Posted in February 2012 …

Feb 28 2012
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Fantasy, Fiction

A Clash of Kings (A Song of Ice & Fire, Book 2)

The Short Version: Winter is on its way – but first comes war.  With Robert Baratheon dead, multiple claimants to the throne (or a throne, any throne) pop up across Westeros and civil war immediately tears the land apart.  While the Stark children struggle to survive in this harsh new world, a dragon-bearing queen fights across the dead sands of a land across the world – and in the North, a bastard discovers a danger far greater than any of the warring families can fathom.  An Imp is a hero, a ward becomes a traitor, and blood is spilled.  War has come to Westeros.

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS.

The Review: This book is simultaneously better and not-quite-as-good as its predecessor.  Let me begin by dispensing with my one problem, namely that everything gets a bit… well, confusing.  There are so many goddamn lords and knights and alliances and double-crosses, triple-crosses, sellswords… and while I’m fine keeping track of most of that, I have an issue when it comes to characters I don’t care about.  Case in point: Theon Greyjoy.  A petulant boy who we certainly aren’t supposed to like, he goes from being a secondary character with interesting characteristics to a downtrodden son of a king to a wily fighter… and yet I never once got a handle on who he was, what the hell his faction had anything to do with, and why George R. R. Martin was wasting his (and my) time.  I understand that to see the sack of Winterfell, we couldn’t see it through Bran’s eyes and thus we needed a character who could be part of the sacking – but while I understood Theon’s motivation (he wants to impress his dad!), I didn’t understand how he could be so stupid and why, in the end, it mattered.  The town is leveled in the end and Theon hopefully killed… and it doesn’t do much other than get Bran out of the castle and into the wilderness.  Big fucking whoop – there were an infinite number of ways to’ve dealt with that and not forced me to spend time with a character so flat, made even more flat by the brilliantly realized characters surrounding him.

Okay, now onto the good stuff.  For example, said brilliantly realized characters.  I mean, has there been such a fascinating character as Tyrion Lannister in all of fantasy?  I argue that the answer is no – he even rivals characters created in any fiction.  He is, I say again, fascinating.  Incredibly nuanced, certainly not a good person, but not a bad one necessarily either… I would read an entire book set from his perspective because he’s funny, smart, and engaging.  His persona as written here sparks the imagination!  Coupled with forever imagining him as the wonderful Peter Dinklage, Tyrion becomes a character who surpasses the world he was created for.  He is a character, like Gandalf or Darth Vader, who should (and hopefully will) enter the public consciousness so that even non-readers will know exactly who you’re talking about when you mention his name.

The plot moves forward like an army smashing into its foe: there’s a whole lot of momentum and then a big explosion – and then chaos.  The battle scenes are well-rendered, although strangely detached.  Ser Cleos’ battle at King’s Landing is probably the best-written of the bunch, seen from the water and all the more original for watching the Baratheons discover Tyrion’s brilliant schemes moments too late each time.  On the other hand, Tyrion’s decision to ride out and engage in battle, while interesting and developmental, was a lost opportunity – it felt rote, like any other battle sequence in any other fantasy novel.  That doesn’t mean it was bad, that just means it was predictable and somewhat ordinary, despite having such a unique character in the hotseat.

The plot itself, I realize, hasn’t actually moved forward all that much.  Daenerys doesn’t really get all that much closer to come back to Westeros and while I have to assume the prophecies from the (admittedly very creepy) sequence in the House of the Undying Ones will come into play later in the series… this plot feels a little secondary and my attention was rarely captured on the same level as some of the other plots.  Even Arya’s plot this time around, as she pretends to be a boy and tries to evade capture/discovery, was less-than-engaging at times.  At the end, as she suddenly grows up in the face of her plight, I realized the mirror between the two sisters – both of them hit a major developmental milestone (womanhood for both of them, although in very different ways) – but I found that Arya’s was quite a bit of biding time until she could ‘level up’, in a way.  Sansa’s plot was interesting in the way that it’s interesting to watch your bratty sibling have to grow up – and for the insight we gained into Cersei’s head.

Of course, for my money, the best plot (next to Tyrion’s, of course) has been Jon’s.  Ranging far North of the Wall, trying to discover just what the hell is going on, Jon’s got the most mysterious plot.  Are there giants?  What the hell is up with this Mance guy?  And the wights? And does any of this make any sense to anyone else?  WHAM captured by wildlings.  It’s all very engaging in a journeyman mystery sort of way and I dig that.

In the end, though, the general scope of the story hasn’t changed.  Towns and castles have been traded, blood has been shed… but really there isn’t much of a difference in the scope of things.  There’s a war on – and there seems to be no end in sight.  Perhaps with a few of the outliers dead, the next books will be a little more manageable in terms of who is who and why they are important to this person or that person.  I hope, anyway.

