Can you break up with someone you've never met?

Can a book be both existential and light?

Is the phrase "an existential romp" an oxymoron?

Readers of Martin Page's The Discreet Pleasures of Rejection may be inclined to answer those questions in the affirmative.

Who knew existential ennui could be such riotous good fun?

The premise of Discreet Pleasures is simple and outlandish: Virgil returns home one day from his unfulfilling work at the Svengali Advertising Agency to a message on his answering machine:

Virgil, it's Clara. I'm sorry, but I'd rather stop here. I'm leaving you, Virgil. I'm leaving you.

Etiquette experts argue that one must respect one's partner by breaking up in person, but the method of Clara's breakup is of only minor importance. Because Virgil doesn't know or can't remember who Clara is. In essence, he's been dumped by an apparition.

The incident sets Virgil on a journey of self-discovery (as the blurbists like to put it) in which, at least initially, he does indeed experience the "pleasures" of "rejection." He tells all his friends (exclusively women) that he's yet again been dumped and suddenly he's the center of attention. They dote on him, feed him, pat his back, encourage him, compliment him. This is fun for awhile.

But eventually Virgil begins to ask another question: Why do all my relationships, even the ones I've never got to enjoy, end in sorrow?

Book Serf caught up with Martin Page (via the wonders of the internets) and asked the Parisian satirist (his How I Became Stupid was described as a "modern day Candide") the following questions:

BS: What is the secret, do you think, in getting readers to buy into such a fantasical premise?

MP: The secret? Hmm. Difficult for me to think that there’s a secret.

BS: How does one make believable a character who does things none of us would do?

MP: Well, that’s the kind of thing I do. It's a normal, regular way of thinking for me. So what’s unrealistic for most people is in fact a daily thing for me.

But you are right: there's a challenge in making a bizarre idea realistic. My point was not to write a surrealistic novel, but to write a novel about love. The bizarre beginning is a catch. It's a way to amaze the main character, Virgil, and to create excitement. And the reader of course. And to let me follow my ideas.

BS: Can you talk a little bit about pitch? It seems to me that you -- ie, the narrator -- has to strike just the right tone, a certain dead-pan delivery that makes the farce come alive.

MP: Yes, it's very important for me, that deadpan sense of humor. The more you play it seriously, the more profound and intelligent it is. It's always more intersting when amazing and crazy things are underplayed. Because then we see the farce (and the uncanny) as a part of our lives. It shows the strange unreality of reality.

BS: If you met Virgil in real life, do you think you would like him?

MP: That’s a difficult question, because Virgil is pretty much a self-portrait of me. So if I met myself in real life, there's a chance I would be a little upset, because I would see all my defects.

BS: Your narrator and Virgil both have wide-ranging interests, from the history of advertising in the Western world to the invention of the CAT scan machine and catafalques! Can you talk about the structure of your book and its inclusive, digressive, polymathic (is that even a word?) nature?

MP: I try to write novels that are polysemic. You can read them on different levels. If you want to read this one as a simple bizarre comedy, you can. If you want to read it as a reflection on love, you can. If you want to read that as a reflection on memory, you can.

I like digression. That's why I adore books like Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Montaigne's essays. Something that seems to be a detour is in fact telling us something about the main subject. A digression is not unbounded, it's not without purpose. It's connected to the subject, it gives it some ornaments (which are great and beautiful things) that mean something (even if you don't notice that at first).

BS: What are the things that you most enjoy about Oscar Wilde? What could contemporary writers learn from him?

MP: Wilde is an underestimated writer. People talk about him mostly as the king of paradox (and of course Chesterton is the prince of paradox). They say he’s very witty, but that he wrote quotes more than works of art. But he's a complex writer. There's a journey between The Picture of Dorian Gray and De Profundis. And I like that journey, the diversity, the variety of work. Most of all, I like him because he's light and profound, sad and full of joy, tragic and comic. It's more than a philosophy of litterature, it's an ethic: to live and to write.

BS: Do you share Virgil's complicated views of Paris ?

MP: Totally. It's my own words. Paris is not an easy city to understand.

BS: My favorite line from Raymond Chandler is from Farewell, My Lovely, where the narrator says, "She was so cold spumoni wouldn't have melted on her." I read an interview in which you identified similarities between The Long Goodbye and your latest novel. Can you elaborate on that? And, what's your favorite Chandler line?

