The Short Version:

The Review: There’s a line in a song on the new John Mayer album where he sings that he “can’t trace how [he] got here” – and it’s a rather fitting line to summarize… really everything about this novel.  I mean, the whole concept of the ‘reconstructionist’ is that idea of finding how something got to where it ended up: someone who goes out and, using photos and tape measures and plumb-bobs, manages to piece together exactly what happened at a crash scene.  Sort of CSI meets Macgyver. But, because novels can’t be written without at least two layers of meaning these days, it’s more than that.  It’s about how ELLIS in his LIFE got to where he is.  What a coincidence that he happens to be a reconstructionist for a living!

The novel starts off well enough.  The first extended sequence – Pig Accident 2 – is masterfully quirky and odd.  The Macgyver part comes in when they recreate a pig (long story) with a skin and some Home Depot supplies.  It’s just funny and weird and establishes a certain set of rules for the universe of the book.  After all, there are plenty of jobs that have odd quirks to them that we don’t ever realize.  So this quirky job feels right.  I dig it.

We quickly get a sense of the scope of the odd background here – the coincidences like Ellis running into Heather after so many years and all of that.  It starts to feel like a not-so-nihilistic Palahniuk novel – and the concept is, honestly, one that Palahniuk could’ve used as one of those now lost-to-history sequels to Rant.  It would’ve been a cool addition to that world, I think.  But in Mr. Arvin’s hands, unfortunately, it doesn’t turn out so well.  Not to say that it turns out poorly, per se – although I disliked the last 50 pages quite a bit – but it just doesn’t turn out well either.

So the Big Question behind the novel is “what happened to Christopher?” even though the novel spends most of its time trying to ignore that question.  Still, consider its the one thing that connects all of the main characters and the ending devotes so much effort to revealing the answer, you have to believe that’s the Main Question driving the action.  After all, doesn’t it make sense that such a Question would drive Ellis into reconstructionism?  Does this all feel a bit heavy-handed to you too?  Okay, just making sure I’m not crazy.

See, we can predict most of what happens (as opposed to getting to the end and wondering how we got there) and that’s what makes the book flawed from the get-go.  It’s not a spoiler to say that Ellis ends up having an affair with Heather – hell, it says so in most synopses – and as a result, very little seems surprising about what happens.  Boggs’ break with reality (if I can call it that/save you from a lite spoiler), the eventual realization of what happened to Christopher… the only true surprise was the resolution to Pig Accident 2 and that gets brushed over almost without a thought.  Which is a shame because I found myself most engaged by the reconstruction of these accidents, in the same way that I suppose people continue to tune in to watch CSI every week.

There are a few interesting comments made about fate/the way our lives work.  “The only miracle is that there aren’t more miracles” and that whole concept of 1 in a million not actually being so rare is bandied about quite a bit, the obvious “coincidence” angle is a common trope throughout the novel, and that sense of needing to look back in order to figure out what happened/the unreliability of memory – these things are all scattered throughout.  They don’t necessarily say anything new but they don’t wear out their welcome here either.

The one thing I will say this book made me consider was the actual physicality of car accidents.  I’ve been in one in my life – my car was totaled but I was okay, as were the passengers of the inciting car.  Still, I drive through that intersection and can’t not think of the moment.  My dad, a few months before my parents’ wedding, was t-boned at impressive velocity in his Jeep and still carries a slight PTSD memory of it today.  But it wasn’t until I read this book – the way Arvin describes accidents – that I suddenly understood what it means to smash two cars together so hard that one flips over three times.  Cars are terrifying things, man.  And then the news of Michael McKean getting hit by a car yesterday on the UWS?  Strange timing and strange understanding.

Rating: 3 out of 5.  The book is pretty solidly run of the mill.  I wish it hadn’t ended like it did.  I wish it hadn’t been so repetitive in the middle to be honest.  The characters are pretty flat.  But the overarching concept – the world that has been created – is interesting.  In the hands of another writer, perhaps they would’ve taken it to a different place and created something else entirely.  Here, it’s just sort of ‘eh’.  Not bad or good, simply eh.

