Booking Around

"Blueprints" an Explosive Portrait of Post-feminist Girls

2012-02-13T17:21:00.000+01:00

The first story of Elissa Schappell’s collection Blueprints for Building Better Girls explodes off the pages. The vulnerability, sadness, cruelty and idiocy are like brutal scratches and the familiarity of the emotions like salt on a wound.

Heather has a bad reputation. Slut is shouted more than whispered as she walks through the halls of her high school. Ross is haunted by his recent past as the fat kid. The one in the pool with a long shirt, the one shoved into lockers, his books catapulted toward the floor. They find each other and it is a first exchange of intimacy and surrender. They are broken fledglings and their desperate search for solace is heartbreaking and destructive. “I couldn’t figure out why Ross, after taking such good care of that car, polishing each sleek curve, never seemed to clean outside,” thinks Heather, illuminating the way that all of Ross’s workouts and diets have shaved off the pounds but not smoothed whatever is inside him.

Schappell’s stories are linked by incidental crossovers between characters and my mind hopped around a bit trying to remember where Jenny had appeared before and what I knew about her. I’ve begun to tire of the six degrees of separation approach in short story collections, but Schapell’s overlaps bothered me less than some.

Joy of Cooking was good enough to make me pause. I have a tendency to react violently to narratives of eating disorders. Too often they are so wrong it feels like an insult. Schappell is at her strongest when she is writing in the first person and this is the best way to inhabit the pain of Emily’s mother. Twelve was the beginning of her daughter’s anorexia. Sit-ups, calorie counting, 74 pounds. The story hurts. The disease is an awful game where the winner dies, and this insidious disease is everywhere. Joy of Cooking harrowingly reminds us of the ripple effect, the way the obsession with food scuttles relationships and devastates multiple lives. “No one saw how much the mother hurt,” Schappell writes. “No one knew, or cared, what she’d lost.”

Schappell examines more than a few marriages, probing at the eventuality of children. She illuminates the polarizing feeling of absolute love and devotion paired with a distinct, if temporary, loss of self.

Sex itself is a vital thread in this narrative of girls and women. Unfortunately, every instance of sex in these pages is laced with ulterior motives, a promise or a deprivation. A woman bears three children to her husband and he stops sleeping with her. Another can't bear children and is similarly rejected. The anorexic is so uncomfortable in her body she can’t be touched, and a college girl tries to erase herself through degrading, semi-conscious encounters. Sex is not a success for these women, which I found upsetting and unfair. When will women, even in the confines of fiction, be permitted to pursue their sexual impulses without damning results?

I spent a lot of time thinking about these women’s relationship to sex afterward. Wanted, denied, unwanted, degraded, feared. Ultimately I think Schappell wouldn’t let sex be easy for her characters. Maybe she thinks it isn’t easy, or maybe she thinks it shouldn’t be, and maybe she’s right. But I can’t help hoping for stories about women who ask for what they desire and get it, without strings, without damage. How many times have we explained the foibles of men as boys being boys? When Heather’s son explains away a girl’s slip-up in a similar manner, her reply is devastating: “Don’t be a fool, there is no such thing as just a girl.”

Schappell unveils the frigid contours of post-feminist blueprints. The ability to have it all was somewhere confused with a directive. And as anyone knows, who has tried to be the good daughter, the temptress, and the measured prude, you simply can’t be everyone you’re expected to be.

"Grief of Others" Speaks to Suburbia

2011-11-30T18:13:00.000+01:00

When I read a review of Leah Hager Cohen’s novel The Grief of Others, I was curious how it would compare to Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. ¬The books possess similar elements, a fraying family, suburbia, secrets. As readers of Booking Around are aware, I did not like Freedom. I felt differently about The Grief of Others.

The Ryries live outside of New York City in a pleasant neighborhood and have two children. John also has an elder daughter from a relationship in college. And the Ryries have just lost their infant son. Ricky chose to carry the baby to term, though she knew he would survive only a few hours after his birth. He had a rare defect where his skull didn’t properly form to protect his brain. Ricky kept this knowledge from her husband John and her secretive decisions has opened a vast chasm between them and shaken the constructs of their family.

The shift has affected both their children, and the parents seem just mildly aware of the impact their marital trouble is having. Paul is being bullied by his peers, and Biscuit has started skipping school for no reason they can discern at the early age of ten. John’s first daughter, and their half-sister, Jessica shows up with a pregnancy of her own, and it is her presence that begins to bring the Ryries’ rupture to light.

What Hager Cohen draws from her characters is the human despair and desire to improve that Franzen failed to imbue in the Berglunds. They infuriated me because they saw their problems but wouldn’t attempt to repair them and answered the situation by destroying the lives of the people around them instead. The Ryries are similarly on fragile ground, and while the behavior that occurs may be hurtful, it is not cruel. The complexity of desires and selfishness of people, even mothers and fathers, is not overlooked by Hager Cohen, but neither is it indulged.

Gordie is another character who comes into the frame of the Ryries lives. He is of college age and has lost his father to cancer. He happens to spot Biscuit as she falls into the river and brings the sodden child home and finds himself welcomed into a home that doesn’t seem to have room for each other. He is suffering from his own grief and confusion about who he is now that he has one less template of personhood to compare to.

Hager Cohen gets deep into the heads of all of her characters, illustrating each with clear and sometimes startling illuminations of their thoughts. Her writing has the qualities of a river, direct in its course but able to respond to changes in light and interferences. The book is about recovering from crisis. Moving beyond what one believes one is capable of in order to be there for the ones left behind. The Ryries struggle to revitalize what they have built without razing their first attempt. The work is hard but the ability to reflect is available to them and recognized.

Love story at the heart of Murakami's 1Q84

2011-11-15T22:09:00.002+01:00

The world of 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami is not to be entered casually. I suppose I wouldn’t encourage anyone to blindly jump into one of his previous books either (except I can’t help recommending the dark brilliance of Norwegian Wood to anyone who asks). Murakami tends toward the dark or bizarre or the sad. 1Q84 brims with all of these and its intensities are sometime wearisome or upsetting. But what 1Q84 made me realize more than anything else is that Murakami’s novels are always love stories. The romances are hardly formulaic, but at the center of shifting worlds and convoluted self-discoveries the ultimate focus is strangely pure. The grand complexities of 1Q84 manage to emphasize this more than most.

Aomame, her name means green peas, is a determined, attractive, and somewhat frightening woman. Her audacity is evident from the first scene, in which she exits a taxi in the middle of a traffic jam on the elevated Metropolitan Expressway of Tokyo. She is in a rush to make her business appointment (she’s an assassin) and she effortlessly climbs down the emergency exit in her stockings and skirt suit. As she departs from the safe confines of the cab the driver offers ger strange advice: “Please remember: things are not what they seem.” Aomame’s descent allows her to keep her appointment, and takes her into a world with two moons, air chrysalises, and the Little People.

Tengo is the same age as Aomame and has the strange occupation of working as a professor of math and of being a writer. His entrance into the year 1Q84 isn’t marked by a dramatic change, but the course of his days do shift when his editor asks him to rewrite a short story submission the magazine has received. Air Chrysalis was written by a 17-year-old girl, Fuka-Eri, and the editor believes that with Tengo’s writing and Fuka-Eri’s youth and odd story, they will have a blockbuster success. Tengo agrees to ghostwrite the project, bringing to life with eerie clarity the actions of the Little People.

Murakami’s characters are nothing if not enigmatic and he constructs them with such careful detail that their quirks are easy to recall months later. An eccentric, protective dowager plays a silent hand in the fates of women, and the men who abuse them. A hideous, unlikable man works on behalf of dark groups without any real agenda. Fuka-Eri’s speech is strangely devoid of inflection, while the contortions of Aomame’s face in the throes of anger are so horrifying as to be unrecognizable. Tengo resembles many of Murakami’s previous heroes. He is contemplative, solitary, smart. At times his inaction has a more profound effect than any action and it is common to spend pages with him as he goes about his modest daily movements.

As the title clearly suggests, 1Q84 exhibits the themes of George Orwell’s 1984. The world that Aomame and Tengo find themselves in isn’t so different from the 1984 they know, but the currents of power have shifted and as their stories grow closer together their survival is mutually dependent.

There is much that is mystical and mysterious about Murakami’s novel, but sometimes the most incredible aspect is the love story. A foreordained quality exists in the lovers’ trajectory. The intensity of the link between the two is both sustaining and suspicious, humming too closely to the tune of a fairy tale. I find it wild that such a massive, complex and unique text is built upon such a delicate kernel of truth. Aomame and Tengo are written as incredibly solitary, self-contained people and yet their union is the fulcrum of the fate of 1Q84. The novel is an adventure, a journey through the fantastical imagination of Murakami and his incredible web of detail. There is much to analyze in the text, much to like or dislike. If you are a fan of Murakami, you will savor this book, if you are not, it may not win you over.

The Stark Terrain of "The Outlaw Album"

2011-10-31T19:37:00.001+01:00

The reader's introduction to any of Daniel Woodrell's stories is a clang of doom. "Morrow wondered if he might soon die because of a beautiful girl from his teens he'd never had the nerve to approach." This is typical of opening sentences in Woodrell’s short story collection The Outlaw Album. Non-decisions have just as much impact as bad ones. A horrifying combination of despair and accident exists in his characters' tales. Life is taxing and dark, danger is never too far off, and if you don't get mired in it this time, you are bound to the next time around.

In “Black Step,” Woodrell illustrates the life of a modern soldier with a gritty clarity that portrays the struggles of the returned as well as anything I've previously read. His protagonist, Darden, joined the army to become more interesting than his peers; overgrown boys who cruised the same bars night after night, hoping to get laid. Now that he has survived the desert the empty simplicity of those evenings is no longer available to him. Darden can’t even remember the desire to fuck or be touched. He remains at a remove, seeing his past as frequently as he sees his present, relishing graves that disappear.

The Outlaw Album isn't a collection to dive into without premeditation. I frequently noticed that I was steeling myself for the next encounter. Woodrell's language is spare, amplifying the intensity of what occurs. In an era where so much is packaged for our immediate satisfaction and instant entertainment, the weight of Woodrell's stories feel all the more poignant and necessary. Their edges are sharp and jagged. They not only cut into our consciousness but leave a corrugated mark as a reminder of what was learned.

Viewers of last year’s film “Winter’s Bone” will be familiar with the ferocity of Woodrell’s tales. He is the author of the novel and the filmmakers captured something of the sparse despair of the regular days of his characters; their shots floating across run down properties that are encapsulated in a persistent, dour grey.

The austerity of Woodrell’s prose puts him in league with Hemingway but tacks closer to Raymond Carber. Like Carver he writes of hard drinking, lost men, and determined, stern women. He excavates communities that we are not or comfortable, accustomed to, reading about. Readers of Annie Proulx’s Wyoming stories may be more at ease with Woodrell’s terrain but he takes a different tone. There is filter on his lens and what is delivered is stark and harsh. Moments of possibility and beauty are not absent, but they are pared down to their essence. The presence of an artistic flourish would undermine the truth of what Woodrell creates and he has no need for them.

To infer that the absence of flourish means a cut and dry tone would be a mistake. Woodrell is a master of his craft and has a command of multiple writing styles. He is first person and third, brother and daughter, violent and loyal. Each hardscrabble character in Woodrell’s collection has a different story of upset and survival to tell. Recuperative periods are suggested between each portrait of life that he presents, but Woodrell’s book is a rare and raw piece of work that should garner the admiration and attention of its readers and perforate the heart.

Harbach Wins Fans with Debut

2011-10-05T17:27:00.001+02:00

On occasion there are fictional characters whose lives you can imagine beyond the pages of the book they reside in. One feels like one has been given a window into their experience, not as if they have been created solely to prove a point or tell a single story. The characters in Chad Harbach’s debut novel The Art of Fielding are these sorts of people. When I reached the last page, in a matter of days despite the novel’s bulk, I was sure that Henry, Schwartz, and their teammates would continue on with their lives, and it was my loss to no longer be a witness.

Henry Skrimshander is a kid from South Dakota for whom baseball is the only thing. He plays shortstop with an effortless kind of beauty that Mike Schwartz spots immediately. Schwartz is a student at Westish College, a small, fictional school in Wisconsin. A hulking, stereotypical form of an athlete, Schwartz recognizes the kind of talent he always wished he possessed and decides to help Henry realize his potential. Schwartz himself is perhaps the most compelling character. He pursues law school as vehemently as he coaches the best from his teammates but finds himself skidding to a confused stop and searching for what actually anchors and drives him.

Schwartz changes Henry’s life drastically, shifting its course from community college student to rising baseball star of Westish. Henry’s arrival on campus exposes him to grueling, vivid training sessions and introduces him to his roommate Owen, one of the book’s fulcrums.

Guert Affenlight, the president of Westish, and his daughter Pella, are actors off the baseball field. Affenlight is a wonderful, scholarly figure, whom we see stirred by unexpected desires. His daughter has returned to him after a botched, early marriage, and is trying to land on her feet. Both characters add a dash of relativity to the events on the field, though struggles are not placed in a hierarchy.

Often I found myself pausing over Harbach’s sentences for the pleasure of rereading them. He is inclined to describe people with food in mind and I was happy to be sent to the dictionary more than once, though fuchsin was perhaps unnecessary since fuchsia works just as well. Quite a lot of reference was made to the “hip hop anthem of the moment,” a tired means of expressing the wilted nature of the surrounding college culture. But happily much is made of 19th century literary bastions, particularly Melville, whose brief, rediscovered visit to Westish earns the college athletes their name, the Harpooners.

The relationships in The Art of Fielding are fragile. Some of the relationships constructed by Harbach seem founded on very little. But then that can be the case; an incidental bond at the heart of something that grows almost without encouragement or reason. Their basis resides in the familial, loyalty, awe.

For much of the novel Henry is an obedient puppy dog to Schwartz’s insistent regime of vicarious success. But Henry’s relationship with baseball founders at the novel’s center, calling into question his purpose. He is infamous for his errorless play, and just as he ties the record of his hero, he throws an errant ball. The consequences multiply and set numerous, irreversible events in motion.

The Art of Fielding educates the reader about passion as well as confusion, prejudice, and baseball. As someone for whom sports are incidental, the novel was a consistent pleasure if not a comprehensive course on America’s favorite pastime.

History, Fables Meld in "The Tiger's Wife"

2011-09-26T18:38:00.003+02:00

In her rich and often startling debut, The Tiger’s Wife, Téa Obreht exhibits an attraction to wonder, and a finely tuned talent for storytelling. Natalia is a young doctor in an unnamed Balkan country, which is still recovering from the effects of the recent war. While traveling across the border to administer vaccinations at an orphanage, she learns that her grandfather has died. Her grandfather was a doctor himself. His death is the crux of the novel and his life is its bulk.

Old world superstitions are close to the surface in the landscape of The Tiger’s Wife. Near the orphanage a family is vigorously digging up the vineyards. They are suffering from tuberculosis, but refuse treatment. The patriarch is convinced they are sick because he has not yet found the remains of his cousin. A cousin he had to leave behind during the war and buried under the vineyard. Natalia is pragmatic, a woman of science, and knows this can’t be true. But as her time across the border unfolds, interspersed with the narrative of her grandfather, everything begins to seem possible.

Natalia’s grandfather is an equally practical man of medicine, whose experience was nevertheless deeply tied to the lore of the tiger’s wife and his repeated encounters with the deathless man. The narrator, Natalia, invents or extrapolates the background details of the main players in these stories, deepening and obscuring the realities. In her hands no one is an open book.

The tiger who appears in her grandfather’s village is just one example of someone with a storied past. He is an escaped resident of a zoo miles away. His unexpected freedom is the result of a rain of bombs, missiles that liberate him even as they crush the lives of others. The abused, deaf-mute wife of the village butcher does not respond to the tiger’s presence with fear, and neither does Natalia’s grandfather, who is excited to know the Jungle Book’s Shere Kahn is in his own woods. The tiger’s former life depended on familiarity with the hand that fed him, which leads him to the butcher’s wife, inspiring terror and suspicion in her neighbors. Every piece is part of a bigger lattice, brought together by unique turns of fate. Life wouldn’t have it any other way. The tiger turns the village of Gallina topsy-turvy, and convinces her grandfather that he must get out.

Natalia herself is not as vivid as the subjects of her stories. She is a witness to the war, and tries to be a part of the remedy. But her character is mostly built on her grandfather’s stories and her affection for him. Natalia’s love for her grandfather is deep, but not particularly complex. Her father is a markedly absent presence, and this is never discussed, putting more weight on the relationship with her grandfather. Natalia’s rebellions are brief and her grandfather’s pursuits quickly become her own. Perhaps it is a relief in the chaos of war to follow so closely in someone else’s path.

Obreht’s descriptions are rich and affecting. She is terrifically young, barely 26, and was born in Belgrade, moving to the US at the age of 12. Amongst these stories certainly lie parts of her own understanding of her history. Her subject is heavy but she handles beauty just as well and can spot moments of humor amidst acts of betrayal and destruction. Obreht undeniably recognizes human fallibility; she casts light on manipulative actions without judgment, merely incorporating them into the fabric of her tale. People are human and they keep themselves sane through the little fictions they tell themselves. At some point, who is to say what is real and what is merely possible.

