Posted in May 2011 …

May 31 2011
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Fiction, Literature

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

The Short Version: On the eve of her ninth birthday, Rose develops the peculiar ability to taste not only the innate details of food – where it comes from, down to the particular factory or farm in the world – but also the emotions of the person who made it.  Suddenly, she’s privy to a whole realm of information she had previously never even imagined.  She grows up with this ability, struggling to fit in – but it turns out her family has more secrets than she knew.

The Review:  This book seems like the plot of a Sarah Ruhl play, doesn’t it?  A girl who can taste feelings in her food?  If that’s not “magical realism”, I don’t know what is.  The Ruhlian plot goes awry pretty quickly though – because Aimee Bender is not Sarah Ruhl.  This may be an unfair comparison but the fact remains: the book doesn’t live up to the promise of its premise.

Rose is an interesting enough narrator.  She has to go through the growing pains of being nine – then a teenager – then a young woman, all with the burden of being unable to enjoy a meal.  Even her own cooking opens up untold waves of emotions she didn’t even begin to know she was feeling.  So finding her solace in processed foods was an inspired touch.  The early scenes with Rose and her mother, discovering her mother’s deep sadness, as well as the sequence where Rose and George (her brother’s best friend and her crush) go on a fact-finding mission at a cookie shop were delightful and as bursting with imagination as you’d hope. Unfortunately for those beginnings, Bender’s interest in her protagonist wanes pretty quickly and she starts to bring in more complications.  She seems to want to turn the novel into a teen-lit kind of novel – kids in middle school/high school! drama! – but never commits fully and instead we just sort of bounce around through Rose’s life a bit.  SPOILERS COMING…

 

Rose’s brother, as it turns out, has his own ability – he can disappear.  Completely.  He eventually disappears into a chair for good – but I found myself wondering why this was necessary.  The plot becomes trying to figure out what’s up with Joseph when it’s pretty obvious to just about anyone reading that he must have a gift and maybe it involves disappearing, considering that’s what he’s been doing for quite some time.  So I think the teen-lit plot might’ve actually been more engaging – to see Rose using her talent for good (and evil) by having her friends make her something or what-not.  Bender dabbles with this plot at one point but it’s a half-hearted attempt: a new friend believes in Rose’s gift but ends up abusing it and when Rose cuts her off actually calls her a “drug pusher.”  At about this point, I started to lose patience with the novel.

There are some interesting developments on the romantic side of the plot – I was surprised but happy to see that George actually had feelings for Rose… and bothered that it seemed, in the end, like a neglected plot point that Bender was too careless to fully remove.  Then there’s the mother’s affair.  I don’t understand the way Rose went about dealing with it – by completely ignoring it.  Too, I don’t know how it never came up – the affair lasts for quite a long time and you have to imagine it’d've been obvious at some point to the husband (who seems pretty sharp).  This whole plot just frustrated me and went nowhere until about twenty pages from the end.  And that’s being generous.

Maybe my frustration with this novel comes from the fact that my family has a much more open dynamic – we all talk about everything, all the time.  Why didn’t Rose try harder to explain her gift to her parents?  Especially seeing as (again, SPOILERS that were pretty obvious about the second time it gets mentioned in the book…) her father probably has a gift as well.  Why didn’t she do something else, knowing how her parents were feeling, to help them – instead of just watching them from afar?  Something just bothered me immensely about this.  I’m all for families who don’t act like mine – but I get the sense that Rose was a child who would reach out to her family and when she doesn’t, it seems strikingly out of character… even though that’s how, very early on, we’re introduced to her as a character.

Rating: 2 out of 5.  I was rooting for this book during the ToB simply because of its premise – but having now read it, I understand why there was so much vehement hatred towards it during that august exercise.  It isn’t a very good book.  It isn’t very well written, it doesn’t have a very interesting group of characters, and it constantly undercuts its own momentum by spinning around in circles.  And yet there are these moments of beauty – when Rose talks about food, especially when its a particularly good emotion, like the experience with the chefs at the French restaurant… those moments are wonderful.  The magical realism comes through and Bender’s otherwise mediocre prose is elevated to another place.  But that’s simply not enough to make this a book I could actually recommend – and that, of course, is the real tipping point between a 2 and a 3.

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May 29 2011
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Fiction

The Devil’s Star

The Short Version: At the end of his rope, Detective Harry Hole looks like he’s finally blown every act of goodwill or camaraderie anyone has offered him.  About to be fired from the police force and having seen his airtight case against Waaler fizzle out, his salvation – of sorts – comes in the form of a serial killer stalking the streets of Oslo.  Meanwhile, his nemesis Waaler has offered him a partnership and he’s managed to stop drinking long enough to start working on the case – but it soon becomes clear that the case connects right back to the one he’s been working on for so long… and Harry Hole finally comes out in the lead.

The Review:  Easily the best of the Harry Hole books so far.  Easily.  Hands down.  Far and away.  The end left me furiously turning the pages and barely stopping to catch my breath.  No, seriously, I realized I was almost panting at the end of the novel – my blood was pumping, I was locked into this story in a way that only the best crime novelists can pull off.