The Short Version:

The Review: Something came over me yesterday on my way to Connecticut about needing to read another McInerney novel. Prepare for irrelevant if vaguely savory background – or skip to the next paragraph: Bright Lights Big City was a game-changer in many ways for me last year and after seeing McInerney on Morning Joe this week and with complicated thoughts about the girl who inspired me to live a vaguely McInerney-esque life (minus the blow) and with summer coming on strong, it just felt right.  But I didn’t want to read his 9/11 novel or about the middle-aged people.  I wanted another Bright Lights Big City – not a sequel or a rehash but a companion novel, like the way Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction feel like kindred spirits.

Fantastically, this is actually exactly that: a sibling novel.  Where Bright Lights was a late-twentysomething young man having lost his way – this is the 20-year-old girl losing hers.  (Oddly enough – perhaps its a maturity level thing? – I see girls at 20/21 as approximately mentally equal to guys in the 25-28 range.) And it’s fantastic.  It really is.  It’s as funny and sharp and hopeless as his other novels but from the flipped perspective.  I was nervous, at first, about McInerney writing from the POV of a girl – and yes, some of the stuff gets a little icky (the vaginal infection was a bit much, for real) – but he pulls it off pretty well.

In fact, he pulls it off well enough that I believe it all to be somewhat true.  This is partially because I know Ms. Poole is based off a young Rielle Hunter – yes, that’s right, John Edwards’ baby momma mistress lady – but partially because I know a girl (several, actually) who is living this sort of life.  Sure, things have changed in 2012 – the 80s were a uniquely suited time for these sorts of shenanigans – but the basic refrain remains the same.  They run up their fathers’ credit cards, they do a lot of drugs, they fuck who they want when they want, and they only vaguely have a plan for any sort of ‘future’.  I don’t know what else to do but shrug – I’m certainly not judging.  I’ve dated too many of this type of girl to be judgey.

What’s most interesting about the book is the path that Alison takes.  Where our unnamed narrator in Bright Lights sees the future he wanted slip away from him, Alison doesn’t know what future she wants until it dawns on her.  Sorry, that’s not a terrifically apt way of putting it, but do you know what I mean?  She doesn’t have a plan of muffins and the New York Times in the mornings, but she suddenly realizes one day that her friends, well… aren’t.  And that’s what resonated most with me about this novel.  I mean, that struck a chord.  This is not to say that I’m over my friends or anything like that – but we all have that experience of outgrowing a friendship, moving on.  Being at a party with the same faces talking the same talk and making the same mistakes and suddenly you think “why the hell am I here with these people?” and in that moment you’ve separated yourself from them and that’s an irrevocable step.  Sure, like Alison – and like most of us – you might keep hanging out with them, doing those same old things… but it’s not the same anymore because you’ve made a step, logically, that you cannot unmake.  It’s like once you’ve had an idea, you can’t un-have it.

The end of the novel, too, is a bit jarring.  I keep comparing the two, but Bright Lights ends on a redemptive and hopeful note: the reader believes that You is going to learn everything all over again.  This novel ends on a much less happy note.  It ends (SPOILERS……….)

with Alison in rehab/a psych hospital?  It’s definitely at least the former, but there are hints that it may be the latter.  I mean, we know it doesn’t end up doing her all that much good (remember, our dear Ms. Poole returns in Bret Easton Ellis’ late great novels: American Psycho and Glamorama) but in the moment, there’s the positive of her being off drugs.  But she starts to wonder how much of this she remembers accurately and the last line is far more haunting: “I’d love to think that ninety percent of it was just dreaming.”  That’s such a sad and forlorn way to end things – despondent, perhaps.  But as an early twentysomething male, I understand it.  There’s a part of me that wishes I could lead the crazy lives that these characters lead – and I’m right next door to it, I know that – but I also know that I’m too melancholic at times anyway.  A life like this, facing that pivot where 2 a.m. becomes 6 a.m., would end me as we know it.

Rating: 4 out of 5.  It’s an excellent novel.  As the back cover notes, this is pre-Gossip Girl and all that stuff.  This is where it started.  Alison Poole – who lives, if I’m not mistaken, on my block (or at least just across the avenue – and no, I won’t say where but intrepid readers can probably figure it out) – is a fantastic character and seeing her earlier days is a treat.  But most importantly, it’s about the trashy crazy life I wish I could lead and the multitude of reasons I don’t. It’s pure escapism, in that sense – and what the hell else are books for?  I hoover them up like Didi does lines of blow – really, we’re both just looking for the same thing.  And our habits probably cost about the same.  Mine just won’t deviate your septum.

