Before I attempt to critically address a book that might not warrant critical reading, I insist on disclosing my motive in reading it: my book club, which meets once a month and has previously foisted upon me such literary atrocities as Atonement, decided that, after reading such tearjerkers as Atonement and What Is the What, we needed a break, something light. They wanted to read How To Make Love Like a Porn Star, wherein "author" Jenna Jameson offers her top ten tips on how to give a great blow job. But this is intended as a critical discussion of the book, not the book club. The genre is standard star fare: autobiographical memoir tell-all, but the creators (I can't say Jameson, because it's hard to parse out what portion of the book she actually wrote or even devised) mix it up a bit, including graphic novel pages, diary entries, interview "transcripts," snippets of screenplays, and tons of photos—black and white and full-color glossies—to break up the straight narration. This, plus all the smut (and I use that word with tenderness), makes for a quick read: I plowed through the nearly 600 pages over two evenings.

The joke on my book club is that Jameson's story isn't any more cheerful than Achak Deng's (from What Is the What). Of course, she has less philosophical depth than Deng, and her ghostwriter (Neil Strauss of The Game, also ghostwriter to pickup artist Mystery) has aspirations far less literary than Dave Eggers (Deng's "ghost"writer), and so we feel less like crying when we read about teenaged Jenna being gang raped on the side of the road in a country town where she's a stranger, about teenaged Jenna being raped again, this time by a no-good boyfriend's surrogate father, a biker caricature of evil for whom Jenna is one in a long string of victims (including his own daughter, we later find out), about college-aged Jenna (who dropped out of high school so certainly isn't going to college) addicted to smoking meth (thanks again to that no-good boyfriend), weighing 80 lbs, unable to work or even walk, left for dead in an empty apartment with no friends to wonder or worry about her. To be perfectly plain, she comes from a broken white-trash home (her mother a Vegas showgirl dead from cancer when Jenna was just a toddler, her father a veteran who went into law enforcement but never controlled his own two kids, who ran around the neighborhood setting fires and otherwise disturbing the peace, a brother who was a drug addict, and a grandmother—would you believe this?—a grandmother who stole drugs from her own grandson (Jenna's brother)).

If this is a cautionary tale, it's one for parents, not children. And so while, in a way, Jameson's story is an inspiring tale of survival against all odds, it's incredibly depressing if one steps back to see the forest. What Is the What shook me because I couldn't believe we let that happen (ten year old children making death marches across Sudanese desert, starving so that when they happened upon a bird, they ate it raw, beak to claw, feathers included), but that, at least, happened far away, for political reasons: complex arguments between allied groups and nations over resources and power. This happened, happens still I'm sure, right here, under our noses, for small reasons, individual desires, frustrations, moments of violence, lack of control. It's far less forgivable.

Now where's my grain of salt? How seriously do we want to take Jameson? If the purpose of the book is to make money (I think that, without even reading it, you will agree that the purpose of such a book is not to tell a story, but only to make money), the inclusion of just the right amount of tragedy validates the extreme amount of debauchery (the lesbian lovemaking off the set, the constant full-body pleasure in her work (she her onscreen orgasms are actual), and the enormity of every cock she's ever touched (her narration constantly includes asides describing her trepidation at each of her partner's sizes; not once does she describe a man as anything less than brobdignanian—non porn-stars included)). Clearly, she is pandering, but to point that out only reiterates the absurdity of my attempt to consider this book critically. I ought, like the rest of my book club, say "bring on the blow job tips." Unfortunately, there isn't anything new or useful there either.

Everything I said about Barthelme's Forty Stories here applies, except 50% more. The two best stories are (the completely weird but wonderful) Me and Miss Mandible and (somehow less weird but equally wonderful) The Great Hug. One is long and one is short, but they both can and should be read.

A good lot of the other stories (e.g. Will You Tell Me?, The Emerald, The School, I Bought a Little City, A City of Churches) are interesting, at least in part, if a bit weird, confusing, distant, or surreal. They may warrant perusal if you have nothing better to do, or need some exposure to the outside of the box.

And some stories (Alice, Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning, Paraguay, Eugenie Grandet, A Manual For Sons, Aria, How I Write My Songs, etc.) are basically unreadable and offer no prize for your labors. They should be avoided at all costs, lest you decide that all modern literature should be thrown out the window, and pledge from hereon to read nothing but Dickens.

