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WORK TITLE: We Begin Our Ascent
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Edinburgh
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in London, England.
EDUCATION:Received master’s degree from University of Edinburgh; Syracuse University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author.
AWARDS:Joyce Carol Oates Award in Fiction, Syracuse University.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Best of Gigantic (anthology), and to periodicals, including Gigantic and Virginia Quarterly Review.
SIDELIGHTS
London-born author Joe Mungo Reed launched his career as a novelist with We Begin Our Ascent, a book about a famous race and the scandals attached to it. “It’s a debut novel about a married couple–she’s a geneticist, he’s a professional cyclist–who get dragged into a drug smuggling operation during the Tour de France,” explained a Fiction Advocate contributor. “Hilarious, right?” “Reed’s novel,” wrote a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “is both an exciting depiction of the prestigious bike race and an intimate portrait of a couple.”
We Begin Our Ascent is a look, not just at the world’s most famous bicycle race, but at the ways in which competition can color a person’s perceptions of right and wrong. “Our narrator, Solomon, is a professional cyclist racing in the Tour de France,” said a Kirkus Reviews contributor. “His wife, Liz, is a research biologist with an ‘interest in adaptive theory.’ They are both ambitious.” “We join Sol on day twelve of the Tour de France,” explained a reviewer for the His Futile Preoccupations website. … Reed’s “novel follows Solomon,” declared Booklist reviewer Jonathan Fullmer, “… whose job is to help his teammates maintain their pace.” “Sol isn’t bitter about his subaltern status,” observed Dwight Garner in the New York Times. “He’s a stoic, an existential drone, a man who doesn’t crave notoriety and has strict internal standards. What he aims for is ‘not the podiums or flowers or paychecks (or not only them), but the feeling of justified exhaustion, the satisfaction of having done what was asked of me.’ It’s one of the indices of Reed’s talent that you hotly flip this book’s pages even when there’s not a lot going on, when it’s just another hilly day on the tour.”
Over time Solomon becomes more and more involved in the process of doping that all the riders on his team seem to engage in. Eventually even Liz is drawn into the doping scandal. “I realized that I wanted to write a book about cycling in the fall of 2012. As a casual fan of the sport, I had been following the slow drip of revelations about Lance Armstrong’s drug use over the previous months, interested in the extent of the scandal and in the way these discoveries recast the recent history of races I remembered,” Reed stated in Powells.com. “It had been easy, hearing about this sustained project of doping, to assume these guys to be pathological cheats, but … they were also very young athletes, inexperienced in the wider world, making things up as they went along.”
Reed has said that he intended We Begin Our Ascent to be about morality as much as racing. “The greatest pleasure I had in plotting … We Begin our Ascent,” Reed stated in Literary Hub, “was laying out the way my narrator, a professional cyclist, decided to use banned drugs, and the way this first transgression necessitated and justified further ones. People are good at normalizing their own actions, at adjusting to rationalize even their most extreme acts. In this sense, rule-breaking seems utterly invigorating, natively literary: with each successful deceit the world is reframed, becoming seen anew, filled with possibility.” “Reed’s descriptions of racing are fabulous,” enthused a reviewer for the Of Books and Bicycles website. “Of course, I have no idea what it’s like to ride in the Tour, but I’ve raced and ridden in a pack … and he captures what it’s like to work together with your competitors, to navigate the elaborate etiquette of cycling.” “If I’d known that the book described Sol’s grueling, punishing days spent on the Tour de France,” asserted the reviewer for the His Futile Preoccupations website …, “I might have passed over the novel, and that would have been my loss. The book could be categorized as a sport novel, but that categorization is limiting. Essentially this is a novel about how far we are prepared to go to achieve our goals, and just how much we are willing to sacrifice.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 15, 2018, Jonathan Fullmer, review of We Begin Our Ascent, p. 24.
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2018, review of We Begin Our Ascent.
New York Times, June 19, 2018, Dwight Garner, “It’s Totally About the Bike,” p. C6.
Publishers Weekly, April 23, 2018, review of We Begin Our Ascent, p. 59.
ONLINE
Fiction Advocate, http://fictionadvocate.com/ (June 19, 2018), “Hitting Shelves: We Begin Our Ascent by Joe Mungo Reed.”
His Futile Preoccupations …, https://swiftlytiltingplanet.wordpress.com/ (July 8, 2018), review of We Begin Our Ascent.
Literary Hub, https://lithub.com/ (June 20, 2018), Joe Mungo Reed, “Why Do We Love Reading about Cheaters and Schemers?”