Rating: 4 out of 5.  Mostly, this book suffers a bit from second-book syndrome.  It has all the same awesome of the first novel, but it’s a little longer and a little fatter at times.  The characters are becoming incredibly realized, which is a wonderful thing to experience, but there’s a limit to how deep you can go into such a sprawling world before you start to lose your audience a little.  Feeling a little lost isn’t a bad thing – in fact, it’s sort of exciting to be swept up in it all – but I worry about Martin’s ability to hold the reins together.  The next book is going to need to have some serious further developments instead of being another The Empire Strikes Back. Development is fun but even a little resolution goes a long way…

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Feb 19 2012
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Classical, Contemporary, Plays

The Underpants

The Short Version: When Louise’s underpants mysteriously fall off during a parade for the King, Theo is convinced that he will lose his job and everything he holds dear.  Meanwhile, under his nose, two gentlemen who got a view of Louise’s nether regions have arrived to rent their available room – and make off with Louise in the process.

The Review: You know, I think there’s a reason we go to the French for our farces and not the Germans.  If there’s one thing that seems entirely at odds with the Germanic attitude, it’s frivolity – and that’s what a farce needs in order to run.  Steve Martin (yes, he of the wild & crazy) does a good job at bringing a sense of fun to the play but I wonder if it’s actually just lacking a fundamental sense of how a farce should work.

It’s funny enough, don’t get me wrong – the elements are all in place, with people entering and exiting at just the right moments and deceptions and betrayals happening right in front of unseeing eyes.  There’s even a great little appearance by the King himself at the end of the play, which is amusing and curious… and yet nothing’s really done with it, as Louise seems to’ve given up on the idea of finding a lover at that point.  Of course, it could be played that she and the King have an understanding – whereas on the page there’s no such revelation.

I just found it lacking in a certain snap that I look for in my farces.  Look at David Ives’ The Liar.  That update isn’t even really a farce, per se, but it zips.  It has a sense of energy and perpetual humoric (made that word up) motion.  This play doesn’t ever reach that level of non-stop breathless manic action.  Instead, it picks up speed and certainly has a few laughs… but I only found it moderately entertaining as opposed to wildly so.

I will say that the update (as Martin mentions in his preface) works well – it sheds some light on the circumstances of the modern era as opposed to just being a faithful translation of the original work.  I appreciated Martin’s tossed-in line about “waiting for the adaptation” of the “new Sternheim” that Gertrude sees.  I liked the gender politics angle of the play, especially in light of the recent uproar over gender politics in the US – in fact, I think that was the most interesting part of the whole shebang.  But you never want the politics to be the most interesting part of a farce!  You want the funny to be the most important part… and sadly, here, it isn’t even a contest.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.  A good adaptation and probably a better staged production than the script allows.  Barry Edelstein, a director I greatly admire, was the one who shepherded this into production when he was running CSC in New York and I desperately wish I had seen it.  As for now, I’m glad to’ve read it – but it hasn’t really done much to truly excite me on the page.

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Feb 18 2012
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Contemporary, Plays

Icecream

The Short Version: Caryl Churchill’s late 80s thriller, about an American couple who meet their distant English relations and get caught up in a murder.

The Review: The play starts a little slow.  The first three scenes are confusing and not entirely cohesive… there’s a 40-something American couple and they’re in England and they’re looking around at something and it gets confusing.  You don’t know what they’re doing or why they’re there.  But then they meet a 20-something pair of siblings who are distantly related to them and the play kicks into gear.  Suddenly there’s a sense of tension and menace about the play – Phil, the brother, is a Hitchcockian villain and the play turns into a “Man Who Knew Too Much” sort of nightmare.

Then, at the halfway point, it shoots forward a year and crosses the pond, turning into a strange (albeit still nightmarish) American travelogue.  Phil and Jaq come to visit their relatives and send the Americans into a state of disarray: they believe that they’re still in danger of being found out for the murder Phil committed right in front of them in England.  But when they realize that things aren’t so dire… they warm up to the siblings again.   It’s Phil’s unexpected death that sends Jaq out into the wilds of America and where she encounters some creepy stereotypes straight out of American horror movies.

But the play ends without any real sense of… anything.  The tension, if this play’s done right, never fades and instead we see just a strange and rather warped view of two societies, filtered through the lens of pyschopathy.  Phil and Jaq are both, as it turns out, murderous and their relatives are so passive and docile that the relations themselves seem tenuous at best.  Mostly, the whole thing feels a bit tenuous if you think about it too much.  The tossed-off scene of Phil getting physically intimate with Vera is odd – much as the scene between Jaq and the professor is jarring and somewhat mercurial in tone.  There’s a lot of interesting possibilities here but it feels like Churchill never quite lets them off the leash.  The recurring images of forests and hidden bodies is allowed to creep up but it never takes over into something actually scary.

Rating: 3 out of 5.  I think, in a well-handled production, this would be a cracking thriller.  I mean really seriously intense – but I think it could also feel like a copout, like a fizzle.  There are a lot of differences between Brits and Americans (how we say “ice cream” is only one of them) but when you’re playing with broadly stroked stereotypes, you have to really punch it so that it doesn’t feel cliche or flat.  This walks that very fine line.