I also now understand why Harper Perennial got these three books but not, unfortunately, the others in the Harry Hole series – these three form a loose sort of trilogy.  The first two (publication dates still unknown for the US) are referenced often (especially the Sydney case) in this book and I wish I could read those… but these three books have the overarching story of Ellen, Harry’s former partner – the one murdered at the end of The Redbreast.  We know that Tom Waaler was involved and Harry spends all of his time over the course of Nemesis and leading into this novel trying to pin Waaler for the crime (and for his general arms-smuggling ring).  What I never expected is that this would all finally pay off – and come to a closure that benefits an inter-series trilogy like this one.

The relationship between Waaler and Hole develops most in this novel.  To see Waaler trying to cajole Harry – and then to hear Harry (potentially…) agree to work with him – was stunning.  The respectful near-Moriarty/Holmes relationship that they develop during the novel is… unsettling.  For Harry and for the reader.  It makes you stay on your toes and that’s all due to Nesbø’s impeccable plotting.  He keeps it tense through the whole novel and I honestly didn’t know what was going to happen.  I didn’t know who the murderer was – and the overlapping pieces of the story were played in such a perfect way that tension just built.  The fourth murder, for example, plays out on the page in such a way that you’re wondering if this is really going to be it, if they’re really going to catch him – and then it gets blown wide open in the most jaw-droppingly cool way.

If I had a complaint about the novel, I’d say that the wrap-up of the serial killer felt a bit much.  It seemed a bit too perfunctory, there was a bit too much that was too jarring about it – but then, as I had that thought, I followed up with the realization that this novel wasn’t about the serial killer.  It was about Hole and Waaler, completely – and boy oh boy does it pay off.  The final twists and turns between Harry and Waaler are so fantastically done that I was, I admit, saddened to see it end.  I won’t spoil it – I’ll simply suffice it to say that there is closure.  Finite and complete closure.  Wonderful closure.  Brutal, heart-stopping, pulse-pounding closure.  I can’t really talk any more without SPOILERS, which in this case I think would do a disservice to the trilogy as a whole, let alone this single book.

One thing I did notice in this book that stuck out, in a way that I never noticed in the first two Hole books (perhaps because it wasn’t there…?) was the almost Pushing Daisies-esque narration that sometimes popped in.  The beginning, with the details about the water racing down through the house… the occasional “if this – but alas, this” kind of thing you could just hear Jim Dale saying… It isn’t jarring or anything and doesn’t stick out in a cutesy or weird way – but it was just fun to see the author winking at his reader now and then.  So many authors forget that, at the end of the day, it is all about entertainment – and what’s a little wink now and then?

Rating: 5 out of 5.  Like I said, the strongest of the three Harry Hole novels that Harper published.  The final book of that ‘trilogy’ – and now Knopf is publishing them even further out of order, skipping over “book 6″ and going right to book 7 with The Snowman… it pains me.  But, regardless – this novel is worth your time.  You have to read the first two books, of course, in order to know meet Harry and Ellen and Rakel and really come to understand what was happening previously that leads to the denouement found in the last hundred pages of this book.  All told, though, this is easily the strongest “Nordic” crime trilogy since Larsson’s Millenium trilogy – but it’s actually (shhhh) better.  It has a stronger writer and if it lacks an iconic ‘original’ character like Lisbeth, it more than makes up for it in Hole’s classical detective figure.

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May 27 2011
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A Moveable Feast

The Short Version: Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of his time spent in Paris, featuring stories both of writing and of meeting and living with other literary lights of his generation.

The Review: I’m a little embarrassed to say that this is my first experience with Hemingway.  I know, right?  Somehow, he (and Faulkner – they are, for some reason, associated in my mind) fell through the cracks in all of the many literature courses I’ve taken.  That’s what they say about lit courses, though – no matter how much you read, you’ll always miss somebody.

Maria, my old boss at The Public Theater, gave me this as an end-of-internship gift.  She told me that it is one of her favorite books and that she was reading it just as she came to The Public and felt a kinship with young Hemingway – meeting and working and becoming friends with these impressive figures in the theater much as he did with those of literature.  I completely understand.

Perhaps it is due to Hemingway’s simple prose – but he just makes it seem so matter-of-fact that, yes, he was at Gertrude Stein’s apartment or yes, he was driving up from Lyon with F. Scott Fitzgerald.  The funniest and most “ohhhh” celebrity moment is probably when he mistakes Alistair Crowley for some poet.  But as I read this book and reflected on my time so far at The Public, I realized that I have a number of similar stories.  Oskar Eustis and Suzan-Lori Parks know me by name, Steven Spinella complimented me on my voice & diction, I’ve had the privilege of sharing lunch with Tom Aldredge, and so on.  So there is a refreshing reality to the book – because it is so simple and so matter-of-fact and that’s, really, how life goes.