Only three or four pages in, I knew that I was going to hate this book. I was on the fence about reading it in the first place, it being from a female author, and on the topics of memory, loss, and love (a dangerous and boggy territory for any writer, but for women in particular). In fact, because I had no recollection of how this book made its way onto my reading list (the person I thought recommended it has denied ever even hearing the name Lydia Davis, much less recommending this, her first novel; nor did it come, where some crappier recommendations have, from Slate, to which I pay much too much attention, but which hasn't mentioned Davis since I began reading it), I considered, after the first 40 pages, to add it to the short list of books I'd started but didn't finish. I could see that I wasn't going to get a thing out of it, except an evening lost. So, being myself, I decided to call the evening lost, power through, and finish the goddamned thing then and there.

It wasn't until I sat down to blog this morning that I found out that Davis, the tedious, insecure, neurotic, depressive, and ugly (sorry, low blow I know) creator of this sad, lonely diary parading itself as a novel is not only a McSweeny's author (really, there is no way; I refuse to believe it), and not only a successful translator (the creator of newly acclaimed Proust), but the ex-wife of Paul Auster (really?!), and, to top it all off, a recipient of a bloody MacArthur genius grant. If she's a genius, I'm MacArthur.

Okay okay okay. So what, exactly, about this book fills me with such disdain? Davis takes advantage of the post-modern tendency toward self-consciousness and, rather than building up a riveting, wry, impressive, shocking edifice only to tear it down and build it again from the pieces, as regularly do writers like Barth, Pynchon, Foster Wallace, Eggers, etc. (all men, it's true, but I can't help that), she catalogs her fretting about wanting to write, and calls that collected fretting a novel. Devils advocates will argue that Eggers frets aplenty in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius—beginning in the very introduction!—but I shoot back to them that it's not the same. Eggers' fretting works to propel the story; many things happen in A Heartbreaking Work. In The End of the Story, nothing happens. Paragraph after paragraph describe Davis' painstaking process: "I don't know why I need to reconstruct all this. . ."; "I have tried to find a good order, but my thoughts are not orderly. . ."; "I am trying to separate out a few pages to add to the novel and I want to put them together in one box, but I'm not sure how to label the box. . ."; "And every idea had to be written down so that I would not forget it, even though I knew that later some of these ideas wouldn't seem worth remembering." Lady, here's a hint: none of these ideas are worth remembering. They're not worth writing down. They're not even ideas! Buy a goddamned remote control and turn off the inner monologue!

Perhaps this is what happens when you spend too much time with (fussy, self-obsessed, neurasthenic) Proust. He, too, is on my short list of books I began and never finished, but I intend to finish not only the half-read Swann's Way, but also the entire seven volumes of À la recherche du temps perdue. Perhaps I'll try Davis' translation, since I didn't have much luck with Scott Moncrieff. Perhaps she'll redeem herself.

It seems I've come across yet another book that's far out of my league. In spite of its slim binding and thick-stock pages graced with extra white space, engaging with this book's depth is a challenge for anyone functioning with less intellectual capacity than Pynchon, Foster Wallace, or Mathews himself. The author is one fascinated by eccentricities, minutiae, anachronisms, and oddities; indeed, this semi-noirish, semi-picaresque, semi-mystery wild goose chase seems the book that Mr. Kindt would write, if Mr. Kindt were to write a novel (Mr. Kindt, in case you're not sure, is the tattooed, museum-going, fish-eating man in Laird Hunt's The Exquisite, which book may have been influenced by Mathew's style, just as Jesse Ball's Samedi the Deafness might have; it bears a striking thematic and stylistic similarity.) Both of these contemporary novels seem closer to The Conversions than A Void, the e-less murder mystery by Mathew's friend and contemporary Georges Perec, which I read before the dahlhaus was instated, but which includes rather incredible rewrites of both The Raven and Hamlet's famous monologue without the letter "e" ("Quoth that Black Bird, 'Not Again.'") Mathew's most important influence is said to be Raymond Roussel, author of Locus Solus, a novel I've been meaning to read for years now, but can't seem to find at the library in English translation (Roussel wrote it in French).

The topic of linguistic difficulties brings me back to The Conversions. Mathews is clearly comfortable with not only his native English, but also French, Latin, and German—all of which he includes, sans translation, in his novel. And it is not only a mere line or two—no!—the entire last few pages of the book (described as Appendix, but which may, thanks to his general trickery, contain the actual completion of the story (for the last chapter offers none)) are written in German. And in case his reader is as highly-educated as he is, and is fluent in French, Latin, and German, Mathews includes a number of paragraphs sprinkled throughout the novel in non-existent languages, languages that he has made up, that, if one reads aloud, offer a flicker of hope of intelligibility, as if they were some evolved or corrupted pig-latin, but ultimately remain elusive.