MP: Farewell, My Lovely is a great novel. I like the idea that a novel is an investigation. At the end the hero is not exactly the same — now life may begin. I think noirs and dectective novels give us a very interesting structure on which to build "literary" or "classic" novels. There's a lot to be learned from them. The Long Good-Bye is that kind of quest. And it's a beautiful book about Los Angeles.

BS: What are you working on now?

MP: A graphic novel, a comic book (comic strips in the tradition of Schultz's Peanuts), a novel for teenagers, and an essay about my father.

L'Enfant Sauvage ... T.C. Boyle returns ...

Wild Child by T.C. Boyle (Viking, $25.95)

By Erik Harden for Book Serf

The ‘80s punk band the Minutemen, in its succinct and abstract style, once pondered a world unspoiled by humankind in its song Nature Without Man. T.C. Boyle takes the opposite approach to the matter in his latest collection of short stories, Wild Child.

These previously published short stories offer several tales based on the uneasy relationship between man and nature. Boyle takes an array of approaches – from mundane and humorous to horrifying and heartbreaking. And he packs an emotional wallop using a style that manages to be straightforward yet complex.

In “La Conchita,” he brings the horror and panic of being trapped in a natural disaster to life. Coincidentally, I was reading this story the week the earthquake struck Haiti. Although Boyle’s story is about a mudslide in Southern California, it was easy to imagine the shell-shocked survivors of the quake thinking something like the following:

By the time we reached the top of the street, a long block and a half in, all of it uphill, I was out of breath – heaving, actually – but whether my lungs burned or my shoes were ruined beyond salvage or repair or the finish on the car was damaged to the tune of five hundred bucks or more didn’t matter, because the whole thing suddenly came clear to me. This was the real deal. This was affliction and loss, horror unfolding, the houses crushed like eggshells, cars swallowed up, sections of roof flung out across the street and nothing visible beneath but tons of wet mud and a scatter of splintered beams. I was staggered. I was in awe.

And the story actually becomes more harrowing as the central character – a courier who delivers donated organs to hospitals – finds himself frantically digging through the mud to save the lives of people he has never met. Let’s just say the results are riveting.

“Admiral,” one of the funnier stories in the collection, also tackles the clash between man and nature, but with sharp sarcasm and wit. It’s the story of a recent college graduate who returns to her hometown and takes a job as a dogsitter for a $250,000 cloned Afghan hound.

To me, it feels like a cautionary tale of man becoming too godlike, but that’s not to say Boyle is up on a soapbox. He just lets the absurdity of two self-absorbed professionals insanely doting over a genetic copy of an earlier spoiled pooch unfold. At one point, Nisha – the dogsitter – asks herself:

Four years of college for this? Wars were being fought, people were starving, there were diseases to conquer, children to educate, good to do in the world, and here she was reliving her adolescence in the company of inbred, semi-retarded clown of a cloned Afghan hound because two childless rich people decreed it should be so.

Boyle brings the moral center of the story into sharp focus when Erhard, an animal rights activist who befriends Nisha, contends the two people she is working for are "arrogant exemplars of bourgeois excess, even to the point of violating the laws of nature – and God, God too – simply to satisfy their own solipsistic desires."

While this story is based on man’s best friend, I couldn’t help but notice Boyle’s fascination with creatures of the avian variety throughout the anthology. In “Balto,” the first story in the book, a man looks at a gull and notices "the way the breeze touched its feathers and the sun whitened its breast until there was nothing brighter and more perfect in the world – this creature, his fellow creature."

In another story he describes a widower like a bird stripped of its feathers in some aerial catastrophe. In the book’s title story, a parrot has a fatal run-in with the story’s central character. And finally, in another story a major league baseball player’s mother is kidnapped in Venezuela. The player, as it turns out, is a pitcher for the Orioles.

“Wild Child,” the longest story in the anthology, is Boyle’s take on the classic story of L’Enfant Sauvage – a feral boy found living in the French countryside at the turn of the 19th century.
Boyle breathes new life into the legendary tale that is based on the memoirs of the French physician Jean Itard.

Boyle, maybe more than any previous telling of this story, often tries to see things the way the boy – eventually named Victor – would interpret his surroundings and the attempts to assimilate him into the civilized world. When he is first being hunted by villagers in the countryside, this is his description:

A fire was built beneath the tree, the boy all the while watching these three bipeds, these shagged and violent and strangely habited and gibbering animals, out of the deep retreat of his eyes.

