I Was Able To Get A Sense Of His Soul

Now that it's 2014, and we've seen Pussy Riot and "gay propaganda" and imprisoned oligarchs and whatever else bizarre about Russia, you might think that Vladimir Putin's unraveling of whatever democratic reforms accomplished after 1991 happened slowly, almost imperceptibly, and only after many turbulent years. Which is why Masha Gessen's The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin is such an important book — because not only is there so much you forgot — especially in the haze of front sections packed with terrorism and whatever else was going on in the US — but she also reminds everyone how Putin's dismantling of the nascent Russian democracy happened like almost immediately upon his taking power in 2000.

In some ways I think people just wanted to ignore it. It just didn't jive with the heady 1990s when there was only one superpower, no wars and democratic expressions of freedom or whatnot exploding all over the world, or at least Eastern Europe. In other words, when Jesus Jones ruled the world, "watching the world wake up from history" or however that embarrassingly simplistic thought went. And as far as the west was concerned, the end of the Cold War worked for everyone: the cowboys heralded the victory of democracy over communism and the apologists got to feel vindicated that the Soviet "threat" was overblown. No one wanted to think that it could be resurrected any time soon, and something sinister like what Gessen describes just didn't fit whatever narrative had taken hold in the Clinton-Yeltsin years: International Space Stations, arms control treaties, G8 and whatever else.

If you read the newspaper during the Putin years you probably remember some of the chipping away at civil society. I remember specifically when Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested in 2003 and thinking something along the lines of well, I'm sure something sketchy was probably happening, you know those Russian oligarchs or whatever. In reality it was just a bald power grab by Putin's government and, Jesus Fucking Christ, why didn't anyone say anything about it?

So I'm going back now and looking at some of the reports I'm sure I read in 2003, when Khodorkovsky was arrested. Here's one I'm pretty sure I remember, with a representative paragraph:

What brought him down is far from clear, whether political rivalries or criminal misdeeds, and his political aspirations remain unplayed. But his life as a businessman illustrates the changes and conflicts of a modern Russia that created a coterie of super rich.

Even a op-ed somewhat critical of Putin (that I don't remember reading) treats the whole arrest like it's a sort of growing pain in Russian democracy:

The Putin-Khodorkovsky showdown is a tough one to fathom. The contenders are both shining beacons of the New Russia — one a KGB operative transformed into a slick national leader with enormous popular support, the other a Young Communist who became a multibillionaire champion of corporate honesty. Both are darlings of the West — President Vladimir Putin is at home on President George W. Bush's ranch or in Queen Elizabeth's carriage; Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the erstwhile head of the giant Yukos oil company, is embraced by Wall Street and hailed as a "visionary" by the Librarian of Congress. Yet these two are locked in a seamy struggle.

The key, of course, is that for all the progress it has made, Russia is still a long way from really fitting into any Western mold. The fabulously wealthy men we have taken to calling oligarchs, or "businessmen," are really the lucky beneficiaries of a shameless division of spoils from the collapse of the centralized Soviet economy. Putin, whom we like to call Russia's democratically elected president, was arbitrarily plucked from obscurity by Boris Yeltsin's threatened political "family" and plunked into the Kremlin. Neither man is really the product of either democracy or market economy: Theirs is the struggle of power and plunder.

This is not to say that Putin is in any way justified in hounding Khodorkovsky and throwing him into the notorious Matrosskaya Tishina prison. The issue is not whether Khodorkovsky's wealth is ill-gotten — that's the only kind of wealth there is in Russia. But the arrest was so blatantly political — and so crudely theatrical, with masked gunmen and all — that Putin is not likely to have another barbecue anytime soon in Crawford, Texas.

The tone is condescending, and fits with what I remember Russia's standing was in the early 2000s (just before "Axis of Weasel" intransigence) — you know it whenever you hear a leader referred to as "a darling of [blank], for one. As for Khodorkovsky, the guy's an oligarch, and people don't feel sorry for oligarchs. Gessen's book reports something similar from the inside — there's a point where she writes that the dissidents shook their heads that they were eventually put into a position of having to defend oligarchs.