The Short Version: 

The Review: Why does Mustafa Sa’eed apparently have the ability to convince people to commit suicide?   This is the question I’ve had for the whole book and one I feel like, were I reading this 8-10 years ago, I’d be expecting to write a five-paragraph-essay on it.  But I don’t have an answer and I don’t quite understand.  Is the whole thing an allegory?  Did I just miss something?

Because for the most part, I really quite enjoyed this book.  (Thanks again, Jeremy, for moving and getting rid of some books.)  But in the end, I’m a bit mystified still.  I suppose that isn’t a bad thing – but so many questions are left unanswered and that frustrates me a bit in this situation.

Interestingly enough, I was reminded quite a bit of The Alexandria Quartet and how I felt while reading those books.  The writing is not up to Durrell’s level and it didn’t capture me in the same magical, mystical way… but elements felt like kindred spirits.  The mysterious man, the narrator who is frustrated by people outside of his understanding, the murders, the thought/feeling of being in Africa right before/right after WWII.  I felt some of those same things here, just not done quite as well.

Salih’s writing is quite good, I must say.  His description of Mustafa, for example, is brilliant and there were so many moments that conjured up specific images in my head without my really needing to do any work.  It’s just that there were also stretches where I wasn’t so bowled over.  Where I was, dare I say, bored.  I mean, this is barely a novel – it’s arguably a novella.  Pretty sad if I’m getting bored.  And then, the simple low-key simplicity of how things play out made me feel a little like I had been played.

See, the most interesting thing about the book is the concept of this mysterious figure who has appeared and who clearly seems to have a hidden past and then he disappears again.  Bits and pieces of his life and the rest of his story are revealed throughout the novel, but I (quite simply) wanted more.  I wanted to understand what happened between Sa’eed and those women.  I wanted to understand why our narrator makes the decision he does at the end.  I wanted to make sure I wasn’t feeling I’d suddenly entered a surreal universe – the description of the hidden room seems far too large and far too fake for what we’d established as reality.  And yet, we just go with it.

Rating: 4 out of 5.  I really enjoyed it.  I have some thoughts but even as I work to write them down, they mostly fade away.  I think the book was a bit better than average but also nothing wildly extraordinary.  Sometimes that just happens, I guess.

The Review:  I really wanted to love this book but instead I only liked it.  It’s not at all what I expected, that’s to be sure.  I was thinking something more Douglas Adams, something quirky and screwball.  And there are those elements, to be sure: the book is darkly comedic at times and has plenty of winks to the legends of the sci-fi genre.  But it’s also quite somber, quite moving, and quite… sad, I guess.

At its heart, it isn’t a sci-fi book – it’s a book about a father and son and the strange gap between fathers and sons in general.  The protagonist (Charles Yu, making me wonder how much of his own life is manifest in this book…) was not the best son to his father.  His father wasn’t the best father, either, but isn’t that how it goes?  Our dads want us to do certain things and we want our dads to be supermen and in the end there’s always going to be a disconnect.  It’s how we deal with that, of course, that defines our relationship.  When Yu’s dad fails to make a splash with his time machine prototype and spirals into anger and sadness and then finally disappears in said time machine, Charles is upset.  Angry.  But also confused.  And as he gets older and softens out (literally and emotionally), he begins to see his past in a new light.  I mean, literally: he goes back and sees himself go through these things and comes out with more understanding.

The plot itself is a bit hazy – Yu is trying to find his father but is also stuck in a time loop and there’s quite a bit of sci-fi heady jargon flying around.  The plot itself doesn’t really kick in until about a third of the way into the book, too.  The first third is mostly world-building… but it’s sort of almost a little too much.  We get to see Luke Skywalker’s son, we get to see the combined city that is New Angeles / Lost Tokyo 2, beautiful descriptions of things like newsclouds (made me think of Transmetropolitan) and other various technological advancements… but it all felt a little lacking in cohesion.  I suppose that’s part of the point, as Yu is safely outside of time – coasting in the Present-Indefinite drive – and so the whole thing lacks a sense of forward movement.  Coupled with the fact that my copy was rather poorly bound (the final set of pages wasn’t glued into the spine correctly so it’s offset and nearly falling out of my book) and you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was all just a meta-meta thing to further the idea of Minor Universe 31 and the slight lack of finished construction on said universe.