Of Books and Bicycles, https://ofbooksandbikes.com/ (May 24, 2018), review of We Begin Our Ascent.
Powells.com, http://www.powells.com/ (June 20, 2018), Joe Mungo Reed, “Original Essays: Weird Details.
Virginia Quarterly Review, https://www.vqronline.org/ (August 8, 2018), author profile.
Joe Mungo Reed was born in London and raised in Gloucestershire, England. He has a master’s in philosophy and politics at the University of Edinburgh and an MFA in creative writing at Syracuse University, where he won the Joyce Carol Oates Award in Fiction. He is the author of the novel, We Begin Our Ascent, and his short stories have appeared in VQR and Gigantic and anthologized in Best of Gigantic. He is currently living in Edinburgh, UK.
Joe Mungo Reed holds an MFA in fiction from Syracuse University. His work has appeared in Gigantic and the Best of Gigantic anthology. He is originally from Gloucestershire, England, and lives in Ojai, California.
7 days ago
HITTING SHELVES: We Begin Our Ascent by Joe Mungo Reed
We Begin Our Ascent by Joe Mungo Reed comes out today! It’s a debut novel about a married couple–she’s a geneticist, he’s a professional cyclist–who get dragged into a drug smuggling operation during the Tour de France. Hilarious, right? We asked the author how he’s celebrating.
When you’ve been working on a book for some time, the concept of a publication day begins to take on a nearly abstract quality. It’s a strange experience to be asked what I will be doing on the day my book comes out, because I’ve somewhat forgotten that that this day will be actually be day—that is, twenty-four hours in which I will occupy myself in some way or other.
Instead, June 19th has been a point on the calendar towards which much activity has been directed: edits, and galley passes and companion essays. The activity around putting out a book is amazing, and I have felt myself lost, somewhat pleasantly, within it.
In the past, I used to dislike acknowledgment pages at the back of novels. I felt that they were something close to over-indulgent Oscar speeches: purporting to thank others, but gesturing all the while at the achievements of the person doing the thanking. Having written a novel, however, I’ve changed my mind. I’m really in awe of the lengths that so many people—my agent, my editor, my former teachers, copyeditors and publicists—have gone to bring my book into the world in its best possible form. A novel is a more collaborative project than I ever knew, and, against much doom-saying about the status of the arts in our society, I find much hope in the dedication of those who work to publish fiction.
It is the people who helped me with my novel I will be thinking of, then, as it arrives on shelves. Perhaps not first of all, however, because there is very important resident of my household who will require attention long before people arrive in offices in New York. Cromarty, the four-month-old puppy, will wake at 6:30, and I’ll carry him downstairs to do his dog business on the thin strip of grass opposite our apartment. Like any being new to the world he has quite a lot of demands, but my girlfriend and I have realised that he is best managed through a reliable routine. Cromarty will get me to my desk early, then. He likes to be right next to one or other of us. A bit of chewing and some sleeping should occupy him for most of the morning, his crate at feet.
The thought of this routine is very welcome to me. The other way in which publishing a novel is temporally weird is that one receives praise for passages of writing done years before. From this, I find, arises a certain amount of insecurity. I love a compliment, but these pieces of praise seem directed towards a different man. What if I’ve lost the ability to do what I was doing then? I think.
The best cure for this kind of anxiety, I suspect, is sticking with the work. At noon, Cromarty will get fidgety and he and I will walk to our local park to do a bit of puppy training. At his age, he learns fast and forgets again nearly as quickly. I’ll wave a little bag of chicken in front of him, telling him to concentrate, to wait. His ability to focus gets better each day. I hope only to keep pace with him.
Joe Mungo Reed was born in London and raised in Gloucestershire, England. He has a master’s in philosophy and politics at the University of Edinburgh and an MFA in creative writing at Syracuse University, where he won the Joyce Carol Oates Award in Fiction. He is the author of the novel, We Begin Our Ascent, and his short stories have appeared in VQR and Gigantic and anthologized in Best of Gigantic. He is currently living in Edinburgh, UK.
Original Essays
Weird Details
by Joe Mungo Reed, June 20, 2018 8:45 AM
Photo credit: Jo Hanley
I realized that I wanted to write a book about cycling in the fall of 2012. As a casual fan of the sport, I had been following the slow drip of revelations about Lance Armstrong’s drug use over the previous months, interested in the extent of the scandal and in the way these discoveries recast the recent history of races I remembered. What made me think that cycle racing could be a subject for fiction, however, was a revelation by Armstrong’s teammate, Tyler Hamilton, which would later appear in Hamilton’s book, The Secret Race.