Of course, I have to talk about my first experience with Hemingway’s prose.  I have never, in all my years of reading, experienced anything quite like the sensation of reading Hemingway.  I can’t accurately relate it to anything, I just know that it is truly unique.  He talks, early in the book, about the methodology – stripping away anything superflous or flashy, instead saying what you mean in the simplest way possible.   As you’ve no doubt realized, if you’ve read even this review let alone anything else on this blog, I’m not someone who writes like that.  I don’t even know that an author could, really, write like that in today’s society.  What Hem did was radical at the time – the fact that it still feels radical to me, nearly a century after his work started to be published, just goes to show that no one else (at least, no one else I’ve encountered) has done the same thing.  There is an intensity required – a singular drive of purpose – to write like this and I just don’t know any author who would so ruthlessly pare down their writing.

The stories of the book are quite entertaining, by the way.  I don’t mean to gloss over that.  They’re beautiful little insights into a life well-lived at a time when (as it seems) life was so much simpler to live.  The veracity of the book is arguable – Hem himself writes that the reader could well believe it to be fiction if that suited them and it has been reported that his depiction of their “poverty” was grossly exaggerated – but that doesn’t matter.  I treat this like a memoir because it, as the last lines say, is a memoir regardless of its veracity.  The cases of our memory, when opened, may reveal things that look differently from how they actually happened – but that’s the way our minds and our memories work.

Rating: 5 out of 5.  Like a refreshing glass of ice water on a warm day.  There is something easy and clear about Hemingway’s writing and I’m interested to see how this writing transfers to his fiction.  For now, though, I not only understand my boss’ love for this book – but I feel the same way she did and the same way Hemingway felt, as I begin to develop relationships with the grandest figures in my field.  This is a book for any young artist in any profession – it is a story of living and working simply.

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May 25 2011
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News/Updates

General Update from the Goodreads Book Club Launch!

Tonight was the launch of the Goodreads Book Club.  My ears are ringing, my book is signed, and I’ve found a new place to go chill out and be surrounded by books.  I couldn’t let the moment go unremarked-upon… so, for anyone who is interested, a few thoughts and such.

Firstly, the launch book is A Visit From The Goon Squad.  One of my top ten favorite books of all time, I think  - got a rare ’6′ rating here on the ol’ RB – and the book that made me realize that New York was where I needed to be.  So, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to attend this event and hear Ms. Egan read from her book and listen to some good fresh punk and generally be surrounded by people who like some of the same things that I do.

Bullet Thoughts:

  • Jennifer Egan is the nicest and most down-to-Earth Pulitzer Prize winner I’ve ever met.  Scratch that, maybe just one of the nicest and most down-to-Earth people, period.
  • She also has a wonderful speaking voice.
  • She also also has a beautiful signature.  Yes, she signed my copy of Goon Squad.
  • Care Bears On Fire = awesome.  A) I wish I was that cool when I was in grade school, B) I wish I knew girls who were that cool in grade school, C) there’s nothing like seeing young kids who love what they’re doing rock the fuck out.  Look them up and enjoy – it’s fun punk, the sort of nasty groovy fun you want to have on a summer night.
  • Definitely enjoyed the mass of people who left after Egan finished reading – rude of them to leave in the midst of a CBoF song and not wait for a break, but also hilarious because they were all mostly older and/or square-looking types who were NOT happy about some girls kicking out some loud punk in their faces.
  • Housing Works Bookstore is not only a great place with some neat titles on the shelves/a relaxing atmosphere, they’re supporting an amazing cause (since 1991, helping homeless AIDS/HIV patients) and doing it in a fun way (books, food, live music).
  • Goodreads knows how to throw a party.  First drink on them, nametags that say “HELLO I’m currently reading ______”, guitar picks specialized for the event with Goodreads & Goon Squad, a great setup and pitch-perfect artist selection… I hope they have more events like this in New York, because I’ll definitely be there for any and all of them.
Check it out over at www.goodreads.com/bookclub, especially if you’ve yet to read the fantastic Goon Squad - or even if you already have.  It’s fun to know you’re sharing a book with other people, even if they’re thousands of miles away.
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May 22 2011
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Fiction, Literature

The Children’s Hospital

The Short Version: A massive flood covers the Earth under seven miles of water.  The only (apparent) survivors are left in a children’s hospital that has – unbeknownst to them – been commissioned by an angel to serve as an ark.  What begins as an effort just to survive – and to save the children, most of whom critically ill or deformed – turns into something else when Jemma discovers not only that’s she’s pregnant… but that she has a special healing spark inside of her, enabling her to heal others.  Life in the hospital then turns into a sort-of utopia – but God or whoever’s plan isn’t finished and both the adults & children still have trials to face before they can hope to see land.

The Review: What a strange book.  It vacillates, sometimes rather abruptly, between various tones and never quite coheres on the molecular level.  On the outside, however, it mostly shapes up in the same unique way that its author has done: Adrian trained in pediatrics before going to Harvard Divinity School.  So, you can probably guess where the two major themes come from.