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Feb 18 2012
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Non-Fiction

The Year of Magical Thinking

The Short Version: Didion’s exploration of grief and mourning in the year after her husband’s sudden death.  Part memoir, part academic thought-exercise, part biography, it adds up to be a lucid and thought-provoking examination of just what it means to lose someone and how such a loss can thoroughly shift your life.

The Review: I didn’t entirely know what to expect when I finally came round to reading this book.  I hadn’t seen Vanessa Redgrave on Broadway, although I had considered it.  I don’t really know Didion’s writing beyond that I confused her for Joyce Carol Oates as a younger reader and the one or two pieces of hers that I’d seen in The New Yorker or something.  And the concept of grief is something that troubles me, that I struggle with.

I think, perhaps, the best way to approach the book is to take stock of your own life and the tragedies that have befallen you, personally.  I have not lost a parent or a sibling or a lover.  I have lost grandparents and I have lost an old school friend, someone who I grew up with.  But in all of those cases, I am troubled to admit that I did not grieve as I had expected I would or as I felt I should.  I don’t entirely remember my paternal grandmother’s passing except that it happened on Thanksgiving 1996 – I distinctly remember telling my younger cousin Brendan why everyone had come back to my house instead of going to see her.  I remember the wake but not the funeral – the cousins put on an epic, multi-hour theatrical… event, I guess, that might’ve seemed inappropriate but was in fact a celebration of the woman who had reigned over our family for so long.  It was a memorial to the grandfather we never met, too – the man who’d died on that very stage.  But I don’t believe I cried.

Similarly when my maternal grandmother died, I don’t recall crying until many weeks later.  Long after the funeral, at which I did tear up but did not cry.  I noticed it among my family as well – my grandmother had lived a long and incredibly full life and, at the end, it was her body that failed her still incredibly sharp mind.  I hadn’t gone to see her in her final days because I didn’t want my last memory of her to be someone who wasn’t the smartest person in the room.  I mourned her in the sense that I was glad that she could finally be at peace – but I was not, per se, mourning her.

And when a childhood friend, a girl I had grown up with and who had dated my best friend in high school, died tragically a couple years ago, I found myself strangely unmoved until I stood at the funeral surrounded by people I’d not spoken to in literally years (a long and complicated falling out left me detached from the people I’d been closest to in high school) and I snuck away to a corner and found myself uncontrollably crying – but why?  I hadn’t seen this girl in years, I hadn’t even been all that friendly with her towards the end of our association.

All of these questions that I had and continue to have are, as it turns out, the same questions Didion is wrestling with in this book.  It’s a different end of the spectrum – to have spent forty years married to someone who then suddenly is not there is something I cannot even wrap my head around – but it is still the same spectrum.  The questions of being able to change things, the questions of what we might’ve done differently, the questions of certain memories and certain places that now must be avoided.

The thing that’s most remarkable about this book, though, is that Ms. Didion is able to write so lucidly about something that is, by her own admission, a clouding.  Grief obscures, confuses.  And yet, eventually – as she points out with a mix of sadness and acceptance at the end of the book – one begins to accept it.  Her life, at the end of the writing of this book, was not yet through its most tragic period but the very fact that she was able to start writing this book… and that it then only took her 88 short days to put it together… it is a sign of how time moves us forward.  I am reluctant to say “getting over” the event – because how, how, can you get over such a loss? – but that’s perhaps the best phrase we have for the experience of feeling time continue to push forward and move us away from the epicenter of the quake that destroys what we knew.

There’s a lyrical quality to Didion’s prose – I’ve heard that she was heavily influenced by Hemingway and you can see that in the sparseness and clarity of the writing… but there’s also an elliptical quality that Hemingway, with his sharp clean prose, never would’ve been capable of (or, indeed, interested in).  There is a poetry, in fact, to the writing.  Perhaps its the subconscious links to the world of poetry – I mean, her husband’s name was John Dunne.  Or perhaps it’s the fact that death, the one thing we cannot (no matter how hard we try) truly comprehend, forces us to write in a way that is simultaneously honest and vague.  Both clear and confusing.  We throw as many words as we can at the problem but we will never solve it.  Ever.  And this is, in a way, what this book accomplishes: you can feel the catharsis on the last page, as Didion finally understands as best she can the new world which the year of magical thinking led her to.  It is a beautiful and moving experience, if one that I cannot fully come to grips with (simply because I am too young and too blessedly sheltered to have any experience that I could remotely associate with such a colossal loss).

