Also, did you pause to mourn the death of con man Billie Sol Estes earlier in the month? I posted about the muckraking newspaper exposé that brought him down over at Echoes on Bloomberg, and will have a few other posts there in upcoming weeks.

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Similarly, if you shift your focus away from, say, the market-share battle between Amazon and the Big Six, you’ll notice that the literary output of our culture has never been higher. “What we see again and again in our society is that people do not need to be encouraged to create, only that businesses want methods by which they can minimize the risk of investing in the creation.” He argues that publishers should recognize that their business is not to print books but to help curate literary culture.

His solution–which, yes, does involve authors’ bloody thumbprints–might strike some writers as an explusion from the stratosphere of solitary literary creation. But I, for one, would love to see publishers invest in authors’ careers rather than their individual books. This essay by Jane Friedman also sounds some of the same themes.

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There is, for instance, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, which tells the story of a poor black woman whose cells were used without her knowledge for scientific experiments, then follows the fortunes of her descendents to examine the ethics of biomedical experimentation and the effects of structural inequality.

Another example is Blood Done Sign My Name by Timothy Tyson, which narrates a racially motivated killing in the Southern town of the author’s boyhood to push forward a larger argument about the unacknowledged role of violence, or the threat of violence, in the civil rights movement.

And there is The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, which actually uses three stories of black Americans who moved from the South to the North in the first half of the twentieth century as part of the six million people who made the same move in search of economic opportunity and freedom from oppression.

It just so happens that all three of this books are about race in American history. Which brings me to my question: can you think of any recent books (narrative histories written for a smart general audience) that do for gender and women’s history what these books do for race? It also just so happens that all three of these books employ memoir, but that is not as relevant here. I’d love it if you’d post a comment or email me at info@amyreading.com. And yes, this is related to a book I’m thinking of writing.

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At least a decade ago, Stephen took Jay and me on a hike to see trilliums, and there we met Hazel, wearing the world’s most awesome hat. I had never heard of Shakespeare, the fishing tackle company, and just thought she had impeccable literary taste that extended even into her hiking gear. As I related this all back to her, she said, “You know, I wore that hat to pieces, but I think I still have it.” And a few days later, it arrived in the mail.

Check out the number of times it has been repaired with whatever was on hand. I wish you could feel the brim. The plastic inside has grown brittle and completely crumbled. This is a hat that has sat on a head that has done quite a lot of living.

I think it looks just right on my dark blue office wall, where it will live out a second, honorable life as a reminder to me to get outside and think under the sign of literature.

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Hypothesis #2: Gift-giving represents one of the oldest ways to resist and subvert capitalism. It rejects the idea of an equal exchange, an object traded for its exact equivalent in money with no emotional residue, in favor of imbalance, surplus, and the messy transferral of meaning. A gift is a generosity that asks nothing in return but creates or accentuates a relationship between giver and receiver. Gift-giving in the form of philanthropy can help heal some of capitalism’s wrongs. Personal gift-giving can help puncture the spectacle of reality created by mass media and return us to the realm of immediacy.

So which is it?

I find it very hard to disentangle one from the other, not least because they aren’t mutually exclusive. Hypothesis #1 describes the purchase and Hypothesis #2 the gift. You could argue that the knot can be cut simply by opting out of Amazon and big box retailers, and choosing locally made, homemade, or heirloom gifts, thus restoring meaning to gift-giving by circumventing the marketplace. But this dodges the paradox in favor of oversimplification. The handmade gift can be inadequate; the retail gift can change a life (prime example: a book. Such as Lewis Hyde’s The Gift).

No, the two meanings of gift-exchange are deeply intertwined. It’s hard to argue that giving something away for free is a radical act when that is exactly the marketing strategy being trumpeted by the latest new media gurus. Yet it’s equally hard to believe that capitalism has co-opted absolutely everything when it is still possible to be moved—whether unsettled or uplifted—by an unanticipated gift, like walking into an art gallery and being offered a gold-wrapped candy from a never-exhausted supply.

I can’t offer you a glossy visual spread of the 25 best items under $25 to give your loved ones. I can’t ventriloquize Marcel Mauss. But I can tell you what I think constitutes a good gift:

1. It has to hurt. For a gift to be truly meaningful, it has to contain a piece of yourself, and it should be a big deal to give away that piece. At the very least, it should be risky—you should be willing to risk being hurt if your gift does not hit its mark. But perhaps more than that, it should be something slightly bigger or slightly more personal than you can easily part with. That’s when you know you are being generous—if the easier choice would be to keep it.

2. It has to move. A gift that is successful prompts the recipient to make a gift of her own. Not necessarily to the original giver, and not necessarily in a form that mimics the original gift. But the point of the exercise is that the generosity, the spirit of the gift, the giftiness of it, the thing that wounds the giver, transfers to the recipient, and bestows on her a kind of wealth that, in the best of circumstances, she should feel moved to put back into circulation. Good gifts are like library books that you can never find on the shelf.

3. It has to be part of a story. You know how, at Christmas and birthdays, the opening of a gift often prompts a wordy gift explanation from the giver? I used to think those sentences were a sign of the gift’s inadequacy. A good gift shouldn’t need a bunch of framing text. But now I know that these words are almost entirely the point. A gift should be the punchline of a story, or the opening sentence, or a perhaps just the perfect ending of a chapter in the middle of a long novel.

Most of the gifts I give this year will not match these criteria, but I’m aiming in that direction: risk, movement, and story.

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Lennon largely resists the temptation to make this a meta-fictional novel that comments on itself, and there is no authorial hand reaching in from above (though a book called Familiar does briefly appear at the end). Instead, Elisa goes searching for a paradigm to help explain what has happened to her. She considers video-game design (her not-dead son’s profession), talk therapy, science fiction, and physics with its theory of the multiverse. Elisa is herself a scientist, a plant biologist who has become a university administrator. Her mind is orderly and rational, and she is determined to find a true explanation for the impossibility–the fictionality–that has just erupted in her life.

Marco Roth in the journal n+1 has written about the recent trend in contemporary literary fiction for protagonists with faulty brains. He calls them “neuronovels,” and sees them as the 21st-century heirs to early 20th-century modernist “stream of consciousness” novels, in which neuroscience has been given all the explanatory power for altered perception and heightened language. Roth deplores this turn to the materialist and wonders why novelists have ceded so much ground to science.

Lennon’s book happens to rebut Roth quite neatly. Something is gravely wrong with Elisa–either in her mind with her perception of reality or with the quantum particles of her entire world–but she is not otherwise different from us. Perhaps if Roth had written this book, Elisa would run right to the library to read “The Metamorphosis.” But applying science rather than, say, literature to her problem proliferates Lennon’s story, instead of neatly reducing and resolving it as Roth fears. Science happens to contain exactly as many stories as psychology (i.e. an infinite amount).

Lest I leave you with the impression that this is a cold exercise in problem-solving, I hasten to add that the book contains a beating heart as well as a faulty brain. Elisa must figure out how to relate to her family in this new world, her husband and surviving son, as well as the son that died in her old world but has reappeared to her. And he is not okay. It is affecting and haunting.

If you like Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, read this book. I suspect John Fowles’ The Magus is somewhere in this book’s ancestry. Right now I’m reading The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro, which J. Robert Lennon recommended at his book reading here in Ithaca.

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