Interest is Drowned in "The Lake"

2011-09-14T17:06:00.001+02:00

The coupling of the protagonists in Banana Yoshimoto's novel The Lake is begun in a cinematic fashion. Chihiro starts observing Nakajima from the sill of her window. They begin exchanging cross-alley waves and she grows comfortable in the familiarity of his presence. Waves lead to coffee and all at once he is spending most nights in her apartment, carefully reimbursing her for the extra heat and groceries he uses. They sleep together a single time. And it is a lonely and sexually pleasureless union. The two seem to have bumbled into each other’s company. Their accidental merger is a reflection of quiet desperation more than an enjoyment of companionship.

Chihiro has moved to Tokyo from the village where she spent her childhood. Her mother is dying of cancer when she leaves, and after her death Chihiro finds very little to tie her to her home. Not even the presence of her father affects her affiliation to the place. She has her art degree and is a muralist of a vague amount of minor fame. When she begins her time with Nakajima she has been enlisted to paint a mural on a wall of the local school. The piece grows to represent much more than a project as her relationship with Nakajima takes shape.

Nakajima is a mysterious figure and we are meant to wonder what lies behind his oddities, including his inability to want and enjoy sex. He is a brilliant Ph.D. student, who has lost himself to his studies in the past and opens himself up very little. Chihiro begins to suspect that there is a shady reason for all his strangeness, suspicions that are confirmed when he brings her to the lake.
At the lake we meet an even stranger pair than Chihiro and Nakajima. They are a shrunken brother and sister pair, Mino and Chii. He entertains the guests, serving them the best tea Chihiro has ever had, while his sister sleeps in a room nearby. Chii’s almost always asleep, and when she does rouse herself, she communicates through Mino, who seems to channel her words telepathically. Chihiro is not sure what this duo explains about Nakajima’s past, but she knows it is the key to his difficulties and his uncomfortable manner.

Aside from the improbable nature of their meeting, there is no real romance between Chihiro and Nakajima and I had a hard time feeling a resonance in their connection. Both have lost their mothers and are marooned in the seclusion of their own worlds. It’s fathomable that this on its own can bring people together but that magnetism remains absent. Chihiro’s language frequently vacillates between security in her affection for her companion and allusions to a shadowy naiveté of sentiment. Her inability to truly fixate on Nakajima, often felt like the fault of mistranslation. Whatever the cause, the result was frustration with unknowable characters, their emotions and actions too perforated to complete a whole.

Yoshimoto's prose is incredibly sparse. Her subjects in The Lake are very often odd and perhaps the basic nature of her language is meant to temper the peculiarities that inhabit her worlds. I kept slowing down and looking for something that might send me to the dictionary or at least pique my interest. Instead I was shuttled from the apartment, to the schoolyard, to dreams of Paris, to the lake. I couldn’t care very much. How much is at stake when the complicated pasts of protagonists aren’t synthesized into an engaging future? The loneliness of Chihiro and Nakajima didn’t play on my sympathies. And what did it matter if they found each other if there was no one to care?

"Tough Without a Gun:" A Flat Tale of a Dimensional Star

2011-08-17T20:26:00.000+02:00

My beginnings as a cinephile were unusual, going, as I did, to a Waldorf school where TV was frowned upon, and belonging, as I did, to obedient parents. My sister and I were, however, allowed the requisite one or two movies on the weekend. Disney was verboten, so there was a lot of Shirley Temple flicks, which graduated into Rogers and Astaire, and finally, pivotally, Noir.

The foreign twang of the word was enough to satisfy me and my 14-year-old cohorts; eager, budding culture snobs that we were. Sleepovers were popcorn-packed nights of Hitchcock, Gilda, The Third Man, and Humphrey Bogart. Finally, ultimately, Humphrey. We fell for the cantankerous, weather beaten antihero as so many had before us, sketching out lines from To Have and Have Not in our margins and whistling for our imaginary Steves. (To my everlasting delight, my high school sweetheart met my Lauren Bacall in full rumrunner regalia one Halloween.)

All this is by way of saying that I had to read “Tough Without A Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart” by Stefan Kanfer. I was excited to learn about my gruff idol, find out if he was the face of the Gerber baby, and how it was that he had dodged his third wife (whom he called “Slugger”) to make Lauren his fourth.

I got my answers but the delivery was a little dull. Kanfer clearly reveres the star and faithfully takes his readers through Bogart’s life, which began in 1899. Humphrey was born to a well-to-do family in New York City, the eldest, with two younger sisters. Although bright, he rebelled against authority and it was evident early on that he would not be following in his father’s footsteps toward the medical profession.

Bogart got his start on Broadway, as most stars had to at the time. He married and divorced, slowly rising to roles of more prominence. Upon Bogart’s move to Hollywood, Kanfer patiently unpacks his cinematic choices and outlines how one sort of movie led to another, culminating in the films that define how Bogart is viewed today: He is renowned as classic, unshakably masculine. He withholds his affection but there is tenderness beneath the crust.

Kanfer spends a good amount of time quoting reviews from the era. He details the many ways that history intersected with Bogart’s career, affecting his trajectory as a star and sculpting his image. These tie-ins were often striking, and yet when Kanfer directly quotes his subject, Humphrey never comes off the page. Even Kanfer’s descriptions of Hollywood and the Bogarts’ travels in Africa fall flat. There are glimmers of dimension but ultimately the biographer sticks too close to his facts without illuminating the contours of the scenes or personalities. I never felt like I got to know Kanfer’s subject better, though he handled the impact of Bogart’s afterlife with much more skill.

My sense is that the author’s respect for the figure and for his family outweighed his desire to make Bogart human. The decision to avoid sensationalist guesses about his fidelity is admirable, but Kanfer’s whitewashed approach is tiresome. Somewhere there is a happy medium, maybe the next biographer will reach it. Because it is obvious that though Bogart reached his cinematic heights in his 40s, and died more than 50 years ago, this is only the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Fourth Novel is a Finely Tunned "Tale" of Wealth

2011-07-18T18:09:00.001+02:00

Julia Glass is the author of a wonderful book called “Three Junes” (which you can always get a copy of at the bookstore “Three Lives,” read it to find out why). Last fall she published her latest novel “The Widower’s Tale.” It’s largest and perhaps only real flaw is the title. The book is about much more than the charming, cantankerous, widowed Percival Darling and the title oozes a treacly sentiment that is absent in the novel.

Glass is partial to male narrators and the four we have in “The Widower’s Tale” are a diverse bunch. The aforementioned Percy lives on the property where his wife died 30 odd years ago in an accident for which he thinks he is to blame. The novel opens as his barn is being transformed into a fancy pre-school, a surprising decision fueled by his desire to ground his eldest daughter. Ira is one of the teachers at Elves and Fairies. He is damaged, recovering from the harsh loss of his previous job as a result of false accusations stemming from his sexuality. Then there is Celestino, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala whose life looked immeasurably brighter before he fell in love with his patron’s daughter years before. The youngest protagonist is Robert, Percy’s grandson, a bright boy at Harvard, blithely following his mother’s footsteps toward med-school.

Circumstance and humanity bring these lives into the same orbit in crucial ways. Percy’s careful widowhood is reshuffled by a new love and the pleasures, risks and heartbreaks associated. He is the only character given a first person narrative and his voice is often hilarious in its high brow, dry humor. The reader experiences Percy’s awakening in an immediate manner, and we find ourselves puzzled and righteously appalled by the privilege that has altered his small town into something he finds absurdly gentrified.

Robert, Celestino, and Ira’s stories are interesting but they lack the vibrancy of Percy’s voice. Each character’s transformation is crucial and fleshes out another dimension of current society.

The novel is not just of men. But they are our lenses, a perspective Glass manages quite well, faltering only with the college age slang Robert and his roommate Turo mouth. Almost across the board Glass’s women are tough. As mothers, doctors, scholars, and even lovers, they have a somewhat fierce outer layer that their men want to penetrate. I liked these women well enough, but my understanding of them was less complete, more fractured, and I wanted to be better acquainted with their weaknesses and their drive.

Issues of the moment are central to the narrative. The novel encompasses capitalist greed, gay marriage, illegal immigration and the seepage of technology into the way we live. This is not done obliquely or in a preacher’s tone. The subjects’ presence never feels forced (unlike the racial and class crossings that occur in the popular “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” by Helen Simonson). Percy’s wealthy Boston suburb becomes the victim of a mysterious eco-terrorism group, clever pranks he initially finds amusing. The impact of these attempts to right an imbalance in wealth and spotlight an abuse of resources is both startling and thought provoking. The logic might be sound, but the execution is badly misdirected.

What I ultimately appreciated about Glass’s novel is that very little is neatly packaged at its conclusion. Like many novels before it, it ends with a wedding. But the event felt more like a beginning of something or a continuation for all the characters. There were no clear answers or sure destinies, but the possibility of transformative opportunities just might be on the horizon.

Visiting with Egan's "Goon Squad"

2011-06-13T22:24:00.002+02:00

Winning an award for your work is inevitably an honor and for some readers the mark of the Pulitzer Prize is a compelling emblem; for others it is intimidating. This year’s winner is a laudable accomplishment as well as a comprehensible and engaging read. In fact the most elusive feature of Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit from the Goon Squad” is the title.

The first chapter, and first story, introduces us to Sasha. She is a thirty-something single woman in New York, discussing her most recent setback with her shrink. The scene is typical so far. Sasha, it turns out, is a kleptomaniac and her fervid encounter with an online date concludes in forgettable sex and a poignant theft.

Sasha's story introduces a few of the characters who appear in the successive stories. Egan cleverly extracts minor figures from early stories and fleshes out their worlds as the book proceeds. For a time, the reader is traveling backward in time, retracing history, but ultimately we arrive somewhere in the future. While Sasha’s presence is a fundamental thread in the book, she never entirely reclaims the narrative as her own. The reader pieces her life together through the eyes of her contemporaries and acquaintances, and we learn almost as much about them along the way. It is fair to say that the story is no more hers than it is any of theirs.

“Goon Squad” follows its population of protagonists to Naples, Africa, and the suburbs, but it always returns to New York. The city harbors the wounded and spits out the derelict. It is a place where gifted musicians become riverside fishermen, PR magnates light their guests on fire, people find their callings, and others find themselves selling their foundering souls. By reconnecting with Egan’s characters in different stages of their lives, we become acquainted with a panorama of their choices. Throughout the book their mistakes and triumphs come into focus and give them a very human identity. An aging producer who seduces young girls is also a father and a mentor while an American sweetheart actress morphs into a political rebel. Egan’s characters are unfailingly complex, and like most people, they continue to surprise us.

In addition to the creative tool of intersecting but not continuous or chronological storylines, Egan uses a variety of methods to tell her story. A troubled college student speaks about himself entirely in the second person, until he reaches a mental climax and collapse. A young girl illustrates the fluctuating complications of her family via power point, and a few conversations are had entirely via abbreviated Ts, a form of texting reduced further than our own. These methods reflect both time and states of mind.

Egan’s characters' narratives come together like puzzle pieces. It is a sly approach and one that Egan executes with grace. It is somewhat disappointing, however, not to acquire a full view of any one of her characters. This is partly a compliment to Egan's craftsmanship as a writer that we want to intimately understand everyone she creates. But the sliver we are given, no matter how substantial, is never enough. Arguably our chagrin at remaining on the fringes of these realities should be swallowed in homage to artistic license. Egan is, perhaps, using these slices to paint a larger picture. I resented the deprivation nonetheless. “A Visit from the Goon Squad” is a novel in short stories. I am a fan of both genres and Egan’s book is a well-developed delight, but I couldn’t help wishing I’d had one or the other because both didn’t give me enough of either.

Dark Corners in "Swamplandia!"

2011-05-14T18:57:00.002+02:00

Karen Russell’s second book “Swamplandia!” is a novel of the south, set deep in the swampy groves of Florida. The lush plant life and entangled landmasses permeate the book’s atmosphere and provide a climate not often explored in fiction or even by non-fictional people. The story is about children and the timbre of the tale is dark, an effect deepened by the innocence of the children’s voices.

“Swamplandia!” is full of oddities. The title refers to the amusement park/tourist attraction located off the mainland run by the Bigtree family. The Bigtrees are not an ounce Indian but they don the garb and raise alligators, or Seths as they call them, and impress their audiences with death defying performances. Ava, our primary narrator, is the third generation of the Bigtree dynasty and a witness to its collapse. She is the youngest member of the alligator wrestling family, baby sister to her brother Kiwi and sister Ossie.

Their mother dies at the outset of the novel and Ava doesn't quite know how to deal with the fact that it was cancer that killed her, though she defied death regularly during her alligator swims. Her mother’s tragic but mundane demise disappoints the tourists and without the star of the most popular attraction, the audience to dwindles.

The appeal of the Bigtree theme park is further diminished by the establishment of the sinister World of Darkness on the mainland. The new park is host to a vast array of disturbing rides and the slick, manufactured nature of the entertainment is something Chief Bigtree looks down on. But Ava’s father, while a safe presence, has no grasp of how to care for his children and when Kiwi runs away to the mainland to help bail out the family, the Chief leaves Ossie and Ava on their own soon after.

The three children are displaced by the loss of their mother and they take very different tacks to manage the situation. Their attempts to embrace and escape their legacy are central to the story and tainted by darkness.

Ossie is dreamy, the middle sister. In the wake of her mother’s death she begins to obsess over, and eventually consort with, ghosts. Thick in the margins of adolescence, Ossie becomes enamored with a young dredgeman, Louis, who died decades before she was born. Ava listens to her sister’s recitation of Louis’s tale (perhaps the best section of the novel) and is swept up in the romance but never believes the way Ossie does, and can’t discern the limits of her sister’s imagination.

When Ossie disappears into the everglades, Ava begins her own odyssey to find her. Her guide is a sinister, mystical guy called Bird Man, who claims he can lead her to the underworld and retrieve the sister she has lost. Russell has asked us to suspend our disbelief to minor degrees throughout the book and by this point we want to trust in the Bird Man as much as Ava, even though our better judgment tells us to be wary.

Parallel to Ava’s adventures through the slippery waterways, is Kiwi’s exposure to mainland culture. The bright, homeschooled boy is used to being the star of his surroundings and is suddenly thrust in the judgmental mediocrity of teenage life.
Kiwi is dealt the surprise of different uncertainties, neither more nor less prickly than Ossie and Ava’s precarious involvements.

Russell constructs a strange world for her protagonists and deftly guides the reader around its contours. The distinction between fantasy and reality is tenuous in the worlds of the Bigtree children and Russell expertly reminds us of the appealing possibilities that accompany this fluidity as well as the dangers.

The Continuous Pleasure of "Just Kids"

2011-04-01T21:44:00.001+02:00

The 2010 winner of the National Book Award is a modest tome brimming with charm. Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids” is a memoir of love. It is a love story written for New York and for Robert Mapplethorpe. Smith tells her tale without frills and her matter-of-fact delivery makes her brushes with celebrity more compelling and her relationship with Mapplethorpe incredibly affecting. Her path to success feels almost accidental and incites a certainly misplaced nostalgia for the trials of the past. Smith manages to create a Neverland out of New York, despite the fact that this was actually her life and the challenges she overcame were quite real.

Smith's prose is imbued with a grounded ingenuity. She arrives in NY after a little bit of college, giving a child up to adoptive parents, and with an interest in poetry and art. She not so marches as glides into the New York of '67, the summer Coltrane dies, as she marks it.

Her memories of New York are stippled with gravestones. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and finally, Robert Mapplethorpe. The way she depicts the times, the New York of these artists was roiling with creative opportunity. They lived beneath the surface and made their worlds the center of the universe.

Patti meets Robert by chance on a hot day in Brooklyn. Their second and third encounters are as accidental as the first, but they are the beginning of an enduring love affair and, more importantly, a relationship between artist and muse.

The cursory knowledge I had of Mapplethorpe before this book was of his later photographs. It is impossible to forget his images of nudity and bondage once you have seen them. If the subject matter doesn’t appeal, the beauty of his execution does. His photographs suggest a sexual preference; an assumption that is easily made and not quite accurate.

Patti walks alongside Robert as his sexuality burgeons and changes. His metamorphosis is terrain she does not play a part in and yet her embrace is complete. “Robert took areas of dark human consent and made them into art,” she writes. “He worked without apology, investing the homosexual with grandeur, masculinity and enviable nobility. Without affectation, he created a presence that was wholly male without sacrificing feminine grace.” Smith’s rendering of Mapplethorpe’s personal expansion is incredibly gentle and a tribute to their bond as well as to her patience and desire to understand him.

Reading about the New York of 40 years ago today is delicious. The cost of living makes your mouth water and the casual encounters Smith has with artistic legends are simple and savory. Smith blossoms separately from Mapplethorpe, but their work was in constant conversation with the other’s. Smith lists toward the light, while Mapplethorpe probes at the darkness. "Just Kids" is in many ways a work of poetry and though it falters at times in its center, its artistry and emotion make it an overwhelming success.

The morning I took “Just Kids” out of my purse, I dined on eggs in the West Village. Looking up after ordering, I saw a woman with a cappuccino in front of her, and a notebook. She had a pen on the table but was reading from the book and smiling from time to time. The restaurant was tiny and I didn’t want to invade her privacy, but I whispered to my companions, “It’s her! It’s Patti Smith!” The serendipity of the moment felt like a slice of the old New York she knew. The coincidence of the sighting was a moment of urban grace, which wrapped us up in the world she wrote of.