It is that eluding that seems to thrill Mathews; he is not unlike the wealthy eccentric who dies at the novel's beginning, after rigging a musical worm race (I told you he was eccentric!) and sending the narrator on a quest to answer three peculiar (and multi-lingual) questions about an antique adze (and if you know what that is without consulting a dictionary, perhaps this book is for you). And yet, the bulk of the novel contains less information about the adze than digressive vignettes about other curiosities, stories told to the narrator by the people from whom he seeks information about the adze. We read about a painter who has rigged a machine in order to mechanize his color choices, and Mathews describes the apparatus and its many pipes and joints in great detail. We read the history of a scientist who discovered what he thought was a new element, called fleshmetal, which refuses to liquefy, and Mathews describes his experiments, quoting temperatures and chemicals with abundant jargon. There is a chapter about a cult-like Christian splinter, a chapter about ancient choral music, and a chapter about a group of customs officials who spend their days smoking contraband cigars and reading confiscated picture books. There is a man who uses for a doorbell a carpet of chirping crickets on his stoop, which silence themselves at the approach of a guest. And none of this fits together sensically at all. I'm afraid I am going to have to read it again, once I've learned German, relearned my Latin, picked up a bit of French, and increased my IQ.

As sometimes happens, I'm not certain how P got onto my reading list, but there it was, and the New York Public Library finally provided. According the the flaps and some nonsense on the internet, the book is a Joycean (oops, haven't read Ulysses yet) Lolita, sans pedophilia but with plenty of other smut to make up for it: a tale of a thirty-something pornographer and his unexpected friendship with a precocious ten-year-old runaway girl.

This is all well and good, but it is also Conn's first novel, and it reads painstakingly so. It's rare that, when reading, I feel the author's nervous effort, his fretting, his anxiousness to just get something—anything!—on the page. Here, Conn over-experiments. It's not the Joycean wordplay that bogs down his book, but the attempt to postmodernize the form. In the middle of the book, he switches from narrative prose to screenplay. As a denouement, he shoehorns in a lengthy stream of consciousness from a character tangential to the tale.

Benji, Conn's shabby protagonist, is an aging pornographer (filmmaker and often the star of his own movies) who can't get his life back together now that the industry has moved to LA and his wife—the only love of his life—has moved there with it, leaving him behind in New York. Conn attentively draws Benji with the care of a Renaissance draughtsman; this is a fully-realized, beautifully detailed character, whom we understand through by his actions (for example, we understand the depth of his love for Penelope when he sucks the blood out of her used tampon; and if reading that horrifies you, don't read the book). Finn, the runaway girl who, at ten, is reading Nietzsche in Washington Square Park while smoking a marijuana joint, is a little less well-realized (I suppose Conn had more trouble getting in touch with his inner tween than his inner porn star). To be honest, her presence in the novel doesn't do much to illuminate Benji (our real concern), except to provide a way from him to end his three year dry spell by sleeping with her mother once he has rescued her and brought her home.

What Conn needs is a tyrannical editor, who will beat the lazy bug out of him (the screenplay section reads as if Conn originally was writing a screenplay, and then decided to write a novel instead, but got too tired of converting all the dialogue into straight prose, so instead just pasted it right into the middle) and rub out the less-important characters. The author is too sentimental, too attached to his creations, to do this on his own. P reads like a great manuscript, awaiting a fascist armed with a fistful of red pens. It's not, though, in the league of Joyce or even Safran-Foer, whom his publishers name-check as his contemporary. I don't know if it ever could be.

It's difficult enough to write about a book of short stories, with all its diverging characters and plot lines, but Carver makes it even harder. His stories are simple and natural and perfect; there seems little to say about them, other than that they make you want to read more of them.

The title story, last in the volume, is astonishingly good. Like most of Carver's stories, it describes, in real time (however close literature can ever get to "real" time) people in a relationship at the moment of pressure (in this case, the admittance of infidelity, a common theme). But they aren't all so similar (not that I would mind if they were); there's a story about a boy's battle in a creek for a giant fish (Nobody Said Anything) and a wary letter written by an estranged mother in regard to her now-famous son (Why, Honey?). But these stories diverge from Carver's sweet spot: the feelings of a thirty- to forty-something man and/or woman who is falling apart, like the eerily awkward mother in Are You a Doctor? (one of the volume's best stories), who calls a wrong number but then insists that the man on the line come over to her apartment (and he does). The muffled despair of extreme loneliness, smoked away with cigarettes (and, in What's in Alaska?, with pot), drunk away with beer (in Night School) or buried under food (in Fat) isn't softened by another person's presence—in fact, that other person usually augments the loneliness, by not meeting the first person's needs or expectations (The Student's Wife), by illustrating plainly what is missing.

I have only one complaint, which is that Carver spells "cigarette" without the final "te," and, since his characters do an awful lot of smoking, it's a continual distraction. But if that's the biggest problem with your stories, you're doing pretty well, no?