Rating: 4 out of 5.  I believe this is a book I will revisit as I get older and that my rating may ‘improve’ with time.  There’s nothing wrong with this book – it is superb and moving and funny and sad and brilliant.  But I find myself still grappling with the fact that I’ve yet to encounter a truly earth-shattering form of grief.  May it be that I never have to – may my parents live into old age, may my children outlive me, may my sister and I die on the same day, may my wife do the same, may I luckily only ever have to experience the sadness of the passing of a beloved dog for the foreseeable future.  But when the reaper does come knocking close to my heart, I take comfort in the knowledge that this book will be here.  That minds greater than mine have been unmoored by grief in the same way that I will.  I place this writing next to Hamlet’s early soliloquies as the prose that will be my crutch when my own words are taken away.

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Feb 15 2012
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Contemporary, Plays

Some Explicit Polaroids

The Short Version: Nick has been in prison since 1984 and he’s just been released.  Of course, things have changed – people have changed too.  So what’s it mean to be an angry young man when everyone (including you) has grown up and the world has moved on?

The Review: My first interaction with Mark Ravenhill was the execrable Over There at the Royal Court in 2009.  I hated that play with a passion – it was a heavy-handed parable about Germany’s reunification and what capitalism does to people, complete with a wildly unnecessary moment of actual incest at the end of the play.  Neither of those things felt like they needed to be put onstage and I found myself wondering why this Ravenhill guy – who people speak so highly of – was so lauded.

Of course, it’s perfect that this play should come across my radar.  It’s like, in some ways, he was predicting his own future.  See, Shopping and Fucking (which I’ve never actually read all of, only done scenes from) was this smash of a play – totally in-yer-face, totally shaking up theatrical conventions and what-not.  But you can’t be an angry young man for your whole life and this is a play about that exact conundrum.  He didn’t learn anything from it re: Over There – but reports show that he has, in fact, learned something from it when it comes to some of his other more recent work.

The play is sharp and spiky in that way so many late-90s/early-2000s plays are.  Reading it, I was reminded of the way I felt when reading LaBute’s The Shape of Things for the first time.  There’s something like a shock about the writing – it feels like a knife, the way the words cut right through to the harsh way people actually speak.  It’s not something I’m comfortable writing (if you haven’t noticed, I’m a big fan of lots of words all the time) but, as it turns out, something I’m quite comfortable speaking.  I think that’s because it mimics the way most people actually speak today.  Every once and a while, someone launches into something long and flowery but for the most part?  It’s rough and jagged.  Guttural, even.

There’s a lot to be said for the way this use of language sheds light on human relationships.  The play is about connection, more than anything else.  It’s about how we connect to other people – whether through physical violence, physical intimacy, verbal violence or intimacy, or the withholding of any of those things.  So it feels a little uncomfortable at times, as a character tries to get close to someone and then finds themselves thrust away.  One character purchases a young man from Central Europe as a sex slave, maintaining that neither of them want feelings and that they just want fun – but that, not surprisingly doesn’t work out.  Another character is consistently beat up by her ex-boyfriend (who never appears on stage).  Yet another character carries the scars of a near-fatal attack by Nick that sent him to jail in the first place.

The play is about how all of our emotional fucked-up-edness – that anger that all of us carry around in one way or another – stunts our human relationships until we can find a way to let it release… turn the anger into love… or at least find a way to balance it out.  There’s nothing wildly redeeming about any character here except that they’re all pretty real – and so you have no choice but to pay attention.

All this said – Ravenhill doesn’t do a great job at fleshing things out.  The AIDS subplot is a bit heavy-handed and honestly unnecessary to the plot – you throw something as big as AIDS into the play, you’d better bring the philosophical weight to back it up and Ravenhill doesn’t.  The play blows by, posturing at making these points instead of actually making them.  Most of this philosophy I’ve been rambling about?  It comes out of what the play made me think instead of what I necessarily read.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.  I’d like to see the play stage, in order to see if human beings speaking the words bring a bit more life to the topic at hand.  But for a rainy gray spring morning, I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather’ve done than sit in a chair near the window and read a good play that called up memories of 2007 and 2009.  I was reminded that sometimes theater needs to feel like a gut-punch – I’ve been up in the clouds for far too long.

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Feb 14 2012
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Fiction, Literature

Beat the Reaper (Peter Brown #1)

The Short Version: Peter Brown, a resident at a dingy Manhattan hospital, is having a rough day.  He was the victim of an attempted mugging on the way to work – he beat the guy up pretty good and brought him into the ER on his way to the office.  He’s got ridiculous patients, students, and attendings… and to top it all off, one of his patients is a former connection of his from his mob days.  So now he’s in a race to keep this guy alive long enough to make sure the rest of his old connections don’t come a-calling, especially since he was last seen tossing his former best friend out a sixth-story window….

The Review: This book has a pull-quote from the stellar Lisa Lutz on the back and the paperback edition has a wonderful little drawing of a reaper fellow on it.  For some reason, though, I always thought this was a “guy actually fights against Death” story and every time I’d read the summary, I would be disappointed.  But then I heard about Wild Thing, the sequel which apparently involves cryptozoology, and I knew I had to give this a shot.  Plus, Barnes & Noble always suckers me in when they’ve got hardcovers on sale for like $2.