Gessen's reporting in The Man about this era is eye-opening. Gone is the bullshit ostensible reason for Khodorkovsky's imprisonment — tax evasion or whatnot; all the stuff that you gloss over when reading a Times piece about a faraway place. Instead she fixes it in the context of the rest of Putin's actions, and when you see it alongside the rest of the repression of the opposition, the contemporary silence becomes depressing. Most of the other oligarchs just left the country ("fled" seems like a misplaced word for rich guys), years later they started to go after gay people.

And then there's the terrorism, since that was one topic that I very clearly remember back in the early 2000s. After 9/11, the news from Russia about theater sieges, school hostages, apartment blasts and whatever else that seemed to happen with disturbing — frightening — regularity make you think that the world was about to end. Russia seemed, and was portrayed if I'm not misremembering, as one of the fault lines in the clash of civilizations, so all the worst-case scenario terrorism taking place — dead schoolchildren, theatergoers, people in the middle of nowhere — triggered something awful in a jittery post-9/11 culture.

And then it turns out that basically everything was bullshit — Gessen's recounting intimates that when it wasn't just tragically bungled the acts were actually perpetrated by the regime. In every case, the acts of terror were used to consolidate power in a way that seemed barely (or not at all) germane, which just makes you question it all even more. The machinations make the Patriot Act look like the Magna Carta. Again, it's not until you take it all in at one time that you start to see how efficient and ruthless the dialing back of democratic institutions was.

(I need to be clear: if you felt ill reading about Beslan or were on edge contemplating the fate of the Moscow theatergoers during that several day standoff or got depressed thinking about blown up apartments, you should read about the open questions about these events. It's not so much disturbing as it is disgusting.)

(Also, Face is useful in clearing the air about Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov, who I unfortunately assumed to be just another Russian oligarch but who comes off as actually a pretty good guy; in this context, headlines like "Is Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov taking orders from Russian President Vladimir Putin?" are unfortunate and unfair.)

I don't know when opinion really shifted, but it was definitely after Obama — maybe around Syria, when Putin's intransigence was exposed for everyone who had wanted to "reset" the relationship? (Speaking of which, what exactly was being "reset"? These guys seemed like fuckers way before 2009.)

I suppose Pussy Riot was next, but the thing that really did it was the anti-gay legislation, which seems so backward and impossible that it's hard to fathom. And yet it's there, and it's depressing to think that there's a constituency in Russia that somehow supports it.

Also, Putin likes to steal shit. Like Robert Kraft's Super Bowl ring, which is another completely insane story. Or his $40 billion in wealth.

Oh, and then there are the assassinations and murders of political opponents, whistleblowers and various other obstacles to power.

In the end you wonder how Gessen herself is able to stay in the country. The book's afterword is instructive: it's a coda about the time Gessen finally meets Putin. It happened when she, in her day job as the editor of a popular science magazine that was essentially taken over by the state apparatus — how this happens is as strange as just about everything else you read about in The Man. The upshot of the arrangement was that the magazine was compelled to run one party feature in every issue. Gessen refused to participate in one of Putin's many staged puff pieces about Putin rescuing exotic animals or archaeological treasures, in this case Siberian cranes. She was fired by the publisher, and when the buzz in the media about it filtered up to Putin's office, she was summoned to Putin's office by Putin himself to talk about it. At the meeting he waved off her concerns about photo-ops being environmentally unfriendly and he wasn't interested about her concerns about the lack of press freedom in general. He also ordered the publisher to hire her back. After only a few minutes she realized that Putin really had no idea who she was, or that she had written anything about him on the side, especially something so damning and aimed toward a foreign audience.

It meant two things: one, that she could live and work under the radar, but that two, what kind of radar is Putin using in the first place? I don't know if the caricature of the out-of-touch autocrat is a cautionary tale for budding autocrats or whether it's a feature of a diseased system. Honestly, I'm not sure how it exactly plays out badly, except for the fact that all great fucked up autocrats in the end seem to be tagged as out-of-touch: you think people like Saddam, Kim Jong Il, etc. That and bad things seem to happen when autocrats become out of touch — the apparatus underneath has cover to do what it takes to make sure the boss is somehow pleased.

In the end end, meaning after I finished the book and Googled her to see if she had thoughts about what was happening in the Ukraine — this was after the Crimean annexation I think — I found this article, in which I learned that she actually left Russia because its anti-gay laws; she wasn't about to wait around to see if the legislature was going to follow through on its idea to take away the children of same-sex couples. There are times you take a stand, she explains in so many words, and then you have children, and then things change a little bit; ironic, seeing that the so called "gay propaganda" laws are supposedly about "protecting children," but in the end just depressing really.