I was impressed by how little “God” there was in the book, though.  Yes, there are angels – the existence of which I don’t entirely understand (and perhaps am meant not to) but they never really go into who sent them or why… and no one really questions it, either.  There’s even a move towards unitarianism amongst the survivors – they don’t seem to specifically worship in the way Christians or Jews or Muslims do in the present.  But the parallels are unmistakable: this is the ark, there was a huge flood… There is some thought given to “where are the animals?” but that fades pretty quickly in light of the daily grind of the hospital.  And what a grind it is.  For all of the frightening excitement of the beginning of the novel – as the storm rushes in, then the survivors discovering their surroundings, exploring the ‘new world’, etc – it sure slows down around page 150 or so.  Deadly slow.  You can say that this was Adrian’s point – to illuminate the monotony of constant rounds, the way everything just sort of flattens when you block out the big picture and focus on the little tasks just so you can keep surviving.  But it doesn’t make for an interesting book.  It makes for a dull one – a stagnant one, like a pond breeding West Nile mosquitoes.  The plot picks up the pace again when Jemma discovers her powers – the scene where she races around and heals every single child does drag on for some time but at least it’s interesting and there’s something happening.  As opposed to most of what had come before.

Then, of course, the question of “what is a hospital if there’s no need for healing?” is given some thought and we see the survivors create a stable government, begin to resume ‘normal’ lives, etc.  There’s some fun to be had here, seeing how people adapt to this massive ship they’re living on – with an angel that can literally create anything out of anything else.  It’s rather sci-fi, actually – like travelling on a space ship across loooong distances with your onboard computer who can synthesize whatever you might need.  Except this is the end of the world and these people are all that’s left of humanity.  Which gets lost, at times, as these people settle into their lives.  Sure, there’s excitement – when Ishmael (who I’m pretty sure was so blatantly and clearly an angel that I was dumbfounded as to how nobody else picked up on it but Pickie.  Who I’ll come to in a moment) washes up, when they find the ghost ship (which was… definitely creepy as hell), even the wedding.  But it becomes, in a testament to human endurance and perseverance, the mundane rather quickly.  Humans are incredibly adaptable creatures and that point shines through quite clearly.

A side note, with potential spoilers: who/what the fuck is Pickie Beecher?  He apparently had a part in Gob’s Grief as well – and he tells everyone he’s 137 years old.  And, apparently, he’s a vegetarian vampire.  Or something.  I don’t entirely understand it, myself, and that frustrated me – it was this wonderful and exciting plot point that never really went anywhere.  Hell, it didn’t even get any sort of resolution or development.  It just floated off to the side, along with about seven thousand other questions.

This is where the book falls down, for me: the questions.  Too much time spent on the humdrum, on the procedural-in-the-face-of-the-unbelievable, and not enough time – not nearly enough – on the wrap-up.  I’m about to step into SPOILERS territory, so be fair warned.  Okay?  Okay.

This strange disease that infects everyone and turns them into ash – umm, “da fuck?” as my friends used to say.  Similarly, what’s with this green fire.  Why is Jemma special?  Why the hell is her brother one of the angels, the recording angel?  How did he know he was going to be leaving when he was a kid – did he know this was what was coming?  What was up with Ishmael?  Could the short chapters where the angel (or angels, I don’t even know) interjects have been any more obnoxious and annoying?  (seriously, it was like the Angel in Angels in America only about ten times as annoying as she was to Prior)

I suppose leaving so many questions unanswered can be solved with the whole “divine essence is unknowable” cop-out – but that’s what it is, a cop-out.  This book isn’t pitched as religious fiction – although it has religious elements – so you can’t expect a reader to swallow the “oh, can’t answer that, mysteries of God!” pill.  Especially when the author spends so much time on the mundane and minute and frankly boring – once people started dying at the end, did we really have to see each and every character’s unique death?  Could we not have wrapped that up a little faster and trimmed a good 50 pages off the back end?  And while we’re at it, trim the monotony of the beginning down by about 100 pages.  Then take 25 pages and sprinkle in a little – just a little – clarification of the mumbo-jumbo.  That’d be great.

Rating: 3 out of 5.  The book is evocative, no doubt.  I felt hopeless at the end - despite the hope that arrives on literally the second-to-last page.  It was just a depressing ride from about page 450 onward, despite the fun and happy times that had poked in through the middle of the book.  That’s just not enough, though – to make me feel that hollowness.  The hospital was a cool invention but even the coolest of inventions grows a little ho-hum after a while (just as it does for the residents) and so you need something else.  Something cohesive, propulsive.  The plot in this book moves like a 15 year old trying out driving for the first time.  You get whiplash at times from the way it will ALL OF THE SUDDEN PICK UP THE PACE and then drop it to a crawl just as quickly.  I think Adrian is a good writer and he’s clearly got a fantastic imagination – but I’d like to see him under the knife of a savvy editor who can help turn that imagination into something anyone outside of his head can more clearly follow.

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May 16 2011
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Classical, Fiction, Literature, Plays

The Tragedy of Arthur

The Short Version: Arthur Phillips uses the ‘introduction’ to the first major printing of a heretofore undiscovered Shakespeare to tell the story of how this play came to be and, in the telling, ends up telling most of his life’s story.  Turns out his dad was a conman and that this play might be his greatest con.  Along the way, he manages to alienate his twin sister (and get her girlfriend pregnant), barely patch up his relationship with the jailbird father before his death, and nearly cock up his literary career for good.