Boyle expresses man’s fear of the wild in the way the French country citizens view the child and his growing legend: "He wasn’t a child. He was a spirit, a demon outcast like the rebel angels, mute and staring and mad."

When the boy is brought to Paris to be studied and, for lack of a better word, domesticated, he fails to see the city’s storied beauty. Ironically, the child-beast views the City of Lights in very unflattering terms.

All he knew was what he heard and smelled. He saw confusion , heard chaos, and what he smelled was ranker than anything he’d come across in all his years of wandering the fields and forests of Aveyron, concentrated pungent, the reek of civilization.

Itard, in studying the child, hopes to unlock the mysteries of the question that has been asked by famous philosophers through the years:

Itard was prepared to carry out to put to the test the thesis propounded by Locke and Condillac: Was man born a tabula rasa, unformed and without ideas, ready to be written upon by society, educable and perfectible? Or was society a corrupting influence, as Rousseau supposed, rather than the foundation of all things right and good?

This is the question Boyle grapples with throughout Wild Child.

More of my interview with Julia Keller/Chicago Tribune

The great thing about the internets, as our last president liked to call them, is that nothing need be left on the cutting room floor. To wit: I recently had the pleasure of exchanging emails with Pulitzer Prize journalist Julia Keller (author of Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel) for a column she was writing for her newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, about "when to give up on a book."

JK: Is there a novel you've started but not finished, but that still haunts you? (Your web site talks about White Noise. Any others?)

BS: Sure. There are great novels that I've been unable to defeat. Ulysses is one of them. A friend of mine used to call his attempts to finish Ulysses "assaults" on the novel. And you really do have to gird your loins and prepare for a battle with that particular book. I've enjoyed trying to read Ulysses and would never consider my time spent with it in the least bit wasted. And of course I'm sympathetic to the arguments of the folks who have finished it and loved it. But I am, sorry to say, not among those lucky few. Maybe someday?

I'm sure there's a Faulkner in there that I never finished. I read a lot of him in graduate school! It's not a novel, but I have one more chapter to read in Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari. I'm not sure why I stopped reading it and I'm fairly certain I'll return to it, god willing and if the creek don't rise, as Hank Sr. used to say.

JK: How long do you go before giving up? Is there a rule of thumb?

BS: In all four of these questions, Julia, I would divide the books into two categories: those books we feel that will benefit and enrich us and are worth finishing no matter the degree of difficulty (books such as Buddenbrooks or Lord Jim or Moby-Dick); and all the other, lesser books we're just taking a flyer on.

It's easier to walk away from the latter than from the former. I don't think we should ever walk away from a book merely because it's challenging. That's the wrong reason. On the other hand, certain books simply don't command our respect. Recently I went looking for books that might satisfy a couple of urges I have as a reader: for epic fantasy and for novels of the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars. I'd read Tolkien in the first genre and Patrick O'Brian in the second and considered them the gold standard. I settled on Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson for my epic fantasy and, to be honest with you, I'm not sure I'm going to make it through the trilogy. The lead character, Thomas Covenant, keeps saying, Hellfire!, which I find bizarre and distracting. Donaldson's writing is often atrocious. So many anachronisms, so many poorly chosen words, so much silliness like Hellfire! The story has my attention through 200 pages, so maybe I'll finish this novel and reconsider the final two in the series? In the seafaring genre, I picked up the first novel in the "Ramage" series by Dudley Pope. I walked away from that at about 100 pages because I simply couldn't get excited to pick the book back up again after I'd set it aside. That was three months ago, so I think I'm done with it.

One question I find fascinating is, Why don't we finish a book? There have been times when I wasn't in the mood for a book that I would months or even years later return to and love. So our moods can determine the outcome. At other times, an author will break (in our mind) the compact that exists between all authors and their readers. Perhaps we will have said once too often, Are you kidding me? And we'll decide we no longer want to suspend our disbelief. Or perhaps the author abuses the English language in ways we find intolerable. Or perhaps a tic (say, cuteness) that is at first bearable becomes a reason to set a book aside.

An old friend of mine once rolled down the passenger-side window of my car and threw one of Nabokov's novels out at 70 mph on the interstate! "Sometimes," he said, "deciding not to finish a book calls for a grand gesture." We still laugh about that today!