Firstly, before I forget about it, let me address the reaper drawings in the book.  This is a little quirk about the book but perhaps my favorite thing in the entire book.  And I don’t mean to belittle the rest of the book – but it is this attention to detail that makes me such a fan of Bazell’s creation.  So it starts out that each section marker isn’t the typical *** or anything like that: it’s a little reaper with a scythe.  But at one point, rambling about something, our main character (Bearclaw/Brnwa/Brown) mentions that we still hold onto this antiquated idea of the reaper and in reality he’d be driving a riding tractor today.  Sure enough, the reaper drawing from then on out is riding a tractor.  It’s hilarious and inspired and it’s that little attention to detail that makes an otherwise rather ordinary book rise above and be something a little more.

The book is relatively by-the-numbers in terms of plot.  It’s an intro story, for sure: we get the dual storylines, detailing our hero in his present and how he got to this point.  We see his mob initiation story and how the mob eventually turned on him… we see his childhood vendetta and why that brought him into the mob… we see him in love… and we see him doing his rounds and dealing with this crazy shit in the hospital.  There’s nothing wildly surprising about anything: we know mostly how it’s going to end, although the actual details are occasionally not what you expected.  I didn’t expect the shark-filled denouement of the more youthful story and I didn’t expect the almost-House-like medical savvy our dear Pietro brings to bear even as he’s dealing with a team of mobsters coming after him.  Indeed, the House-esque savant that peeks out of Brnwa’s tough exterior now and then is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the character.  I’d say that it doesn’t fit… but I think, actually, it does.  We just haven’t seen how the whole thing comes together yet.  I think his brusque exterior doesn’t necessarily contradict the super-intelligent doctor but rather that we just didn’t have much time to see the super-intelligent doctor because he was so busy being brusque.  Savvy?

Indeed, if I have a complaint, it is that: the book is over so fast.  I know, I just said that wasn’t really a problem and that this is obviously an origin story so no big thing… but I wanted more.  I wanted more to the point of being unhappy that I didn’t have it.  I could run out and buy the second book now but I’ve got a stacked-enough to-read list at the moment that cryptozoology can take a bit of a backseat.  It’s about this particular book.  The whip-smart voice that comes out of this med student (yes, Bazell was a med student doing his residency when he wrote this) is fantastic.  The footnotes are sharp and to the point – very much of the Pratchettian variety.  The violence is clear and crisp, the dialogue snappy and realistic.  And it’s funny.  There are times that it’s a bit gross too – like using a fibula as a knife, getting jabbed by a needle filled with… something…, etc.  But even then, Bazell seems to know exactly how ridiculous this could all be and so he just treats it like it’s laid out in the operating theatre and this is how it is.  You never feel like he’s taking it too seriously or like he’s playing this for laughs: it’s just very much how it is – and that works so well.  It feels real even as you feel like it could never actually happen.

Rating: 4 out of 5.  An excellent and auspicious debut.  I wish there was more and I’m certainly looking forward to the sequel – but for now, I’m pleasantly pleased by how this book works.  It isn’t anything totally revelatory, as it sits comfortably in the vein of novels like those by the fantastic Ms. Lutz… but it doesn’t need to be.  It’s just a damn fun time and an origin story that (I hope) will spawn many more entertaining adventures.

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Feb 12 2012
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Fiction, Literature

Run

The Short Version: Bernard Doyle, former mayor of Boston, has the highest of hopes for his two adopted sons (Tip and Teddy) but neither of them seem to be interested in the political life he had planned for them.  But a near-miss car accident pulls two strangers into their lives – strangers who might actually be closer to the boys than anyone could’ve known – and everything changes.

The Short Version: This did not feel like an Ann Patchett book.  I don’t know if it was the compressed timeline (with the exception of the final chapter, the book takes place over roughly 24 hours) but it felt far too fast.  I guess that makes sense, with a title like Run, but I don’t read Patchett’s work to feel speed – I read it for exactly the opposite, to feel a sense of relaxation and calmness.  Her usual languid luxurious prose is almost non-existent and as a result you never really feel like you’re actually reading one of her books.  This one is just trying too hard all around.

The plot is a little hackneyed right from the start.  I lived in Boston for four years and while everyone makes light of it… race relations are still a huge problem there.  It’s under the surface now but it was just as hard if not harder to integrate Boston than it was to integrate many Southern cities.  To quote The Departed, “you’re a black guy in Boston – you don’t need any help from me to be completely fucked.”  So the idea of an Irish Catholic mayor adopting two African American siblings requires a surprising amount of suspended disbelief.  I’m not saying it couldn’t/wouldn’t happen – but it’s hard to see them fitting in as well as they do.  That’s just the realities of the town, unfortunately.

