Posts Tagged ‘greatest’
Fantasy kinda sucks. As a longtime fan of the genre, I’ve somewhat earned some right to say that.
While “Harry Potter” is fun to read — excepting the fifth book — its colorful characters and whimsical settings are bogged down by weak writing.
“His Dark Materials” has similar strengths and flaws, and was worsened even further by the author’s tendency to proselytize.
“The Wheel of Time” cribs liberally from Tolkien — an author who wrote his books solely because he liked making up languages.
The worst of all of them is that “Eragon” series; it reads like it was written by a 19-year-old homeschooler from Montana. In part because it was.
Whatever Neil Gaiman writes, he tends to exhibit the same self-indulgent fascination with multi-pantheon crossovers, leaving Terry Brooks alone among living fantasists for being above reproach. After all, Brooks is the only one who doesn’t take his fantasy settings seriously.
It’s become a rule, therefore, that fantasy as a whole is a thin, shallow genre of fiction with especially egregious pretensions that it has meaningful depth and that it’s romanticism profound rather than transparent. Science fiction, unfortunately, is much of the same.
Fortunately, because the overall crappiness of fantastic literature is a rule, there are going to be exceptions. I just spent the better part of two days — almost spilling over into three — reading one of the most important and, dare I say, literary exceptions in recent memory.
“Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” had interested me ever since I first saw it on the discount bookshelves and bestseller lists, but I decided against bothering with it. I didn’t have the money to buy it, and it was too contemporary to be in the school library, besides. Having recently graduated to the local library, I saw it Thursday last and, on a whim, checked it out.
Though buying this book in its native Britain would set me back a good 7 pounds, I’d call it an even trade: the hardcover weighs almost that much. There are nearly 800 pages in the hardcover version I spent a weekend reading — that makes it roughly the size of a King James Bible after a begat-ectomy.
Despite that it reads like Jane Austen and the humanity of its title characters are straight out of Dickens — if you’re sure I exaggerate, you’ll appreciate this book more than I did — I enjoyed every moment.
I shouldn’t make my admiration seem so unlikely — I was bound to like “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” from the very start. It has the flair of a finely researched history, and more footnotes per page than “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” a history in which the author, for whatever reason, apologizes for including as many footnotes as he does.
It’s no criticism of the novel to say that these footnotes were my favorite part of the 7-pound blunt object that is “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell,” and I suppose quite a few readers came to the same conclusion. Indeed, the footnotes were enjoyable enough, and added so much to the world of the novel, that when the author decided to make her second book an anthology of stories, at least a few of these stores were inspired by her first novel’s footnotes.
There’s a lot of story in the book, and it would be difficult to summarize it without unbecoming spoilers and lengthy exposition, but, given fantasy these days, that depth is one of the great charms of “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.” Suffice it to say that the whole of it focuses on the careers of two British magicians of the Regency period, and is full of charmingly fleshed-out characters.
The early 19th century is the such a refreshing setting for fantasy. Rather than a world where dwarves and elves and orcs are the face of the fantastic, one of the great squabbles between the two title characters is over the status and usefulness of fairies, creatures that had once encompassed the whole of British fantasy before Tolkien injected high fantasy with his mish-mash blending of Old Norse mythology and Anglo-Saxon epic. However well-written “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” is, and however well it stands on its own merits, that it ignores the 50-year-old precedent of swords and sorcery, a subgenre that might as well be mimeographed from the worst parts of “The Lord of the Rings,” is one of the greatest strengths that author Susanna Clarke chose for her world of British magic.
After reading so much of dwarves and elves and orcs, a reprieve was due; we needed a reprieve into densely imagined real literature from dense-minded pulp literature, even if that it lasts only a weekend.
But what a weekend.
Toward the end of the interview I had no business attending, our potential employer asked all of us in the group interview all of the basic questions. What qualifies you; what’s your strength; what’s your weakness. At the end, though, he added a particularly devious question:
Besides yourself, who in this room would you hire?
Twenty-three job candidates in a cramped classroom suddenly became very nervous. Even the lady who had graduated from this correspondence school seemed uncomfortable.
In true group interview form, our interviewer asked for the candidates in the back to go first. I was in the front, and I would be almost the last person to answer the question.
Candidate the First had prepared quickly. After a confident pause, she answered the question by making what seemed to be the obvious choice, choosing Cindy, the graduate of this correspondence school. Most of the rest of the room affirmed that decision. As one put it:
She knows the product.