Perhaps I should have prefaced these responses by saying that I finished every book I ever started, good, bad or indifferent, until I was 26 years old. In my old age, I find it so much easier to let a book go than in my youth. (Not sure this has anything to do with our discussion, but in my dotage I have begun for the first time in my life to reread my favorite books, something I thought I'd never do but find I enjoy it immensely.)

JK: What's the earliest you've ever quit on a book? (e.g., first page? first paragraph?) What's the furtherest you've gone, and then quit?

BS: The earliest I ever quit on a book was Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, which I stopped reading on Page 3. I could tell then, despite all the hype, that it was the work of a consumate hack. Reading those first few pages reminded me of a line Dorothy Parker wrote in a review from the 1920s: "This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."
I wish I'd written that line myself! I've certainly read enough books over the years to which it could be applied! Let's just say The Da Vinci Code was a better book than a movie and leave it at that!

As for the book I read most deeply into before giving up, I guess it's Don DeLillo's Underworld, somewhere in the 600s of an 827 page novel! So close, and yet I was so overwhelmed reading it by ennui that to go on was insupportable. I really don't have any regrets for leaving Underworld behind and no intention of going back to it.

JK: Must one finish a book to derive all the meat from it?

BS: I don't think so. At least, not if it's a good book. The best novelists aren't going to give us the answers to life in the final chapter or in the Epilogue, I don't think. My favorite novelists ask the best questions; they don't give the best answers. So I think you can accumulate meat as you move through a book even if you never make it to the end. But what, you ask, about a detective novel? Well, then, yes, one must read on til the end to find out whodunnit. The key in the case of crime fiction or novels with O. Henry-style endings, etc., is to not allow yourself to be sucked in in the first place.

My interview with Julia Keller of the Chicago Tribune!

Thanks to Julia Keller for the shout out in her Chicago Tribune column about "When to give up on a book."

Julia is the author of the fine book Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel, a history of the Gatling gun and, perhaps more so, of the U.S. Patent Office.

You can check out our interview here:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-ae-0221-lit-life-20100221,0,76939.column

They don't make justices like John Marshall anymore ...

Marshall: Writings by John Marshall (Library of America, $40)

Journalists (and all other kinds of writers) would do well to heed the advice of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, who believed that in both speaking and writing "clearness and precision are most essential qualities. The man who by seeking embellishment hazards confusion, is greatly mistaken in what constitutes good writing . . . The writer should always express himself so clearly as to make it impossible to misunderstand him. He should be comprehended without an effort."

That dictum was the guiding principle behind all of Marshall's prose and the reason that contemporary readers of Marshall: Writings can easily traverse the two-hundred-year gulf between his time and ours.

Marshall collects more than 200 of the essays, judicial opions, legal agruments, letters, speeches, resolutions and reports penned by John Marshall between 1779 and 1835, as well as selections from his Life of George Washington.

The Book Serf asked historian and Marshall editor Charles F. Hobson, author of The Great Chief Justice: John Marshall and the Rule of Law, the following questions:

Book Serf: It has been said that, eventually, a biographer must come to loathe his subject. You lived with John Marshall for quite some time. Do you think that's true?

Charles Hobson. Not at all. Who said this? As I said somewhere, Marshall, like fine wine, got better with age. I count myself extremely fortunate to have been associated with him (through his papers) for more than 30 years of my life. I never got tired of spending my days with him.

BS: Imagine John Marshall as a contemporary. (Not difficult, given how forward-thinking he was!) A friend asks you, So what's he like?

CH: In a nutshell, charming, delightful company, full of good cheer and bonhomie, treating high and low with equal attention. He had a knack for putting others at ease, particularly young lawyers appearing in his court for the first time. He took great pleasure in the company of close friends, perhaps most memorably as a member of the Barbecue Club in Richmond, where that town’s elite gathered on Saturday mornings in good weather to pitch quoits, feast on good food, and imbibe punch. He possessed the common touch, a plain and simple manner that endeared him to all except for Thomas Jefferson.

BS: I love Marshall's description of great writing having to do with clarity and precision. Describe his strengths (and weaknesses?) as a writer.

