THE FIRST ANNUAL TMN TOURNAMENT OF BOOKS

Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin)

The Plot Against America

vs. Cloud Atlas

David Mitchell (Random House)

Jim Coudal: Roth, the top-seed, must be considered the chalk here. Mitchell has shown the ability to cover when playing against weaker opponents. He held serve out of the bottom bracket and the smart money has made him a road dog, plus one and a hook. I make him a lock to cover and I’d even parlay a money-line bet ($100/$115) with The Over (4+) for the number of times the word “serious” appears in the final reviews. Oh, and I thought while the “what if” conceit behind Plot gave Roth an opportunity to make some serious (1!) and blistering points about contemporary America, it came across as more of a screech to me.

Pick: CLOUD ATLAS

Mark Sarvas: Oh, boy. What a choice. Natural selection seems to have done its work and delivered up two audacious and deeply imaginative works to choose between. In Mitchell, we have a young, gifted and nearly fearless novelist-as-highwire-performer, taking breathtaking chances with structure and style and pushing the form of the novel as hard as he can. In Roth, we have the elder statesman at the height of his gifts, working in an uncharacteristically stripped-down style as he rewrites American history to accommodate the rise of fascism. This one was agonizingly difficult to decide—both books are exhilarating and brilliant despite their flaws. But the flaws of the Roth—an ending that feels like an afterthought—are less significant than the flaws of the Mitchell, which, for all its virtuosity, feels more clever than profound and relies too heavily on stock characters and situations (even if that is part of Mitchell’s point about narrative). For giving lie to the old canard “It couldn’t happen here,” and weaving it nearly seamlessly with a poignant personal narrative, I choose Roth and The Plot Against America.

Pick: The Plot Against America

Danny Gregory: I vote for Cloud Atlas. Roth’s book was timely and “important,” but Cloud Atlas provided what I read books for. Mitchell takes on every conceivable genre in a novel that challenged, stretched, thrilled, and kept me hanging on to the end.

Pick: Cloud Atlas

Maud Newton: In Cloud Atlas, Mitchell slips in and out of characters and eras, creating a grand thematic statement that feels more like a puzzle than a novel. A virtuoso stylist with metaphysical leanings, Mitchell claims a debt to that other metaphysical puzzle-maker, Jorge Luis Borges. But the Argentinean writer’s work always bore the mark of his unique perspective and style, while Cloud Atlas suggests that Mitchell excels at flitting from head to head but not at establishing an individual voice or unifying tone.

Regardless, I prefer affecting stories to riddles, and Roth’s disquieting alternate history of fascism’s rise in America is a story of the first order. For me, The Plot Against America takes it.

Pick: The Plot Against America

Kate Schlegel: Plot is an unnerving book whose string of dominoes, all falling in just the right places, raise a frightening “what if” about American democracy and irrationality. Cloud Atlas also has dominoes, but plays them the old-fashioned way, laying them out thoughtfully number-to-number across a tabletop rather than standing them on end to be knocked over. In the end, Mitchell’s attention to plotlines and his six vibrant characters and writing styles make Cloud Atlas the better book.

Pick: Cloud Atlas

Margaret Mason: Cloud Atlas explores human savagery, and I was certainly tempted to do violence to my copy. Everything I admire about the novel—its imaginative nature, its experimentation with language, and the author’s dexterity in several genres—is overshadowed by its maddeningly disjointed narrative structure. If you’re going to yank the storyline from under me (again, and again, and again), I’d better understand why by the end. But instead of the structure supporting an emerging point, the structure becomes the point. I found it gimmicky and exasperating. The Plot Against America taxed my suspension of disbelief toward the end, but I cared about the characters and it was an interesting read. So my vote goes to Roth.

Pick: The Plot Against America

Claire Miccio: Cloud Atlas is a peculiar novel and took a while to get the hang of, but after about 150 pages my patience was well rewarded. Unfortunately, The Plot Against America just left me hanging and somewhat weirded out knowing Roth’s capacity for more. This match definitely riled me up because here I was confronted with a novel I would have never picked up, written by a guy I have never heard of, triumphing over a book I was waiting months to read by a guy I have followed for years. I have to give it to Cloud Atlas though, because unlike The Plot Against America, it had me cooing “Oooo, what happens next?”

Pick: Cloud Atlas

Tobias Seamon: Looking back on his childhood years of fear during the fascist presidency of Charles Lindbergh, the narrator of The Plot Against America says, “…the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as ‘History,’ harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.” Such a summary of event, time and place could be the theme for Cloud Atlas as well as for Plot. Both novels speculate: Atlas from history to the end of civilization and back again, and Plot from a revised past as (sorta kinda maybe) an augur of the present. What separates the two is the immediacy of Roth’s novel. The book could as well have been called “The Plot Against the Roth Family,” and that’s where its sinister beauty lies: Human evil isn’t just a series of monstrous entities to be fought against with the confidence of righteousness or even hindsight; it terrorizes and infects the houses, families, and brains of those it has turned its insidious claws upon, often turning one upon another until the disaster is played out, doubt erased and the epic written. For possessing such a chilling familiarity, The Plot Against America gets the nod over Cloud Atlas.