But then the book DOES go meta – incredibly so – and that’s really the joy of reading this book: seeing how freaking smart Charles Yu (the author) is.  Because MAN does he have some chops to’ve pulled this off.  It’s quite impressive and truly a fantastic ride.  The only problem is, it came a bit too late… and there was a bit too much maudlin parent/child drama and I found myself keeping the book at arm’s length sometimes.

This could be a personal reaction – coupled with the release of the new John Mayer album, there’s some soul-searching going on about my place in the universe, as one does.  And this book has a hero who is literally without a place in the universe – he is outside of time and space in a way that bends the mind to try and understand.  But mostly, I found it a bit too melancholic for my taste, as though a gray shroud was dropped over the whole novel.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.  I really enjoyed the meta aspects of the novel, the heavy hard sci-fi that didn’t pander to people who don’t usually read sci-fi, even the broad scope of the plot.  But I just couldn’t really enjoy the novel.  I’m not sure if it was the feeling of sadness that pervaded it or that it was a bit too disjoint at times for its own good (even with the context of it being disjoint on purpose).  I felt sad after reading it, for reasons I can’t entirely articulate – even though the ending is a positive one.  Just one of those things, I guess.

The Review: I think the most wonderful thing about being a totally subjective book reviewer is that I can focus on certain intangibles about the experience of reading.  For example: the joy that comes from reading a really good – not earth-shaking, not life-changing, just really good – book after having read a book that you truly disliked.  Case in point: Kapitoil.

I admit, I was worried.  And I’ve held off on reading this book for quite some time (it was a part of the 2011 Tournament of Books, where it lost in the first round to Freedom – a decision I don’t fully agree with) because of the opening sentence: “The Atlantic elongates below us like an infinite violet carpet.”  This, coupled with the “immigrant comes to New York” storyline, kept me away from this book until, on a random impulse I don’t quite understand, I added it at the last minute to a stack of books from B&N.  This morning, still feeling blerg about The Accidental and being entirely adrift literarily, I grabbed this by chance and said “well, it’s due time and I want something about New York.”

What a pleasure, then, to read a perfectly well-constructed and engaging (while not being demanding) novel on this sunny Upper East Side Sunday.  I read the entire novel today – I wasn’t exactly expecting to but between the East River and Central Park and the multitude of train trips downtown, I was finished before dinnertime.  And therein lies the simplicity of this novel’s appeal: it is a quick and wonderful read, able to be tossed off in a day but also still be a rewarding literary experience.

It’s a curious novel – as Wayne explains in the P.S. interview in the back, it’s a “pre-9/11 novel”.  Part of the other reason I was scared to read this novel was the lingering shadow of that god-awful Netherland – and The Boston Globe’s top-lined review inside the cover linking the two novelists did not help.  But this book isn’t about 9/11 or New York after. Except that it is: it’s the idea of “observ[ing] something [by] study[ing] it in reverse.”  That’s a quote from the book that I’ve butchered to make fit, I’m afraid, but credit where credit’s due.

Anyway, it comes from the idea behind Karim’s (super awesome) computer program which he calls “Kapitoil” and can predict the short-term fluctuations in the oil market based on what’s happening in the news.  And the company is headquartered in the WTC, so that looms over everything.  Plus the idea of the oil market fluctuating based on unrest in the Middle East, the fact that Karim is from Qatar and is nearly deported at one point… there’s just a lot of foreshadowing, I guess.  But it’s all foreshadowing in that way that you can only understand it from afterwards.  This book would not be as good, I don’t think, in 1999/2000 (when it’s set).  It would still be good… but the echoes of history that we understand now wouldn’t add those layers of meaning.  Even non-9/11 related issues like the housing bubble and the Obama Presidency influence this book because they’ve existed and we can see the foreshadowings in Wayne’s novel, whether he intended them or not.  And I must say, that’s rather impressive.

The story itself is a simple one, with shadows of Gatsby (which is started but not finished by our hero) and Wall Street.  Karim is a fantastic character, definitely “on the spectrum” but not autistic.  I’d say Asperger’s, to be honest – and perhaps it’s not a coincidence that I drew Karim in my mind as quite similar to Abed on Community.  I actually think Danny Pudi would be great as Karim, but that’s another topic of conversation.  He’s brilliant but he’s an outsider because of the language barrier and the culture clash.  His relationship that develops over the course of the novel with Rebecca (I’d say SPOILERS but I think it’s pretty predictable from early on) is a wonderful rom-com-esque thawing of a person.  It’s how he develops the most over the course of the novel and the non-ending is also quite lovely, if sad.  In fact, rather like a film, the book is self-contained.  There’s no curiosity about the before or the after.  It is exactly what it is.