CH: Well, his strengths were just that, clarity and precision. As he told his grandson, never let the reader mistake your meaning or even struggle to comprehend it. Like any writer, he fell into sloppiness when he was in a hurry to meet deadlines — as in composing the draft of the first edition of the Life of George Washington. Another example, perhaps, was his opinion in the treason trial of Aaron Burr, which concluded on a Saturday and the opinion delivered on the following Monday. In such instances, Marshall tended to excessive verbiage and repetition.

BS: William Faulkner once said, The past is not dead. In fact, it is not even past. In what ways do we take for granted our United States of America that wouldn't be so had Marshall not exerted such influence on our founding in the early 1800s? What might America look like had Marshall not been Chief Justice for 34 years?

CH: This is a “counterfactual” question, not particularly congenial to my tastes and training as a historian. I caution against attributing too much to a single person — the “great man” theory of history. All I can say with any confidence is that Marshall was in the right place at the right time — that is, he had the opportunity to be creative, to some extent write on a clean slate, map uncharted territory, etc., and that he made the most of his opportunity. More than anyone else, he contributed to the emergence of the judiciary — and the Supreme Court in particular — as a major player in our tripartite scheme of government.

The judiciary — the third and “least dangerous” branch — had acquired significantly greater power and authority by 1835 than it had when Marshall became chief justice in 1801. Now, this might have happened without Marshall. It is also possible that the judiciary, without Marshall at the helm, could have receded into relative insignificance.

BS: Why should the contemporary reader care about John Marshall? What can we learn from him, not only in his role of longest-termed Chief Justice in our nation's history but also as a husband, a father, a friend?

CH: Marshall, indeed, seems to be the very embodiment of judicial wisdom, just the sort of person who should preside over the highest court in the land. In a sense, he created and defined the office, and all subsequent Chiefs have looked to him as the model.

With the robes of office removed, Marshall was a flesh and blood human being — a devoted husband to his wife “Polly,” who was often in precarious physical and emotional health. He was a kind and understanding father to five sons and one daughter. His children were born over a period of 21 years. When he was 60 in 1815, Marshall had sons still in their teens, all of whom had a penchant for getting into trouble. John, Jr., for example, managed to get himself expelled from Harvard for unspecified “immoral and dissolute” behavior. Polly Marshall’s fragile health evidently had its origins in a difficult birth while Marshall was absent in France on a diplomatic mission. She became reclusive, confined to a small circle of family and close friends. She could not stand noise of any kind, so Marshall admonished all visitors to remove their boots or shoes when entering the house. Whenever there was to be a big celebration in town with fireworks — Fourth of July, Christmas, Washington’s Birthday — Marshall made sure that Polly was taken to their farm on the Chickahominy River a few miles east of Richmond. At times her condition became so bad that Marshall felt isolated from society — a difficult situation for the decidedly convivial Chief Justice. When he was away in Washington, he wrote tender and amusing letters to Polly.

Marshall also enjoyed warm friendships, none deeper than that with Joseph Story, his younger brother on the Supreme Court. The venerable Virginian and the New England Yankee had genuine affection for each other, which comes through wonderfully in the letters they exchanged. It was Story who in 1827 prompted Marshall to write an autobiographical account of his life before becoming Chief Justice.

BS:Is there a recent (last 10 years or so?) Supreme Court ruling that would have Marshall rolling over in his grave?

CH: This is the sort of question I tend to shy away from. As a historian, I can only speak of Marshall in his own time and place. Without naming any cases, I will venture to say that Marshall attempted so far as possible to separate law and politics. There are perhaps some recent decisions in which he would be concerned that the Supreme Court had ventured too far into the political sphere.

Marshall is best known, of course, for invoking judicial review in the famous case of Marbury v. Madison (1803). However, I think a more characteristic opinion is McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), in which Marshall and the Court upheld the constitutionality of an act of Congress. Marshall allowed great deference to Congress to define the limits of its own powers.

BS: Can you relate to us your favorite anecdote about Marshall , something that reveals his character or intelligence or wit?

CH: There are many anecdotes, which I think says a lot about his character. Marshall’s simple and unpretentious manner, as well as his sense of humor and delight in a good joke, come through in the story of Marshall at the Richmond market.