According to Hamilton, Armstrong’s US Postal team had a special code for the banned hormone — Erythropoietin, or EPO — which had fueled so much of their success. They called it Edgar Allen Poe, sometimes Edgar for short.
The absurdity of this fact thrilled me. What on earth were these riders thinking? The code did not seem particularly hard to decipher. To get from EPO to Edgar Allen Poe did not, I supposed, require an enigma machine. Secondly, the alibi it implied was bizarre. What was a bystander who overheard one rider asking another for some "Edgar Allen Poe" supposed to think? That after a 100-mile day of cycling through Europe’s highest mountains the man was planning to unwind by reading The Masque of the Red Death?
This was the first detail that revealed to me the human angle of these drug revelations. It had been easy, hearing about this sustained project of doping, to assume these guys to be pathological cheats, but their shoddy code revealed another side of the story. They were also very young athletes, inexperienced in the wider world, making things up as they went along. They were fallible and sometimes ridiculous, and this fallibility allowed me to really imagine a world around them. I could picture them as confused, conflicted actors. I could envision them making the choices that led to their rule-breaking and could imagine that those choices had not been simple, automatic decisions.
One of my favorite moments in the stories of Chekhov occurs in "The Lady With the Little Dog." Gurov, a married dandy, has managed after much effort to seduce the young, unhappy bride, Anna Sergeevna. After the seduction, she finds herself devastated. She says to Gurov: “You’ll be the first not to respect me now.” On hearing this, Gurov’s reaction is not what one might expect: “There was a watermelon on the table in the hotel room. Gurov cut himself a slice and unhurriedly began to eat it. At least half an hour passed in silence.”
The absurdity of this fact thrilled me. What on earth were these riders thinking?
It is, to my mind, one of the strangest reactions in literature. Why a watermelon? Why such a silence? It is bizarre, yet it also works. Readers get a sense in that moment of so many crucial aspects of the story: Gurov’s instinctive coldness towards his romantic conquests, Anna’s paralyzing indecision regarding her own desires, the sense they both have of waiting for something they do not understand.
The detail is effective because it is both weird and right: strange enough to draw attention, real enough to mean something. There is the cliché said of the improbable that “you couldn’t make it up.” But that is exactly what fiction writers try to do.
During my MFA, I had a teacher whose most effusive form of praise was to identify a passage or piece of prose as "weird." For her, that meant it made the work unusual, that it led the story in a direction that one wouldn’t naturally expect. A great value of weird writing, well executed, is that it respects the reader’s intelligence. They don’t get the familiar deceptions of a Lothario in so much soap-opera speak, but a new image of him — in this case, silently munching on a melon — which tells them all that talking would have and more.
The Edgar Allen Poe code, I thought, had some of the texture of that moment in Chekhov. It made the subterfuge of these cyclists seem vividly real. When I began writing my novel, We Begin Our Ascent, I did not put the code into the novel — it was already a compelling detail in Hamilton’s own book — but I tried to invent and incorporate similar types of details. I gave riders odd nicknames and imagined they had unusual hobbies; I tried to embellish my race scenes with unexpected images. It was a process that required thought and revision. Intentional randomness is very hard to pull off: any trip to a college improv show will remind one of that.
For inspiration I read the works of masters of the uncanny: Joy Williams, whose stories seem to proceed with a logic that is always just out of reach, and Denis Johnson, who wrote from a universe two degrees separated from our own.
I was also helped by the fact that cycling is a fundamentally weird sport. Riders have to be a bit unhinged to want to race 3,500 kilometers around France each July. Those who throng the roads to cheer them on have their own idiosyncrasies too. When I need to cheer myself up, I still think of TV footage of race leaders ascending the road up Mont Ventoux in 2013. It was a baking day, the hardest of the whole tour, and as the favorites tried desperately to increase their pace up the mountain, a strange figure appeared sprinting along beside them: a middle-aged man in his underpants holding a stuffed wild boar under his arm.
I didn’t put the wild boar detail in my book. Like any novelist, I’m always looking for material I can smuggle into my work. Yet writing in the boar man seemed too much like copying. Before the Tour de France comes by, the roads along which it will pass are closed for hours. The man must have either waited for half a day in the relentless sun or walked for miles with the boar under his arm. I remain in awe of such dedication. His appearance on television screens was a work of art in itself.
