Okay, so most Americans won’t have heard of Pete Bennett, winner of the English reality-TV show, Big Brother. And it seems highly unlikely that HarperCollins will release his book, Pete: My Story, in the U.S. But I can’t resist an article with the title “My book? I haven’t read it yet.”*

How did he write the book? “This posh geezer came over and asked a load of questions. WANK! And I had to answer them.” How long did it take? “A whole week! WANK! Yeah. WANK! I’m tired, man.” That’s the lovely thing about Pete - he tells it as it is. Is it weird being an author? “I’m not really, it was some geezer with a Dictaphone. Ehehehehe! WANK!” He’d love to discuss the book in detail, there’s only one problem - he hasn’t read it yet.  

This long, somewhat troubling article may not represent the first time that the “author” of a ghostwritten autobiography has been surprised to learn what he’s written about himself, but it’s definitely one of the most extreme examples of that syndrome. 

*Bennett has Tourette’s, and just swears in general, and his profanity has been faithfully transcribed, so if you’re offended by that sort of thing, well, you’ll be offended.

I’ve been lamenting the rise of the celebrity-authored picture book often and loudly enough to have finally realized that I’m part of the problem. Even if I’m only mentioning these books only in order to criticize them, I’m still contributing in a small way–very, very small–to the media hype.

Jessmonster was the first to answer my call for non-celebrity picture books that deserve a shout-out:

You could talk up My Cat, the Silliest Cat in the World. The first subject heading is ‘elephants - juvenile fiction.’ And it’s hilarious.

I haven’t seen it, but I’ll look for it. As for my own nominee, well, Meg Rosoff isn’t exactly an unknown, but as far as I know, she’s neither spiked a ball in the end zone of Texas Stadium nor hosted a late-night chat show. And my two-year-old, my wife, and I all love Meet Wild Boars. It meets both my need for text that allows highly dramatic readings and my two-year-old’s need for the vivid depiction of bodily functions.

(Of course, these things go in phases. Right now he’s more into John Henry: An American Legend, by Ezra Jack Keats. But he’ll be back: what two-year-old can resist a book that ends with a steaming pile of wild-boar poop?)

Asking for recommendations of good picture books that weren’t written by celebrities is pretty broad, I know, but I need help balancing my karma. So help me out, already.

Just when you thought a week would go by without more literary awards…it doesn’t.

NEW YORK, OCTOBER 25 - The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation today named ten recipients of the 2006 Whiting Writers’ Awards. The awards, which are $40,000 each, totaling $400,000, have been given annually since 1985 to emerging writers of exceptional talent and promise.

The winners?

• Sherwin Bitsui, poet, author of Shapeshift (Univ. of Arizona, 2003).
• Charles D’Ambrosio, short-story writer, author of The Dead Fish Museum (Knopf, 2006).
• Stephen Adly Guirgis, playwright, author of The Little Flower of East Orange (premieres at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 2007).
• Tyehimba Jess, poet, author of Leadbelly (Verse, 2005).
• Suji Kwock Kim, poet, author of Notes from the Divided Country: Poems (LSU, 2003).
• Yiyun Li, short-story writer, author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Random, 2005).
• Micheline Aharonian Marcom, novelist, author of The Daydreaming Boy (Riverhead, 2004).
• Nina Marie Martínez, novelist, author of ¡Caramba! A Tale Told in Turns of the Card (Knopf, 2004).
• Bruce Norris, playwright, author of The Pain and the Itch (opened this fall at the Playwrights Horizon in New York).
• Patrick O’Keeffe, short-story writer, author of The Hill Road (Viking, 2005).

So, let’s say you’re an emerging writer of exceptional talent and promise. How do you go about getting nominated for the Whiting Award?

Whiting Writers’ Awards candidates are proposed by about a hundred anonymous nominators from across the country whose experience and vocations give them knowledge about individuals of extraordinary talent. Winners are chosen by a small anonymous selection committee of recognized writers, literary scholars, and editors, appointed annually by the Foundation. At four meetings over the course of the year, the selectors discuss the candidates’ work and gradually winnow the list. They then recommend up to ten writers for awards to the Foundation’s Trustees. The Foundation accepts nominations only from the designated nominators.