Patchett does do a great job at nailing the specifics of Boston – hell, there’s even a B line to Boston College reference.  There are a few little things (there haven’t been subway tokens in Boston since before I got there in 2006) but they’re forgivable in the interest of narrative and artistic license.  But the whole thing seems so academic – it never gains the sense of reality that her other books so easily capture, even in the most extreme and unlikely settings (the Amazon rainforest, a South American mansion under siege, the flat expanses of Nebraska).  It’s almost as though the city of my mind (London being the city of my heart and New York being the city of my existence, for those keeping track) grounded her too firmly in realities and so her prose was never able to take flight.

As a result, the whole book ends up feeling kind of stilted.  You feel gypped at the end of it.  It is so saccharine and cloying by the end that I almost felt like shouting “sell-out!” – because that’s kind of what it is.  There’s a Goodreads review that blasts the book for copping to the Oprah’s Book Club audience and, in many ways, it does.  To be clear, this is instead of writing a book for itself that is then embraced by such mainstream mostly-middle-aged-women book-club-esque groups.  The rest of Patchett’s work (the other three that I’ve read, anyway) falls into this latter category but Run is the former.

There’s also a striking lack of clarity about the book.  I again wonder if this has to do with the changed writing tone – but that’s not for me to answer.  I had a hard time differentiating Tip and Teddy – yes, one was the ichthyologist and one was considering priesthood, but it was a struggle to remember who was older and I think that really this is because they were mostly interchangeable.  They were not developed beyond the point of Capital-Letter delineation.  No shading, no fleshing-out until about 3/4 of the way through the book and, even then, it’s Tip at the expense of Teddy instead of something mutual.  Kenya, the young girl of the story, is perhaps the most fully-formed character but that’s because she gets the narrative task of being “the underprivileged child with a secret who is suddenly thrust into a world of means she’s only ever dreamed of.”  It’s very Dickensian but executed by rote here.  She’s the most developed character because the story demands that she be – not because she’s actually a developed character.

I think there’s a very strong story in here, albeit an odd one.  It reminded me a little bit of Ian McEwan’s far-superior 24-hour-novel Saturday - but McEwan realized his constraints there and made sure to keep things lean and focussed.  Here, we end up with strange and not-necessarily important subplots that don’t really go anywhere.  SPOILERS COMING UP.
It turns out that Tennessee is not, in fact, Kenya’s mom – but she was in fact Tip & Teddy’s.  She took Kenya under her wing after the real Tennessee, her best friend and Kenya’s mom, died.  This is revealed in a dream sequence that recalls The Magician’s Assistant but ends up looking like a poor copy by comparison.  We also find out that Sullivan, the older child of the Doyle clan, apparently killed his girlfriend in a drunk-driving accident and that Bernard and Sullivan decide that it was her driving the car since he can’t remember.  If you’re thinking of Chappaquiddick, I’m sure that was the intent.  Sullivan has been in Africa doing… something?  Stealing anti-virals?  It’s not really clear and Patchett seems to give up caring halfway through telling that particular story.  His character is the most inconsistent: he’s painted as this unreliable failure but once he appears in the novel, he’s probably the most with-it of the whole group.  No explanation is given, really.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5.  I can’t find it in my heart to give this a 2 just because, well, I can’t.  But it isn’t a very good novel.  The plot is predictable and eye-rolling at best, the characters are all surprisingly flat, and Patchett’s “sitting by a stream in a forest” prose is nowhere to be found.  The book felt generic and while it was moderately engaging, I think that was really only because I was trying to ‘run’ to the end of the book.  There were elements of something quite good here – sparks of character, flashes of plot – but they feel like they were all cobbled together in a big mush because the author didn’t have the interest in exploring any one of them individually.  It’s with a heavy heart that I say I’m disappointed by one of my favorite author’s works with this book.

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Feb 09 2012
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Fiction, Literature

The Uncoupling

The Short Version: A small town in New Jersey, full of happy and contented couples of all ages, is suddenly struck by a strange spell that chills the desire of the women and drives them from their husbands’/lovers’/boyfriends’ beds.  Meanwhile, the high school students prepare for opening night of a production of Lysistrata, led by their quirky new drama teacher.

The Review: Before I started reading, I was astonished to see that this book had such a low rating on Goodreads.  It seems like such a great concept and Wolitzer is a moderately respected author – what was the problem?

And even as I started reading, I couldn’t figure out what the issue was. The book itself is a beautiful object – the slight grit on the cover mixed with a heavier glossier paper made it feel great in the hand, the light blue of the actual book itself is quite pleasing – and I was enjoying my introduction to these ordinary folk in Stellar Plains, NJ.  The tone is light and witty and there was a generally Ann Patchett-y feeling to the whole thing.  It was comfortable to read this book and the pages fell away.  And then I started to realize something – I not only knew exactly what was going to happen, but that Wolitzer wasn’t going to come through on actually making it a worthwhile ending.  And this is a shame, because the book has some nice scenes and lots of well-written segments about theater and life and love.