÷ ÷ ÷
Joe Mungo Reed was born in London and raised in Gloucestershire, England. He has a master’s in philosophy and politics at the University of Edinburgh and an MFA in creative writing at Syracuse University, where he won the Joyce Carol Oates Award in Fiction. He is the author of the novel, We Begin Our Ascent, and his short stories have appeared in VQR and Gigantic and anthologized in Best of Gigantic. He is currently living in Edinburgh, UK.
We Begin Our Ascent
Jonathan Fullmer
Booklist. 114.18 (May 15, 2018): p24.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
We Begin Our Ascent.
By Joe Mungo Reed.
June 2018. 256p. Simon & Schuster, $26 (9781501169205).
Reed's debut offers a fascinating, darkly funny look at doping in professional cycling. Set during the harrowing middle stages of the Tour de France, the novel follows Solomon, a new father and cyclist whose job is to help his teammates maintain their pace and make sure their tireless leader, Fabrice, crosses the finish line. Their boisterous and calculating directeur sportif, Rafael, hasn't been pleased with the team's performance and is counting on the next dose of stimulants to get them in gear. But when a team doctor gets nabbed for unrelated offenses, the riders are in danger of losing their supply--and their chance to win. Lucky for them, Sol's wife, Liz, is on her way from London with their baby to stay with Sol for the remainder of the tour. Despite Sol's protestations, Liz is all too willing to help out and gets roped into their not-so-well-kept secret. As the team's problems go from bad to worse to disastrous, Reed's wryly profound narrator uncovers insights into groupthink, dependency, and the dangers of mixing personal and professional lives.--Jonathan Fullmer
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Fullmer, Jonathan. "We Begin Our Ascent." Booklist, 15 May 2018, p. 24. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541400807/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=04a7d6fb. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A541400807
We Begin Our Ascent
Publishers Weekly. 265.17 (Apr. 23, 2018): p59.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
We Begin Our Ascent
Joe Mungo Reed. Simon & Schuster, $26
(256p) ISBN 978-1-5011-6920-5
A cyclist competing in the Tour de France narrates Reed's strong, lean, compact debut novel, sharing his bruises and breakaways, cramps and collisions, and shedding light on the life of a competitor. The novel opens halfway through the race, with about two weeks left until the finish. Solomon's goal is not to win but to help team leader Fabrice win by providing pacing and protection, fetching food and water, and accelerating or falling back as needed. Solomon has trained hard for this event. His wife, Liz, a London research biologist and mother of their one-year-old son, understands ambition, dedication, and risk, and when Rafael, the team's director, asks her to deliver banned performance-enhancing substances, she agrees. Reed captures the rigors of competition as well as the complexities of competitive spirit in scenes such as when riders compare injuries en route to the hospital. With its taut, unsentimental prose, Reed's novel is both an exciting depiction of the prestigious bike race and an intimate portrait of a couple coming to terms with the cost of pursuing difficult goals and determining whether they're worth the price. Agent: Amelia Atlas, 1CM Partners. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"We Begin Our Ascent." Publishers Weekly, 23 Apr. 2018, p. 59. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532863/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c5383e9c. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532863
Reed, Joe Mungo: WE BEGIN OUR ASCENT
Kirkus Reviews. (Apr. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Reed, Joe Mungo WE BEGIN OUR ASCENT Simon & Schuster (Adult Fiction) $26.00 6, 19 ISBN: 978-1-5011-6920-5
Cycling, family life, illegal substances--Reed twines them all together in his exceptional debut. Our narrator, Solomon, is a professional cyclist racing in the Tour de France. His wife, Liz, is a research biologist with an "interest in adaptive theory." They are both ambitious, devotedly searching for "a right way to do things, a sense of control." But Sol is not racing to win; his job is "to get our team leader, Fabrice, across the twenty-one stages of this tour in as little time as possible." To properly perform this job, and to remain competitive against their likewise unscrupulous rivals, Sol and his teammates dope--a practice Sol uneasily supports: "I am no fan of the danger of the process, but when I consider the way the team has got into me--altered my chemistry to my own advantage--I am grateful." The novel unfolds over several days midtour. Sol's team has a bit of good luck, and a lot of bad, and eventually Liz, who's driving in from England to watch the race's later stages, is drawn into the doping scheme...then further into it, then further. "Just one little thing more," she says. Reed's first novel lives squarely within Don DeLillo's sphere of influence. In addition to their mutual preoccupation with systems--the systems we live beneath, the systems we design for ourselves--Reed shares with DeLillo certain aspects of pacing, voice, and character: Sol's wryly thoughtful narration is reminiscent of Jack Gladney's in White Noise; Rafael, the team's coercive and brilliantly rendered directeur sportif, could be a relative of Gladney's friend Murray Jay Siskind. But Reed relies more heavily on plot than DeLillo, and the effect is remarkably successful: Alongside the ideas and the jokes, there is real suspense and human drama. Reed shows us the allure of conducting our "days...not for their own sake but for the light that will be cast back upon them by success"--and then he shows us how awful this method of living can be when things go wrong. "We are doing all this for a bicycle race?" Fast and smart, funny and sad, this is an outstanding sports novel, and Reed is an author to watch.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Reed, Joe Mungo: WE BEGIN OUR ASCENT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700509/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7324dce6. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532700509
It's Totally About the Bike
Dwight Garner
The New York Times. (June 19, 2018): Arts and Entertainment: pC6(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Full Text:
Joe Mungo Reed has the sort of triple-barreled name that often comes attached to a certain kind of disheveled country music star, a Ray Wylie Hubbard or a Billy Joe Shaver or a Robert Earl Keen, men you can imagine Jeff Bridges playing in the movies.