The Review:  God damn it, what an interminable book.  The novel itself is 250 pages long, the play another ~120.  I will address the play first, having just seen the world premiere reading of it by the Guerrilla Shakespeare Project: the play is certainly interesting.  It has its moments, that’s for sure – but it is also (as I think it is best captured by the brief summary of a minor character in the novel, I think his name was Tom) most definitely not Shakespeare.  It doesn’t have his unique fingerprint.  It does not move like his work.  You can say what you want about the man from Stratford but when you compare his work to the work of the other surviving Elizabethan/Jacobean playwrights, his work is unique.  It has, yes, a fingerprint that is inimitable.  Arthur Phillips does a decent job at pastiche but cannot hold a candle to the confluence of imagination and chutzpah that Shakespeare whipped up.

Now onto the novel.  How a novel so short can irritate me so much, I am not entirely sure.  I can tell you, however, that it sure did irritate me.  Hoo-boy.

The novel is, as John Warner might call it, a “white male fuck-up novel” when all is said and done.  Arthur Phillips is a (nominally) Jewish white male from Minnesota who, you guessed it, fucks up his life.  The play is simply the catalyst – but that might even be too generous.  It is the MacGuffin to this plot – because really, the play doesn’t matter.  Phillips himself makes this point a number of times, before going back on himself and vacillating yet again.  Phillips had a shitty relationship with his father – he felt betrayed by his father and, as so often happens, that can mess up a young man for good.  He manages to keep an even-ish keel, though, thanks to his twin sister Dana.  They are the best kind of siblings – always having each other’s backs, always keeping each other honest.  I liked this about them.

I even tolerated the ridiculous conceit (really, even having a brand new Shakespeare would not guarantee an author free reign to write whatever the hell he pleased in the introduction.  A publishing house will have lawyers and they will make sure they get to do at least some kind of editing) that forced me to endure over 140 pages of Arthur’s childhood and his adolescence and his finding-himself time and his dislike for Shakespeare as a child.  Just write the damn biography – or fake biography, as this appears to be – and leave out the meta “oh, but I’m supposed to be using this time to talk about the play!” bullshit.  It just makes you seem like you think you’re hot stuff, Mr. Phillips, but in an “emperor’s got no clothes” kind of way.  I endured this because I liked the relationship between Arthur and Dana.  They were quirky, their family was quirky – it wasn’t the sort of quirk I expected (I would’ve picked up that other book, the name of which escapes me at the moment, that came out this year about a family obsessed with Shakespeare) but it was an enjoyable and real kind of quirk, so I went with it.

Phillips really started to lose me around the time Arthur drunkenly loses a bet with his sister in a bar one night and ends up getting “Arthur Rex” tattooed on his penis.  Yep, you heard me right – and apparently while it was erect.  The absolute ridiculousness of this moment very nearly led me to toss the book into a corner where it would never be heard from again.  It was unnecessary and just bloody stupid – not to mention more than a little unrealistic (I don’t care HOW drunk, a guy like Arthur – the Arthur we’ve been introduced to thus far – isn’t going to let that actually happen).  Also, it just completely disappears from the book after a page.  Despite the sex that happens throughout the rest of the book.  Um.  Really?

SPOILERS DO FOLLOW because I can’t talk about how idiotic the rest of the book is without bringing up spoilers.  The book rapidly speeds downhill, picking up speed and knocking out signposts to reality rather willy-nilly.  Dana’s lesbian girlfriend?  Sure, Arthur falls in love at first sight – and then gets her pregnant!  Arthur comes to believe his father about the play, despite years of reasons why he SHOULDN’T, and then turns on a dime with his father’s body basically still warm because he found an illegible index card!  Dana fakes her death to get Arthur’s attention or something and then, along with her mother and Petra (the girlfriend) convince Arthur to undertake a year completely out of contact with them (yes, this is pulled directly from Love’s Labour’s Lost.  yes, it feels as labored and ridiculous and false as you think it will)!  The play turns out to maybe have been real because so far most critics and scientific tests say “it isn’t NOT real” and therefore it must be real!

Arthur Phillips (the author and the character – I cannot separate them, having never read any of Phillips’ other work) is also, as it turns out, a pretty mediocre writer.  How he managed to cook up some of the moments of the “Shakespeare” play, I’ll never know – because a few of them are quite lovely.  HIs dialogue is flat, his attempts to be the smartest guy in the room (talking about what Shakespeare means and addressing the idea that we owe him too much and oh-my-god-how-hipster…… turns out he lives in Brooklyn and, I’m sorry to say it, but I’m not surprised.  seriously, the hipster “I’m too cool” attitude is all over this book) are cloying at best and idiotic at worst, his narrative device is interesting for about a half-second before you realize how unrealistic it is – and then you start to realize how ramblingly and poorly written it is and you have to ask yourself: “This guy – the character and the author – has written four other novels, which all did pretty well?  HOW?”