"Freedom" and its Disappointments

2011-03-10T22:36:00.003+01:00

I almost hate to add my voice to cacophony surrounding Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom.” For weeks after its publication you could barely get three paragraphs into an arbitrary New York Times article without mention of the book.

The wild success of Franzen's latest suburban fiction is baffling to me. I read “The Corrections” in high school and abhorred the characters so intensely that I have no recollection of the novel beyond my dislike. The lack of redemption and personal depth in each cranky, self-involved figure seemed a belittlement of their live, equally flawed, counterparts. I read “Freedom” hoping the extra years would open my eyes to the strengths of the author’s oeuvre and perceptions.

I did like “Freedom” more than “The Corrections,” which is like saying I like a vicious hangover more than food poisoning. “Freedom” is an easy read. The characters are less despicable than those found in “The Corrections,” but ultimately every one comes up with a less than full deck of humanity.

Walter and Patty Berglund are surburbanites, the harbingers of gentrification in a Minnesota neighborhood. On the surface they are a Pleasantville unit of contentment, which contributes to their neighbors' enjoyment when the family begins to implode. It should come as no surprise that the pages are full of infidelity, superiority complexes, and helicopter mothering.

The conceit of the characters in “Freedom” is that they appear to be fully realized, complex figures. Franzen does not shy away from exhibiting the flaws of his characters' "human natures" and at first glance this reads as depth. But as my uncle noted in a correspondence about the text, we never really know, and thus don’t like, any of the characters.

The majority of the Berglunds actions are driven by anger, revenge, repression, etc, and are held up as prototypes of middle-class normality. I agree that people are inherently self-interested, but not that they are exclusively, constantly so.

Perhaps my life has been unfairly filled with generous people. But I come from a world of comfort and privilege and nothing I've encountered resembles the selfish, bad behavior of “Freedom.” I agree with Franzen that our boundless range of opportunity has provided us with more reasons, not fewer, to be disappointed by our circumstances. I agree that humans are flawed, egocentric and prone to making mistakes. What infuriates me about Franzen's work is that he creates caricatures and proceeds to endow them with so much history, a full 562 pages, that we are tricked into believing they are three-dimensional.

Recently, a friend asked me what was wrong with reading about characters you don’t like. Perhaps it’s a blind spot of mine, but my feeling is: Why bother? Which is not to say that I dismiss literary figures based on whether or not I would take them to dinner or agree with their morals. There is humanity in reprehensible characters, think of Humbert Humbert, and when that humanity is accessed the reader can identify or reflect upon similar vulnerabilities, moral or emotional, in herself.

Franzen’s characters made me want to smack them over the heads for being so self-consumed. They are in a state of paralysis, unable or unwilling to adjust their circumstances. There is a bit of silver lining at the end, but at that point I couldn't forgive them and just wanted to forget.

"Cleopatra: A Life" is a Chance to Enjoy the Enduring Wiles of the Egyptian Queen

2011-02-26T21:29:00.001+01:00

“She really was impressive, wasn’t she,” said my great-aunt Phoebe over the soup. We were discussing our mutual fascination with Stacy Schiff’s biography “Cleopatra: A Life.” Aunt Phoebe’s sparkling eyes brightened talking about the victories of the queen. Although a figure infamous for her sexual allure, Schiff separates the strength of the woman from the strength of her notorious legacy. The result is a sumptuous depiction of the era, with a discerning eye turned toward the biases of the time.

The tumultuous world of Cleopatra's Egypt is easily accessible on the arm of Schiff. Her extensive research puts her at ease in her subject's world and gives her the ability to enthrall those who are unfamiliar with its terrain. Schiff deftly organizes the clutter of history and hearsay and she brushes the cobwebs off of intrigues 2,000 years old.

The name Cleopatra is tossed around with such frequency that one imagines one knows her entire story. Her seduction of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, her venomous suicide, her deadly allure. Cleopatra's name is practically synonymous with devastating beauty. The primary point that Schiff makes about the queen is that we have virtually no idea what she looked like. The exquisite cover of the book shows the arch of a woman's neck, her face turned away. Cleopatra was a woman who always held something back, making her all the more dangerous and powerful.

It is difficult to trust the descriptions we do have of the queen and its necessary to examine the sources. Notably, no one was able to mention her beauty without also elaborating on her intelligence. In an early biography of Marc Antony by Plutarch, Cleopatra dominates more than have the narrative. Schiff is mindful of the fact that people writing about Cleopatra wrote a hundred years after her death, or more. Inevitably they were men. Cleopatra’s accomplishments were extensive, (presiding as an unmarried queen over an enormous empire, enlisting the help of Rome in the face of a siege, carrying the children of two Caesars) and it is unsurprising that the commentary about her success is biting.

Schiff pokes fun at the attitudes of the time, and indeed some details inspire frank amazement. Members of the Ptolemy clan routinely married uncles, mothers and daughters. Cleopatra was likely the daughter of a brother and sister. The family was also known for brutally murdering each other in order to achieve the throne. Amusingly the Greek language was considered one of "low morals, the dialect of sex manuals, a language 'with fingers of its own.' The Greeks covered all bases, noted a later scholar, ‘including some I should not care to explain in class.'"

Schiff educates us on the customs of the times, and describes the opulent approach of the queen that it becomes impossible not to get lost in her world. The evidence shows that Cleopatra was educated in the same manner as Julius Caesar and that their personalities were uncommonly alike, as was their desire to rule their empires.

Throughout the book Schiff debunks a few myths. An asp undoubtedly did not strike the queen in the breast, despite the poetry of the image. For all the accusations of Cleopatra being a skilled and wanton seductress, she was a virgin when she became Caesar's lover and Marc Antony may have been the only other. There are moments of repetition in the tome, but by and large the information, based on thorough research and clever guesswork, is a spectacularly engaging biography.

What with all the conjecture around the infamous temptress, what remains is Cleopatra's indomitable wit and her ability to shape the world around her despite her gender. Whatever the whispering tongues of history have said or will say, she lived her life as she chose to, no small feat.

Glamour drowns insight in "Why Not Say What Happened?"

2011-01-24T21:48:00.002+01:00

The world of the have-a-lots is intrinsically appealing to outsiders and insiders. Glamour and power bounce from the gilded facades of the rich, famous and infamous, and we might just catch a ray; a secondary glow seems better than none. We can’t help at least glancing through the tabloids to read about the latest scandal and to get a glimpse of someone’s tumble or rise. Ivana Lowell’s memoir “Why Not Say What Happened?” plays directly into our eager appetites for the lavish and sensational. A descendant of the wealthy Guinness family, she is also the stepdaughter of the American poet Robert Lowell. The lure for the reader is both the wealth and the brilliance of the players.

The memoir opens with the death of the author’s mother, Lady Caroline Blackwood, wife of Lucien Freud and Robert Lowell. Whisked away from mourning in order to lunch with a friend of Caroline’s, Lowell finds herself forced to question her paternity. Her dining partner suggests, coyly, that by now Lowell knows that she has a different father than her sisters. Lowell is startled and this quandary is meant to be a driving force behind the book. But Israel Citkowitz, who Lowell believed to be her father for thirty odd years, died when she was a child, and her most vivid memories of a father figure are of Robert Lowell himself, who chronologically cannot be her father. Because Lowell's sense of paternity is already benignly disjointed one wonders if the mystery needs to be solved.

Lowell speeds through her narrative by illustrating anecdotes of splendid wealth, whimsical indulgences, and a veritable menagerie of names worth mentioning. Her grandmother Maureen is portrayed as something of a tyrannical social climber, and her mother's moods sway in tandem with her inebriation. Maureen touts the queen mother as among her closest friends, and is only saved from the “family problem” of alcoholism by fatally embarrassing herself in front of the royals and swearing off liquor. Neither Lowell nor her mother escape so easily.

The second thread of the memoir is the author’s struggle with alcohol. Lowell tells us that she has gone to rehab many times, occupying those of both a sparse and luxurious nature. She trots through them at unspecified points in her life and mentions them so lightly it is difficult to discern if she takes them seriously. It is even harder to know if she’s close to conquering her alcoholism or interested in doing so, and your heart goes out to her daughter Daisy, who is a glimmering apparition of hope in her mother’s narrative.

For all of the glamorous hullabaloo Lowell kicks up, there is very little revealed about the depth of either her or her mother’s struggle with alcohol; nor are any of the author’s relationships delineated with concrete particulars or insight. I understand the delicacy of family and the sacred nature of its history. Bringing the public into family secrets is a tricky business. But if you are going to write about it, you have to peel back all the layers. Otherwise the result is not worth even a modicum of the discomfort it will inevitably cause.

Robert Lowell is little more than a benevolent, phantom presence in the narrative and it is disappointing to find his complexities so easily dismissed. The major matriarchal figures in Ivana Lowell’s life are described with an awareness of their venom but without any real exploration of their truths or the consequences. Perhaps this stems from a reluctance to accuse or, merely, to find fault, but Lowell’s inability to truly examine her predecessors makes it impossible for her to incorporate their lessons into her understanding of herself. As a result, not even the reader learns anything of note.

Imperfections become serious flaws in Tom Rachman's novel

2010-12-10T18:02:00.000+01:00

The life and death of a small newspaper is the focus of Tom Rachman’s first novel The Imperfectionists. A wealthy businessman decides to start an international English-language paper in Rome. As its custodians, he installs a married couple, Betty and Leo. It is evident that he and Betty have history. The reader assumes he has another motive.

Rachman has laid out his book so that half the chapters read like short stories. Each of these chapters contains a new character and is prefaced by a somewhat sensationalist headline. The paper has been around for fifty years by this time, and is foundering. The other chapters focus on the early years when Betty and Leo were at the helm. Ott makes infrequent, mysterious appearances and one is meant to wonder what it’s all about.

Rachman’s writing is quick and engaging. The dialogue runs smoothly and reveals quantities about the speaker. The ostensible link between characters is the newspaper, but with each additional character that connection grows deeper and more complex. Loneliness emanates from these people, as do misplaced ambitions and resignation.

The title foreshadows flaws in the characters personalities. And one by one they exhibit quite a range. They are bitterly restrictive, selfish, rich, pathetic, cruel. Rachman fails to explore the depths of these characteristics, and an attribute that might have been one facet of a personality, becomes its bulk.

Little is done to evoke either the Rome of fifty years previous or its current incarnation. The newspaper’s staff is, almost across the board, removed from the Italian life. Rachman’s decision to elide the complexities of where his characters are, is a further shortcoming of the novel.

The male figures in the novel are constructed with a much steadier hand. The women wither beneath their imperfections. Hardy, the first woman introduced, is filled with neuroses: body image, self-esteem, daddy issues. Her eating disorder is an integral part of who she has become and, as is so often the case in fiction, it is used as a casual detail. Rachman joins a legion of male and female authors who slip in anorexia or bulimia as an aside. The lack of comprehension is evident in the omission of serious examination.

I had tired of the cast by the end and was surprised to find myself entranced by an airplane tryst. The location is wonderfully tantalizing for its impermanence and its suggestion of adventure. Abby Pinnola is the only woman who is pitch perfect. Crotchety and resigned to the 11-hour flight, she is humanized by her recently fired co-worker, Dave. The two of them have experienced the disappointment of Italy. Italians spend their lives as a large family, by blood or bond, and neither was able to find a niche. The delightful scene that emerged from accidental proximity threatened to redeem if not salvage the novel. The eventual dissolution into petty revenge enraged me.

While I was initially enchanted by the light accessibility of Rachman’s prose, the casual, cruel nature of the his characters imperfections wore me out.

No punches pulled for "The Surrendered"

2010-11-01T03:40:00.004+01:00

The three protagonists of Chang-Rae Lee’s novel The Surrendered are marked by fatalities and tragedy. The depth of the damage they experience appears infinite, and yet all three continue to stay afloat, if not move forward.

June is a dutiful daughter of eleven when her family is ensnared in the brutality of the Korean War. After weeks of starvation on the road with her family, she is the only one who remains of her parents and four siblings. Their deaths are unceremonious; she can do nothing but continue. June survives, but the war marks her indelibly. As the violence peters out, she encounters an American soldier on the road and, despite the reader’s grim expectations, he does nothing but lead her to a home for the other children who have lost their pasts to the war. But the child who was June has vanished, she has grown cruel and withdrawn with her peers and there is little hope of her adoption.

The American soldier is Hector. He is a man who possesses an almost supernatural ability to cheat destruction. He wins any drinking contest because alcohol has no discernible effect on him and the many physical, brutal fights he engages in reward him with wounds that heal with absurd, and for him, frustrating, rapidity. After the death of his father, Hector leaps at the chance to join the army, finding himself in the inferno of Korea, where he continuously confronts horrors and dead bodies with a frightening ease.

The third protagonist is Sylvie. She is the wife of the Reverend Tanner and together they run orphanage where Hector and June wind up. Sylvie has enough terrors and darkness of her own without the lurking shadows of the war in Korea. The only child of missionaries, her family was caught in Manchuria during the conflict between the Japanese and the Chinese and her very existence cost others their lives.

These three intricately crafted characters are a trio of the ravished. When their paths entwine, the meetings do not remedy the damage of their pasts. Lee lays out his story in swatches and it is with eagerness, but bated breath, that the reader awaits the union of the pieces.

Lee’s descriptions are not vociferously brutal, but the circumstances he describes make your heart pound. The stories are factual and soul splitting. Need is central to these characters’ experiences and the needs of the body are particularly felt. The corporeal desires range from food, to release, to sex. Not one of Lee’s characters is whole and the manners in which they attempt to satiate their need are hardly healing.

Lee treats the mundane details of his story with the same weight as the injustices of war, never putting one above the other in the hierarchy of pain. But the difference is obvious and the author's ability not to stress the point intensifies the poignancy of the discrepancies.

The hand of the author is not invisible in this novel. Sometimes his language ranges obtusely outside the colloquial usage, and at other moments his odd choices are a delicious stamp of authorship. The moments when Lee emerges from the text suggests a certain discomfort with the comforts he so briefly allows his characters. Life is ruthless with them; their suffering does not make them heroes, nor does it make them exempt from further pain.

Despite Navigational Pitfalls, Mitchell Safely Berthes Sixth Novel

2010-08-19T20:28:00.002+02:00

The appeal of David Mitchell's work has just begun to sink in this side of the Atlantic. A popular author of the last decade in Britain, Mitchell's interwoven stories and myriad voices are now being mentioned over a glass of Italian wine, between parents at birthday parties, and discussed in Brooklyn brownstones. Mitchell writes with an uncanny appreciation for beauty as well and his stories are rooted in a developed structure of suspense and complexity.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is the title of Mitchell's most recent novel. The story's backdrop is Japan at the turn of the 18th century. Jacob de Zoet finds himself on a fool's errand in Nagasaki, the only trading post permitted on Japan's jealously guarded empire. He is the clever and endearing protagonist of Mitchell’s sixth novel, a Dutch clerk on the ship Shenandoah. At the Dutch trading company's behest, the crew of the Shenandoah arrives to cleanse the post of corruption and abuse of power. With a moral compass pointed toward Christ and honorable dismissal of his rising golden star, Jacob finds himself caught within a culture he does not know and a community of rakish sailors, few of whom he can trust.

Jacob’s expectations are continuously disappointed. The reader has a vested interest in the honorable, love sick but savvy clerk. He is kind and alert to the fascinations of a foreign country. The reader’s hopes rise with his and Mitchell’s prose promises the possibility of a happy resolution up until the final word.

Mitchell presents an ably researched account of Japan and its circumstances as the 1700s came to a close. The language and behaviors of the sailors are as colorful as one might imagine. Their lives are rarely more than a string of misfortunes and their immorality and greed are the consequences. Sentiments are aligned early on in favor of the Japanese but Mitchell makes sure there is good and evil in both camps.

A crux of the novel is Jacob’s adoration of a Japanese midwife. The reader’s first glimpse Orito Abigawa shows her attending a complicated birth. Her skill and character are on display and seeing through her eyes makes her personality appealing. But it is difficult to pinpoint why Jacob is entranced by her, as he is not privy to these scenes. The love that he professes both for Orito and his betrothed in Holland are vague and hard to locate. Jacob is human and thus flawed; his gestures toward Orito are belated and his delay is disastrous.

In the second half of The Thousand Autumns, one reads from Orito’s point of view. The sinister Lord Enamoto runs a secluded convent populated by servants of the goddess; they are deformed women rescued from brothels and brought to a better life. What Orito discovers as an inmate of the mountain walls is disturbing and devastating to the men who love her. As plans are put into motion for rescue and escape, Mitchell plays on the disgust and fear felt for Enamoto and the respect for Orito. His approach is pitch-perfect.

Mitchell’s authorial expertise lies in his ability to convincingly create a multitude of viewpoints. In his previous books, Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten, the novels are based on the structure of changing voices, intersecting storylines and time frames. The Thousand Autumns changes point of view with less purpose. Instead of figuring as a flourish of the novel, the story depends on it. A voice must be given to characters from all for the plot to function. The changing voice loses its regularity and the lost focus detracts from the honorable, exotic nature of Jacob’s revelations and the tragedy of Orito’s fate.