His middle name, Mungo, has American literary resonances. It made me recall the great Raymond Mungo, the counterculture journalist turned Vermont communard and the author of shyly winning memoirs with titles like ''Famous Long Ago'' and ''Total Loss Farm.''
But scratch all that. Reed is young and English and ungrizzled. And no relation to Raymond. Based on the aloof, punishing control he displays in his small, tight bud of a first novel, ''We Begin Our Ascent,'' he doesn't appear to have a disheveled bone in his body.
''We Begin Our Ascent'' is a bicycling novel. It's about a 29-year-old man, Sol, who is a professional rider in the Tour de France. He's one of those bright-shirted fellows who, as Joseph O'Neill put it in his novel ''Netherland,'' ''zoomed by like fantastically bicycling macaws.''
A salient fact about Sol is that he's not the star of his cycling team, nor does he particularly care to be. As his coach, the amoral Rafael, says to Sol and his teammates about the team's best rider:
''Obviously, you are supporting Fabrice. Shield him from the wind, bring him water, give him your bike if he punctures. If it makes you happy, make an inspirational speech about how much you believe in him and slap him on the bottom.''
Sol isn't bitter about his subaltern status. He's a stoic, an existential drone, a man who doesn't crave notoriety and has strict internal standards. What he aims for is ''not the podiums or flowers or paychecks (or not only them), but the feeling of justified exhaustion, the satisfaction of having done what was asked of me.''
It's one of the indices of Reed's talent that you hotly flip this book's pages even when there's not a lot going on, when it's just another hilly day on the tour.
Though Reed has never been a professional rider himself, he's a sensitive writer about the quiddities of professional cycling. He remarks that cyclists never drink the water that spectators proffer because, who knows, any stranger might be a saboteur or a psychopath.
He scrutinizes cyclist's bodies. ''We cannot run, most of us. Our hamstrings have tightened to the minimal extension cycling requires. Our backs are used to being bent.'' He has a feeling for the systole and diastole, the contraction and release, of a body's mechanisms.
He writes especially keenly about life in the peloton, the main pack of cyclists who cluster together to save energy by coasting in each other's slipstreams.
Sol senses a distinct sort of power ''when one is enclosed within the peloton, between those other bodies, part of a mass, rolling amorphously along the road like a drop of water down a pane of glass.'' On bad days he feels ''like a Victorian unfortunate caught in a factory apparatus.''
The story of Sol's tour is braided with a love story. He's been married for nearly three years to Liz, a research biologist. They have a young son. Back home in England, Liz watches his races on the television, searching for him in the pack.
Without pressing too hard, this novel proposes the peloton as a metaphor for marriage. Spouses take turns shielding one another from wind and rain; there's an intuitive sense of when it's time to hold back or advance.
This novel derives its power from its limited focus and direct language. There are no adipose, word-glutted sentences. Reed is mostly content to give us strong silk thread, absent pearls.
This novel's darkness, like heart disease, sneaks up on you. Sol's team does some mild doping. Tiny doses of testosterone are doled out from an eyedropper at the end of the day to aid recovery. It's no big deal, Rafael explains. ''The ancient Greeks used to use testosterone,'' he says. ''They used to eat ram's testicles before a race.''
The exhausted team members are also sometimes injected with blood, harvested from them at the height of training and replete with red cells, that has been kept frozen for this purpose.
Sol has qualms about the microdosing and the other procedures. At the same time, he doesn't wish to let his teammates down. Among the questions this novel asks is: How much of a person's existence does he owe to others and how much can he keep for himself?