So the sex strike (because that’s essentially what it is – there’s a Lysistrata thing here and let’s not make any bones about it) starts with this mysterious cold wind that breezes over and into these women, sometimes literally in the midst of sex.  It’s a fascinating thing, this breeze: it fights harder to quell the flames of desire in some while others essentially just accept it.  Willa, a young girl caught in the passion of first love and first sex, takes a lot more working than her mother or the older women in town.  And so the reader is left wondering: where does this breeze come from?  What causes it?  Is there a witch?  What’s the deal?

The fact that all of this coincides with a new drama teacher, a strange and opinionated woman, coming to town and choosing to direct Lysistrata should make things clear to even the slowest of readers.  Trust your gut here, folks – you will be rewarded.  Except because the story is so obvious, one expects more from it.  You want there to be an interesting reveal about the witchy teacher, you want the spell to have something to do with the Chinese herbal drug shop, you want something to have an impact.  But nothing does.  Absolutely nothing about this book has an impact because its all so damn obvious.  Will the spell be lifted?  Of course it will.  When will it happen?  If you’ve seen any teen movie ever, you know exactly when the spell will lift.  And suddenly a reader finds themselves lacking any real connection to the story.  The stakes are empty, the tension gone, and all we’re left with are the characters – and none of them are all that wildly exciting and so interest itself flags completely.

See, the characters start interesting – but they all have this artificial arc placed on them because of the sex thing.  Oh, the hot young teacher decides to stop sleeping around… but then just decides to stop sleeping with married men.  Oh, the loving teacher couple stops sleeping together and it breaks the husband’s heart… but then they start sleeping together again.  The only person who arguably doesn’t get a happy ending is Willa – but even that’s ambiguous, thanks to the final scene of her and Eli in Farrest.  It’s frustrating and makes you feel like you’ve wasted your time getting invested in these people if nothing was going to change.

All this said, though, the book is a pleasurable read.  It’s funny, it makes some interesting observations regarding fidelity and intimacy in the modern age… but that’s not enough to sustain a novel.  And then the ending.  The ending whacks off an entire star just for its sheer affront to all that is good in storytelling.  SPOILERS FOLLOW, so, be warned.
It turns out that, indeed, the drama teacher caused the sex strike.  And she’s been doing this all over New Jersey.  And she doesn’t feel bad about it because it makes everyone happier in the end!  Except she messed up this time because her son got her and oh, gosh, whatever will she do?  How miserable for her.  Oh by the way she isn’t actually a witch – she just noticed, empirically, that doing a production of Lysistrata will bring on this sex-strike wind in whatever New Jersey town she’s currently teaching in.  (NOTE: as if you needed another reason to stay away from New Jersey…)

It’s just such a wildly frustrating ending because you feel like Wolitzer thinks its okay, that she’s done a great job wrapping everything up.  She’s congratulating herself even as you’re tearing your hair out and wondering why you’ve just read the book.  Because it’s not bad – it’s just not good, either.  It is so very smack-dab in the middle that it hurts.

Rating: 3 out of 5.  If someone like Sarah Ruhl or Ann Patchett had written this book, I think it would’ve been much different.  I can’t really say it was bad, nor can I rate it as such.  I had an enjoyable time reading it and I certainly enjoyed burning through it.  But the ending was so frustratingly simple and such a cop-out that I can’t really like the book either.  It’s kind of a literary blue-balls, to be crass: so much build up and then you don’t get the release you were looking for.

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Feb 05 2012
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Fiction, Literature

The Lover’s Dictionary

The Short Version:
synopsis, n.
The story of a love affair, told not chronologically but alphabetically.

The Review:
wonderful, adj.
As an unabashed romantic and unrepentant word-user, this book was a tiny slice of perfection.  It manages to encapsulate so much of how we feel in any given relationship while remaining specific to the individual story at hand.

verbose, adj.
By god, there are quite a number of words.  It’s an impressive commitment, really: you decide you’re going to write a book structured as a dictionary, you damn well better make it feel like a dictionary… and Levithan certainly does.  I enjoyed the witty aside about x, too.  Although I personally would’ve used the maybe-not-actually-a-word cheat of the following:
x, n.
A kiss when I can’t kiss you in person.

heart, n.
I mean, it’s on the cover: this book has a huge beating heart.  It’s looking at a relationship through a prism, through a kaleidoscope – and that’s what makes it feel much more intimate and truthful than many other relationship novels.  It’s true because it doesn’t have all the right definitions.

definition, n.
Definition can be a scary thing.  Defining a relationship is probably the hardest thing to do next to breaking up with someone.  But in reality, definitions are simply finding words to explain other words – at least, to a linguistic individual like me.  So these dictionary entries that might be an entire scene or might be a simple sentence… they’re more revealing than an actual definition would be.  In being verbose and rambling, they end up providing a clearer definition than a simple “this is what I meant” could ever hope to provide.

favorite, adj. and n.
It’s hard to choose my favorite entry – but if I were to have a favorite, it would be the one for ‘love’.  I took a picture – take a look: 

light, n. and adj. and v.
The book zipped by in a single sitting.  Under an hour.  Ordinarily, that wouldn’t make me swoon.  But in this case, the light tome ends up providing such radiant beautiful light…. it so perfectly captures my feelings about relationships.  All of our collective feelings about them.  It’s a thing of beauty, a simple clean thought to light one’s way or lighten one’s mood.