Although there are disappointments, each life Mitchell illustrates contains surprise and deft moves of plot and language. His fiction deserves more discussion at the dinner table.

Beauty of Trevor's voice hampered by bulk of novel

2010-03-14T14:57:00.001+01:00

The topic of William Trevor’s novel Love and Summer is made clear by the title. The beauty and fertility of Irish summer is strewn in abundance across the pages but the rousing passions of love remain largely absent. Trevor is a superb author with an incredible command of language and a delicate but rigorous understanding of inner lives. Part of Trevor’s genius lies in his ability to communicate emotions and complicated truths while leaving much unsaid. But in Love and Summer what isn’t articulated is too strongly vague and its saps the life from the novel.

Ellie is the orphaned heroine of the book. She was raised by nuns, and they continue to figure as a warm presence in her life. A position as housekeeper for the widower Dillahan is found for Ellie once she has passed through adolescence. After a few years Ellie assumes the status of wife on Dillahan’s farm. Her husband is a good, if not particularly emotive, man. Ellie has learned her duties well and does them contentedly if not with joy. They are childless but this is her only disappointment. One imagines that the Dillahans have the capacity to carry on indefinitely. But Ellie’s calm is interrupted by the appearance of a stranger in Rathmoye.

The appearance of Florian Kilderry is an entirely random event. There is little reason to pass through Rathmoye. Florian is from a town nearby, his parents have recently died and he has nothing keeping him in Ireland. He and Ellie become acquainted by chance and though he thinks about her afterward, even dreaming of her, his effect on her is much more severe. She falls for him immediately. Routine series of trysts in the open countryside of Ireland unfold but there is never a moment of animation seen between them. Trevor’s discretion is often mesmerizing but the entire absence of romantic detail makes the affair come across as prudish, practically imagined, as opposed to precious and private.

Glimpses are given into the lives of other of the town members. Moments of pity and humor are strongly felt and Rathmoye has the odd, colorful personalities to be expected from a small town. A forgetful madman plays a significant, as do the Connultys, an important family in the town whose final generation is unmarried. Ultimately the cast of characters seems caught in a stupor induced by the haze of summer. Miss Connulty, who herself experienced mistaken love, is the only one who behaves without languor. But her plaintive warnings sound peevish and jealous against the template of those who drift along.

The entrance given into the lives of the characters only reveal the ways in which everyone is making do. The comfort of routine soothes the broken heart and silent admirers are resigned to the precious hour in which they can view their beloved. There is a vague suggestion that history has the tendency to repeat itself, but the characters are so private and reserved that any inclination of exchange or connection remains concealed.

Trevor is one of my favorite author’s, but it is his short stories that are the emblems of his success. He contains loneliness and hope in the spaces of his sentences and the simple gathering of paragraphs. The frame of a novel is too bulky for the bewitching minimalism of the moments he creates. Love and Summer is not without its descriptive brilliance and its deeply affecting moments of solitude but these are lost in the abundance of faintly sketched characters and I found myself yearning for the brevity of After Rain.

Sweetness of love story overshadowed by sour plot

2010-03-12T12:44:00.000+01:00

The subject of Jamie Ford’s novel Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is an unjust piece of history well worth exploring. Narrated from the perspective of a young Chinese boy, Henry Lee, Ford writes about the Japanese internment camps that sprung up in America during World War II.
Henry is the only child of first generation Chinese parents. He is 12 when the novel begins and his father has decreed that he only speak English in the house. Using this as a tactic to improve Henry’s English makes sense. But his parents speak only Cantonese, English words are unintelligible to them and so Henry is locked out of his own family so that he can perfect “his American.” His father’s edict is fueled by the climate of fear that is palpable for Asian immigrants of any kind at the time but it makes his son’s home as uncomfortable as the world outside.
Henry’s parents are depicted as classic immigrants, afraid of the new country and yet determined to earn its rights for their children. Ford’s attempts to deepen the complexity of the Lees only serve to highlight the ways in which he has fallen upon the crutch of stereotype.
The novel depends on the strength of Henry’s relationship with Keiko, a Japanese-American who attends the same white school as he. They fortify each other against the racism of their environment, exploring Seattle side by side. Henry is forced to sport a button reading “I am Chinese” to deter some of the hatred directed his way, while Keiko does not speak a word of Japanese but is ostracized nonetheless. The source of the comfort they find in one another is obvious and with Keiko as a figure to defend Henry is able to act brave. The climate is uncomfortable for everyone and it is clear that things are going to get worse before they get better.
Ford also crafts what is meant to be a pivotal friendship between Henry and a black street side saxophone player, Sheldon. As a result Henry and then Keiko have a winning love for jazz. The search for a particular record fuels a substantial portion of the novel. But like the rest of the characters in Ford’s novel, Sheldon is a surface and his existence too convenient in a series of similarly facile events.
Ford’s narrative alternates between Henry’s blooming friendship with Keiko and the period more than 40 years later when he is recovering from his wife, Edith’s death. Keiko’s absence is painted with mystery, but the importance of her disappearance was hard to swallow despite all the author’s efforts. Part of this failure was due to do with the ages of Ford’s protagonists. The duo is on the cusp of 13. I am not immune to the possibility of true love at the age of 13 or 14, and certainly the atmosphere of war affects the maturity level of its children, but for all Henry’s dramatic gravity he never seems capable of the weighty emotions Ford bestows on him. Keiko and Henry cling to each other because they are both different in a sea of white and beyond that there is little recognition and appreciation of the other’s subtleties.
Ford’s recognition of the maltreatment of fellow Americans in World War II is finally eclipsed by the conveniences of the plot. His turns of phrase and conversation exchanges are so cliché they are amusing until one realizes they are meant in earnest. As much as I hoped to be won over by jazz and love at no point did I find myself rooting for the reunion of Keiko and Henry because I found it impossible to care.

Bloom Cross-examines Love in Recent Collection

2010-02-15T14:24:00.000+01:00

The stories in Amy Bloom’s collection Where the God of Love Hangs Out depict the accidents, evasions, and conclusions provoked by the wily deity of the title. Bloom captures the innumerable gradients of romance and base physicality in her engrossing illustrations of attraction. Her twelve stories contain moments of triumphal love as well as love that is mistaken, worn, and familial. Whether you recognize something from your past or see something you want for your future, Bloom ensures your interest with her sharp eye and rare prose.
Bloom begins most of her stories with precise declarative sentences. The reader is dropped into the lives of her characters with a thud; by that first sentence one is already captured by the voice. Although these are largely women’s stories, Bloom never reduces the opposite sex to a caricature. The pain, expectation, failure and fulfillment of men and women vibrate on equal planes in Bloom’s voice; the decibel may change but the depth remains constant.
In two of the four sections of her collection, Bloom traces the trajectory of two different couples. Both storylines have an element of the forbidden but Bloom does not write to scandalize. She isn’t interested in naughtiness, she is merely aware of the odd unions that can be produced circumstances both strained and comfortable. Her characters’ predicaments are deeply felt and the choices they make are not made lightly.
In the first quartet, one half of two couples combine to form a new pair. These fresh lovers are not young themselves and the affair that unfolds is laden with the experience of age, the weight of what this indiscretion means, and the sharp delight of desire. In Bloom’s second quartet, a young widow and her stepson arrive at a dreadful impasse while in the throes of their grief for the man they loved. The results of this encounter are not exactly tragic but staggering nonetheless. Neither coupling leads to predicted or similar conclusions. The author’s awareness of the unpredictability of conscience and emotions is reflected in the expansion of her stories. Mortality is a pervasive presence in Bloom’s works but deaths are not used as a ploy or a crutch.
The characters in this collection are entirely fallible and while each story in these two quartets triumphs in its own right, it is through following each trajectory to its conclusion that confirms Bloom’s expertise. Part of me didn’t want to see the fallout of those first indiscretions, but the instinct to move beyond the finite bounds of a single story and to push the reader into the life past the first lapse of judgment is a crucial decision on Bloom’s behalf that strengthens the effect of the stories.
Bloom’s characters are unabashedly sensual and she writes about sex with candor. At times her descriptions are explicit, but no matter the graphics of her prose the result is never squalid. She does not reduce corporeal pleasures to roses and flickering candlelight, but the intimate details she brings into focus are delivered in a straightforward tone, devoid of frills, rendering them curious, not sordid.
Ultimately the stories that had no further elaboration did not stick with me the way the others did. But Bloom’s sense of plot and character are remarkable and her descriptions and similes often had me grinning or grimacing in recognition no matter where they were situated.

Atwood's novel of speculation demands a contemplation of the present

2010-01-27T11:32:00.001+01:00

Margaret Atwood is an entrepreneur of weird worlds. Her futuristic The Handmaid’s Tale was near revolutionary with its depiction of a society bent on controlling reproduction, i.e. women. Familiar? Atwood’s skill lies in her ability to tweak recognizable reality into something bizarre but frighteningly believable. She has her finger on the pulse of both the humorous and grotesque aspects of humanity. In The Year of the Flood, her most recent novel and an expansion of Oryx and Crake, the combination is almost unthinkably strange. The Year of the Flood unsettles the reader because the future Atwood conceives is based on her clever warping of the banality of today.

Although a number of characters from Oryx and Crake appear in The Year of the Flood, the second novel stands on its own, and stands out in memory. The abstract was too present in Oryx and Crake and while mystery has its benefits, Atwood’s glaring and grotesquely gaudy vision of the future in her latest novel forces the reader to pause and reconsider.

Atwood’s story brings the reader to the years before the flood, alternating with the stories of Ren and Toby in the years that follow the aerobic virus that kills everyone else. Before the Waterless Flood, the world is a disastrous complex of plastic surgery clinics, chain restaurants serving mystery meat called Secretburgers, and a prison system where the inmates fight for their lives, using the principles of Paintball as a template. Atwood delights in puns and many of the monikers of the institutions are amusing, such as Anoo Yoo Spas and the security force CorpSeCorps working for the Corporations who are now in control.

Amongst the jumbles of Pleeb gangs roaming the crumbling streets of unnamed cities, there are groups of idealists trying to make sense of the world. Toby and Ren, into whose heads Atwood grants access, are a part of God’s Gardeners for different reasons and spans of time. This fictitious religion is an impressive creation on Atwood’s part. The Gardener’s beliefs are built on the teachings of the Bible that emphasize the necessity of kindness to all living creatures. They are extreme vegetarians and pacifists, living on rooftops and cultivating gardens away from the stench and degradation of the world below. Every third chapter Atwood includes a brief sermon-like oration given by Adam One, who is the leader of the Gardeners, on each day of a feast for saints who include Rachel Carson and Terry Fox. Priests and churches have vanished but a sense of God and hope remains. Adam One’s interpretations of the Bible are so sincere they are laughable, a much needed release from the tension, and somehow encouraging.

Quality of life has reached an unfortunate low for humanity but it is women who get the short end of the stick. As always Atwood’s women are well crafted and possess an impressive resilience. Ren narrates with a fairly light voice, even as she is trapped inside a healing chamber in the sex club she works in as the world outside dies. She doesn’t possess Toby’s dry wit or careful calculations but her expectant nature is a relief amongst the detailed descriptions of the depths humanity has reached.

Apocalypse, as a premise, does not interest me though its popularity is evident in the size of the science fiction of the bookstore (Atwood is adamant that her imaginings of the future not be relegated to that category, she prefers “speculative fiction”). But there are authors who know how to make the effects more than a paranoid hypothetical. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is an example of this success and so is The Year of the Flood.

Logic and Inexplicable wrestle in "Stranger"

2010-01-19T12:19:00.001+01:00

Feudal grandeur and its loss prove to be painful for more than the immediate family in Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger. The dissolution of the house and the family that inhabits it marks a transition from the lost romance of an older era and the challenges of adjusting to what is new.
The courteous and somewhat stiff narrator, Dr. Faraday, takes the reader through the final chapter of the British estate Hundreds Hall. It is an emblem of the past in his small pastoral town and one that does not always have positive connotations. His mother worked there as a maid in its glory days and Faraday is drawn to the place for a number of reasons: nostalgia, awe, envy.
Since the years following the Second World War, the estate has slowly been broken down into pieces and plots. The patriarch is dead. His son Roderick Ayres is a nervous young man, badly damaged by the war. His older sister Caroline is the heroine, too plain and spirited to make a match that might salvage the property. Her mother, Mrs. Ayres, is a fragment of dilapidated glamour from the past. The three of them are in charge of the beautiful but deteriorating house. They have neither the money nor the strength to resurrect it.
By chance, Dr. Faraday appears at Hundreds to offer his services to the family’s only maid. He is not sure he likes the family exactly, but his visits become a regular part of his routine and slowly the doctor integrates himself into theirs. Underlying the development of these relationships, Waters brings to light the inherited and outdated class divisions. Dr. Faraday’s growing friendship with the Ayres suggests a breaking down of boundaries. There are moments when the differences of background become obvious and cause discomfort, marking the awkward and often reluctant abandonment of the implicit and imbalanced divisions of the past.
The propriety of the family and the failing beauty of the house are well constructed. Waters sets a good pace and the reader gamely follows where Dr. Faraday leads. It isn’t until a third of the way into the book that another element surfaces to complicate the fairly straightforward plot. Hundreds is already tearing at the seams and this is initially what is supposed to have rushed Roderick’s collapse. But by Roderick’s own estimation something else is at work in the grand old house. He does not point to existence of a bona fide ghost, but speaks of a haunting presence that urges malevolence. Dr. Faraday is a man of science and doubtful of such conjectures. He has a hard time swallowing the odd stories of the Hundreds’ inhabitants, and in time all of them mention or believe something extraordinary is at work. As the events grow more frequent and damaging, rational explanations seem to have less and less bearing on what unfolds.
The novel never quite sinks into the classification of a spook story. Waters maintains an excellent tension between straightforward, scientific logic and other less believable possibilities. She plays on whatever superstitions the reader might possess and writes convincingly of bumps in the night. Dr. Faraday continues to evaluate the existence of a malevolent force as preposterous, but as the novel draws to a close, his conclusions seem increasingly stubborn and narrow.
The reader isn’t rewarded with answers. Waters’ narrator might want to push one in a certain direction, but after a novel inside Dr. Faraday’s discerning if narrow head, one can’t help but ponder the other possibilities. Change works as a double-edged sword and the reader witnesses the measured need for a balance in the hands of The Little Stranger.

Fantasy quelled by reality; plot by cast

2010-01-10T19:59:00.001+01:00

A.S. Byatt’s novel The Children’s Book contains a compelling confusion of fairy tales, families, sexual awakenings, and pottery. Victorian England is dying out and the 1900s are on the cusp; Byatt attempts to take it all in stride. She has a huge cast of characters to perform acts of rebellion, desire and distress. There is someone for every reader: author, anarchist, adulterer, child-at-heart. And if no one meets your fancy Olive Wellwood will inspire you to invent your own.
The novel starts with small mysteries, art, and a reigning matriarch who deals in fantasy. A boy, Phillip, is found hiding in the basement of a museum and his eye for design is the piece of magic that carries him from the industrial dirt of London into the pastoral beauty of the countryside where contentment and simplicity seem to reign.
Olive Wellwood is the matriarch who transports him. She is an author of fairy tales and the mother of a sprawling brood. The Wellwoods’ home is the perfect backdrop for the childish merriment she encourages. The adults take part in the magic as well. They host a Midsummer’s party annually, indulging their own fantasies, enlisting foreign puppeteers and participating in lengthy discussions about the problems of poverty and corruption in England. Olive writes for children while her husband Humphrey faces the problems of the world with words of his own.
In addition to the Humphrey Wellwoods, Byatt follows the children of his brother Basil, the Cains and the offspring of the eccentric and genius potter, Benedict Fludd. The latter is a mysterious and frightening force. Phillip becomes his apprentice and the relationship between art and its executor is fascinating. Fludd must be handled with kid gloves; his rages and the distress of his family are permissible because of his brilliance. Byatt successfully introduces the reader to pottery and examines the refuge provided by creativity and the delicate balance between genius and mania.
Entering further into the worlds of these families, the atmosphere of gaiety splits at the seams. Humphrey is repeatedly unfaithful and her children are largely cared for by her spinster sister, Violet. Sexual exploration inserts itself to the continually more tangled web of lives. This force has a tricky combination of fantasy and reality. The consequences are all too tangible and the repercussions are born by the women. Interspersed with the history of these families are segments of Olive’s fairy tales as well as summaries of the changing temperature in Europe as the years race forward; it is easy to see why the fantasy is preferable.
As they grow, the children begin to push against the magical inventions that encapsulate their lives. One finds refuge in Marxism, another pursues medicine. Those who cannot look beyond, remain in an unsettling limbo. Reality bursts in with the arrival of the First World War and has damaging effects on those who are unequipped with the tools to face the harshness of the world. Fantasy withers in the face of reality. The lucky ones can use it as a tool, but fantasy cannot be sustained. Byatt reveals that if one has nothing else, one is lost.
The strength of Byatt’s novel seems to fade as the vibrancy of her characters is dulled by experience. Byatt’s characters are distinct but the cast is too large. One or two minor characters wind up playing crucial roles and their importance feels misplaced without a clear understanding of them when others are known quite well. There are too many shrouds when there should be moments of clarity. When Byatt’s control of her complex cast slips, the book falls to pieces.

