But the first shot of New York City in You’ve Got Mail is not of one of these idyllic quarters, one of these provincial and folksy avenues dotted with decorative gourds or blooming flower boxes, persistent details of a district so charming and precious that it might have been embroidered rather than built. The first shot is a stark computerized rendering of the city, not at all like the real thing.
The film opens on a digital image, a dark screen with a few swirls and floating loops moving about. The title appears over this animation, typed out with a blinking cursor, as if on a word processor. But this is not intended to simply evoke a computer, it is intended to evoke the internet (the script refers to it as a visualization of the term “cyberspace”); we can hear the wails and chugs of dial-up in the background.
Ten days before my father died, he suffered a small stroke and fell. Or perhaps he fell and then had the stroke. Either way, it surprised me when people asked what was the cause of death. I mean, he was 98! Wasn’t that cause enough?
I visited him shortly after his fall, flew down from New York with Amy and Hugh. Gretchen and Paul met us at Springmoor, but he was essentially gone by then. There was a livid gash on his forehead, and he was propped up in his bed, which seemed ridiculously short, like a cut-down one you’d see in a department store. His eyes were closed, his mouth was open, and behind his lips swayed a glistening curtain of spittle.
Say what you will about Quentin Tarantino: His films are violent but often hilarious, exulting in the history of cinema, from spaghetti westerns to slasher films to auteurs such as Welles and Kurosawa.
The same can be said of Dan Chaon's brash, exuberant new novel, "Sleepwalk," a Tarantino vibe in book form, with nods to Pynchon-paranoia and Kerouac-style road epic, Greek myths and dystopian fiction. "Sleepwalk" draws on an array of genres and narratives, but it's also a visionary work, a preview of a nation just minutes away.
If “cultural good” strikes you as a maddeningly vague descriptor, I regret to inform you that In Praise of Good Bookstores won’t give you the ah-ha specificity that you might be seeking, or that might help you win an argument with my dad. It does, however, put forth a moving and capacious argument that seems less concerned with convincing skeptics that there is something urgent and necessary about spaces devoted to books (and to their thoughtful, algorithm-free curation) than it does with validating, heartening, and invigorating believers. Deutsch calmly and deftly defends the value of bookstores while eschewing the panicky self-justification and broad-strokes condemnations of our bloodless, anti-intellectual plutocracy that some might default to (read: that I might default to), instead favoring a quiet, loving return to what drew us book-lovers to bookstores in the first place.
Struggles we had
a name for and those
for which we didn’t.