Rating: 5 out of 5.  I don’t think it’s life-changing or world-altering – but it was simply a damn good read.  I enjoyed it as it sped by, like taking the scenic route in a convertible.  It’s smart, funny, and even a little inspiring.  An incredibly assured debut novel and a smart look at the way we were before and how, really, not all that much has changed.  It’s worth your time, I promise.

The Short Version: A charming woman bluffs her way into the house of a rather ordinary English family during their summer vacation in Norfolk.  What starts off innocuous becomes life-altering for all of them and leaves none of them the person they were before the summer began.

The Review: What a fucking waste.

Sorry.  I’m actually not all that angry at this book.  I’m more annoyed.  Not frustrated – frustration isn’t a bad thing in literature, not necessarily – but just annoyed.  I think I’m safely in the camp of people who simply do not ‘get’ why this book was such a big deal in 2006.

It’s inventive and quirky, sure.  I dig that.  I dig a book that has an entire section written in poem form – not just one form, either, but many.  I dig a non-linear, multi-narrator novel.  And the plot of this book – or at least the way it is described by anyone who attempts to summarize it – sounds awesome.  What I expected when I read the summary: crazy 30-something Amber shows up at this quaint cottage in Norfolk, squirms her way into the family, and then reveals them all for just how messed up they are – and then, like Mary Poppins or Nanny McPhee, she leaves without a trace.  OR she kills them, I wasn’t too sure.  But that’s sort of what I was expecting: something more psychologically interesting, with higher stakes and people I cared about.

Instead, I got this.  There are ‘plots’, I suppose, for each character: Astrid is growing up and no longer a child, Magnus is guilt-ridden over the death he indirectly caused, Eve is struggling with minor notoriety and writer’s block, and Michael is a middle-aged academic who keeps fucking his students.  Lots of dramatic potential here.  Too bad it’s mostly ignored in favor of mundanities and Cool Authorial Quirks! Sure, Amber gets sexual with at least one member of the family unit.  Wasn’t really surprising to me and in fact my favorite moment of the book comes when the family member in question says something about how this happens in movies but not real life and WOW it was happening to them!  I’ve never been in a situation like this but I often have the feeling that my life is more movie than reality, so I enjoyed that single solitary moment.

Otherwise, I was pretty bothered by all of these people.  First off, how are they so fucking stupid that they just let Amber in?  It’s not the 1960s, its 2003.  The Iraq war, mentioned way too often for my taste, is raging.  It’s so ridiculously unlikely that a total stranger would show up and the two adults in the picture would be so blind as to just invite her in because they believe the other one invited her.  Suspension of disbelief is one thing – this requires something else.

Then, moving on, I was just bored by how predictable these characters were in their unlikeability.  Sure, Astrid is precocious and cute and it’s not like there aren’t 7 million precocious cute 12-year-olds in English literature.  It all just felt so uninspired – as though the writing the novel in a strange way was the point, making up for the fact that there was absolutely no substance.  A pig in a dress is still a pig.

Rating: 1 out of 5.  Similarly to Netherland, I just could NOT wait for this book to be over.  I was annoyed by it.  It was, quite simply, not for me.  It didn’t make me irrationally angry like some books I won’t say by name… it was just such a waste of my time that I can’t even accept the formal inventiveness of the writing.  How this book ever won The Rooster is beyond me.  It felt more like an exercise than a proper novel.

The Review:When you try to summarize this book in short order, it sounds rather flat and clichéd, doesn’t it?  Ohhh, family tragedy forces crazy siblings to grow up, how original.  And yet, this book is rather original.  The most striking thing – and the thing that’ll either turn you off on the first page or become your defining memory of the novel – is the voice: first-person plural.  Much like the still-memorable Then We Came to the End, the “we” is impossibly powerful as you start the book.  “We came home because we were failures” begins the novel and, well, that just grabbed me right there.  That use of the plural narrator is a fascinating and tricky thing to pull off but Ms. Brown does it.  She’s successful at it mainly because she doesn’t force it.  The narration slips between first-person plural and third-person omniscient with ease and so we might be following one of the sisters on a various misadventure but then “we thought X” will pop in and thus we’re treated to a delightful sense of that mostly-impossible-to-describe sibling bond.  Anyone who has siblings knows what I mean: that way to jointly communicate about something, to pass judgment on something, to understand something.  It’s a marvelous and not entirely explicable thing – but it does exist and Brown captures it between these three girls here.