"Nocturnes" fails to live up to implications of title

2010-01-06T10:40:00.004+01:00

The word or category “nocturnes” evokes a particular sobriety. It transmits a dreamy but serious and often mournful atmosphere. The tones struck in a nocturne are haunting if not eerie. Even when the sound stops the mood lingers. One puts on an album of nocturnes for a meditative, gray afternoon or in the wake of desire. None of the stories in Kazui Ishiguro’s Nocturnes strike these chords and the title of the collection is unfitting. The narrators fly through their tales at an andante pace, rather than with the mix of caution and tumult that should be found in such meditative pieces of music
Although there is a jumble of narrators in Ishiguro's short stories, the variety of tone is indistinct. Each protagonist is male, each a musician or an aficionado, no one at the top of his field. Two play in St. Mark’s square in Venice, another in the rolling English hills, and a third is met in a Beverly Hills hotel where he is recovering from plastic surgery. All these characters share a plaintive tone. This exasperating quality is brought to the attention of a few of the protagonists, giving them another reason for self-righteous indignation. This evidence of Ishiguro’s understanding of his characters' whining does not alleviate the reader’s annoyance with their grating disenchantment.
I sailed through these stories of depression, friendship, and ending love. This rapidity alone contradicts the principle of a nocturne, a piece of music that is created to be savored, not hurriedly consumed. My brief and hasty encounters with the Ishiguro's characters never convinced me to care about them. They are too thoughtless and too self-pitying; shells of rejection and disappointment. Their passion for music is the emotion that should sustain them, but it no longer triumphs because they have lost their ear for their passion.
Additionally, many of the author’s premises felt preposterous. In the title story, a middle-aged saxophone player is all too easily talked into the need for plastic surgery in order to advance his career. In another a grown, if somewhat misdirected, man impersonates a dog in order to create a faux scene of destruction in a friend’s apartment to throw the owners off a moment of his own indiscretion. I didn’t buy these events and felt almost bitter to be asked to swallow the conceits upon which the stories were founded.
It is impossible to know if these are tales of deserving geniuses, or the gripes of decent musicians in a cutthroat business because everyone of Ishiguro’s narrators speaks in the first person. This narrow vision creates a slanted opinion and prevents the reader from hearing the music objectively. Whenever a secondary character bestows a compliment on the protagonist’s talent, it is always a remark complicated by another motive and does nothing to help the reader understand the plight of who is playing.
The secondary characters are often the real focus of Ishiguro’s Nocturnes. Their stories were often more interesting or glaringly tragic than the protagonists but they, also, fail to engage one’s sympathies. Ishiguro's tales orchestrate passing connections with people, and through these new acquaintances shades of past relationships are revealed. Music is usually the longest relationship a character is involved in. Had the stories been developed more thoroughly in this vein they would have both caught my attention and bewitched me. Music has the same ability as glue, it is able to attach unlikely persons to one another in odd or momentarily comforting ways. This is a premise I can accept and respect; it is a wonderful and true notion. But my interest was stunted by the deprecating whine of the protagonists and the inconclusive worth of everyone else.

Consequences of Complacency in "Brooklyn"

2010-01-03T13:26:00.001+01:00

Colm Toíbín’s novel Brooklyn is as straightforward as its title. Eilis is a young, capable woman in Ireland in the 1950s. Despite her qualifications, she, like many others, is unable to find work. Her mother, her sister Rose, and a priest, who has moved to Brooklyn himself, plan for her to cross to American and begin a life there. She goes, obediently. Eilis is not ambitious, but she is willing. Her complacence is understandable, she is a “good girl.” But as the novel progresses her deferential attitude morphs from beneficial to damaging.
Eilis lodges at the house of an Irish woman with a gaggle of other Irish girls in Brooklyn. Despite America being a different world, Toíbín doesn’t spend a lot of time describing the changes in locale. He manages the new terrain firmly but without exaggerated emphasis. Toíbín’s character is adaptable; Eilis manages America as she does most things, without protest. But there are subtle moments of conflict. Toíbín stages a well-calculated encounter with race and there is a moment of uncomfortable boundaries crossed in Eilis’s relationship with a co-worker. She must face small moments of class discrepancy in the society that is more elastic than Ireland’s but still divided.
Eilis doesn’t spend her time making friends, She works hard at the department store where she has a position even though the work is below her qualifications. When homesickness catches up with her, night classes in bookkeeping are arranged to keep her busy. Her force of will allows this to be enough to help her mend and her willing intelligence aids her success. By and large her American life is dull.
Eventually, a young man appears on the canvas of the novel. Tony chooses her unequivocally and Eilis is carried along compliantly, but without much enthusiasm. Tony is a very good man. He is not Irish but Italian and Eilis has trouble explaining to her sister that in America his low status as a plumber is not a reflection of who he is as a man. Toíbín manages to depict Tony as a good, solid and dependable person without making him boring. He is simply loveable. But one wonders if Eilis is the one to love him. Moments pass in which she seems the happy object of his affection only to be followed by an almost violent desire to keep her distance.
In the last third of the novel, Eilis is called back to Ireland. Like most of the major decisions in her life, this one is made for her, shaped by extenuating circumstances. Her return is meant to be temporary but as Eilis faces the familiarity of her past Brooklyn, its heights and depths, begin to fade. With the reality of her new life paling in comparison her old one, Eilis is finally forced to confront her uncertainties.
Eilis is likeable and the reader is invested in her choices. It remains difficult for anyone to decide the “right” path for the heroine. America has transformed her into a person who stands out in a place where she had comfortably been part of the background. Her emergence from the shadows makes Eilis more certain of her worth but less confident of the choices she made in the past.
Toíbín artfully and shrewdly builds the simple novel to a point of irrevocable change and choice. He constructs a branching of opportunity and shows how easily one sort of life can be forever altered. Eilis’s initial, endearing complacency has unforeseen repercussions that suggests the necessity of always employing one’s own judgment rather than following someone else’s lead, however benign.

A Guide to Gifts in the Holiday Homestretch

2009-12-18T12:31:00.002+01:00

Despite the 50-degree weather in Rome, it’s not difficult to tell the holidays are on the horizon. My chestnuts roasting on an open fire days ended when I left Tuscany, but almost every corner has some for sale. Sparkly lights rim the more commercial streets and if you’re lucky you can catch an Italian singing “Jingle Bells.” It’s past time to start shopping for gifts. All I want for Christmas is a 2,000-piece puzzle (for when I get lonely) but for those who like a book and a mug of apple cider, I have suggestions.
The fictional coup pulled by Hilary Mantel in her novel Wolf Hall was recently chronicled in the pages (?) of this blog. Here the reality of another time woven into fiction. Henry VIII is angling for his second wife and is taut wire of lust, insecurity and power. Mantel chronicles Thomas Cromwell’s ascent to indispensability and reconfigures his character in the process. His intelligence and surprising kindness are emphasized. The tone is humorous and carries the reader quickly through this pile of pages. In Wolf Hall the changes taking place in Europe are depicted as what they were; calculated evasions and manipulations by powerful men and canny women.
The narrative unfolded in the pages of Phillip Meyer’s American Rust is full of nitty, gritty reality despite the surreal beauty of Buell, Pennsylvania. Without a note of bitterness the author chronicles the dissolution of a once booming steel town. In the stale limbo of Buell opportunities are scarce and lack of direction becomes dangers. The near impossibility of success leads to mad attempts and criminal failures. Meyer’s characters are fusions of humanity and the metal of the region. They are beautiful and their confusion and missteps tragic.
For those exhausted by the recycled cast of characters running through fiction, Jayne Anne Phillip’s Lark and Termite will prove an uncommon delight. Phillips unfurls her story in a range of different voices and in two distinct periods of time. Corporal Robert Leavitt is enmeshed in the violent turmoil of the Korean War. Time becomes fluid. His memories are of Lola, his lover who is a blurry but strong presence in the novel. Leavitt’s mental return to her throbs with an urgent but gentle sexuality. Ten years later Lark cares for her disabled brother Termite with a wisdom beyond her years. She credits him with a reality of his own despite his inability to speak and Phillips’s entrance into the minds of each character indisputably real and new.
Everything about Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is captivating. In Wells Tower’s debut collection of short stories he focuses those recently set adrift. His characters, largely men, are regular. Their concerns are ordinary ones. But even ordinary navigations can be a struggle. Tower’s people are not always likeable but they are human and the reader is caught up in their plights to find something that will anchor them. The author has an excellent touch with language and will throw in the right sort of zesty verb or cutting adjective to the story interesting and the reader off-balance.
Finally, a little advice about the contents of the archives. Do not ever give or read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. The final pages caught my interest but the preceding hundreds didn’t make them worth my while. If you are in Paris, or going, or have been, or love Hemingway, read A Moveable Feast. It isn’t really finished, a delightful mishmash of his genius and his encounters with other geniuses of the 1920s on the Left Bank. Colm Tobin has an excellent and dark collection of short stories called Mothers and Sons and in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral one learns huge amounts about gloves.
I’ll be dreaming of your white Christmases, book in hand.

Poetry animated by Baker's Paul

2009-12-13T18:25:00.000+01:00

After reading a review of Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, I got the impression that the narrator, Paul Chowder, was a bit pathetic. Wrong. Well, not exactly wrong. But his pathetic qualities are entirely delightful. The narrative is lively, humorous and drowning in poetry. Paul’s obsession with poetry is similar to Rob Fleming in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. But while Rob was a professional appreciator, Paul is a poet himself.
By the time the reader is introduced to Paul he has reached his fifties and is more of a struggling poet than a successful one. His current project is writing an introduction to his anthology Only Rhyme. After patient weeks of supporting him, his girlfriend Roz has finally left. He had avoided the daunting task of writing his introduction to his anthology by singing in his office, reorganizing and buying more books of poetry than he can afford.
Baker’s protagonist would be entirely pathetic if it weren’t for his extravagant adoration of poetry and language. The book is both an unraveling of Paul’s current distress and his fervent explanation of bits poems and sketches of the lives of his favorite poets.
Paul passes on reasonable bits of advice amidst his diatribes of loneliness and mild self-loathing. He suggests reading your poems aloud in different accents, and paying attention to the stories you hear every day; they just might wend themselves into a poem. Paul walks the reader through the rhythm of a poem with precision, concluding a line with his own triumphant BOOM to emphasize where the aural rest exists. His declarations about his circumstances are often acute and he uses words like “fulth” and “gimbleflap” with ease. I couldn’t help giggling. The exuberant nature of Paul’s approach to poetry would serve in many college introductory courses. (I was fortunate enough to have a more successful and socially adjusted version of Paul Chowder.)
The current that carries the book to its conclusion bears almost no relation to Paul’s love affair with Roz. There are few moments in the text when his preoccupation with his girlfriend rises above mildly dull. She seems very nice and entirely justified in her decision to leave her crumbling poet until he gets back on his feet. She isn’t and wasn’t a must. Paul addresses the necessity of suffering for a poet to be truly successful and admits that comparatively, he has nothing to complain about.
Paul’s meticulous untangling of rhyme, and his enduring battle against the iambic pentameter, burst with giddiness. He gets his perks from poetry and so does the reader. The title of the book is something of a misnomer because although part of Paul’s difficulty stems from the introduction he is attempting to write, his aim remains the poetry itself, not its collection. He shows the reader how a poem often turns on a single stanza. And in a funny moment in the text realizes that it is in fact a single line that mesmerizes him and finally a single word. The miracle is that the reader understands him and in fact agrees.
All passionate reader will identify with Paul’s anecdotes even if poetry never makes it on their reading lists. Baker gets at the pleasures, surprises and lasting effects that words have when strung together properly. Paul enunciates both sizzling criticisms and melting words of awe. His entrancement with his subject is engaging if not rousing. Paul’s intimate knowledge of his favorite poets awakens the reader’s interest in them and inspires one to search again for a half forgotten line in order to pin down why exactly that phrase demanded particular attention.

Cromwell Resurrected

2009-12-09T11:31:00.000+01:00

The first point that Hilary Mantel should be commended for in her lengthy historical novel Wolf Hall is the humor. Mantel writes about a epoch filled with scandal, blood, corporeal and spiritual wants. But rather than relying mainly on the sex (unlike the very sexy show the Tudors) or drying the narrative with clunky play by plays, Mantel infuses these stodgy historical characters with the wit necessary to afloat.

Thomas Cromwell, the corrugated self-made protagonist, is a master of self-control. He possesses a mottled history after his escape from beneath the fist of his father at the age of about 15 (no one had thought it necessary to record his birth). When the reader meets him again it is after his shadowy years in Europe. Years that have schooled him in the ways of bankers, memory, control, as well as Italian, French, Flemish, to name a few.

Mantel succeeds in revealing all that passes beneath the impassive surface of Cromwell’s notably unattractive face. In her prose he has a rich internal life that is constructed from intelligence and shrewd observation. He both notices the person in the room everyone disregards and has the ability to fade from view himself.

Cromwell is made human by Mantel. His house at Austin Friars is first decimated by the sweating sickness, which takes his wife and daughters. Mantel crafts likely moments of tenderness between her hero and his family members.

Cromwell’s unlikely kindness is strewn across the pages of Wolf Hall. He takes in a number of wards as well as those fortune has dealt a bad hand. The man Mantel portrays is not soft; his are never acts of charity. When he fills his home with rouges he manages to transform them into indispensable persons. His generosity fills his house to the brim with wealth of influence, people, power and money. He is a force to be reckoned with.

Mantel’s novel makes it difficult, or impossible, not to like Cromwell. In addition to being clever, he is incredibly knowledgeable. His vast linguistic knowledge and his experience on foreign, military and marketing frontiers prove essential to his growing position of power. The nobles who surround him lack these qualifications. Cromwell’s common birth would hobble a lesser man. His shadowed past manages to count in his favor. Dirty dealings must have accelerated his acquisition of wealth and power but he does not appear to be fueled by greed. Smart calculations propel him forward.

It is perhaps a sign of the changes in England at the time that he was able to reach the heights he did.

Mantel’s excellent prose brings the stink and violence of Tudor times to life. Despite its length, the novel never lags. Mantel’s renders the historical characters at her disposal in all their complexity. Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, Katherine of Aragon and King Henry are rendered from the viewpoint of man who served in their time, not by history. Through Cromwell, Mantel snatches at the human filament beneath the label of Queen, peasant, whore.

Aside from the feat of rescuing Cromwell from the historical slop bucket, Mantel pulls off a more literary coup. From page one the reader is directly alongside Cromwell. “He” is always used. Mantel takes seriously the concept that mentioning a character’s name distances the reader from him. Despite the occasional awkward moment, her ploy succeeds in immersing the reader into whatever clandestine mission Cromwell is about to achieve. The reader is on Cromwell’s side as he sculpts laws in favor of King Henry’s desires, changes the identity of the queen and creates the Church of England. Not an easy feat.

"Spin" carries weight of Twin Towers

2009-12-02T23:14:00.000+01:00

Colum McCann weaves stories betwixt and between the disparate neighborhoods and towers of New York in his most recent work Let the Great World Spin. His world of stories pivots on a single event, even as the characters’ lives dip and turn in ways that draw them far from what occurs early one morning in New York City. McCann passes the reader from narrator to narrator with ease. As is to be expected in a book where Manhattan is the backdrop, a wide range of characters appears in the pages of Spin.

Always at the periphery of their narratives hovers the solitary figure of a man traversing a grand distance, at a grander height, on the thread of a wire.

Phillipe Petit’s walk between the World Trade Centers was a fraction of a day decades ago. Its impact had faded from consciousness, having yet to be brought to the attention of the next generation. A different story now envelops the Twin Towers, casting the more innocent event in the dark. September 11 is only mentioned once in McCann’s collection but its shadow hovers behind the text. His stories evaluate the disparate reality of the transience and endurance of a moment. And despite its potential for dominancy, McCann deftly maintains control over the force he has put to use in his collection.

Spin provides entrance into the lives of a hooker, priest, nurse, artist, Park Avenue mother and many more. The person on whom McCann focuses his lens next is never predictable. He jumps and dodges through his cast of characters. The reader’s view of each one is intimate. With each acquaintance a new angle emerges from which to consider the walker’s feat. In some stories the man in the sky only flutters briefly against the structure of the character’s life. McCann does not suggest that lives were changed by the man’s walk through the sky. But the walk itself is emblematic. It is a resistance, a challenge, and a moment of beauty.

The time the reader spends alongside the walker proves the most magnetic. McCann has measured command over his craft and each story draws the reader into its twists. Swaths of characters’ lives are revealed in most of the stories but with the walker the material relates directly to the moment. He is attuned to the weather, the bend of the wind, the suppleness of his body. The anecdotes that examine the walker express the simplicity of what he wanted to do. In these sections nothing exterior exists. There is only balance, a wire, height and the sky. Desire, pure and simple, is frozen above the heads of people full of their own buzzing lives. The walk fulfills nothing more or less than a determined craving. Politics, Vietnam, death, crime, motherhood, marriage, remain reassuringly outside the scope of what this man set out to achieve. He capers. His body is life and movement as he gambols in space. In McCann’s print, the moment is alive again and it works to extinguish all the rest.