Rating: 1 out of 5 for the “novel” – but it gets an extra star for the play because, well, it takes balls to pastiche Shakespeare and Phillips manages to do a half-decent job.  Stunning, considering the rest of the book goes from mediocre family-life tale to hackneyed, overcooked plot devices with one-dimensional characters in the space of about 200 pages.  I wanted this book to be so much more than it was – it could’ve had a lot to say about Shakespeare but everything, even the good & intelligent bits, are overshadowed by the fact that, as I read the last page of the novel, I was heard to say aloud “you have got to be fucking kidding me.”  That’s a line of iambic pentameter, by the way (with a possible trochee at the first foot).  So there, maybe it isn’t so hard.

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May 14 2011
2 Comments
Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, Literature

Anansi Boys

The Short Version: Fat Charlie Nancy never really liked his father, who always found ways to embarrass him.  When Fat Charlie’s dad dies, though, he finds out that he not only has a brother called Spider – but that his father was the trickster god Anansi.  What starts off as a sibling reunion turns into something much worse, as Spider recklessly takes control of Fat Charlie’s life and Fat Charlie enters into a dangerous bargain to rid himself of his brother.  There’s some hoodoo, some voodoo, and a number of trips back and forth across the Atlantic – and of course a bit of self-discovery.  Blood, after all, is far thicker than water.

The Review: Neil Gaiman (whose episode of Doctor Who airs tonight, ps) is one of my favorite authors.  American Gods, as faithful readers know, is one of my favorite novels of all time.  This book, a sort-of sequel, takes place in the same universe (as I believe Neverwhere does… but I don’t know if that’s actually true, that’s just my own imagined hope/belief) as AG and one of the major supporting players in that book is the catalyzing force of this one: Anansi.  The wily old trickster in his hat, smoking his cheroot, laughing and dancing – he’s here, but only briefly.  The story here, as mentioned, deals with his two sons – essentially twins, although there’s a bit of a twist (albeit a predictable one) in that tale.

I was curious to see how this novel would play.  It’s far tighter in scope, far more intimate.  The adventure, yes, bounces between Florida and London and the Caribbean – but it doesn’t have that epic feel that Gods had.  It is a family story.  Of course, family stories can be trying, especially when there’s the obligatory Discovery Of Previously Unknown Family and the Irritation At ‘New’ Sibling and the Reveal Of Self-Worth and all that stuff.  But this is Gaiman – of course it was going to be more than I’d expected.

First off, although the story has some deeply American roots – it isn’t an American story.  So in that sense, it immediately rejected my predictions.  Fat Charlie, although born in the States, flees to England as a kid and so he’s basically straight-up English.  This is important to keep in mind because it allows Gaiman to write about, well, what he knows.  Yes, he’s a dual citizen and all that – but seeing Gaiman return to the scene of London and to even talk about Piccadilly, Leicester Sq, etc… it calls up thoughts of Neverwhere.  You realize that he’s writing about home – and as a result, some of the Floridian scenes feel even more otherworldly.  Because Florida is, even to me (and I’m a full-blooded American, no matter how often I pretend to be a Brit), a pretty otherworldly place.  I can’t wait to read Karen Russell’s Swamplandia for that very reason.  But to see that strangeness from the perspective of a Brit is, well, rather entertaining.  The four large older ladies who help/hinder Fat Charlie – they’re a hoot.  Exactly what you expect large older Southern ladies to look/sound/act like.  I picture all of them as some variation on the theme of the old lady in the Coen Brothers remake of The Ladykillers.  To give you an idea.

I will admit that the female characters in this book – Daisy and Rosie, specifically – are a bit underdeveloped.  This was not a huge sticking point but it did bug me a little.  They seemed… two-dimensional instead of three.  Whereas Charlie and Spider… well, they’re two halves of a whole.  Like a starfish cut in half that then becomes two separate starfish.  They both feel like complete characters.  The last scenes with Charlie, especially, are terrific – because you suddenly see the Charlie who was lurking around the edges come out in full force.  That latent potential is realized, wonderfully.  Likewise, we get to see the flip side of Spider’s personality.  They’re brothers – with all the feelings and thoughts and life that comes with that term.  I liked them.

The plot trucks along at a solid pace and Gaiman keeps it light – in his Q&A at the end, he mentions that although the book veers towards horror at times, it’s really a comedy.  I do think that the subplots with Rosie’s mom, Maeve, and even Daisy are all a little thin – they don’t bring much to the table and he knows it so there’s never all that much time spent in those specific stories.  Still, it all comes together at the end (as it should) and I understand why we did spend that time in those spots.  I’m just not sure that it couldn’t've been done in a slightly more meaningful and dense way.

