doesn't often make its way into on-the-page (or screen) critical writing: your preferences, background, etc. are going to play a huge role in determining what kinds of movies, books, music, etc. engages you, what kinds bore you, and what kinds just put you off.

For example, it doesn't surprise me at all that Grant Morrison was named the #1 comics writer by comics bloggers: his comics are written as if their primary purpose is to be blogged about. That is, they require and reward a certain kind of allegorical interpretation and symbolic puzzle solving that is enhanced by the cross-blog-pollination of interpretations and solutions.

Another favorite example (which I've stolen from Michael Blowhard), the canonization of Ulysses by academics probably has something to do with how well that book rewards academic-style reading and criticism.

I suppose I'd, er, prefer it if more critics would be up front about their own preferences. I mean, I know it's best to read any kind of value judgment in a piece criticism as if the author had stuck an "In my opinion" in front of it, but revealing personal preferences gives your audience a better handle on the way you approach art and makes your value judgments a lot more useful.

A Hazard of New Fortunes

At one time, William Dean Howells was considered one of the big guns of 19th C American Lit - up there with Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, etc. But (based on my research, i.e. reading the afterword to A Hazard of New Fortunes) his reputation seems to have taken a serious hit sometime after the rise of modernism and the kind of novels he wrote aren't that fashionable in lit-fic circles. I don't think too many people nowadays are familiar with his work, which is too bad, IMHO.

Anyway, here are some things I liked about the book, along with some half-assed speculations/generalizations about why Howells's star has faded:

1. The "Journalistic" Aspect - Probably the most striking/coolest thing about the book from the perspective of a resident of 21st C New York City is the picture it paints of late 19th C New York City life. For instance, there's a relatively large section in the early part of the book that is all about the problems of finding a suitable NYC apartment - it was very neat to compare what has changed (which neighborhoods were considered good) with what hasn't (finding an apartment is a pain in the ass). There's also lots of great stuff about how the relatively new Elevated Train changed the way people lived their lives (not to mention another chunk of the book that deals with early transit worker strikes).

One of my big beefs with modernist & post-modernist novelists is that, for the most part, they've given up on this journalistic/documentarian aspect of the novel. "A Hazard of New Fortunes" tries to convey a sense of what day-to-day life was like, in a very matter-of-fact, laid-back manner.

I think the journalistic aspect has faded for two major reasons: One, modernist and post-modernist novels seem to be much more focused on issues of Identity. Take Philip Roth's "Zuckerman Unbound" (chosen because this is one of my favorite novels, so I feel that I am allowed to pick on it a little): lots of stuff about what it means to be Jewish (of a contempo, secular bent) and what it means to be a writer who has taken his Jewishness as a subject but virtually nothing on what it is like to live in NYC during the 1960s. Not that Roth is under any obligation to provide any "documentary details", but when every novel becomes, essentially, What It Means to Be Me, lit-fic (as a whole) becomes dangerously close to being swallowed up by solipsistic quicksand. Two, I wonder if narrative film & TV have somewhat displaced the novel in this regard. That's a bigger, sociological question that I am completely unprepared to answer, though.

2. The Characters - Of course I enjoy reading about characters that I can "identify with", but I also really like it when I'm reading an older novel and come across characters I can identify from my life. For instance, one of the main characters in the book is an artist living the NYC bohemian lifestyle while being supported by his father (a laborer from Upstate): I can easily imagine a lot of the parent-supported bohemians that I know making the same kind of rationalizations that Howells's artist character does.

3. No Big Deal - Compared to the other 19th C American Lit I've read, Howells's books are pretty low key: they aren't epics or huge tragedies or searing indictments of anything. They're much more modest and operate on a very down-to-earth level. "A Hazard of New Fortunes" doesn't go after a Big Theme and, if it can be honestly said to be "About" anything (in the sense that students write papers about
how a novel is "about" something) it's about what life was like in NYC at the end of the 19th C and, somewhat more specifically, about how the economic realities of 19th C America shaped NYC society. But it goes about its business in a fairly unfocused manner. Howells isn't interested in the Great Capitalized Themes: Love, Death, Honor, Revolution, Evil, Progress, etc. Or rather, he's not interested in capitalizing any of these themes - they're all there, floating around, but none ever threatens to take over the book.

I think, to a certain extent, we overvalue Big, Searing, Great Novels and undervalue novels that might be just as good, but keep a much lower profile. Not that there's anything wrong with Big, Searing, Great Novels, but variety being the spice of life and all that. (By "we" here, I might mean "Americans", as it seems the Brits, for
example, have done a pretty good job of honoring lower-key, "domestic" authors, like Trollope, for instance).

Topic for Discussion: That Special Feeling...

A topic for discussion from something I wrote in the comments section of my last post:

I wonder if [Alan] Moore is "big" enough that someone will come along and do Moore "right" without actually, specifically adapting one his works. I'm thinking of the way Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind captured the low-rent sci-fi feel of Philip K. Dick's stories better than any of the official Dick adaptations.

So, we're talking about movies that aren't actual adaptations that "get" something about a writer better than any other movie, especially movies that are adapted directly from the writer's work.

The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind is my go-to example: it nails the next-week-in-Hoboken feel of Philip K. Dick's stories better than the big-budget, effects-packed movies that are actually adapted from them.