There is a breakdown in the supply chain for the performance enhancers. Liz happens to be traveling to France. Rafael proposes her as a mule.
Sol is upset, and convinced Liz will never participate. Rafael reaches out to her anyway.
Absorbing the shift of events that ensues, a reader's mind may turn to the Louise Gluck poem in which she declares, ''I expected better of two creatures / who were given minds.''
Like a racer, Reed carefully husbands his resources in this ruthless little sports novel. He enlists our mind in Sol's project as an athlete. He sees the madness in it as well.
''What kind of adult,'' one of Liz's friends asks, ''worries about how fast he can ride his bike?'' Sol and the other cyclists lust, pathetically, for the shiny little stickers Rafael hands out for strong efforts.
The focus here is narrow, and mean. We learn little, for example, about Sol's background. Small details are given room to resonate. Like Sol on race day, Reed cuts out distractions as if they were cancer.
We Begin Our AscentBy Joe Mungo Reed244 pages. Simon & Schuster. $26.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTOS: Joe Mungo Reed (PHOTOGRAPH BY JO HANLEY)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Garner, Dwight. "It's Totally About the Bike." New York Times, 19 June 2018, p. C6(L). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543431823/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=929026de. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A543431823
THURSDAY, MAY 24, 2018 · 7:54 PM ↓ Jump to Comments
We Begin Our Ascent, by Joe Mungo Reed
We Begin Our Ascent coverI enjoyed this book so much! It’s perfect for me: a smart, thoughtful, well-written novel about cycling. I’m not sure what non-cycling readers will make of it: I can’t tell because an important part of the experience for me was reading great writing about what it’s like to ride and race, but my guess is they will find much to like in it too.
The novel (to be published on June 19th) tells the story of Sol, a rider in the Tour de France. It takes place over the course of a few days, with flashbacks to how he met his wife Liz, the birth of his infant son, the story of how he got into cycling, and what his years of training were like. Liz is a scientist trying to get some good results in the lab, and one thing I particularly liked about this book is how Reed makes connections between their two careers, both of them involving long hours of tedious work for an uncertain payoff. In both cases, people outside their respective fields don’t understand what they do. Nobody understands why Sol doesn’t try to win stages of the Tour — that’s not his job, which is to help their star climber win — and nobody really gets why Liz puts in such long hours for results that probably won’t revolutionize anything. Reed gets deeply into the nature of work, its meaning, its frustrations, its rituals and intricacies.
Reed’s descriptions of racing are fabulous. Of course, I have no idea what it’s like to ride in the Tour, but I’ve raced and ridden in a pack (the peloton, or the main group of riders), and he captures what it’s like to work together with your competitors, to navigate the elaborate etiquette of cycling: when you should help others (because that means you will be helped too) and when you should break from the pack and try to make a go of it by yourself, when it’s your turn to win the race and when you need to blow yourself up early so a stronger teammate can save crucial energy until the very end. I particularly loved how Reed uses the plural “we” to describe riding in the pack , as though it were a creature of its own, taking on different shapes as the race proceeds. The racing sequences got my heart rate up with the suspense, and I could feel the riders’ exhaustion as they pedaled toward the finish line with nothing left to give.
The novel is also about family life and what it’s like to be a professional couple with a brand new baby. I had to laugh at Sol and Liz’s confidence before the baby was born that they knew how their new life was going to be. The novel takes them in places they never expected to go, both personally and professionally.
Every cyclist who likes to read should pick this book up for sure, but it has a lot to offer for anyone interested in work, family, competition, and ambition, and for anyone who wants an absorbing, thought-provoking, exciting read.
JULY 8, 2018 · 2:21 PM ↓ Jump to Comments
We Begin Our Ascent: Joe Mungo Reed
In these internet times, blurbs are often the entry point for book reading, and that is true in the case of We Begin Our Ascent, a debut fiction novel from Joe Mungo Reed. The description proffered a look into the life of professional cyclist, Sol and his research biologist wife, Liz as they navigate various moral choices. There’s nothing wrong with that description, however, I’ll add for potential readers that the novel follows Sol during the Tour de France, so scenes of Sol and Liz’s married life are mostly seen through memories.
We begin our ascent
If I’d known that the book described Sol’s grueling, punishing days spent on the Tour de France, I might have passed over the novel, and that would have been my loss. The book could be categorized as a sport novel, but that categorization is limiting. Essentially this is a novel about how far we are prepared to go to achieve our goals, and just how much we are willing to sacrifice.