Rating: 5+ out of 5.

5+, n.
It is, I think, a perfect book for any time you’re engaged in a relationship: the first dates, the serious-ing, the exclusivity, the hurt, the break-up… It’s beautiful written and ambiguous enough that it’ll appeal to a wide swath of people.  Because we all deal with this thing we call love – but no one ever knows exactly how to put it into words.  David Levithan’s book is probably the closest thing I’ve ever seen to actually putting the concept-at-large into words.  We do it all the time in our own special idiosyncratic ways when we fall for someone, but for the feeling itself as pertains to the human race?  I can’t think of a more charming and lovely way to explain it as it exists in this wondrous moment.

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Feb 05 2012
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Fiction, Literature

Amberville

The Short Version: Eric Bear is living a happy life – he’s got a great job, a beautiful wife, and he’s left the remnants of his shady past behind him.  Or so he thinks.  A surprise visit from his old employer with a threat to his wife sends him back into the shady life he thought he’d left behind – and onto a journey that will shake the very foundations of Mollisan Town.

The Review: Goddamn, this is refreshingly original.  First up: the characters are all stuffed animals.  Eric Bear, Tom-Tom Crow, Snake Marek – you can figure it out pretty quickly.  You’ve got to let your imagination run loose on this one, otherwise you’ll find the conceit too frustrating.  I was worried about it, to be honest… but then I started to imagine the book as a stop-motion film.  Something about it actually demands that such a film be made, preferably by Aardman.  But I don’t want to go down that particular rabbit hole.

The story is a relatively simple one – one that stretches back to the classic noir of Chandler, really.  A mixed-up youth grows up to become respectable but gets pulled back into the underworld when someone near him is threatened.  From there, the book becomes a mix of Ocean’s Eleven and classic noir – the sequence where Eric goes and recruits his old ‘team’ was especially reminiscent of the former.  There are some deeper elements too: a psychological subplot that recalls a bit of Fight Club and a bit of The Prestige.  I started to put it together slightly ahead of the book – but then Davys threw a curve at me that I didn’t see coming (I was neglecting the noir side of the story) and suddenly the whole thing was not quite what I had predicted.  And I loved that.  Damn, I love being surprised like that – it’s nice to be knocked down a peg from thinking I’m smarter than the author.

My only quibbles with the book are two in number: 1) the resolution is a bit abrupt (I have this problem with many noir stories) and 2) there’s a slight lack of detail towards the latter half of the novel.  And by detail I mean… that fine shading, that world-building that you need in order to sustain such a strange and quirky universe.  The first half of the book does a great job at setting up Mollisan Town without giving away any mysteries and the resolution doesn’t answer any of the major questions you’re going to have (like: “how did this world come into being?” or “what’s beyond the impenetrable forest?”) – but the build-up and the climax sacrifice a bit of detail in order to keep the story lean.  This isn’t so much a problem, I don’t think – but the ending happens and BAM that’s it.  The name is crossed off the list and that’s basically that.  There’s no follow-up on what happens to the characters but in such a way that you’re not expecting it to come in a sequel.  The caper over, the players are left in suspended animation right where we last saw them.  I think this is a symptom of the entire genre and I’m not sure what to do about it – and I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to be left wanting more.  I’m just saying that I did, in fact, want more.

The world itself is fantastic, though.  Colored streets, stuffed animals – they don’t bleed, they just leak stuffing, a sense of Sin City-esque lawlessness sitting just under the surface.  Four districts, each relatively clearly defined and each getting its own novel.  Not that this novel is particularly about Amberville.  In fact, it’s equally set in Yok or racing about town as far as I could tell.  And the characters are all so intriguing simply because they are stuffed animals: they’re automatically more interesting than they would be if they were humans.  As humans, we understand them.  They’re what we know them to be.  But as stuffed animals… a drugged out gay gazelle is far more interesting for being just that one step removed from humanity.  It’s fascinating, truly, to see how quickly something becomes foreign simply by replacing what we’re intimately familiar with (a human being).  The allegory is there, certainly: we can look at this society Davys has created and see our own but from an interesting remove.  But the story itself surpasses the allegory and makes for a damn fun time.

Rating: 5 out of 5. A fast read and a fun one.  I’m intrigued by the world that has been created and I want to see how well it holds up in the following tales.  The planned quartet is set to finish up this summer and I’m eagerly anticipating the next read: Lanceheim.  Got a fair number of things to get through before then but I’m glad to find another winner out of the pile of books I looted from the Borders (RIP) that closed in my hometown.  I might not have picked this book up otherwise – it would’ve remained an intriguing but not quite purchase-worthy read.  And that would’ve been disappointing, because I wouldn’t have discovered the wonderfully unique and lovely world of Mollisan Town.

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