Of course the lightheartedness of the walker’s triumph is meant to stand against the events of 9/11 that occurred almost thirty years later. The bliss is momentary. McCann’s stories bear testimony to this as much as they create a patchwork view of New York. Inevitably the September 11 theme has been abused and can verge on wearisome when mishandled. But McCann’s collection examines the same buildings for chapters on end without succumbing to the obvious. His silence makes the event all the more powerful and the reader is immersed in other lives even as the Towers spin toward their conclusion.

"Advantages of Breathing" often Intangible, Elusive

2009-11-18T08:39:00.000+01:00

The title of Lydia Peelle’s collection of short stories, Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, addresses the silver lining rather than the bulk of her tales. Reasons is about the lives of people who seem to have sufficient grounds to call it quits.
The people Peelle examines are grasping at the bottom rung. There is the obese taxidermist who has recently lost his leg, the unenthused carnie, and the girls whose summer fearlessness astride a duo of ponies is soon swallowed by the perilous dares of fast cars and drugs. The voices of these characters are not whining or sorrowful, but the dullness of loss or emptiness moves alongside them.
The despair arises from the common tragedies that disrupt life. A separation from the loved and familiar; a fork in the road and the doubt accompanying the new path; an attempt at escape and its loneliness. The upheavals are not revolutionary, and yet Peelle dodges the mundane. She probes deeper and brings to the surface people’s facets. Peelle’s characters are caught at the bottom of the hierarchy and amidst the hesitancies of their position.
The narrators have the mark of introspection even when they can’t see their own lives clearly. Despite the seemingly aimless drift that directs many of these characters, they remain fully rooted in life. Most are hoping to break free from where they stand. It is less dissatisfaction that drives them than a notion that there just might be something else. Some are desperate to escape, some merely wonder if they should.
There is another thread that runs through these stories aside from flight. In each of the Peelle’s tales there are animals at the center or skirting the periphery. Somehow the chanced glimpse of a tail or the silent winging of a bird in flight imbues Reasons with an atmosphere that feels particularly American. There is the mysterious, menacing presence of a panther, the myth of the thunderbird, a communion with horses, goats, and reptiles. Peelle’s characters are comforted or haunted by these creatures, be they tamed, feral or mythic. The ubiquitous appearance of animals stabilizes Peelle’s stories. The inclusion of other creatures and acknowledgement of their awareness, suffering and empathetic capacities, diffuses the bleakness of the stories, lending a universal sensitivity to the tales rather than the rampant self-absorption that can stem from human narrations of disappointment.
The animals are embodiments of fears and desires. They read people for their essence when others are blind. By and large the people are lost or foundering and while the animals do not quite provide direction they offer support of a sort and an alternative. Resolutions are unattainable and far from the point in Peelle’s collection. The stories conclude with possibilities rather than answers, and the possibilities are rarely heartening.
In the small spaces of Peelle’s stories, only slices of her characters’ personalities are revealed. Everything shown is cast in the shadow of where their lives have brought them. Despite there being an absence of a visible light at the end of the tunnel, Peelle manages to situate the reader alongside her characters without provoking despondency. It is less a note of empathy that she strikes than one of thoughtful observance. Little of the circumstances of these people’s lives drew parallels with my own, but something kept me afloat despite the weight of what was being experienced and despite the absence of novelty. The impetus to continue forward was quite unidentifiable, but there was a reason.

"Lark and Termite" Proves Exceptional

2009-11-11T09:16:00.000+01:00

Writing about this particular book was a challenge. There are myriad, untried ways to pick at a flaw; innovative praise defiant of cliché proves more difficult. Lark and Termite, by Jayne Anne Phillips, is, in a word, superb. The characters were ones I had never met before. With the narrative moving fluidly between locations in America and Korea, the uncertain map of these people’s lives brings the reader into contact with new perspectives, tribulations and joys. Phillips handles the demanding intricacies of her characters and the importance of their stories expertly. The narrative is startling corporeal even when it crosses the boundaries between the seen to unseen, the proven and the understood.
The novel opens in Korea alongside Corporal Robert Leavitt. Transferred from a post in Japan to Seoul, Leavitt finds himself tangled in the confusion of the Korean War. Due to its situation between WWII and Vietnam, the Korean War often gets lost in the shuffle of transformative, twentieth century events. It appears as a minor blip on the screen of history compared with the involvement of the world in the 40s and the revolutionary rage of the 60s. A blip if you weren’t there, excruciatingly real to the soldiers and refugees whose lives were destroyed by death or by survival. Merely witnessing the atrocities devastated just as certainly. Entering into the head of Leavitt, Phillips brings this screeching reality to the surface.
Ten years later, the petals of other characters’ stories unfold around Termite, Robert’s son. Termite was born unable to walk or speak and he participates in the world on an indeterminate level. His awareness is quantified differently by his observers. He is tranquil and perceptive, exhibiting a deep response to the sounds around him. Lark, his half sister, ascribes more to him than their aunt Nonnie, though both women care for him with the depths and heights of dedicated love.
Nonnie is the novel’s pillar of strength. For reasons initially unrevealed she is caring for both of the children of her inexplicably absent and incapable younger sister, Lola.
Lola is never seen head on. An image of her is constructed through the lenses of those shattered or made whole by her. Lola is depicted as a force. For Robert she is the constant for him to cling to on the battlefield. He calls up a gentle, pungent procession of memories of their love affair. Moments both carnal and tender. And in the context of the bodily and mental destruction he is facing, they are wrenching. Even in these scenes there is a hint that Lola’s entirety is not simple, but Robert’s resonance with her lends a profundity to her person that might not be grasped through another’s perception.
Every relationship in Philips’s novel possesses a multitude of gradations. No one is simply a lover, brother, mother or aunt. This awareness of overlap in human rapports constructs the reality in the narrative. And within this reality, Lark’s relationship to her brother is situated. Philips crafts an incredible connection by these two. They are linked through the blood of their mother but Lark’s affinity for her damaged brother exceeds sisterly bounds. Lark reads the emotions of Termite without effort. But ultimately her awareness of his conscience merely corroborates his interior, Philips allows Termite his own lens.
The story is measured and Philips navigates time and her broad array of voices with ease. I left one character with reluctance only to find myself caught up in the intricacies of the next. Stratums of understanding exist in this novel and its richness caused it to figure as much more than a blip on this reader’s list.

Flavor appears too late in "Broccoli"

2009-09-30T11:21:00.000+02:00

It took me awhile to hunt down Lara Vapynar’s short stories Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love. It is a short collection and one I never felt I was able to sink my teeth into, despite the subjects.
Vapynar is a Russian immigrant and the tales she tells are those of other immigrants. Food has obvious cultural significance and in each story the characters are trying to connect with or rediscover some part of themselves through the dishes they create and consume. The familiarity of a dish or the taste of a specific ingredient has the ability to transport people into the past and back to whence they came. This is certainly one of the fascinating attributes of food; it has the remarkable ability to link a person with other moments in time and with the people who shared the meal.
I appreciate Vapynar’s acknowledgment of the power of what we fill our bodies with. But unfortunately the power instilled in the dishes she honors does not manifest in many of her characters.
The immigrant’s dream of America is often an unfulfilled or poorly sketched one. Anything put on a pedestal is bound to fall short of the heights expected of it and America’s superior virtues have been questionable for almost as long as they’ve been praised. For most of Vapynar’s characters the prevalent sentiments are loneliness and disappointment. These emotions rarely incapacitate but certainly affect the young woman who loses her husband to the novelties of America and the rug layer whose wife in Russia is content to stay apart as long as he continues to send money.
Solace is sought or appears in unlikely places. A nanny who doubles as a prostitute to make more money for her family in Russia soothes a man whose resolve has faltered with her borscht; two elderly women slave over meatballs to win the heart and stomach of a Russian widower in their English language class. There is humor amidst the adjustments necessarily made for a new life and the author has an eye for the ironic twist.
Most of the dishes described by Vapynar were unfamiliar to me. To my delight, the author included the recipes for the meals her characters consume and cherish at the conclusion of the book. It was in these post-scripted moments of the collection that Vapanyr came alive as a writer. Her relationship to these foods evoked far more than the supposed predilections of the characters she created. The reality of the food and its familiar and nourishing comforts twinkled with their real worth from these final pages.
Within the boundaries of the stories themselves everything has a much more abstract form. The background for these stories, New York of course, never emits any energy of its own. It remains a two-dimensional backdrop of hardly any consequence, a strange lens through which to view that bustling city. As a result, the characters who play against this static setting are flat themselves. Vapnyar’s are portraits of hypotheticals, not of people. Thus the appearance of the animated recipes at the book’s finish is particularly heartening. Unfortunately the taste of her expertise came too late and I was left with the sweetness of the final course could not disguise the blandness of those that preceded it.

Atkinson lacks suspenseful flair of Christie, Doyle

2009-09-20T11:17:00.000+02:00

Somewhere between the ages of 12 and 14 I decided to read all of Agatha Christie’s mysteries featuring Hercule Poirot. I plowed through what was in the library and used the virtue of my being “such a good reader!” to persuade my parents to buy me the ones I couldn’t track down for free. I loved the funny little Belgian and the appearance of his various sidekicks. All of this is to say that I am not unfamiliar with British crime writing (during another summer I read every one of Sherlock Holmes’s adventures). Kate Atkinson is a writer of this variety. Her novel "When Will There Be Good News?" is the third she has written that includes former policeman Jackson Brodie and the only one I’ve read.
First off, it’s a quick read. The characters are amusing and Atkinson is capable of enticing the reader forward with the carrot of the next sensational event. The prologue is a gruesome murder that sets a particular tone for the rest of the book. The events that follow occur some thirty years later, but that first murder and other murders like it are never far from the surface.
Jackson Brodie is only one of the characters from whose perspective the novel unfolds. He is semi-retired and too young to be cantankerous but approaches something like it.
Reggie is sixteen years old, alone, but for her thief of a brother, in the wake of her mother’s accidental death. She works for Joanna, the only survivor of that first murder. Reggie cares for her toddler daughter and worships both mother and child.
Finally, there is Louise Monroe. She and Jackson have a history of working together and there are undertones if what might have been more. At the moment Louise’s life is filled with the burdens of a new, not particularly suitable marriage, (though the husband is jolly and adjusted, perhaps too perfect) and the protection of women who have been the victims of brutal crimes.
The lives of the three protagonists become tangled in various ways that rely heavily on coincidences manufactured by the author. Together they work to discover the solutions to the various, lengthy mysteries that present themselves.
All three carry on amusing inner monologues. They have quick tongues and each possesses a particular twist of humor. It is not difficult to glide along beside them as one thing or another is bemoaned or discovered. But despite the light tone of the characters, they are all somewhat grating. Much of consequence is taken for granted in this narrative and trivialities explicitly explained. The book is packed with dramatic events because the characters lack the complexity to carry the story forward on their own.
Atkinson’s novel is not particularly mysterious in the sense of Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle. There is not a carefully placed trail of clues, which only the brilliance of an uncommon mind can link together. That approach is not necessarily essential for a successful detective novel, but there should be some suspense as to the way the outcome unfolds. In "When Will There Be Good News?" any urgency to turn the pages was linked to an obvious cliffhanger as opposed to the titillating suspense of not yet having found the answer. I always knew the answer was coming with Atkinson, a great mystery makes you forget that the formula demands an answer.

Quick read fails to properly gauge the meaning of Help

2009-09-15T09:54:00.000+02:00

While in transit, I always find myself studying what others have brought to pass the time. Is it something from work, something mindless, something to savor? Despite the crowds it may be among the only meditative moments people have regularly, before stepping out into the flurry of activity that usually marks their lives. On the New Jersey Transit, I sat next to a young woman reading a copy of The Help by Kathryn Stockett. I’d seen the yellow jacket frequently throughout the summer and had had it recommended to me once or twice. I asked her how she liked it. “It’s pretty good,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “I started it yesterday,” she added while demonstrating that she was more than halfway finished.
My conclusion, when I read the book a few weeks later, was about the same. It reads well, you can’t really put it down for long, and in the end it is little better than okay.
Stockett chooses three Southern women to recount their stories. Aibileen has brought up 17 white children and is currently raising Mae Mobley, whose own mother lacks real affection for her child. Aibileen loves the children whom she is hired to care for. After the first few she learned to detach before their environment developed their perception of color. Aibileen lives in Jackson, Mississippi, and at the time her narrative begins it is 1960. Stocket has chosen a particularly fraught moment in history during which Aibileen and other black maids make the decision to tell their stories of what it is like to be the help.
Their confessions are prompted by Stockett’s second narrator, Skeeter Phelan. She had a black nurse of her own, Constantine, who has disappeared without a trace while Skeeter was in her last year of college. Skeeter does not conform to the Southern standards of femininity and beauty, she is too tall, her hair is unmanageable and since graduating she has harbored ambitions of becoming a journalist. Given a somewhat implausible chance by an editor in New York, Skeeter embarks on her exposé of what really transpires between white mistresses and their maids.
The Help is full of the drama of a society constructed on an explicit understanding of manners and demeanor. Minny, the sass-talking maid who has to date lost 19 jobs, and is the most feisty of the three narrators. She currently works for Celia, a woman of poor white upbringing, who doesn’t understand that nothing she does will provide her with entrance into the world of highfaluting Southerners.
Much of The Help’s content is the politics of feminine society. The dynamics between the maid and her mistress are manifestations of other personality traits. It is disheartening to see these catty dynamics unfolding across the page. But Minny’s exclusion from white society and Celia’s are hardly parallel injustices. Crossing boundaries for Minny has far more dire consequences than for Celia. Although it is the men who perform the lynching’s and other atrocities, the maids make it clear that it is the wrath of the mistress that should be most feared.
The largest flaw of the novel is one that the characters frequently acknowledge. That is Skeeter’s failure to comprehend the danger of what she is asking. The weight of the risk is never depicted with enough force. The book contains a few reports of brutality and unjust behavior, but the era Stockett is dealing with is the early 1960s in Mississippi. Her inability to drive home the gravity of the Aibileen and Skeeter’s endeavor deprives The Help of being a serious novel about the realities of the time.

Evasions: Wilson's employ of the Bizarre

2009-09-06T12:41:00.001+02:00

Many of Kevin Wilson’s stories in his collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth are structured around the plausibility of the absurd. Spontaneous human-combustion, scrabble-tile sorting as a profession, and paper cranes determining an inheritance sound feasible and not at all unlikely. The oddity of the events that Wilson uses as scaffolding for his stories does not interfere with the sharp insights into the composition of his characters.
At the start of the collection I wasn’t entirely wooed by the frequent transpiring of the weird. For a few stories it felt a little like a ploy. Not halfway into the collection, however, my mind was changed. When the stories are seen as a whole, each odd twist of plot and personality fashion themselves into a comprehensive and well-executed examination of individuality.
Wilson’s stories are amusing, and more suddenly heart-breaking. He has a light touch with the irregular angles of the personalities he captures. Those who appear in his stories are somewhat fragile. They operate slightly outside the predictable boundaries of society. But they are functioning, some with grace, some patience, some despair.
The two friends in “Mortal Kombat” are outsiders due to the stereotypical marks of the geek. Their predilection for obscure knowledge removes them from the sphere of popular high school culture. They spend their lunch hour locked in the library together, quizzing each other on historical and pop trivia. While waiting for the interminable span of high school to come to a close, the boys amuse themselves with each other and video games. By proximity and accident they move from playful physicality to a rough embrace. The revelation of this intimacy disrupts their friendship. Neither fully understands his feelings; trepidation and electricity edge their discovery. Within the space of this story Wilson delves into the uncertain territory of adolescence. A turbulent world of choice lies beneath the surface and it is impossible to exclude anything from the realm of possibility.
Like the boys in “Mortal Kombat”, others of Wilson’s protagonists are reluctant if not entirely opposed to forming attachments. They are aware of the repercussions of connections and reluctant to address them. One woman works in a museum dedicated to the odd collections of other people (spoons, rubber bands, tinfoil, etc.) while refusing to keep even the odd book for herself. Another woman works as a stand-in grandmother for various families; she enjoys the occupation but has no desire to create a family of her own. In the story that titles the collection, three recent college graduates dig a complex maze of tunnels underneath their town. For the moment they have nothing better to do and the retreat into the dark depths of the earth provides solace from the emptiness above. The world is open to these people but it is up to them to find their way into it.
It is difficult not to feel alongside the people that populate Wilson’s stories. In each he channels a different mode of survival, confusion, joy or triumph. There are many who are adrift and those that find anchors are to be envied.
All of Wilson’s characters are in search of something. Understanding, significance, and entrance reside at the center of their pursuits. The remarkable aids them; retreat and participation abets their cause in various measure. It is not for everyone to find what they seek. The satisfaction and the crucial struggle sometimes resides in the search alone.

Duncan guides readers through "A Day A Night and A Day"

2009-08-30T09:52:00.000+02:00

In his novel A Day A Night and A Day Glen Duncan bookends a fiery love affair with two equally combustible eras. Selina and Augustus, the enticing protagonists, fall in love in the heat of the 1960s. Their relations are startling and carnal. The sight of them together in public turns heads; Augustus is half black and Selina is a white woman of wealth. The duo alarms its audience and the couple is very aware of this effect and its power has a channel in their relationship.

