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Well, we're finished with World War Z, which means we'll finally have time to pick up Jonathan Raban's Surveillance and that some lucky souls at the library will move up a notch on the hold list.
Surveillance, of course, is the first book in Seattlest's Book Club. If you haven't picked up your copy yet, don't forget to ask for the Seattlest Book Club discount at Santoro's Books in Greenwood and Bailey-Coy Books on Capitol Hill.
Happily, we've confirmed that some fellow Seattlests have in fact started Raban's book, so they'll be able to contribute some insight, commentary, or snark, as they see fit. And while we can't promise anything, it's possible Raban himself might stop by one of these weeks to engage his reading public.
To get started, though, here are two elements common to most discussions of Surveillance: as the title suggests, it's an examination of life in a surveillance-heavy America. A quote from the NY Review of Books review, by Michael Dirda:
In contemporary America, as Jonathan Raban reminds us in Surveillance, any quest for anonymity—"to live obscurely" according to the Greek ideal for happiness—has grown increasingly difficult, if not impossible. And it's not only an Orwellian Big Brother who is watching. We track each other.The other element -- which has led to much unhappiness among the reviewers at Amazon.com -- is that "Raban is not much interested in plot," as the Oregonian's Jeff Baker notes. Lots of readers, on the other hand, love plot. You?
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How was WW-Z? I saw it in the bookstore, and even read a few pages (which I thought were somewhat humorous), but just couldn't convince myself to purchase something that appeared, on the surface at least, to be a novel based on a one-joke premise.
The news out today about the FBI abusing even the wide latitude granted by the Patriot Act--Raban probably would've called that one.
Seth, it's a lot less about government surveillance (to me, anyway) than about how we are all spying on each other. Every day. Except, perhaps, the autistic. Getting around in the world requires it. Technology soups it up.
As for the Amazon.com negative reviews...maybe reviewers didn't like him describing them this way in Chapter 8: "It seemed to be part of the house rules at Amazon that to praise a book you had to manifest any exaggerated physiological response--laughing till you cried, cracking up, weeping buckets, or, as a woman from Akron, Ohio, claimed, wetting yourself, choking for breath, depriving yourself of sleep, as if readers were competing for some emotional dysfunction award."
It's not that I'm "not much interested in plot"--I'm intensely interested in plot. But the question Surveillance raises is whether the world it describes is amenable to the conventional plot mechanism of questions and problems spawned in the first two thirds of the arc, then logically, satisfyingly resolved in the last third. On one level, this novel is a book about plot. See eleven-year-old Alida's take on this on pages 96-98, and, much later,
her mother's ruminations on it on pages 241-243. Those two passages to some extent define both the limits and ambitions of "Surveillance", and they are squarely focused on the problem of plot.
read the book. it does have a plot but the problem is where it eventually goes ... or doesn't go. at least, that was a problem for me. hits home tho after we noticed yet another surv cam going up (disguised as a light) outside our local Target this week. how many cams a day do you suppose each of us appear on?
At the Super Bowl a couple of years ago, they photographed everyone going in at the turnstiles...then they used facial recognition software to match the faces to people with outstanding warrants and, if I remember correctly, arrest them. I think the NFL put the kibosh on that--not so nice to invite your fans into a law enforcement trap.
I'm a huge fan of plot--why else would I read Louis L'Amour and PG Wodehouse as much as I do--but, halfway through Surveillance, I'm not finding the relative lack of plot bothersome...there are enough hints at potentially negative endings--will professor guy molest Alisa? Will Tad go all Pyle on people? Is the memoir plagiarized? Is Lee an identity thief?--that I'm enthralled. I got the book at about 4pm and I'm nearly halfway done now, and I cooked steak and cleaned my kitchen in the middle...this could be a one-nighter.
I picked up Surveillance this morning at Bailey/Coy and read the first 20 pages about the TOPOFF drill while waiting for a haircut; then I started reading the article "The Unthinkable" in this week's New Yorker, which contains this line: "Later this year, the federal government will hold its annual, classified exercise involving top officials (known as TOP-OFF), in which these officials rehearse responses to a major disaster scenario. This year's scenario, an official familiar with the planning told me, will posit three simultaneous dirty-bomb explosions."
It's like the New Yorker knew I was going to buy the book before I bought it!