Pretty Little . . . Aw, Christ, Do I Really Have To?

Is there a term for the practice of narrowing margins, blowing up font sizes, kerning type and generally adjusting leading in an attempt to pad out a term paper? I wish there were some sort of sniglet or something, because I would definitely apply it to Sara Shepard's Pretty Little Liars.

The first book in the double-digit franchise is a breezy 286-page ditty, excluding acknowledgements, that finds the time to namedrop all manner of mid-2000s era brands but somehow can't get quite its shit together enough to resolve into an actual "story," with anything resembling an actual "ending." I don't know what it is about young adult fiction that makes authors, editors and publishers think it's OK to blueball a bunch of innocent tweens with a shit-ass "to-be-continued" ending, but PLL certainly subscribes to that theory. And fuck these people for that; there's only one thing worse than a dippy tween book and that's a dippy tween cliffhanger book. It's the sort of democracy-denying move that makes kids not want to vote; the kind of fuckshow reality that makes children hate their parents, friends and country; the type of jerk move that makes a kid hate god.

There's something depressing and fatiguing about the brand namedrops that relentlessly bob around the book. It's shit like this:

• As she pulled out the Twizzlers, she felt her BlackBerry buzzing. Hanna hesitated. What if it was Sean, chewing her out via voice mail?
• She reached into her Manhattan Portage knapsack and showed Emily the top of a Jack Daniel's bottle. "[. . .] Wanna help kill it with me?"
• She leaned over and smacked Noel on the cheek with her lips. Surprisingly, Noel smelled pretty good. Like Kiehl's Blue Eagle shaving cream.
• He smelled like Lever and, strangely, chocolate, & she loved how his recently buzzed haircut showed off all the sexy angles of his face.
• She flipped her long, sleek dark-blond ponytail over her shoulder and took a swig from her purple Nalgene bottle.
• He guided her into a tiny back bedroom that had clothes all over the floor and an open bag of Lay's on the nightstand.

It goes on and on and on and on like that. And you're never sure why — other than the obvious, which is that it's lazy fucking writing to take a brand name as a stand-in for a real description. And then sometimes it just seems so opaque: Twizzlers? Lay's?

The book revolves around a bunch of bitchy, insecure or type-A middle-school girls whose friend disappears. They then move on to high school and are haunted by the missing girl, to the point where they believe the missing girl is stalking them on their cell phones. Freakouts ensue. It seems as if the missing girl is a shape shifter or the NSA. And then, motherfucker, not a goddamn thing is revealed about who or what this entity is. Because of that to-be-continued trope or whatnot. It's like, all the girls and all the boys want to IF YOU SEEK AMY.

And then there's the creep factor in pretending that these suburban Philadelphia teenage girls are somehow sexually attractive to adult males. Maybe it's just my latent adult male, but I kept thinking "You know what? Fuck you. We adult males, even fucking screwy bozo moron dipshit fuckface moron bozo males, do not give a fuck about your pathetic underage selves."

But the interesting thing is how this somehow — apparently — appeals to tweens. Do underage girls think overage males are constantly out to get into their @Abercrombie drawers? Is that some tween fantasy or something? Do they believe that there's a Santa Claus out there that delivers their runty selves to secret hidden cocktail lounges where bouncers don't exist and bartenders have terrible eyesight? Please. Get the fuck over yourselves. Besides which, we're mostly looking for sexually available 25-year-olds who "understand" us so much better than our age-appropriate partners.

Which all brings us to this: Who exactly writes this shit? This lady has a degree from NYU and a MFA from Brooklyn College. And it's not so much that this person writes moronic tween twaddle more than this person writes moronic tween twaddle with no fucking ending to speak of. And you're like, "Jesus Fucking Christ, is it so fucking hard to reveal 'The Jenna Thing' in one goddamn 'novel'? Oh, but apparently it is."

Christ almighty we've turned our backs on young people.

Every Shitty Book Is Shitty In Its Own Way

Someone, I can't remember who it was, once said that good books are all alike, while every shitty book is shitty in its own way.

That said, when it comes to shitty books, there are some through lines. Shitty books are a chore to read. Shitty books make you want to watch TV. Shitty books make you want to clean the basement.