Anonymous, eh? Seems to me that your best bet is to, whenever you meet anyone connected with fiction, poetry, or playwriting, start talking about how you can’t wait to find out who wins next year’s Whiting Award. Be sure to specifically praise the infallible wisdom of the nominators. And slip a copy of your creative resume and latest manuscript into the person’s bag when they’re not looking. You never know, they might be a nominator!

Next week I’ll reveal my sure-fire method for ensuring that you win the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.

If you found it too daunting to wade through my endless post on Dave Eggers’ new book, What Is the What, you can read the distilled version of my thoughts over at Review of the Day.

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I’m reading House of Meetings, by Martin Amis. So far, it’s great. (Despite its compact size and clean, whittled prose, it’s been slow going for me this week due to the six-month-old’s nighttime schedule.) Written as a memoir intended for an audience of one, it’s the story of an elderly Russian man who returns as a tourist to the work camp where he was once a prisoner. With remarkable economy, Amis explores Russian history and the national character, the hardship of both free and incarcerated life, political intolerance and anti-Semitism, all the while building a love triangle that I sense will have a tragic outcome. (The “House of Meetings” is building where Lev, the narrator’s brother, and Zoya, his wife, are allowed a conjugal visit.)

The narrator is a man who’s done terrible things and is able to look at them philosophically–a perfect character for a writer like Amis, who isn’t afraid to say anything. (And who indeed may fear the idea of failing to outrage people.) But I do suspect that old age leads us toward extremes of either nostalgia or disillusionment, and the narrator is at a point in his life where there’s nothing to be gained by dishonesty. (Although I find myself wondering why he’s so blunt with Venus, the young woman for whom he’s writing.)

Often Amis writes something that registers a little shock–but I think the shocks often come not from what his characters are saying or thinking but because, even in fiction, we have so few examples of people who say or think things that are truly unconventional–often they’re just aping someone else’s idea of unconventional–or that aren’t in some way trying to win our approval.

Discussing the possibilities of love, romance, or just physical contact in the camp (there were women there, too), this short passage strikes me as vintage Amis. It’s original, sad, funny, and unlikely to win him any new friends among a certain type of reader:

Usually I could conjure with Tanya, and recreate the little darling she must surely have been in freedom. But that night, as we sat for an hour on the tree stumps in the clearing behind the infirmary, all I could manage was a kind of callous fascination. It was her mouth. Her mouth resembled one of the etched hieroglyphs you see on the walls of the cell of the prototypical solitary, in cartoons, in the illustrations to nineteenth-century novels about epic confinements; a horizontal line measured off with six notched verticals, representing yet another week of your time. The only impulse resembling desire that Tanya awoke in me was an evanescent urge to eat her shirt buttons, which were made from pellets of chewed bread. Oh yes: and the sandpapery grain of the flushed flesh of her cheeks, in the white dusk, made me long for the rind of an orange.

After my attack of blogorrhea on Monday, it’s a wonder I didn’t develop a worse case of blaryngitis. I didn’t post yesterday because, among other things, I was putting a gloss (well, a second coat of base, anyway) on my reviews for The Case of the Missing Books, Prime Green, The God of Animals, and Born in Flames. I had hoped to complete my review of What Is the What today, but I spent the wee small hours last night with a smiling midget (well, he’s only six months old, so he may yet grow to full stature) and my first draft looks like a bunch of code right now. I think maybe I’ll post it on October 25, which is the book’s official release date. (It would have figured prominently in print Booklist but apparently we didn’t get the galleys in time.)

Spoiler alert: If you plan to read Aryn Kyle’s The God of Animals (which, if you like lyrically written stories about growing up in the changing West, you should)–or if don’t like knowing in advance how any book you haven’t read yet ends–stop reading here.

I mean it. Stop.

Okay, for those of you who don’t mind knowing the ending in advance…I’m not going to actually tell you how it ends. But I am going to give away a piece of information that it annoyed me greatly when I had the misfortune to stumble across it.