It was not unusual for gentlemen to do the family marketing, though they were usually accompanied by a servant who would carry the various purchases back home. Marshall shopped by himself, stuffing a chicken, turkey, or whatever in his coat pocket. One day a young man all dressed up in aristocratic finery happened to be at market without his servant. Having purchased a chicken, he was much distressed that he had no one to carry the fowl home for him. He was obviously a recent arrival in Richmond, for he turned to a plainly dressed older man and asked him if he would carry his chicken. The man obliged him and on arriving at the young dandy’s house he was rewarded with a small coin for his trouble. The Chief Justice removed his hat and did a slow bow before returning to do his own shopping.

BS: Guess I have to ask this "required" Library of America question! What single piece of writing did you most regret leaving out of the collection?

CH: There is no single piece that I regret omitting because I think what is included is both representative and comprehensive. In other words, nothing was left out that would have added to our knowledge and understanding of the man.

BS: The subtitle of one of your books is John Marshall and the Rule of Law. Can you discuss Marshall 's contribution to our country's understanding of the "rule of law"?

CH: Marshall’s whole career was the embodiment of this concept. He spoke of it explicitly in the famous early case of Marbury v. Madison (1803), when he said the U.S. government “has been emphatically termed a government of laws, & not of men.” In that context, he was thinking in terms of legal rights and remedies — that is when our individual rights are violated we can seek redress in the courts.

But I think he had a broader understanding of the “rule of law” as an attitude or habit of mind ingrained in the American people that democracy and majority rule must be bounded and limited by law — of which the most fundamental is the Constitution. The phrase “rule of law” is often used in contrast to the “will of the people.” Marshall’s idea was that the two work in tandem to produce what he called a “well regulated democracy.”

In other words the American people, by their Constitution, agree that it is their “will” to be limited and bounded by law. Marshall did more than anyone to carve out a large role for the Supreme Court to enforce the “rule of law,” but he never asserted that this could be achieved exclusively or even primarily by the Court. To be a reality, the “rule of law” had to be the duty and responsibility of all departments of government and ultimately of the people at large.

Robert Flanagan's Top 5 Boxing Short Stories ...

Novelist/poet/short story writer/essayist/raconteur Robert Flanagan provides us with his list of the Top 5 Boxing Short Stories of All Time:

1. “The Croxley Master,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Why is this story always included in collections of best boxing fiction? Not because its author created Sherlock Holmes but because it is one of the best. Surgery assistant Montgomery needs one more university course to give him his medical license but no one will loan him the money. A dust-up with a boorish pug whom Montgomery, a gentleman amateur, flattens, leads him to enter a big money fight. His opponent is Silas Craggs, the dreaded Croxley Master, in a 20 round bout fought with 2 oz gloves, Queensbury rules.

2. “The Battle Royal,” Ralph Ellison: This is prizefighting in its most brutal, elemental form. Blindfolded black boys fight to the last man standing for a prize given by dominant whites and those left standing are thrown coins they scrabble to pick up. Published separately as a story, “The Battle Royal” became the first chapter of Ellison’s novel Invisible Man.

3. “Fifty Grand,” Ernest Hemingway: A man’s world, boxing, and in this tale manly men, Irish, Jewish and Black, fill it to the brim. Fighter Jack Brennan is stoic, the dialogue is laconic, the thinking cynical. The boredom of training camp, the manipulations of managers, the insatiable hunger for money all are here, along with a doubled double-cross killer ending.

4. “He Swung and He Missed,” Nelson Algren: Included in his great collection The Neon Wilderness, this story of character and heart captures the world of the urban downtrodden hoping for one lucky break. Young Rocco may be a loser but he’s never a quitter and his heart-felt line to his wife, “You got good odds, honey,” is a winner.

5. “The Mexican” & “Steak,” Jack London: The author of The Call of the Wild was a fierce boxing fan, writing about it in newspaper features (such as his racist attacks on Jack Johnson) and in his fiction. “The Mexican” is Felipe Rivera, a young man so committed to buying rifles for the Mexican revolution that he fights as the underdog in a “winner take all” bout. In “Steak” Tom King was once a comer. Now, stripped of promise, he fights because that’s all he knows how to do. It’s no longer a dream but just a business. When he was young King beat aging pugs; now it’s his turn to be beaten by up-and-comers.

Honorable Mention: “His Brother’s Keeper,” Dashiell Hammett; “Champion,” Ring Lardner.

An excerpt from Robert Flanagan's work-in-progress!