But let’s move beyond the innovative (well, maybe not innovative - but refreshingly underused) writing style and to the meat of the matter: the book itself.  The story, as I’ve expressed, isn’t anything groundbreaking – it’s rather simple and mostly pretty predictable.  You can see it in most traditional novels about families, especially (sorry if this offends anyone but I’m just speaking truth) those written by/about women.  Quick breakdown of the three sisters, you tell me there isn’t a bit of a cliché wrapped up in this whole thing: Rosalind is the oldest, the most controlling, the one who stayed home to take care of her family and feels bitter about it; Bianca has middle child syndrome, believing that her bookending sisters took all the love and so she goes to NYC and goes crazy and does self-destructive things for attention; Cordelia is the princess who can do no wrong, even when she comes home pregnant after years of drifting about the country.  See what I mean?

And while I’m wired to roll my eyes at this sort of thing – I’m sorry, I don’t like Fried Green Tomatoes either – I found myself strangely captivated by this family.  Perhaps it’s because their father is a distinguished Shakespeare scholar who liberally quotes from the Bard.  Perhaps it’s because they’re all nerds, constantly in a book or many books or performing or something like that.  Maybe it was just the sheer fact of right book, right time.  But I was charmed from about page 7, as I watched these sisters begin their paths towards each other and home.

I also found the exploration of family dynamics done in an insightful way, overall.  There’s a lot of mystery in the way human being interact, especially those related by blood.  A quiet moment where Bean (I think) remembers seeing her parents at the sink, her father standing behind her mother and laughing about something as he cupped her breasts – that feeling of seeing something we shouldn’t see but also that realization that our parents are people outside of their relationship to us, that they were people LONG BEFORE we were even beginning to be contemplated.  It’s a strange thing to think about, you know?  And this book captures it so well.  That sense of seeing a parent no longer as invincible but as fragile as we are is a terrible thing – those hands that soothed us, held us up, bandaged our wounds, turn old and suddenly it’s our hands doing the same things for them.  It’s a stunning and terrifying – and unalterable, unavoidable – shift in your mental landscape… and that’s what this book is all about, really.  It’s about three girls who hadn’t yet had to grow up realizing that indeed they must.

Now, I fight against ‘growing up’ as much as the next person – I’m happy to be an adult but I’ll never quite ‘grow up’, as it were…  but also, there’s something to consider about the way we inevitably must.  No matter how we try.  And these girls do too – affairs, pregnancy, fights, etc.  But none of it feels remotely surprising in the way it goes down.  You can predict the ending of each sister’s story because this is how these stories must end.  And perhaps that’s a lesson in and of itself: our stories do, for the most part, end if not happy at least well.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.  A sun-drenched summer tale of family and growing up as adults. It’s nothing revelatory – except for the marvelous plural voice – and is probably a bit too nerdy (there are a LOT of Shakespeare quotes throughout the text) for the average reader.  But the feeling of reading this book was like sitting on a porch swing with some lemonade on a summer Sunday afternoon.  A clean and simple experience, elevating the rather mundane subject matter to something more than the sum of its parts.

The Review: I first read Simon Lelic about a year and a half ago, on the recommendation of The Biblioracle.  It was an interesting first novel, a good twist on the crime genre.  I wouldn’t say I was excited to read Lelic’s next book but I was interested enough and when I won a copy from Goodreads, I was intrigued to see what he did next.  The resulting novel is simultaneously better than and worse than A Thousand Cuts, his first.

We shall start with the tone: deeply unsettling.  It’s been quite a long time since I’ve read something that made me feel so uncomfortable.  It wasn’t a gross-out, Palahniuk-style, but just a sense of unease.  Of paranoia.  I’m thinking of the first few episodes of The Killing or the ambiance of Fincher’s Se7en: that sense that something is very WRONG and it just seeps into everything and you can feel it under your skin and in your shoulder tension but you can’t put a finger on it.