Indeed, we've read a lot of shitty books, but I can't think of any as thoughtless and unsatisfying as Joshua Ferris' The Unnamed, a book about a man in the professional-managerial class who has a condition whereby he must start walking until he collapses and falls asleep. Over the years he and his wife have managed the condition so that she'll know where to find him but one day she decides she has enough and lets him wander all over God's green earth until he — spoiler alert here — loses several toes to frostbite. Even though he's just an attorney he somehow has endless pots of money to use to indulge this condition and maintain a house in Connecticut. His wife eventually succumbs to cancer. He dies somewhere, maybe in a tent I think. I forget the ending because you kind of don't give a fuck in the end.

I can overlook effusive book jacket praise — great gobs of flabby unctuousness like "written with uncommon grace" or "rich and profound." I can overlook the self-serious author photo. I can overlook the thoughtless dialogue that sounds like it's the same person speaking over the course of 300 pages. I can overlook a seeming allegory that goes nowhere. Look, I can overlook a lot of things. What I can't overlook is the protagonist's wife telling him toward the end of the story, "Tell me you don't miss your tongue in my pussy. Tell me you can make any sense of this world without that, without your lips on my pussy, making me come."

Mama always told us that boys would only jerk you around and that it took a man to really make sweet love to you, and now I know what she meant by that. Which is to say, under the guise of supposed literary fiction, Unnamed does a bunch of genres in a really shitty, unsatisfying manner: there's a murder mystery that is never resolved; there's some kind of love story, I suppose; there's some sort of allegory that says . . . something?

Unnamed does none of this stuff well: The murder mystery falls by the wayside; the love story is a cardboard caricature of an older couple "in love"; The allegory crunches under your feet like so many dead bees which, along with the bad weather, are a sign of environmental despoliation that has to mean something but which you can't really see how it fits in. You wonder if pressed, the author would plead that those are your expectations and that this work is meant to challenge your expectations. You know what else challenges my expectations? Creighton University's men's basketball team. But at least they make some sense.

Two hundred and seventy-seven pages into Unnamed there's a moment where the protagonist talks about his journey and condition to a preacher out in the middle of the country somewhere. The preacher finally tells him, "So all you life you've searched and searched for a rational explanation, while presuming there is one. But if there isn't?" This is the precise point in Unnamed that makes me want to tear off my own toes. We — I — don't read books to be hectored about my expectations by marginal characters. If there's no rational explanation then we're done here.

Toward the end of Unnamed your mind wanders — you want something freaky to happen with the working class security guard the protagonist befriends. Like he's really a foot fetishist, who doesn't mind toeless men. Or that the real murderer of the high-powered client's wife is actually the protagonist, who doesn't even remember doing it. You want something bold to take place, and then the only thing that's bold is the protagonist's wife whispering about where she wants him to put his tongue. Not what I was thinking. Then you start to perseverate on the details of this overly researched book: Where does the money come from? How would you get a prescription for anti-psychotics from a clinic in the middle of nowhere? Toes just fall off like that? Seriously?

There's a joke — What's your writing process? Spellcheck! And that's how it seems — that it's kind of a vague idea, almost a first draft or maybe someone's MFA thesis. There's some sort of too-clever-by-half idea buried in there under a mound of self-important metaphor. It all feels heavy, burdensome.

The tone and tenor of the book remind you of something. At first, you're not really sure what — it's a familiar feeling that scrapes against the inside of your skull like a dull salon brush. And then it finally occurs to you — oh right, the video for Collective Soul's "The World I Know":

Wait a second, those ants are . . . us? Sublime!

There's no big gaping reason why Unnamed is the biggest piece of turd we've ever read, but I have some ideas. It feels like an allegory that you can't explain — and allegories are unentertaining enough without having it be so opaque that you're not sure what they're allegoring; a man, on a . . . journey! One of us wondered if it was borrowing from some other source, which would also make it seem burdensome and unentertaining — like the Odyssey or, uh, something else that people base stories on; in which case, you'd be lost and unentertained if you had no idea what that clever homage was. Ultimately you just kind of feel disappointed by current literary fiction — it's not particularly good, it doesn't mean much. Unnamed sticks out like a sore, uh, appendage in how little it says and how little passion there is. It feels like a book. It looks like a book. It appears tightly written but somehow says very little. And then you put it down and feel nothing, just unentertained by it all.