Pick: The Plot Against America

Pitchaya Sudbanthad: The Plot Against America is a masterful, immensely detailed book aimed squarely at proto-fascism in America. Advice: Read it with the lights on. Still, there is some truth in critic Stanley Crouch’s pugilistic assertion that the effects of a Nazi-puppet President Lindbergh are far too limited in scope, and I find the way that Roth chose to conveniently resolve his alternative history less than satisfying. A landing of beneficent android life forms might have worked better. Mitchell would have done wonders with androids. Plot’s boldness and imagination pale when faced with Cloud Atlas. Mitchell’s sextet of linked stories crosses space and time to explore universal themes of exploitation, deceit, and cruelty while paying homage to myriad literary genres. Rock! While Plot is an interesting book, Cloud Atlas has ambitions towards art. Did it get there? Perhaps, if not close to it. Mitchell wins against a formidable opponent.

Pick: Cloud Atlas

Rosecrans Baldwin: There’s a line in Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals about the lack of imagination in science fiction, that if we want to enjoy true feats of thought we should turn to novels that dazzle us with moral inquiry, not Martians. Cloud Atlas has a plot as wide as the horizon, but so does The Plot Against America and it goes much deeper into its characters’ lives, where they almost (but never) seem too human, too rich. The cafeteria scene when the family travels to D.C. took my breath away. Mitchell writes grandly, but not as well as Roth.

Pick: The Plot Against America

Andrew Womack: Though it takes a chapter to find its footing—and I may be referring to myself there as well—Cloud Atlas is a sprawling history that details the smallest decisions that torture, drive, confound, and define all of us, all of which coil into a stunning ascension and then all the way back again. It’s a beautiful, stunning thing that’s at once moving, hilarious, and chilling, and here makes Mitchell the clear winner over The Plot Against America. While Roth’s story is memorable, Mitchell’s is unforgettable. As much about its characters and its story as it is about us, Cloud Atlas will have a lifelong spot on my bookshelf; it’s a book I hope to reach for it many times, for many years to come.

Pick: Cloud Atlas

Kevin Guilfoile: As with a great building, you can sense the brilliant architecture of Cloud Atlas even before you enter. On the other hand, I wasn’t optimistic as I started The Plot Against America. Novelists are almost always lame when their prose adopts a political agenda and I feared this alternate history would turn out to be nothing more than a shrill indictment of the current administration—a 360-page invocation of Godwin’s Law. Roth, however, avoids this trap. His story is relevant for all times, not just the present, and although there are parallels between Roth’s President Lindbergh and our President Bush, there are also similarities between W and the book’s beloved FDR. There are times, in fact, when the anti-war Lindy supporters sound an awful lot like Deaniacs. I read Cloud Atlas second and as I read, I dithered over which novel I liked better. (In the middle, sci-fi chapters, the book’s self-conscious structure distanced me from the story a bit.) But in the end Mitchell’s beautiful prose gets the edge from me. The Roth would be in my top five from last year, but top five isn’t good enough.

Pick: Cloud Atlas

Choire Sicha: I suppose there is a God: I Am Charlotte Simmons didn’t actually make it to the finals. Though how it came so far—or really, how it came to be in this competition at all—makes me suspect a conspiracy worthy of a Roth novel. As we all know, the mighty and well-funded Wolfe lobby will stop at nothing to peddle his faux-provocative pablum. In the end, I have considered the choices cruelly vomited before me, and I declare that the best book of 2004 was, without a doubt, Joy Williams’s collection of stories, Honored Guest. What a rocking, kick-ass book. But among the two that have ended up here, I’m absolutely going with Cloud Atlas.

Pick: Cloud Atlas

Jessa Crispin: I’m going by gut instinct on this one, because I loved so much dearly. But don’t ask why or else I might change my mind yet again.

Pick: Cloud Atlas

John Warner: The Plot Against America is a very good book. The central premise of a Lindbergh presidency and a fascist America seems terrifyingly possible in Roth’s rendering and often ricochets uncomfortably off of some of our present day realities. However, many of the scenes lack zest, resulting in a somewhat limp narrative, which keeps it from achieving masterpiece status in my book. Cloud Atlas is, as they say, a hoot and a half. Every page, every line, every word is electrified, and reading it was simply a great joy. The dialect in the central section (a post-apocalyptic Hawaii) stifled me for a bit, but this is a small quibble and is more than offset by the story of Timothy Cavendish, which made my stomach hurt from laughing. Cloud Atlas is the kind of book you eagerly press into friends’ hands because they absolutely must read it, and for that reason, I’m giving it my vote in the First Annual The Morning News Tournament of Books.