The death of a child is, of course, one of the most horrible things in the universe.  Murder of a child is even worse.  But for another child to, seemingly without reason, kill and torture – because that’s what it was, torture – a contemporary?  A 12-year-old boy to bash a girl’s head in, rape her with a stick, then wrap her up and drown her in the river?  That’s deeply, deeply disturbing.  That’s laws-of-nature-overturned disturbing.  It provokes actual revulsion just thinking about it because it is so outside the realm of normality – and that’s basically what every character in this novel thinks, too.  Sure, Leo is trying to be a good guy and be impartial and all that – but honestly, I cry bullshit.  It was, plain and simple, contrived for Leo to be such a knight in shining armor by trying to play by the rules with this kid.  Sure, there are mitigating circumstances (big shock – the last minute reveals that Leo’s hunches were correct are unbelievably unsurprising) but that doesn’t change the horrendous actions.  You can’t go baying for blood but it’s an indefensible crime and, well, I just didn’t think Lelic did a good job trying to argue that a 12-year-old cannot be responsible in the same way an adult can.

He makes a good point about a third of the way through the novel when a character brings up the ‘magic line’ at which, when you turn a certain age, the state recognizes you as an adult or a grown-up or no longer a child, even if mentally you haven’t yet developed that far.  I can agree with this concept – I think it’s pretty damn arbitrary, especially in today’s world.  But at the same time, the character of Daniel never seems like anything more than a borderline psychopath.  He isn’t, as he clearly shows that he has feelings of some kind, but I grew up with kids like him.  We all did.  There’s something to be said for the belief that a bad egg isn’t going to get much better – and could in fact get worse.  It’s a scary thought and not a popular opinion to voice aloud but we all believe it.  I had a friend prone to aggression and competitiveness in grade school who later tried to stab a guy.  There are logical progressions to these things and while it’s nice to see that Leo believes in the good of humanity, he’s also quite simply being unrealistic about it.

Also unrealistic: the big plot twist that’s awkwardly telegraphed from the beginning with these flashforwards from Megan’s point of view.  It’s pretty clear that something’s going to happen to their daughter – but it’s also pretty clear that it isn’t what Lelic wants to distract you into believing happens.  This was my big problem: I never, for a second, believed any of what I was being shown.  Leo wasn’t a believable character and the plot twist with Ellie was quite clearly NOT what we were being shown.  The ending resolution was not only not surprising, it was borderline regrettable in its obviousness.  It also dilutes the focus of the whole novel.  We start out with a searing look at the way we treat juvenile offenders and the reality-bending horror that is the murder of a child – but it just degenerates into a mediocre Law & Order episode.  Or, come to think of it, The Killing.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5.  The only reason this novel gets even something close to middle marks is Lelic’s way of evoking real discomfort in the first third of the novel.  I was deeply, deeply unsettled while I was reading – and that’s impressive.  But the payoff – or lack thereof – is so disappointing that the novel just looks, retrospectively, hackneyed and obvious.  The promise of that unsettling feeling fades away into just not caring, about any of it.  I still believe Lelic to be an interesting addition to the crime genre but he’s yet to translate that promise into anything actually worthy of praise.  Instead, you mostly get disappointment.

The Review: What a pleasant surprise.  The Dark Tower stands above everything else ever created in English letters – ken it well, friend; there is NOTHING remotely as intricate and detailed and all-consuming.  It is the magnum opus, the center, the pivot, the lynchpin of the worlds that Mr. King has created (and possibly the lynchpin of all worlds).  I closed that final, eponymous novel with a strange sense of confusion and happiness and sadness.  I shed some tears and marked the passing of an era.  I knew Roland and his friends would be there for me to revisit – and while I secretly hoped that Uncle Stevie would someday give his long-suffering hero a true happy ending, I was contented to leave the man in black fleeing across the desert and the gunslinger following.

So what a thing, to find old friends at the height of their powers back in my life to tell one more forgotten story?

I sit here, I tell thee true, with a tear in my eye at the sheer joy of it all.  The story has low stakes, it’s true: we know full well that our friends will safely weather the starkblast – we know that Roland will survive the skin-man – we can even rather safely assume the ending of Tim Ross’ tale.   But the sheer joy of a simple story back in the world that we’ve come to know so well means the stakes don’t matter.  This is a nostalgia tour, released on the heels of a collection of b-sides and unreleased tracks – not a cash grab, just an excuse to remember for a while.