Rating: 5 out of 5.  The humor, the pathos, the pace, and the sheer story of a Gaiman novel are why you read his work.  Some of them are better than others – but none of them are bad.  This book gets great marks for all of those things and for providing a delightful return to the world set up in American Gods.  Sure, it has some problems – and it isn’t as good a novel as Gods or even Neverwhere - but it’s still really damn good.   Read it over a cloudy weekend when you can let your imagination run free.  Oh, and I hope you aren’t scared of spiders (like I am….) because there are some creeeeeeepy spider moments.  *shudder*

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May 10 2011
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Fiction, Literature

Damascus

The Short Version: At a bar called Damascus in the Mission District in San Fran, there are all kinds of assorted odd-types.  They’re all damaged in their own ways and they find solace in this dive.  It takes an art installation about the Iraq War to change their lives and remind us all just what kind of country it is we live in.

The Review: Interesting story about this one.  This is, I think it relatively safe to say, a book that would’ve otherwise passed me by.  Perhaps some great reviews (once it hits stores in October) might’ve put it on my radar… but I think I would’ve missed this one.  Except Josh Mohr, the author, reached out to me after seeing this blog and finding me on Goodreads.  He asked me if I’d like an advance proof of the book, to read and review and hopefully (if I liked it) recommend.  This isn’t like There Is No Year - this is the author himself, reaching out months before publication.  This book sitting next to me is an “uncorrected proof” – although I didn’t notice any errors, FYI.  So this was a pretty cool thing for me and I was honored to tell Josh “yes, I’ll read it!”

The gamble (on both of our parts) paid off pretty well – because I really liked this book.  Would’ve been a little awkward had I not, you know?  But, despite a few bumps here and there, I found this to be a thought-provoking and (perhaps more importantly) wholly engaging little novel.  And it is little - my copy runs just over 200 pages.  Barely bigger than a novella, really (the word count, I suppose, is what would define that).  But its size is one of its blessings – had it been longer, I think it might’ve overstayed its welcome.

The book starts off in a way that just gets me: the narrator (who otherwise remains relatively third-person omniscient) starts the story.  ”Let’s start this one when a cancer patient named No Eyebrows…” is a hell of an opener.  It reminds me a bit of Sharp Teeth, if I’m being totally honest – the classic invocation of The Beginning.  Not quite calling for inspiration from the gods or invoking the muses for an epic – but there’s a sense of story there.  The author takes a moment to invite us inside.  There’s almost something familiar about it, even though I’ve not read either of Mohr’s other books.  This is another story, in the pantheon of stories – welcome to it.  The other moments where that narrator’s voice appears were also welcomed happily.

Of course, that opening sentence also worried me.  The cancer patient’s name is “No Eyebrows”?  Pretty quickly we’re introduced to characters named Revv and Shambles and the owner of this bar has a birthmark like a Hitler mustache?  Weird names/attributes for weird people is so often a tired cliche – it’s like “look, this person is strange!” when you could do so much more to show me that they’re strange.  That they’re damaged.  That they’re the sort of sad-sack people you hope you never become.  But I fought through the initial urge to roll my eyes… and discovered some wonderfully deep individuals.  Shambles, who remains perhaps the most enigmatic (that ending…), was warm and loving and had a bigger heart than a lot of real people I know.  No Eyebrows – when I found out his real name, I actually said it aloud and laughed to myself.  Because it seemed strange – that person is not the one I’d gotten to know; I’d gotten to know No Eyebrows.  They were different, slightly.

Even the Hitler mustache (if there’s one scene I really did roll my eyes at, it was the scene with the little girl calling him Hitler) on Owen faded away – the Santa suit idea was hilarious and (this is, perhaps, most telling about how quickly I got sucked into the book) not-at-all ridiculous.  When he bought the Santa suit, I simply thought “yeah, okay” and kept right on going.

The plot itself is somewhat loose – although there is a central story, which I’ll address in a moment.  This book is very much a collection of people’s lives, all intersecting with this bar called Damascus.  It’s also a story about America in 2003 (now addressing the central story, ps).  About who we were at that dark, dark time – and, in some ways, about who we still are.  Bin Laden’s death adds an unexpected layer to this novel because that death, while largely symbolic, is still a note of closure on the whole damn reason we got into Iraq.  And I remember how frustrated everyone was in 2003.  Think about The Hurt Locker and the mental stresses those soldiers go through – well, there’s a lot of that in this book.

See – Owen, owner of the bar, agrees to host an art installation in which a young artist has painted twelve pictures of soldiers who died in Iraq… and she nails a living catfish to each of them.  Her idea is to let the fish stay and rot and smell and thus remind everyone, viscerally, just what is happening in Iraq when our countrymen are dying.  Is this a little sick?  Yes.  Absolutely.  But it also makes a pretty strong point – and one that it would’ve been good to continually remind everyone of as our soldiers were dying over there.  The reaction of the soldiers who see the installation – which I won’t spoil for you here – is not surprising but its also terrifying.  The blind passion with which people will not tolerate divergent opinions or even divergent ways of expressing the same opinion… that will be the downfall of civilization.  Blindly hating on someone else just because you don’t understand or they offend you or they think about something differently than you do.  I can’t even look at the cover of this week’s New Yorker (the erased drawing of Bin Laden) the same way I might’ve before I read this book.  There’s something about this book and what happens to the installation/the artist/the ideas they represent that just… makes me think somewhat differently about what it means to show vs. erase the image of someone no longer here.