Duncan situates the reader in an alternative timeline almost four decades later, in the wake of 9/11. Augustus is being tortured for information in a sterile cell by a man called Harper. Initially, the reader does not know what could have occurred that would deliver Augustus to this fate. There is the suggestion that the corporeal abuse he suffers is connected to Selina, but the ties do not reveal themselves until later in the narrative.

The tone of Duncan’s narrative is declarative. His sentences firmly direct the reader’s understanding of the events that unfold; he leaves wiggle room for reactions but not speculation. Duncan handles the seething tensions of the 60s with grace, giving voice to the passions and fears that surrounded new liberties and new fears.

Augustus and Selina’s love story is passionate and full of the intensity of youth. Their strong attraction to one another is complicated by Selina’s relationship with her brother, Michael. He is a soldier in Vietnam and his reasons for going, she believes, are at least partly because of her. Selina’s relationship with Michael was at one point physical, and while she has resolved to bury that dynamic, Michael is unwilling to do the same. The vengeful ex-lover is a common figure in literature and the incestuous feature is a difficult twist to add. The immediate, inherent reaction to this revelation is revulsion and leads to feelings aversion toward Selina, a character formerly revered. The author does not condone the violation of boundaries between brother and sister, but neither is the breach condemned. He shapes the reader’s sentiments, without force, so that the incident resonates as an element of Selina’s past as she wishes it to. It is a blemish but not a disfigurement.

Duncan examines the dynamics between aggressor and victim with as much attention as he does the attractions between lovers. He recognizes the opposing scenarios as fundamentals of human nature and addresses them equally.

Harper is the worst kind of interrogator. He expresses sincere interest in Augustus. He is cheerful and purposefully pauses between interrogations to talk freely and deeply with his prisoner about the state of the world in the aftermath of 9/11. Many of his theses are valid, cold in their lucidity. Harper’s occupation does not draw him as far beyond reality as the reader would like to believe such an occupation demands. He thrives on the energy his job requires and approaches it without sensation. Harper sincerely likes Augustus, but when he arrives at the point when it is required of him to shoot him in the head, he would do so; and he would think it a shame, but he would execute him without hesitation nonetheless.

Duncan refrains from gratuitous explanations of the corporeal pain Augustus is made to suffer. His descriptions do not resemble the scenes in an episode of 24. The author is precise in the moments he reveals about pain and pleasure. He respects them and their effect is communicated without obscenity.

In the terrain of both love and hate, Duncan is an excellent guide. He does not need to magnify the strength of either; his clear presentation and direct prose are sufficient.

"New Valley" plunges through varied terrain

2009-07-16T09:31:00.000+02:00

The valleys of Virginia are not vastly populated. And yet they are inhabited by the complex and simple people of Josh Weil’s first book The New Valley. The debut contains three novellas. Each utterly distinct from the others despite the fact that they share the same locale.
In the fist novella, a man, Osby, has just lost his father. For years the two of them lived and worked side by side on their farm. They bred cattle and lived a controllable if not entirely contented life as bachelors in a house too large for just two of them. Osby finds himself marooned by the grief his doesn’t know how to express or even own. Left with no one to care for besides his cows, Osby attempts to navigate the new waters he finds himself adrift upon. Innocent and reluctant to open himself up to the world, he approaches everything with good intentions and is bewildered by his inability to succeed.
Stillman Wing is the main character in Weil’s second novella. At seventy he is forced into retirement and in a rare break from his customary caution, Stillman makes away with an ancient Deutz from his former employer’s yard of machines, planning on fixing the tractor up like new.
Stillman lives with his obese daughter Caroline. Her tremendous weight plagues Stillman and he begs her to abide by his own fastidious approaches to physical health. Caroline continually rebuffs him. He has raised her on his own since she was a toddler and his love for her is evident and immense. But his devotion to her is incapable of stabilizing his impetuous daughter.
Two elements of this novella are particularly intriguing. The manner in which Weil deals with time is remarkable in Stillman Wing. Within the space of a single paragraph inside Stillman’s head, a whole year has gone by. The transition is absolutely fluid and once one tunes into his strategy, Weil’s approach to the seasonal cycles is both striking and delightful. Time resides at the axis of the story, and the author’s unique approach to its unfurling makes its importance all the more conspicuous.
Secondly, there are wonderful illustrations splitting up the text in this narrative. The drawings are intricate and surprising. They complement the story beautifully, adding another element of mystery.
Finally, Weil introduces the reader to the last of the Sarvers in the final, longest novella. All of Weil’s stories do a dance on the heartstrings, but Sarverville Remains is particularly affecting.
Weil strikes an entirely different tone in this story. Geoffrey Sarver is the first-person narrator of this dark narrative. He is writing to someone and it becomes evident through his prose that he is mentally impaired to a minor degree. At the age of thirty Geoffrey spends his time with high school boys who are looking for sex and trouble. The company he keeps leads him to his first love affair, an event that disrupts the placidity of the life he had made for himself.
Weil’s ability to enter the minds of the characters on his pages is remarkable. The variations in their lives and personalities are complex and yet ring with a similar searching tremor. None of them are resigned. All three male protagonists strive toward something beyond what they have known; their largest obstacle is only that they are unsure of what lies beyond their immediate existence.
Weil’s debut has rare depths and penetrates into minds and communities that are rarely explored. A literary trend toward the exploration of those outside the spotlight is emerging, a phase that Weil proves to be compelling and profitable.

"Hedgehog" has prickly intelligence but falls into fairy tale predictability

2009-07-13T04:48:00.000+02:00

Capricious little girls have the capacity to be annoying or incredibly endearing. Crotchety concierges can be as gnarled as they appear or unpredictably erudite. Muriel Bradbury’s novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog, translated from the French, seeks to examine those who are usually overlooked, peeling back exterior presentations to reveal the subtlety or the prickles that lie beneath.
Renée presides over number 7, rue de Grenelle in Paris. She is a self-described inelegant lady, plump, ugly and utterly uninteresting. This is an image she cultivates as the concierge of a building filled with wealthy men and women, broods of self-important children, and pampered pets. Behind her façade of stoic tedium Renée reads Tolstoy with a vengeance, peruses philosophy, and fosters a deep love for art and classical music. The reader is privy to her scorn for the inhabitants of her building and to her admiration of the academic realms she is not supposed to have access to or interest in. Through Renée’s ponderings and observations the crass and disappointing behavior of modern, wealthy Parisians is revealed and soundly judged.
On the other side of the financial divide is Paloma. She is the 12-year-old daughter of the Josses who live in one of the upper apartments of rue de Grenelle. Like Renée, she is ferociously bright. She also has no tolerance for the frivolity of her mother and elder sister and the tedious politics of her father. Paloma has become so disgusted with the lives around her that she has decided to kill herself on her thirteenth birthday. Renée’s musings are interspersed with Paloma’s Profound Thoughts and her entries in her Journal of the Movement of the World. She marks down moments that resonate with her, wondering if something will appear in her last few months that might make life worthwhile.
Paloma and Renée’s withdrawn scrutiny of the world is interrupted by the arrival of a new tenant. He is Japanese and his coming captures the entire building's attention. Much to Renée’s chagrin, her behavior and the offhand quoting of a Tolstoy line, catches Kakuro Ozu’s attention. He senses that something more lies behind the stern exterior of his concierge and works to break down the barriers Renée has constructed to protect herself.
Both Renée and Paloma’s musings verge on tiresome. Intriguing insights glimmer among the precocious ruminations of Paloma, and Renée’s somewhat overdone erudition. But both parties’ decision to conceal their intelligence struck me as odd and disappointing. Renée’s disguise might be explicated by an inability to break out of the class her working class birth dictated, but that notion seems antiquated and Renée’s will too strong to succumb to such prescriptions. Paloma’s suppression of her mental capacity felt childish and somewhat ridiculous. It suggests an adolescent desire to dupe the world, indulgent and immature. Her despair was believable but her behavior made me pity her less.
After the appearance of Kakuro, the novel too closely follows the path of a Cinderella story. He is the exotic prince, come to deliver Paloma and Renée from the farces they have created for themselves. Kakuro plays his role down to the delivery of a new wardrobe for the drab Madame Renée. The transformations occur too quickly and lack the disciplined unraveling that would make them resonate truthfully.
Bradbury does salvage the novel with something of a surprise ending. The upward trajectory of the story comes to a screeching halt and Paloma has a final revelation that strikes a significant chord. But by the conclusion of the book the reader has tired of both ladies’ musings and has little invested in their fates.

Interiors excavated by Wells Tower

2009-07-09T07:33:00.000+02:00

As I believe is becoming clear to anyone who reads my reviews regularly, I have a penchant for things like names and titles. I came across the name Wells Tower two summers ago when I was working at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. At the time, Tower’s book wasn’t even in galleys but I knew I wouldn’t forget that moniker in a hurry. This spring, FSG published Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned and I rushed to the bookstore as soon as I received graduation funds from my grandparents. I vanquished Tower’s book promptly, much like his Vikings vanquish whom they choose in his final story.
Tower’s prose is fairly plain, straightforward. But he knows when to throw in a zesty noun or verb, like ravaged, to prick your attention. The simplicity of his language is deceptive, and neither are his characters hot shots. More often than not, they are regular Joes, playing at bigger roles and quickly determining that what they are suited for is less glamorous and more comfortable.
The internal troubles of Tower’s characters manifest in their surroundings. The helplessness of a recently separated man is embodied by the decimation of his gigantic fish tank, while a boy’s fear of his peers and stepfather is encapsulated in the lurking presence of a leopard. Tower mostly focuses on men in his stories, men and boys who are adrift, have lost or have not yet found their anchors.
In most stories, the events that Tower turns into revolutionary moments are fairly basic. My favorite occurred in “Door in Your Eye.” A man who has just moved in with his daughter believes that their neighbor is a prostitute. He watches a wide variety of men enter said neighbor’s house while perched on his daughter’s porch. Aside from the man’s endearing nosiness, what I liked most about him was what he occupied himself with while spying on the neighbors. Every morning he goes out to paint the sky. It is these sorts of details that distinguish Tower’s people from the usual characters on the fringe, making them unique and plausible.
Tremors of despair certainly loiter beneath the surface of these stories. The fundamentals of the lives described are not dramatically awry, but neither are they particularly secure or even pleasant. These characters are not setback by customary hiccups of existence but they are affected and Tower allows them to be shaped by these occurrences without pitying them or hanging them out to dry.
The men, women and children of these stories are flawed. Few have magnanimous or glamorous goals. Managing their god-given peccadilloes and learning to construct them into something satisfactory is enough work. Tower gets into the heads of the ordinary and unravels their emotions and ponderings with a sensitivity and patience not always seen in a writer.
Tower’s debut is attracting a lot of attention. He is being compared to a number of masters and mistresses of the short story. The praise is largely rooted in his vernacular abilities and the tightly bound quality of each story. Anything of excess has been battered from the lines of his polished first work.
This collection is both amusing and brooding, two moods one can usually expect from life. Despite the down and out situations many of Tower’s characters are found in, the bitterness they might possess remains absent. They maintain their humor: Life gives you lemons, and if you can’t find a way to make lemonade why not crack a grin.

"Some Fun" scrutinizes familial love

2009-07-06T07:49:00.000+02:00

I read Antonya Nelson’s short story collection Female Troubles five or so years ago and was immediately enraptured. Part of this had something to do with the title, which I thought incredibly clever. And then there was the fact of her distinct narrative voice. It has a decidedly female tone to it, as well as an edge that is unmistakably Southwestern. It could be argued that her stories sound Southwestern because most are set in that region, but I would suggest looking more closely at the people she chooses to uncover in her stories, and the manner in which she does so before pinning down her style to mere narrative location.
Her collection and novella from 2006, Some Fun, slices through run-of-the-mill domesticity. Nelson exhibits a particular interest in the relationships between parents and their children. Often her stories zero in on the dynamics between a mother and her son. She spends less time on these familial bonds once the children have aged, preferring to focus on the attachments created in the childhoods of her subjects. Happily there is nothing sinister in Nelson’s exploration of these connections. She probes the intricacies of relationships that are merely result from plain old paternal and maternal love.
These relationships, as we quickly discover, are fraught with a smorgasborg of issues, which Nelson expertly draws out. There is abandonment, protection and fear to be wrestled with as well as difficult and shifting dynamics of power within the familial unit. Nelson examines the factors and tensions that sway the balance of authority in a family, whether it be age, mental health or the presence of a person who exists outside of the domestic sphere and threatens to disturb if not destroy it. Nelson, one feels, speaks the stories of the people whom one might run into at the grocery store but whose full lives are never revealed.
Nelson refuses to let her characters off easily. They confront situations that push their beliefs, sense of propriety, and security to the limits. Rarely do they return unaltered. Nelson recognizes and allows for the ugliness in people. She brings these darker facets to light without forcing anyone’s hand or putting them on trial. This is an author who is not particularly gentle with her characters but neither is she forceful. It is easy to keep pace with their turns in mood. Their intentions can always be grasped from one angle, even if their actions are somewhat off the mark.
The love stories that appear in this collection concern the kind of love that isn’t chosen. The relationships that are unwound for the reader depict the depths and weaknesses of familial love. Nelson understands and embraces the fact that the love between parents and their children is both wonderfully exquisite as well as the pits of misery.
The most important thing I learned my first year of college was unpacked for me in a poetry class. It had to do with the desolate realization in adolescence that your parents’ love is incomparable. This is, of course, coupled with the discovery that you desire a different sort of love that they cannot provide and that most people in the world won’t. Meaning, that as much as you might love the world, very little of it will love you back. This concept struck a chord, caused romantic little me to burst into tears and I have been unable to shake the truth of it. Nelson encapsulates this certainty in her characters' relationships. Mothers yearn to forever protect their sons, and daughters are at a loss when they see their fathers slipping from them. These are impossibilities. But what is preserved and exposed by Nelson’s stories is the intrinsic depths of this unchosen love and its undeniable intensity.

Beauty conflicts with decline in debut "Rust"

2009-07-02T00:14:00.000+02:00

Opening up the newspaper in the morning you read that the police have found the body of a homeless man in an empty shack not far from the train tracks. He appears to have been murdered. There is, at this time, a single suspect, a young man who has a history of assault. It looks as if he doesn’t stand a chance in court, especially not with the new DA. He had it coming, is your first thought. He got off easy the time before because the sheriff helped him out. It’s a tragedy for his mother, but probably no less than he deserves. Reading American Rust, Philipp Meyer’s debut novel, is like reading the truth behind this kind of newspaper story.
Isaac English is smart; he may in fact be brilliant. But at twenty he is still living with his father, unable to get out of the dying steel town like his sister did when she left for Yale. His staying is due to a mixture of stubbornness and filial piety. But after two years of tending to his broken father, Isaac decides to get out of Buell, Fayette County, Pennsylvania. Having stolen $4,000 of his old man’s money he sets off west down the train tracks, headed for Berkley and the education he knows he deserves.
But first, Isaac stops by the trailer where his friend Billy Poe lives. The two are an unlikely pair. The former is frail and bookish, the latter a star football player, who wasted his chances at a college scholarship. Isaac tries to get Poe to come along with him, and his friend apathetically agrees to see Isaac as far as the next town. A rainstorm hits and the two wind up in a shed with three bums, at which point the trouble begins.
A fundamental that must be understood about Buell is its beauty. This aspect of the steel town is repeated continuously throughout the novel. The extraordinary loveliness of the place only belittles the community’s inability to retain the dignity it once possessed. There seems to be no way out.
Meyer uses the lens of his novel to examine the dying industries of America and the lives they take down with them. Poe and Isaac represent one faction of the disintegrating community. They are the misdirected youth, each brilliant and capable in their own ways but neither is given anything to thrive upon. The fathers of Buell toiled at the steel mills and the community prospered. But when those were closed down there was little for them to do and even less for their wives. The towns that once flourished with relative comfort sunk into disrepair in the space of a generation.
Lee, Isaac’s sister, is as much of a concrete character as her younger brother. She made it out, married into a wealthy family even, and her motives are just as complicated and understandable as her brother’s compulsion to stay. Grace, Poe’s mother, has stayed and shedding light on her reasons broadens the scope of the novel, giving the plight of the town’s residents a three-dimensional form.
The aftermath of the shed leaves both Poe and Isaac in an intricate moral predicament. The novel tracks their progress and decline, factoring in the presence of the town’s sheriff, Buddy Harris. I liked and connected with almost all of the characters in American Rust and found Harris particularly appealing. Meyer is careful not to work too hard on a single dimension of his characters and as a result they all materialize as complex people with a thick variety of shortcomings, expectations and disappointment. A human face on the law further strengthened the structure of Meyer’s exceptionally well-developed and multi-dimensioned American novel.