We join Sol on day 12 of the Tour de France. Sol is a “domestique,” It’s his job to support team leader, Fabrice:
We are competing only to get our team leader, Fabrice, across the twenty-one stages of this tour in as little time as possible. This cumulative time, the criteria on which the winner of the tour is judged, is all that matters to us. Our own results are not important. We shade him from the wind, pace him, will give him our own bike if he punctures. These measures have just small effects upon his time, yet this is a sport of fine margins–decided by difference of seconds after days and days of riding–and so small advantages, wrung from our fanatical assistance of our strongest rider, offer our team the best chance of victory. We only think of the ever-rising time it takes Fabrice to make his way through this race, how that time compares to his rivals’, how we may act to lessen it.
Some days the route is mountainous, and other days the land is flat. Before and after each day’s race, as Sol makes his preparations, he thinks of Liz, a specialist in Zebra fish, and how they met. So we see two people with extremely different career goals pursue an elusive end-point. While Liz’s colleagues “marveled at her fluency” in her specialist field, “in her actual accomplishment of the position she had built so long toward, she was truly faced for the first time with the scant effect of the work she had chosen, the world’s apparent indifference to all her expertise.” In contrast to Liz, to those outside of the cycling world, Sol appears to have some sort of stardom, but Sol realises, like most athletes, that he has a short shelf life, and he will never be a household name.
“It must be nice to be able to succeed to clearly,” she said. “To have such definite parameters. Clear successes. No one is cheering me in my lab.”
I knew next to nothing about the Tour de France before reading this book, and since I’m not that interested in sport, it’s to the author’s credit that I enjoyed this novel. But then again, the plot rises above sport, racing, training and instead hits obsession and moral dilemmas when Sol reveals various strategies involving drugs. We spend days with Sol as part of the peloton, his grueling routine, his life of preparation, deprivation and superstition:
I had assumed, when I became a professional, that things would be more intense, somehow, more vivid, and real. The reality, though was that my life had become smaller. I prohibited myself from many things, set myself a limited pattern of thinking. It is perhaps obvious in hindsight, but obsession does not give you more, but less.
I loved the vivid scenes when Sol recalls how he tried to explain his career to skeptical his in-laws who don’t get that the Tour de France isn’t about Sol winning, and Sol’s dialogues with former cycling champion, now coach Rafael were simply brilliant. One night, Sol is called to a meeting with his coach in the hotel basement:
“What do women like about men?” he said. “What does your wife like about you?”
“Conversation?” I said.
He shook his head.
“Commitment? Empathy?” He kept shaking.”Jokes? Cooking?”
“Okay, okay, okay,” he said. “Perhaps all of those things a little bit, but what they like a lot is height. Of all the James Bonds only Daniel Craig has been under six foot. And what is Daniel Craig?”
He mimed flicking something off the table. “A little goblin.”
“I like Casino Royale,” I said.
“Of all the Bonds, only Roger Moore has the true British style.” Rafael wrinkled his nose. There was rattling from the laundry chute and a ball of towels shot out. “Women like height. So in the chase for this, how you say, ‘hypothetical girl in our village,’ height is important.”
“Okay,” I said, “I can see that.”
“And it is man’s nature to maximize every advantage.”
The novel’s conclusion seems a little moralistic, and prior to that, the plot was much more sophisticated and deserved, IMO, a slightly different ending. Still, in spite of that, I was glued to every entertaining, thoughtful page.
VIA SIMON & SCHUSTER
WHY DO WE LOVE READING ABOUT CHEATERS AND SCHEMERS?
ART FORGERY, FAKED DEATHS, AND MORE: A READING LIST
June 20, 2018 By Joe Mungo Reed Share:
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If one of the pleasures of fiction is vicarious experience, then it is perhaps logical that readers should be drawn to books about breaking the rules. Confronted with any prohibition in day to day life, it is the most natural response to imagine acting against it. Who has not seen a “Do not walk on the grass sign,” and envisioned themselves stepping onto the lawn behind? Is there anyone in the world who can watch a security van deliver cash to a bank without briefly considering how they might pull off a heist?
Most people, however, have something that stops them—Training? Social conditioning? The realization that new life you would make with a purloined box of banknotes might not actually be that fun?—there is a switch which trips within them and they walk on, past the lawn, past the bank. Maybe, however, they are still thinking “what if . . .”
Which is where literature comes in. Part of the allure of books about breaking the rules is the chance to continue that little thought experiment longer than one usually might. What really would happen if I tried to cheat? Or if someone cheated me?