Last week, Robert Flanagan (Maggot, Naked to Naked Goes, Loving Power) provided The Book Serf with his Top 5 boxing novels ever. We recruited Bob for the job because, as we said in the introduction to his entry, he had earned, in the ring, two detached retinas.

This week we're fortunate not only to have Flanagan's Top 5 Boxing Stories of All Time (see entry below) but also an excerpt (here) from his as-yet unpublished novel, Champions, which follows the exploits of Catholic boy and Toledo native Pat McCandless, boxer-cum-comedian.

WHAT YOU LEARNED IN BOXING
By Robert Flanagan

Although Billy Conn claimed boxing was simple -- keep your chin down, your hands up, and your ass off the canvas, Pat McCandless had found you could learn a lot in the gym, if you could take the pain.
First off, you learned that if you went into the ring, you were bound to get hit. No matter how good you were, you got hit. Even the best got hit. Skeeter McClure, Willy Pep, even Sugar Ray Robinson. So you didn't need to feel when you ate leather that it meant there was something wrong with you. And when you got hit right, your eyes watered. But you learned that tears meant nothing, they were only an involuntary reaction, they were nothing to be ashamed of. It was the same with everyone. It was like bleeding -- you got cut, you bled. Like getting tagged on the side of the jaw where a nerve crossed over the bone there -- when the nerve was pinched, your legs jackknifed and you went down. It was automatic, it had nothing to do with character, toughness or will, it was just structure and mechanics. One of the many hard facts of life, as your coach explained, which you might as well learn now as later.
You learned that you could get cut and knocked down and still go on, that you were not as breakable as you'd secretly feared.
You learned that feeling afraid before a bout was nothing to worry about. Everyone felt the same way just as everyone bled. Fear was your friend, your coach taught you, because it made you careful. Show him a man who said he felt no fear going into the ring and he'd show you a liar or a fool. You learned because you listened to what you were told: he can run but he can't hide; make him miss and make him pay; kill the body and the head will fall. You listened because you believed it could save you from humiliation, pain and loss.
You learned to your surprise that your opponent was not your enemy. He was there to help you find out just how good you were.
You learned things that no one ever told you, things that you never told anyone. How morning roadwork was like serving the early side altar mass, it was lonely but helped you to believe in yourself. How gym work -- skip rope, medicine ball, light bag, heavy bag -- was like saying the Stations of the Cross, a penance for weakness, yet giving you hope of being redeemed.
What didn't you learn in the gym?
If your nose bled, you were to clinch and press it into your opponent's collarbone to help stop the bleeding. With a puffy eye, you were not to blow your nose as you risked closing the eye and having the referee stop the fight.
You learned that everything was a matter of timing. Don't let your man get set to deliver. You see him get ready, either beat him to the punch or change the distance between you.
Everything was a matter of angles. Never square up, but come in on the angle. Don't ever back up in a straight line, but always slip away to the side. Everything was a matter of knowing. Know what it was your opponent most wanted to do and then stop him from doing it. Be smart -- don't fight the other man's fight, fight your fight. Box a puncher and punch a boxer. A big hitter against a stick-and-move jabber could make lots of mistakes and still win, but a boxer against a puncher could not afford to be wrong even once. A man with knockout power was like someone born rich, he had an edge you'd never have.
Life was not fair. You could be Rocky Marciano, come along and knock out over-the-hill Joe Louis and grandpappy Walcott, have a tough time beating a second-rater like Roland LaStarza and light heavyweight king Archie Moore, never fight one heavyweight of note while in his prime, yet have people call you a great champion. Or you could be Ezzard Charles and give it your all -- brains and moves and beautiful technique, have everything but size and a big punch, and people hadn't the sense to appreciate your talent. But you didn't whine about it. It wouldn't change anything. If you felt bad about falling short of the mark you'd set yourself, you kept it to yourself. Because that was what it meant to take pride in yourself and in your craft.
You learned to take whatever came your way -- tough loss or dull draw -- as you took roadwork, another step along the way, something to face without crying why me? Or trying to blame it on anyone else.
Because it was just in the nature of things. That was the heart of what you learned. If you got into the ring, you were bound to get hit.

An excerpt from Champions, a novel in progress.
Published in The Civic Arts Review, Ohio Wesleyan University, Bernard Murchland, editor.

For more information and to buy Flanagan's books, visit http://www.robertflanagan.com/