After I finished reading What Is the What, I picked up The God of Animals. I wanted to give it a link under “What I’m Reading Now,” so I used Google to search for a cover image, an author site, or something else appropriate. I didn’t find much. Kyle, a Coloradan who now lives in my hometown of Missoula, Montana, apparently likes to lay low.

Then, on a search results page, under a link to her agent, I saw the following text:

Aryn Kyle’s breathtaking first novel, The God of Animals, opens with a dead girl in a canal and ends with an act of violence so astonishing that it upends …

Now, that’s not a true spoiler. They don’t say, “And in the end, Zeke Wilson pulls out a shotgun and blows away his high-school sweetheart, and, for good measure, her dog.”

(That is not what happens in The God of Animals, by the way. He shoots her cat. Just kidding. There is no Zeke Wilson in The God of Animals.)

And it’s probably taken from the publisher’s marketing and publicity copy, so it’s not as if it’s a big secret. But I don’t care how much they want to hype the book, I don’t want someone to tell me in advance that it’s going to end with an act of astonishing violence. Humdrum violence, maybe, but definitely not astonishing violence.

That simple phrase, which I stumbled across on Google, loomed larger and larger in my mind as I read the book. Kyle’s subtle foreshadowing was often trumped by my chance knowledge that AN ACT OF ASTONISHING VIOLENCE would end the book.

I’ve written before about how I try to avoid reading any promotional material whatsoever before I read a book, but because I’ve filed my review already, I now give myself permission to look at the back cover of The God of Animals.

Okay, I’m back. Here’s what’s promised:

Ultimately, Alice and her family must weather a devastating betrayal and a shocking, violent series of events that will test their love and prove the power of forgiveness.

Okay, now it’s SHOCKING VIOLENCE. That’s just not fair. People who browse in bookstores are often influenced by jacket copy, and it seems to me that this brief sentence undermines the painstaking work that Kyle is doing over the course of 305 pages. So stop it, already.

By the way, the ending? Not actually either astonishingly or shockingly violent.

Whereas there is a growing number of memoirists whose work, purported to be true, has been proven to be false, O. J. Simpson is, apparently, going to give this trend a twist: he’s going to publish a memoir he insists is false, but which most people will insist is the truth. (There’s another take, with a few more details–but not the purported publisher’s name–here.)

At least he’s not pretending to be someone else.

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In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg had an interesting article examining why Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder only hit #18 on the New York Times extended bestseller list. As Caleb Carr sagely notes, “you can’t schedule cosmic events.”

Trachtenberg also discusses Barnes & Noble’s “Barnes & Noble Recommends” program, which provided a huge boost to Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale:

The program, which launched Sept. 12, focuses all the retailer’s employees on a single title. It includes in-store displays, promotions online and direct emails to customers. “It’s the first time we put everything, including 40,000 booksellers who hand sell books, behind one title,” says Steve Riggio, the chain’s CEO. With that big push, the book hit No. 1 at the chain the first day it went on sale.

I hope Mr. Riggio appreciated the irony of his words when he saw them in print. Ordering all of your employees to push a single book is not “hand selling.”

Personally, I miss the midlist.

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I haven’t even read Martin Amis’ new novel, House of Meetings, yet, and already he’s talking to Reuters about how much we’ll hate the next one:

“It’s not that far from being finished, so it’s long-ish and very autobiographical and very indiscreet and it will be much hated, and I will be, again.”

Why will we hate Amis and his book?

“There are very recognizable people in it. It’s a sort of celebrity novel but high-brow.

“Mostly what it is is women . . . you know, how it went with women. It’s very much about a period of history I lived through, which is the entire sex revolution starting in the 60s coming up to now. The title is The Pregnant Widow. It’s a Russian-inspired title.”

So, on Saturday night, I finished reading What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, by Dave Eggers. We received the galley too late for a review in print Booklist (the novel’s publication date is October 25, and we’re finalizing the November 15 issue this week), so my review will be a Booklist Online exclusive.

(Yesterday I started reading The God of Animals, by Aryn Kyle, but I can’t find a cover image or an author site so I’m not linking to it.)