There are certain recurring patterns in literature on this subject. Sometimes cheats succeed. More usually they fail. Occasionally rule breaking goes unpunished. More often there is a reckoning. What most narratives seem to agree upon, however, is the thrill of transgressing a prohibition. Scheming is addictive and tends to beget more scheming. The greatest pleasure I had in plotting my own book, We Begin our Ascent, was laying out the way my narrator, a professional cyclist, decided to use banned drugs, and the way this first transgression necessitated and justified further ones. People are good at normalizing their own actions, at adjusting to rationalize even their most extreme acts. In this sense, rule-breaking seems utterly invigorating, natively literary: with each successful deceit the world is reframed, becoming seen anew, filled with possibility.
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Charles Portis The Masters of Atlantis
Charles Portis, The Masters of Atlantis
Charles Portis has a knack for writing conmen, and The Masters of Atlantis contains one of his best. Lamar Jimmerson’s ailing religion of Gnomonism is infiltrated by a chancer, Austin Popper, who, among other things, commissions Jimmerson a highly inaccurate biography, titled Hoosier Wizard, and flees into the Rocky Mountains on a quest to manufacture gold.
Mislaid Nell Zink
Nell Zink, Mislaid
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The central deception in this novel is switch of identity. Peggy, escaping from her disastrous marriage along with her daughter Mireille, takes their new names and birthdates from gravestones. That taking these new identities should also entail changing race intensifies the sharpness of the satire at work here. The book sends up Southern preoccupations about race and the unspoken desire of those in power that people of color conform to white patterns of behavior.
William Gaddis The Recognitions
William Gaddis, The Recognitions
What could seem more glamorous scam than art forgery? Yet in Gaddis’s massive novel the production of fake masterpieces is spiritually corrosive. The struggling painter Wyatt Gwyon recreates Dutch masters for a patron, unravelling in the process. The novel is at times portentous, mean-spirited and a little too aware of its own quality. But it is also very good. It features the funniest (probably only) chapter about a stolen amputated leg in literary history.
a fraction of the whole steve toltz
Steve Tolz, A Fraction of the Whole
Australia is a nation with a fondness for schemes and subversion, and scammers are well-represented the country’s literature. Peter Carey’s Illywacker could easily appear on this list, but instead I’ve picked Steve Tolz’s hilarious debut novel. Over the course of the book Jasper Dean struggles to untangle himself from the scams of friends and family, including his father’s idea for a lottery everyone in Australia takes it in turn to win, and his uncle’s faking his own death.
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Am I suggesting that the creation of the Anglican church was, well, a scam or a cheat? Maybe. If so, however, it is not out of theological conviction but from a desire to include this novel in my list. Thomas Cromwell, as envisaged by Mantel, is a master of maneuvering and plotting. He does everything he can to get on the right side of an unstable king, and then having done so rearranges the spiritual life of his nation to give the king what he wants. Sometimes the best way to get around the rules is to re-write them.
Money Martin Amis
Martin Amis, Money
If the 80s were the prime years of the synthetic and artificial, then this novel takes these characteristics to their logical extents. Money is a novel with precious little money in it. Rather the book is filled with the possibility of money. John Self chases between London and New York in search of his big payday, spending against the anticipation of it all the while. Maybe the scam on which the novel turns it too cute and literary, but it is pleasure to witness a grand deception from the perspective of the victim, to get the visceral sense of what it is like to have been played in such a way.
Nikolai Gogol Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
This novel is the original epic of cheating and deception. Chichikov is a man of appetites, both immediately familiar and strangely enigmatic. He travels around the crumbling estates of rural Russia buying “dead souls”: that is, peasants listed on estate-keepers rolls who have died since the last census was taken. The scheme is ultimately revealed as a way to accumulate a theoretical holding of serfs against which Chichikov can acquire a loan, yet the intricacies of this plan are less important than the interactions that allow its fulfilment. Chichikov meets a luminous, often hilarious, array of characters. As with any great conman, he facilitates the projection of those he meets, drawing out delusions, frustrations and thwarted aspirations.
A Fraction of the Wholebreaking the rulesDead SoulsJoe Mungo ReedMislaidmoneypartnersSimon and SchusterThe Masters of AtlantisThe RecognitionsWolf Hall
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Joe Mungo Reed
Joe Mungo Reed
Joe Mungo Reed was born in London and raised in Gloucestershire, England. He has a master’s in philosophy and politics at the University of Edinburgh and an MFA in creative writing at Syracuse University, where he won the Joyce Carol Oates Award in Fiction. He is the author of the novel, We Begin Our Ascent, and his short stories have appeared in VQR and Gigantic and anthologized in Best of Gigantic. He is currently living in Edinburgh, UK.