Jim Crace, Harvest *** 1/2

Just a few weeks ago in this very forum I said, "I read an interview with Jim Crace as I neared the end of Being Dead. He came across as rather obnoxious and arrogant, making me think I might not like his other work." Yet I've already read some of his other work.

And I liked it. Not as much as I liked Being Dead, but more than I predicted way back three weeks ago. Crace has an unusual way with descriptions: he uses unexpected words to create a poetic effect without sacrificing naturalism. The simultaneous realism and tinge of the fantastic is what makes Crace's prose so enjoyable. It overcomes a certain weakness in creating full-bodied characters: the narrator of Harvest, Walter Thirsk, never fully transcends his symbolic status as the outsider who wants to join the insular village, and the main characters in Being Dead were, of course, dead.

Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise *** 1/2

Nate Silver is the statistician who received a lot of attention for correctly predicting the winner of the 2012 presidential election in all fifty states. His blog FiveThirtyEight (named after the number of electoral votes) is a treasure trove of analysis and predictions for politics, sports, economics, and culture.

I expected The Signal and the Noise to describe, for a general non-mathematically inclined reader, the mechanics of statistical prediction and how to interpret statistical forecasts. The book does include some of that, but most of its chapters explore areas where we try to predict the future -- the stock market, elections, sports, the weather and climate, earthquakes, national security -- and why we mostly fail to make good predictions. We fail to distinguish the signal from the noise due to bias, overfitting small samples, or pure complexity.

The through-line of Silver's argument isn't always clear, but ultimately his more tangible approach is rewarding. Wouldn't I rather think about real-world applications than abstract theory? Well, I'm not sure actually, but the book always held my interest.

Frederick Barthelme, The Law of Averages **** 1/2

Objectively speaking, my four-and-a-half star rating for The Law of Averages is too high. For some reason, though, Barthelme's style appeals to me. His stories are immediately recognizable for their settings (apartment complexes and Gulf Coast casinos), characters (passive Southern blue-collar men and the women who drive them), plots (nearly non-existent, everyday events), and tone (dryly funny).

The IHOP was empty. It reeked of maple syrup, air freshener, cigarette smoke. The workers, all refugees from better times, loitered at the serving counter, looking sticky. ("From Mars")

 He hung up and thumbed the remote on the television, going through the channels, looking for an update [on the weather]...Wallace tried to punch the button to unmute the sound, but he missed and had to punch a couple other buttons, and when he finally got the sound turned up, the station was in the middle of a bean commercial.

The Law of Averages is a short-story collection, presented in chronological order. It's interesting to see the development of Barthelme's style over time. The protagonists of the early stories are sad passive men who get taken on a ride by strong women; the middle stories often feature strange relationships between brothers (Barthelme's brother is the more famous Donald Barthelme); everything comes into balance in the later stories.

Anyway, I can't justify it, but I love Barthelme's stories.

Jim Crace, Being Dead *****

Being Dead is well titled. It is about being dead. The book starts with the murder of a middle-aged married couple amid the dunes of an isolated bay in England. They are killed just after consummating a return to the scene of their first passion, thirty years before. The story moves forward and backward from there, chronicling the decay of their bodies, the day leading up to their death, and their courtship.

What I really like about Being Dead is how Crace manages to emphasize the physical (and aggressively non-spirtitual) details while also showing how human thoughts and feelings bring meaning to them. His prose is poetic and naturalistic at the same time.

Calcium and water usurped the place of blood and oxygen so that her defunct brain, almost at once, began to swell and tear its canopies, spilling all its saps and liquors, all its stored immersions of passion, memory, and will, on her scarf, her jacket and the grass.

I read an interview with Jim Crace as I neared the end of Being Dead. He came across as rather obnoxious and arrogant, making me think I might not like his other work.