Eggers’ book tells the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese man who was one of the so-called “Lost Boys of Sudan.” He was a young boy when the murahaleen, Muslim militias armed by the government in Khartoum, burned his mostly Christian village. Fleeing the attack, he was separated from his family and then became one of many orphan boys (and some girls) making long, dangerous treks in search of safety. He endured exhaustion, hunger, and illness, and faced the dangers posed by lions, bandits, murahaleen, and even the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. (Though the SPLA fought the government and the murahaleen on behalf of the people of southern Sudan, the hardened SPLA soldiers were not always friends to the refugees.) He survived ambush and battles, and after living in several refugee camps, finally found safety–though not an easy life–in Kakuma, a more permanent camp in Kenya. In his twenties, he was finally given an opportunity to emigrate to the U.S., a move he saw as nothing short of salvation.

The book has an unusual framing device. Now living in Atlanta, a too-trusting Deng opens his door to strangers and is beaten and robbed at gunpoint. Lying on the floor, tied up with his telephone cord, he begins to silently tell his story to one of his captors. As we follow him through the rest of the night and a miserable day, he continues these internal monologues: to the indifferent police officer who answers his call for help; to a jaded functionary at the hospital where he waits hours for treatment; to the affluent patrons who arrive at the health club where he must return to work.

(By the way, there’s a good documentary called The Lost Boys of Sudan that I thought of more than once while reading What Is the What.)

According to the preface and an interview, Deng originally planned on writing his own book, but “learned that [he] was not ready to do this.” So Eggers, working from interviews, wrote, in Valentino’s voice, a fictionalized autobiography.

Despite Eggers’ obvious care for Deng and passion for the project (and despite his obvious familiarity with fictionalized memoir), as I began reading I found myself thinking about Eggers’ right to write the book. If they had collaborated so closely, why was Deng’s name relegated to the subtitle, rather than the author line? (After all, in celebrity as-told-to’s, celebrities can claim authorship–isn’t Deng the celebrity here?) Would this be a case of a successful white artist mining the life experience of a suffering black man in order to boost his own credibility?

Not that I’m a member of the correctness police, but I did ask myself these questions.

I didn’t worry about it long. In terms of material gain, all proceeds are going to The Valentino Achak Deng Foundation (whose Web site, however, is not yet active). And in terms of intent, well–who knows what motivates another person, but it’s a book of subtlety and deep feeling. Eggers may be continuing to grow as an artist, or it may simply be a byproduct of his decision to write in Deng’s voice, but he’s moved himself to the background and his subject’s story leaps off the page.

It may seem unfair to talk so much about the circumstances surrounding the book before getting to the book itself, but with a book like this, I don’t know if it’s possible to talk about the book without considering the subtext. As a reader, I couldn’t help but wonder what was real and what was invention–or, if I accepted that it was nearly all true, then which observations were Deng’s, and which were Eggers’ observations of Deng? And because novels must be neater than life, which decisions were simply editorial expediencies?

The story’s power is such that readers won’t be overly distracted by such thoughts, though I’m sure I won’t be alone in thinking them. On the other hand, writing it as a novel might be the perfect solution to the problems of memoirs, which are notoriously unreliable to begin with. If the job is not to give a documentary rendering, but to tease out the deeper truths, then it’s probably best to dispense with a desire for exactitude and to piece together a story that gets it right, even if a few of the details are wrong. If Deng was, as he says, “still taking classes in basic writing at Georgia Perimeter College,” then I think we can safely say that the book written by Eggers is a better book–if perhaps slightly less authentic–than the one not written, and therefore more people will read it. (There’s also the slight boost offered by Eggers’ own status as a literary celebrity.)

If there is painful irony in Deng’s experience of the U.S., then there may also be irony in the fact that his autobiography is written by a famous American. But he seems happy with the book, and I am, too. As Deng endures almost unimaginable hardship and danger, it’s gripping, but because Eggers’ treats his subject with neither reverence nor condescension–there are moments of humor that feel wholly appropriate–we’re left with a portrait that feels astonishingly human. What Is the What succeeds in doing what a novel can do better than any other form, which is to make us feel and understand the deeper truths of another human being’s experience.