Seattlest Book Club: When Last We Met...

My apologies, Mr. Raban, I should have worded that differently. I purchased your book from QA Books (their last copy, from the window). The jacket has a sticker that says "autographed copy" but your signature has vanished. Maybe I'll run into you at Ken's and you can restore it.

"Like" is an understatement, I adored Surveillance. I'm not your ideal reader, though: just a middle-aged, underemployed English-major mom who fell in love with your characters, google-imaged "chiton," and made mental notes of new bands and dishes to try. Deep thoughts, of which you served plenty, got plunked on my back burner. I'll leave those to the pros.

Let me just say that Lucy is a triumph (why is Tad getting all the attention?). She is a driven, self-doubting, complex and compelling every-woman-of-a-certain-age. And funny! Her scenes on the beach, in the kitchen, at the Pilates studio, and with Mr. Lee made me ROTFL.

Please bring her back in your next novel. And give her some resident elvis? She deserves it.

J. Whitehorn: an autographed "sticker"? I'm baffled. So far as I can remember, I've signed no stickers for "Surveillance", but have signed a few hundred copies--always in the same place, just below my printed name on the main title page. I wonder where you bought it?

Delighted to hear that you liked the book, though. If you do reread it, you'll notice how circular it is. In my beginning is my end...

Extraordinary book; one of Raban's best. I raced through it in an evening and was left a little giddy and a little freaked. As if Raban haf been privy to my hard drive. And my hippocampus.

Lots to ponder; I'm eager to read it again. (If you haven't read it yet, avoid reviews. You don't want someone else's highlighter shoving your eyes around and telling you what to feel. )

Ironically, the "autographed" sticker on my book is a fraud. Given Lucy's evaluation of Augie's signed first edition, this made me wonder if Raban, assigned another hundred books to scribble in, said "oh, screw 'em."

A bit late, but...

I read it in two sittings -- the first where I got through the first chapter or so and then straight through -- I simply couldn't put it down. I wasn't hung up on the plot, but I think I may have missed the architectural subtleties Mr. Raban is referring to. I didn't approach it like a thriller--it felt more like a social novel to me--almost a novel of manners.

I suppose it must sound a bit autistic/naive for an educated adult not to have thought deeply about how we all are watchers "by nature," but I hadn't. This book spurred that thinking in me and, like a learning a new word, it has been popping up in everything I see. Last night I was re-reading Gans' The War Against The Poor and right there at the beginning of Chapter 1 I read:

"Everyday life is, among other things, a never-ending flow of moral surveillance. We all survey each other to see if actions live up to the norms and expectations we carry in our heads, since our subsequent behavior is shaped by our surveillance. The surveillance is also moral since we judge rather than merely observe or study situations and the people that make up everyday life....With greater social distance, the judgments are apt to be based less on direct knowledge and more on indirect knowledge, including that gained from the media. And at times, judgments are based on imagined knowledge, which may come from stories and preconceived ideas that accord with the values and prejudices of the judges as well as their position in society."

It made me think some more about the character of Mr. Lee. And it made me wonder why I didn't give the notion of surveillance a second thought when I'd read Gans' book the first time 10 years ago.

I definitely read it in one sitting, as is my wont with novels. And I noticed the foreshadowing of the ending in the narrative, but it still came as rather a shock--which I'd imagine was intended. My immediate take on it was the same as Shacochis'--it's a well-taken reminder that, however high we perceive the stakes to be of our personal dramas, the pale in the (in this case very real) shadow of disaster.

With that, there's sort of a repudiation of the Tad's anti-Bush/anti-war obsession (an obsession I personally also find very annoying)...but I can't help thinking that, to the people of Iraq, the war is sort of its own form of unpredictable disaster--this one with very human actors. Would a nation full of paranoid Tads have prevented it?

Here's a candid confession. Writing the second half of the book, I worried that it might read too fast. Not that I write fast, I write at the speed of a handicapped tortoise. But I feared the reader might too easily skim over the succession of events, and thereby miss the (as I think of it) architectural subtlety of the book. My impression is that a number of readers have approached it as they would a thriller (perhaps encouraged by its thrillerish jacket image), flicking through it rather than properly reading it, and being disappointed in the process because a thriller it is most certainly not. In retrospect, I think it might have helped to deliberately slow the narrative speed of the book, and to go for a more obviously "literary fiction" jacket.

Raban adds, rising to our shameless paraphrasing of one guy's opinion last week:

I also think that your sentence beginning "Literary reviewers contend..." is plain untrue. Some rather careless readers have argued that, but even the Newsday reviewer whom I cited in my failed post, talked of the "mesmeric" plot; Shacochis, in NYTBR and Herald-Tribune, calls it "deceptively modest," with the emphasis on deceptively. I'd agree to the proposition that a lot of readers, most of whom have barely skimmed the book's surface, have been so deceived.

Our comment software is being unkind to Mr. Raban, who writes:

Many reviewers have understood and embraced the ending, described by Michael Dirda in the New York Review of Books (to which James posted a link last week) as "quietly prepared for throughout the book," and the Washington Post reviewer called "scarily beautiful". Reviewers from Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, etc, etc, have followed suit. The best, most intelligent description that I've seen of it is in this coming Sunday's New York Times Book Review, by Bob Shacochis, which also appears in today's International Herald Tribune. However, in yesterday's Newsday, a reviewer who generally liked the book a lot, followed the Amazonians in her hatred of the ending.



Every novel is amenable to multiple readings and violently contrasting judgements on its merits. But I think that anyone who detests the ending of Surveillance should be aware that there are many highly competent reviewers who strongly disagree.

I haven't gotten to the end yet, but I'm finding it a pretty gripping read. (I made myself stop so as not to read it all in one sitting.) That to me is more indicative of good storytelling is how engrossed you are in the narrative while it's going on. The various threads all clearly have to do with surveillance (information-gathering and its discontents), and what's been interesting for me is the interplay between the kinds of surveillance, rather than needing a particular thread tied up. At least in that sense, it wouldn't be realistic to try: the genie has exited the bottle.