Drama of debut makes "April & Oliver" hard to put down

2009-06-17T18:52:00.000+02:00

While reading April & Oliver, the debut novel by Tess Callahan, I frequently went back and forth between thinking it was superb and wondering if I was being conned. Notably, I couldn’t put the book down during this debate. I was certainly caught up in the intrigue and the danger. Upon realizing how mistrustful the content of the story made me, I began to pay more attention to Callahan’s craftsmanship. Having finished the novel I am still not sure if I have been played, but I have to admit that I not only fell for the dramas of the characters but fell a little bit in love with them too.
April and Oliver are cousins, kind of. Their fathers grew up calling April and Oliver’s Nana “Mother” but neither shared the same father or mother. April and Oliver’s proximity and age led them to be inseparable. As children they appeared to have internal radar that kept them aware of the other’s location.
The novel begins with the death of April’s younger brother Buddy. His death brings the family together again and April and Oliver begin to become reacquainted after years of separation.
As teenagers April and Oliver’s approach to their lives had already begun to diverge. April developed quickly, into a bold, sexy and vulnerable young woman. Oliver, on the other hand, exhibited almost excessive responsibility. Despite being an exquisite and talented pianist, he quits the instrument he loves cold turkey and sets off for Stanford, bound for a life less uncertain than that of a composer. Despite Oliver’s desire to protect April from herself and her unfortunate choices in men, as a teenager Oliver is helpless and she is soon lost to him.
When Oliver returns, it is with his fiancée. Bernadette is overwhelmingly kind and beautiful. She is in many ways the antithesis of April, but is canny enough to recognize that the place April holds in Oliver’s past is one that threatens the stasis of her own relationship with him. Because of the attachment to April the reader develops early on, it is difficult to not automatically reject Bernadette as inferior.
Plenty of drama ensues. April has a severely troubled and jealous lover who fails to leave her alone. His presence in the novel is frightening and April’s attraction to him reveals a number of weak spots in her character.
The tension that constantly undercuts the exchanges between characters, and particularly between April and Oliver, is well managed by Callahan. There is not a single dynamic between two people in this narrative that is repetitive. Each relationship is charged in a different and believable way. The most striking is the intensity of feeling between April and Oliver. Their mutual attraction is palpable but at the same time contains an element of danger. The extremity of their differences might possibly be the ideal complement to the other’s nature, but Callahan ensures that the opposite is just as likely.
The author marvelously constructs intricate qualities of both the primary and secondary characters in this novel. I felt I knew these people well and I had a lot invested in the decisions they came to and their respective fates. Again, I do not know if this is partly because I was conned into needing to know about them due to the high level of personal drama in this narrative. Ultimately, I do think there is more to the novel than the sensational aspects of it. Callahan’s ability to tell a good story is finely tuned, and the depth of her character construction suggests an impressive understanding of the intricacies of emotion that make people tick.

The rich and fabulous lack luster in McInerney's short stories

2009-06-15T02:44:00.000+02:00

The stories collected in How It Ended by Jay McInerney spans almost thirty years. They are assembled in no particular order and include McInerney’s first published story as well as a number that he produced rapid fire in 2008. What struck me most about these stories is that I could never guess in what year each was written. I was almost always surprised by the date at the end. This disconcerted me. Rather than being illustrative of a particular style, it suggested stagnation.
The content and characters of How It Ended are particularly fascinated with wealth, beauty and too many drugs. McInerney excavates the terrain of infidelity with much the same vigor as John Updike applied to the same subject. Trust in one’s partner appears to be a naïve fantasy in almost every story, a fundamental I find depressing, inaccurate and a tad sensationalist.
The message in most of McInerney’s stories is that his characters are by and large decent people with relatively good intentions. They just always seem to stray. Whether this means another drink, line of coke or affair, the repercussions are never too severe. Usually the protagonists come to in an alleyway they would prefer to avoid or saddled with lawyers fees they would prefer to avoid. The stakes of the aftermath rarely include death or consequences that might teach these wayward individuals a lesson.
A minor, almost silly, point that I have to mention is McInerney’s utter lack of imagination in the department of names. Being drawn to complex and odd names myself, I was chagrined not only to be acquainted with the regular Tom, Dick, and Harrys, but also with the repetition of monikers. I can understand using a non-descript name once for one protagonist, but then to have another character who takes center stage as well with the same boring name was much too uninspired for my liking.
McInerney roots most of his stories in New York, though there are a few trips to the lush South as well. The lives he describes are either full of riches and glamour or they concern people who are brushing against the linen lapels and satin skirt hems, hoping to get in with the proper crowd and experience the lush life, as is their apparent due. It was difficult for me to feel sympathetic toward these people.
It was not difficult, however, for me to believe that these people exist. McInerney does not use fancy language to describe the fancy lives his characters live. This contributes to the credibility of the conversation and even makes the presence of a potbellied pig fathomable in the master bed. He paints the facts of his protagonists lives clearly, if not coldly.
The stories are delivered in such a well-mannered and matter-of-fact tone that McInerney’s intentions ultimately remain unclear. Is he providing the reader with a peek into the lives of the inordinately wealthy in order to reveal the pitiable qualities of a life of excess and absurd and dangerous luxury? Or is the author asking that the reader to feel empathy for these characters, characters who are just as lost in their lives as those less fortunate financially and far more lost than others?
My inclination was to be somewhat contemptuous. The love stories and indiscretions that McInerney recounts neither struck me in their simplicity, beauty or authenticity. These characters fell in or out of due to boredom or because they lacked imagination. The tragedies and disappointments that these decisions inevitably led to appeared to be exactly what was deserved. As the collection progressed I saw few characters develop any self-awareness and this rendered McInerney’s rich far less valuable than their bank accounts would suggest.

Despite engaging pace, debut novel fails to hold attention

2009-06-10T22:31:00.000+02:00

Laila Lalami's debut novel Secret Son enters the streets and houses of both the wealthy and poor of modern day Casablanca. Through the eyes of characters young and old, Lalami works to illustrate the struggles of identity and the reconciliation of class, politics and beliefs within Morocco.
In the slums of Casablanca, Youssef El Mekki lives with his mother. She is a widow, working in a hospital to support her only son. Youssef is thoughtful, excels at school, and though he wishes he had grown up knowing his father, he is a loving son.
Soon after a flood destroys much of Youssef's neighborhood, a Muslim group calling themselves the Party sets its headquarters up in the old cinema. It is at this juncture that Youssef's life and the lives of his friends begin to diverge. Amin heads to college with Youssef, while Maati is hired as security for the Party, a position that is questioned and scorned by his friends.
Soon after entering the university, Youssef learns that his father whom he believed long dead is very much alive. Nabil Amrani is a successful businessman and he resides in Casablanca, though the life he leads might as well be worlds away from the one Youssef has experienced. The discovery of the truth about the encounters between his parents causes Youssef to question his mother who for years has raised him on lies describing a man who never existed. He wonders how many other secrets she has kept from him. His distrust leads him to seeking out his father and revealing to Nabil his identity.
Surprisingly, Nabil invests time and money in his illegitimate son. He has recently fallen out with his daughter and Youssef’s appearance seems an answer to his disappointment. Amal is studying at UCLA and Nabil has discovered that she has an American boyfriend. His displeasure with her fuels his relationship with Youssef who is the son he was unable to have with his wife. Youssef is his second chance.
Nabil’s wealth and opinions are enticing. Youssef willingly accepts his father’s offer of an apartment, as well as a job and fine clothes. He leaves his mother behind despite her warnings about the fickle nature of people such as Nabil, along with his childhood friends and dedication to school. Youssef’s entrance into the world of the wealthy is disorienting, pleasurable and brief.
As Youssef’s brief sojourn among the affluent unwinds, he is left stranded. Having had a taste of a more comfortable life it is both arduous and shameful for him to return the life he had led quite happily.
Lalami combines a number of human factors to explicate the circumstance of Youssef. Everyone In the novel plays a role in the disintegration of Youssef’s prospects including the young man himself. Greed, pride, stubbornness, naïveté and love are all essential and understandable factors in the disastrous repercussions of Youssef’s desire to participate in his father’s life.
Secret Son is a quick and engrossing read. But having finished it nothing lingered. The development of some characters, particularly Youssef’s mother, occurs too late. What is revealed is too little and distressingly detrimental to Youssef.
Casablanca never fully came alive in this novel. I vaguely knew that Youssef’s neighborhood stank and that there were no sidewalk hawkers by the apartment Nabil owned but at no moment did I cringe in disgust at the absurd luxuries or the wretched stench. Lalami is a fair storyteller and hers does say something about the atmosphere in Morocco. Unfortunately her prose does not drive the weight, danger and complexity of the circumstances home, leaving the reader with only a vague impression of what has just been read.

Meetings with the Gods in Gaiman's novel

2009-06-07T20:50:00.000+02:00

During my tenure as a student at the Waldorf School in Santa Fe, I became well acquainted with the gods. In second grade we learned about Native American beliefs, in third grade we studied the Old Testament, and by sixth grade I knew a little something about the Norse, Greek, Indian, and Egyptian gods. The title of Neil Gaiman’s book, American Gods, didn’t immediately put me in mind of what I learned ten plus years ago, but it wasn’t far into the novel before I caught on.
Shadow is on the verge of getting out of prison when he learns that his wife Laura has died. He is released three days early from his three-year sentence in order to go home and take care of the funeral arrangements. Shadow is stunned and somewhat incredulous that Laura has actually died. Very quickly, however, her death becomes the least impossible phenomena he encounters.
Soon after Shadow has left the confines of his cell, he is met by Wednesday. Wednesday enlists his services with almost no explanation and a very vague list of tasks for Shadow to complete. Believing that he has little or northing to live for now that Laura is gone, Shadow agrees to work for the mysterious Wednesday.
Laura appears in Shadow’s motel room the night he buries her. While it is clear that she is dead, her skin is cold to the touch, there is clay from the grave in her hair, she unquestionably enters his room and talks with her husband. Shadow is a particularly even-keeled guy, and though Laura’s appearance unsettles him, he manages to take it in stride.
This bodes well for him as Wednesday takes him on a journey to a number of astonishing and even impossible places.
Interspersed with Shadow’s adventures, are vignettes that depict the manner in which certain gods were carried from the old world to the new. A wanton British lass brings her beliefs across the ocean on two different voyages and African lore is passed through generations of slaves. It is due to these transportations of faith that America has the sprites and spirit of the old world.
The trouble for Wednesday, and by association for Shadow, is that these beliefs have begun to fade. They have been replaced by worship of TVs, the media, material goods. People no longer leave out a bowl of milk for their gods nor are there sacrifices in their names. Wednesday is gunning for a war between the old gods and the new.
The characters that populate American Gods are an incredible cast of oddballs, hot tempers, and seductresses. Shadow spends a prolonged amount of time in Wisconsin. Those who come to the surface in this small town are both endearing and complex. It is the only place that seems to be absent of all danger and where the reader gets to know Shadow more completely. He is a gentle man and aside from his meager assortment of coin tricks, he has very little up his sleeve. It is impossible not to want to look out for him.
Gaiman brings up interesting issues of worship and faith in this novel. I am partial to the idea of moody gods and they were abundant here. The perennial Norse trickster Loki makes an appearance as does the Indian Kali. I was surprised to find the Greeks absaent, however. Their pantheon fails to make a peep despite being infamous for their meddlings in the mortal world.
Ultimately it is Shadow’s relatively easy acceptance of what happens to him that makes the novel plausible. His tranquility in the face of all the strange events that occur after his release from prison makes the story believable. It does, however, frequently and delightfully dip into the fantastic. For worshipers of gods, fantasy, and America alike, this is a quick-paced, intriguing novel.

All Alone in Livesey's "World"

2009-06-05T19:56:00.000+02:00

For some reason I am always surprised by role of sadness in Margot Livesey’s novels. This has much to do with her excellent character construction. She brings the reader into the minds of her protagonist, shedding light on their doubts and insecurities. The people she introduces become intimately known, making their tribulations all the more affecting. Having read The House on Fortune Street, I should, perhaps, have been prepared for the sorrows of The Missing World, a novel whose premise is fairly dark.
Hazel is crossing the street when she is hit by a car. Though she is not immediately affected, an hour or so later she winds up in the hospital in a coma. On the phone with her ex-boyfriend, Jonathan, at the time of her collapse after the accident, he is the one to retrieve her from her apartment and deliver her to the emergency room despite their recent history of animosity. Hazel awakes with no memory of the last three years, conveniently providing Jonathan with an opportunity to recreate the life they had together before things began to disintegrate.
Parallel to Hazel’s disaster, Livesey introduces the reader to Freddie. Freddie is an American who has taken up residence in London, currently supporting himself by repairing the roofs of the British. It quickly becomes clear that Freddie is unlike many other roofers. Years before, on the verge of graduating from Stanford, he abruptly dropped out and left the country. He has survived by picking up odd jobs across Europe, trying to escape something long unnamed. Freddie’s work takes him to Jonathan’s house, where he is struck by Hazel’s beauty and the fragility of her condition. He senses she needs to be helped and becomes tangled in Jonathan’s complex evasion of the past.
Finally there is Charlotte. She is equally as lost as Freddie, but her denial of her destitution intensifies her situation. Charlotte is a failed actress; she is behind on her rent, delusional about the scope of her charms, and prone to inviting herself where she is unwanted. Having exhausted every possible source of support, Charlotte winds up living with her disapproving sister Bernice, who has been hired as a nurse for Hazel.
Slowly and precisely all the characters that Livesey initially tracks individually manage to collide. Sexual attraction and indiscretion muddy the intents of the protagonists and the atmosphere of the story accrues elements of danger and the perverse. Despite the contrivance of placing all these characters within the same boundaries of exchange, Livesey does not let the plot devolve into a series of predictabilities. While rescue and renewal are achieved to some degree, little is resolved.
The melancholy of these characters’ lives is more tangible in some instances than others. Charlotte’s life pulsates with destitution that she manages to diffuse with alcohol and a falsified self-importance. Heroism edges Freddie’s persona, but it emerges that little of what he does satisfies his own needs, leaving him incomplete. Hazel is the one to be most pitied it seems. She, however, is the one into whose head very little entry is made. I felt sympathetic toward her, but never felt I knew what made her tick as I did with some others.
Suspense runs at a well-controlled rate throughout this enjoyable novel. The characters are etched with persuasive precision and their plights are convincing. The conclusion of the story contains premonitions of what might follow. The men and women of Livesey’s work pulsate with so much life that it is unfathomable to imagine their lives stop once there are no more pages.

Details in Ondaatje's "Divisidero"

2009-05-31T21:22:00.000+02:00

Unlike my mother, I didn’t love The English Patient. I also didn’t read the book; I saw the movie, which is unlike me. Because I found the film tedious and sentimental I never returned to the novel. For these reasons Divisdero was my first introduction to Michael Ondaatje. As a work of prose, the novel is incredibly beautiful. The stories contained within it are much less straightforward, cavernous and tinged by the tragic.
The book begins with a family. There is a father with two daughters of the same age and an older son. Upon closer inspection, however, the family reveals itself to be patch-worked together. Only one daughter, Anna, is connected to the father by blood. Claire was adopted when he lost his wife in childbirth and she lost her mother. Cooper found his way into this family after his own was brutally murdered.
Ondaatje’s skill lies in his attention to details and the California countryside on which the three makeshift siblings thrive is rife with beauty. The reader experiences the depth of a mesmerizing tranquility emblematic of childhood and retrospection. Contentment unites the family for years, Coop teaching the girls to drive and to get rid of farmland pests.
The pastoral, contented isolation is shattered when the family’s patchwork qualities become visible and the fabric disintegrates. Sex and ardency replace familial love and the discovery of this altered dynamic irrevocably divides the family.
The novel continues to track the lives of the improvised siblings. Ondaatje plunges the reader into the underground realm of gambling at Cooper’s side. The orphaned man acquires loyal if dodgy friends, as well as expertise that can only serve him in the world he has chosen. Ondaatje constructs a convincing backdrop for Cooper’s exploits, convincing, at least, to someone who plays poker with potato chips or some other form of sustenance.
Alongside Anna, we travel to France where she has gone to study the life of writer and poet Lucien Segura. Inhabiting the house he dies in, she meets Rafael, a Frenchman with his own complicated past. Ondaatje has a particular gift for illuminating the sensuality that develops between a couple, drawing forth exchanges that reveal and deepen their characters, emphasizing the splendor and the physicality. In illustrating many of his character’s lives he calls into focus impractical details. The superfluity of the moments he mentions somehow manages to sink the reader deeper into the scenery. Once immersed in the bucolic serenity of France or the grubby danger of Tahoe, it is difficult to extricate oneself from the scene and determine the unnecessary elements.
Both the voice and the setting of this novel oscillate with a slightly disconcerting frequency. It might take a moment to get one’s bearings. This bothered me less than the varying changes in perspective. Sometimes Anna is narrating, and then suddenly she is being observed in the third person. Or there is a jump to Lucien’s childhood in his voice with little or no warning. At a certain point these switches make it difficult to track a linear narrative through the novel. It is possible that this is Ondaatje’s purpose, to evade a progressive storyline and focus on the undergirding theme.
In the case of Divisdero, this theme appears to be loss. Separation and a tangible hopelessness run through the story. What remains are varied incarnations of love: enduring, dead, unrequited, misled, intricate, despairing, triumphal. And, one must recognize, Ontaatje’s own love for language. It marks every passage of the novel, transforming the stories from ones of recurring desolation and division to magnificent illustrations.

Before the Blog: Columns from the Orient

2009-05-02T02:46:00.000+02:00

http://orient.bowdoin.edu/orient/authorpage.php?authorid=330