Cindy was a good choice. Cindy was probably the best choice. However, Cindy was almost certainly the safe choice. Seldom do I make safe choices at job interviews. Blending in is a marvelous apocryphal adaptation of chameleons in the jungle of Madagascar, but it won’t help me get a job. Besides, Cindy looked like she tired of the all of the attention.
Looking toward the back, I saw a man in a blue shirt. He had spoken about having been a listener for years, and how that would help him telemarket to students who had already expressed interest in the program.
He was a wide man with graying hair and Latin features, and his warm smile radiated genuine satisfaction. He looked competent; he looked quiet.
I chose him.
He didn’t have to talk about spin selling, or being a great salesman. He talked about listening. That’s a skill hard for adults to develop if they haven’t already, and if he is that good of a listener, he’d do excellently in sales. He has to match what this school has with what the client wants.
In addition, I think that he’d make an excellent mentor figure to the correspondence school students trying to get restart their life, too. He’d make an excellent father figure, or grandfather figure …
That’s where my 30-second soliloquy stopped, broken by laughter of the interviewers and the other candidates. The wide man in the blue shirt smiled quietly.
Given my defense of my youth earlier that day, I supposed they thought I was trying to undermine his chances of getting hired. I wasn’t trying to make it a dig at his age, though. With age comes awareness, comes respect.
Appearing like a grandfather figure doesn’t make him a bad candidate — it makes him the best candidate. As I began to talk myself through this, I began to believe this, and I never meant to use my opportunity to help out someone else to take someone else out of the running. I don’t know whether the laughter was because they thought I was being a jerk, or whether because they recognized that I didn’t meant to harm the wide man’s chance of getting hired.
Either way, I didn’t get a callback.
On a tip from an acquaintance, I heard that a local correspondence school was hiring and had a roundtable interview scheduled within a couple of days. She said she had just been hired, added that her job pretty much involves answering phones. For a candidate with negligible work experience, phone-answering sounded just fine. I touched up my resume, and, after calling ahead, I went off to the interview.
I ended up showing up half of an hour early — I wrote down the wrong start time — in my dress shirt and slacks. Phone answering, I reasoned, doesn’t warrant suit and tie. Other interviewees started showing up not three minutes after I arrived, promptly quashing that hypothesis.
One of the first to arrive was a loud, brash man at least 24 years my senior. Then, the quiet, demure lady with elegant pearl earrings and a dark-colored pantsuit who was a little older. There was, in a classy pinstripe, the confident but subdued gentleman old enough to be my father. By the time we moved our group into the smallish classroom, we numbered 20 or more, and all but two or three had graduated college before I entered high school.
I assessed the situation.
I’m a little out of my league, and I probably don’t have a chance. Still, since I’m here, I might as well stick around.
Besides, as one of the other, few youngsters told me:
I hear they’re interviewing for a “wide variety of positions.” I’m not sure what that means, but I need a job.
I hoped that it involved answering phones or being a receptionist, but I wasn’t sure.
All things considered, the interview went as well as it could have. Between questions, there were a few presentations — lectures — about the specific business, and how it gets run, and how it outperforms its competitors, and what positions were available. How it wants flexible go-getters willing to take orders and to do what it takes to close a sale.
Low-level openings involved selling the college to interested candidates and screening applicants — probably still out of my reach.
I stuck around, believing that the very worst that could happen was that a meteor would crash into the Earth, obliterating all forms of life except the cockroach. I also believed that the worst thing that could realistically happen was that I’d remain jobless this summer, but with more practice at interviews.
Improving the quality of this practice, the interviewers asked the typical interview questions, and I was prepared.
What’s your greatest strength, and what’s maybe a potential weakness?
I started with a weakness.
I’ll start with a weakness, because I think it’d be hard to evaluate me as a job candidate without considering it — it’s my youth.
The room, normally filled with muttering and whispered chattering, fell silent. I took a breath to calm the nerves; I continued. Paraphrased:
I don’t have the years of experience at the job or in life that a lot of other candidates in this room have, and there’s this impression that everyone my age thinks they know everything. Maybe that’s true for other kids my age, but it isn’t true for me. I don’t think I know everything.
You spoke for a time about wanting employees who are flexible, and who want to learn how to do it your way. That’s me, in part because of my youth and relative inexperience. I don’t think I know everything, and that’s probably my greatest strength.
That’s the speech I had in my head, and, redundant as it was, it was even more galbred in the translation. I could tell that the message got across, though, and I believe it was the right message. As Randy Pausch said, quoting his father:
If there’s an elephant in the room, introduce it.
Not that my introduction helped: I still didn’t get the job. There’s always next time.