I’ve gone on for a long time – bit longer than I often do.  This is because, as I mentioned to Josh in an email last night, the book made me pause when I finished it.  I put it down and had to just let it sit for a while.  I had to let my life resume, go through my day at work today, and now come back to the review just to let the book settle a bit.  I was not expecting to find the book so thought-provoking, so (in a way) challenging.  I haven’t even talked about the excellent portrayal of a cancer patient – one that most books wholly devoted to the subject would be hard-pressed to come up with.  Sure, the book does at times get a little too clever for itself.  Sometimes, it feels a little too indebted to authors like Chuck Palahniuk and the modern nihilists.  I’d even say that the pacing of the end could’ve been rearranged a bit – I wasn’t sure I liked the order in which the stories wrapped up.  But none of that changes the fact that I never wanted to put the book down.  Not once.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.  The flaws it does have are ones that keep it from a perfect rating – but I think that its flaws actually make it a more appealing book.  It’s scrappy, small, proud to put it all out there and then leave you be.  The author’s note thanks the reader for taking the time to dip into this book in particular – and that’s rather what it feels like.  You dipped in and then it was over – but that short time you spent with it was well worth the effort.  Joshua Mohr is one to look out for – he’s only going to get even better and I’ll be proud to say I was there when Damascus first came out.

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May 07 2011
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Wolf Hall

The Short Version: The story of Thomas Cromwell, real-life figure from the reign of Henry VIII.  We get a brief glimpse of his life as a boy and then jump forward to his time with Cardinal Wolsey and his eventual rise to Henry’s chief advisor.  Meanwhile, in England, Henry is working to fracture the church, Anne Boleyn is working her way into his heart and bed, and most of the English court is playing a double game while they wait to see how this will all turn out.

The Review:  Reading a massive book like this takes something out of you.  It’s been long enough (oy, barely two weeks) since I finished a book that I rather forget what it’s like, finishing.  This novel doesn’t entirely feel finished, of course.  The last fifty pages or so don’t, exactly, wrap anything up.  They just tidily finish things like any of the other sections of this book – but Cromwell’s story is far from over.  But I understand why Mantel opted to end the book roughly where she did.  We see Thomas More, who (I believe) the book puts forth as Cromwell’s nemesis of sorts, meet his death and Cromwell safely (for the time being) placed at the very top of the kingdom.  This is a conclusion, in its own right, and so one must be content with it.  That, and I was about ready to be finished with this book.

It is a consuming book in more ways than just sheer word/page count, too.  The images of these characters are stamped into modern consciousness thanks to The Tudors and so, as a result, you have to deal with Henry looking suspiciously like Jonathan Rhys-Meyers… but that fades, eventually, and you find that Ms. Mantel has wrapped you up into this story almost while you weren’t looking.  It plays out at a sometimes glacial pace – but that’s rather the point.  This is almost a biography, really.  It is a literary biography, you might say.  As a result, she doesn’t make any effort to hide the fact that – as in all lives – there are points that drag on a bit too long, that are a bit mundane, that are a bit lackluster, and so on.  The book is never boring – the prose is too well-crafted for that – but it is rather consuming.  Much like a life is expected to be.

The story, of course, is the one we all know.  Again, thanks to The Tudors, people other than AP Euro students (or unreformed former AP Euro students, like yours truly) know who Thomas Cromwell is – but that show was like Soap Opera England.  This is the real stuff.  The real politics, the nittygritty.  Mantel does a nice job at keeping it grounded – even when Cromwell is sleeping with his dead wife’s sister (not as weird as it sounds, I promise), it’s never really a part of the narrative.  It is just an interesting addendum to Cromwell’s very busy life.  And what a life it was: he’s the first Josh Lyman, really.  He doesn’t want to be The Guy, he wants to be the guy The Guy counts on.  And he is.  Really fascinating politicking and maneuvering – stuff that some people might find boring but I find fascinating.  Henry’s push to get divorced and remarried takes up a large amount of this politicking, of course, but the ramifications… Wolsey’s fall from grace, fractured alliances across Europe, the common people listening to false prophets – all of those things come into play and Cromwell handles them adroitly.

Of course, his story doesn’t end well.  We know this (from history) – but Mantel is smart enough to leave him at the top.  She’s apparently writing another book, a sequel, that will detail the rest of his life – but at this moment, one doesn’t need it.  A fully realized and expansive novel like this one (I must point you to the massive list of characters – by no means complete, either – that nearly every review comments on) should be reward enough.  I felt, quite often, like I was reading history – in the way that the best historical films make you feel, briefly, like you’re seeing history.

Rating: 5 out of 5.  The only flaw, if it could be called that, in this book is that it does get a bit long in the tooth at times.  The ending, especially, seemed somewhat out of sync with the rest of the novel.  But that’s irrelevant.  The smart writing – this is not a book for the average person, oh no – and the delicately crafted 1520s/30s England that appears fully formed out of this novel are beautiful, wondrous, and rare qualities to find in any book.  Find a big chunk of time and allow yourself to devote it to this book.  The rewards are rich and sumptuous, I promise.

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