Another example: The Third Man, where Graham Greene and Carol Reed do a better job of bringing the sensibility of Eric Ambler's spy novels to the screen than the movies taken directly from Ambler's novels (even the ones where Ambler worked on the screenplays).

Do any other movies fit?

If I recall correctly, Pauline Kael made this kind of point about Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us and William Faulkner.

Some more of my own suggestions: 28 Days Later - J.G. Ballard's sci-fi novels, Fingers and Black & White - various pieces (essays, novels, etc.) by Norman Mailer.

Anyone else have any?

(As a starting place, here are a couple of authors who, I feel, haven't been done justice by the movies based on their work: Joseph Conrad, Jack Kirby, Donald E. Westlake. Elmore Leonard would have made this list if it weren't for Out of Sight.)

From the Archives: Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

I'd like to look at Pattern Recognition in three ways: (1) as a William Gibson novel, (2) as a descendent of and a variation on The Crying of Lot 49, and (3) as an attempt to deal with a post-9/11 world.

1) Though promoted as Gibson's first novel set in the present, Pattern Recognition reads almost exactly like one of his sci-fi novels. Maybe this is because the present looks more like the future everyday or it may be that Gibson's cyberpunk prophecy has come to pass. My own belief is that Gibson has always understood that you can find the future in the world around you, as long as you know where to look. And almost all of his novels, including Pattern Recognition, are about characters trying to find those places where the future reveals itself in the present.

In this case, our hero is Cayce Pollard, a "cool hunter," paid big bucks by corporations to sniff out the next big thing and to figure out future trends. In all of his novels, there's a loaded MacGuffin (i.e., a plot device that not only motivates the action but also has a symbolic meaning) that drives the story. In Neuromancer, it's AI, in Virtual Light, it's a pair of virtual relaity glasses. Here, it's "The Footage"--fragments of a movie that begin to appear mysteriously on the fringes of the Internet.

No one knows who's made them or why or even how they've made them, whether or not the fragments have been released in any kind of order, or what the fragments--by themselves or all together--actually mean, but a small group of dedicated Footage-followers have set up message boards in order to debate these questions, as well as any other Footage-related issues. Cayce, a fan herself, is hired by a shadowy corporate bigwig to track down the filmmaker and find definitive answers to these questions. The bigwig--who runs a cutting edge advertising company--sees the way the Footage has been distributed across the web as a revolutionary guerilla marketing tool.

Essentially, this is the same plot as every other Gibson novel: our hero uses her special abilities to track down an artifact that will reveal what the future will look like. But Gibson handles this kind of thing really well: the story is well paced and full of neat twists and turns and conspiracies within conspiracies. However, the story is really just a platform for Gibson's observations and commentary on contemporary consumer culture--on the nature and meaning of new fads, careers, and lifestyles that have emerged from the digitized, globalized world.

Unfortunately, Pattern Recognition not only has the plot of Gibson's other books but also their major weakness--their complete lack of humor. The relentlessly depressed mood gets to be a bit of a drag: it seems at odds with the Hitchcock-like thriller plot. Moreover, it makes Gibson's observations of the quirks of contempo-pop culture seem overly dramatic and pretentious.

2) Though it follows the pattern of Gibson's sci-fi novels, Pattern Recognition is also his version of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. The parallels jump right out. Both Cayce and Oedipa Maas are driven by their curiosity to follow the trail of a secret conspiracy. Pierce Iverarity appears in Pattern Recognition as Hugh Bigend, an advertising mogul for the 21st Century. Both center around the question of how are we to make sense of the patterns in the world around us. Yet, where Lot 49 is playful, Pattern Recognition is dour.

Gibson shares his humorlessness with Don DeLillo, another Pynchon disciple. (DeLillo often tries to be funny, but the jokes in something like White Noise are more theoretical than real.) And Pattern Recognition shares Underworld's interest in post-Cold War Russia, urban legends, and the alienation of globalization. Though there are passages in Underworld, a Very Important Novel, where DeLillo's writing is on par with Pynchon's or Saul Bellow's, for the most part the book is not as satisfying as Pattern Recognition, which is merely a thriller that wishes it was a Very Important Novel.

After reading DeLillo and Gibson, not to mention those writers of lesser talent who have also appropriated Pynchon for their own purposes, I think it's time to call a moratorium on novels inspired by Lot 49. As much as I like that book, it seems that (1) it already said everything it needed to say and (2) it is simply too easy to rewrite it by dressing it up in contemporary drag, replacing Tristero with a mysterious Hotmail competitor.

3) Gibson's attempt to deal with the effects of 9/11 is only moderately successful. Part of his problem is that throughout the book he deals more the symbolic effect of 9/11 than with the terrorist attacks themselves. In fact, I don't think he uses the word "terrorist" at all during the entire novel. Gibson does get at the sense of what it was like to be in NYC in the days following the destruction of the WTC--the simultaneous pathos and nobility of the way no one covered up other people's "Missing" flyers while posting their own, the almost unbearable pain of not knowing whether or not a loved one had survived, the shell-shocked feeling shared by everyone in the city. But he really isn't interested in how the world really did, and not just symbolically, change after 9/11: how globalization looked radically different, much more dangerous, than it had before.

Pattern Recognition succeeds where it is least ambitious, in its slick technothriller plot and its commentary on digital culture, but it's take on 9/11--and the bigger picture in general--is too shallow. Nonetheless, it is an honest attempt to deal with a post-9/11 world, even if it falls short.