King also uses the novel to properly bridge the series and bring the two parts – because there are two distinct parts – together.  The first four novels, written over the space of 20+ years, are old-school King.  The final three are new-King.  New-King is not a bad thing – in fact his post-accident novels have been some of the best of his long career.   But they’re different.  They feel different.  ’Sneetches’ and Dr. Doom masks?  Suddenly, these pop culture references were popping up in the series and tying it further to our world – but it was jarring.  It didn’t quite fit with the first four novels.  That’s part of why King went back and revised The Gunslinger: trying to bring everything back into a circle.  This book smoothes the circle – it reiterates the sense of the wheel, it brings in pop culture references (the Dodge Dart gag was hilarious), but it also harkens back to the more simplistic gunslinger stories of the earlier novels.

I’m actually quite surprised at how successful King’s attempt at a ‘children’s story’ goes.  ”The Wind Through the Keyhole” – the story itself – is truly a children’s story, and while there are a few moments of not-quite-ready-for-primetime (the kid dropping a few f-bombs is a bit much – and the blood, too), it’s mostly quite lovely.  It is scary, yes, but there’s a wonderful message and there’s a family thing there that roots all of the great children’s stories – because they’re told to us on windy nights by our mothers.
And that brings us to the middle story, of the skin-man: fitting in with the Susan Delgado story and the tales of the comics, we see a younger Roland – still learning, still the brash boy who Marten Broadcloak goaded into getting his guns before he was ready.  We see a boy still smarting from having killed his own mother.  The grown Roland begins the story by saying “Not long after the death of my mother, which as you know came by my own hand” – and it ends with another woman/mother-figure reminding him that things will be okay.  The most wonderful moment of the book comes right at the end, where Roland responds to the last thing he heard from his mother – and King’s afterward is itself a beautiful moment.

This book is all about stories.  I honestly think that’s a bit of what went wrong with the latter books – too much meta, too much thought, not enough story.  And this is King apologizing but also (as I said) blurring the two halves of the series together into a now-cohesive whole.  He’s reminding us of the pleasure in not only telling stories but hearing them, receiving them.  Does it matter that the whole thing flies by and is suddenly over?  Does it matter that it feels a bit lite (especially in light of the surrounding novels…)?  No.  It is simply a rare and unexpected pleasure to spend a little time with old friends in a land you thought you’d never see again.  Were it larger or longer, people would gripe and complain about various things.  In this circumstance, it’s the Goldilocks novel: just right.

Rating: 5+ out of 5.  I could go on, at quite a rambling length no doubt, talking about the various aspects of the novel – but why?  It’s short enough and you will only read it for one reason: because you are a fan of The Dark Tower.  If you are not a fan, then I bid thee pleasant days and will you see you further on down the road.  If you are a fan, be not afraid.  Say thankee-sai to Uncle Stevie and do yourself a favor: let this just be a simple pleasure, for then it will outstrip any expectations and bring you joy. (yes, I know I’m using that word a lot.  It’s just how I’ve felt the whole time.)

The Review: This.  This is it.  This is, perhaps, the greatest spy novel ever written.  Clocking in at just over 200 pages, it reads like a gunshot – I finished it in less than eight hours of reading.  The tension builds and rolls so brilliantly, so effortlessly, and le Carré has such a talent for deception that the ending does indeed catch you entirely off-guard.  It’s just bloody brilliant.

I will say it’s interesting that Penguin is republishing the le Carré novels with such a focus on George Smiley.  I mean, I’m thrilled that the covers are getting the redesigns they deserve (a topic which I intend to cover shortly in my next “The Art of The Cover” column) – but they’re setting it up so that the Smiley novels are the lynchpin of the entire body of work.  I suppose that’s true to some extent – there are, what, eight or nine novels in which Smiley at least makes an appearance?  He’s the link between all of these cold war novels and so it makes sense to publicize his appearance.  That and the movie, I suppose.  But he’s barely in this book.  I mean, descriptively, it’s quite obvious when he appears, long before he’s named.  Such a unique figure and one so engrained in my mind, it’s hard to miss him.  But he’s a background player in this novel at best – one step above Peter and that’s only because he has a few more lines.  The novel is about Leamas.

Granted, I haven’t read the two novels that come before – those’ll be republished at the end of summer and I suppose I’ll pick up with them then.  Apparently Mundt plays a large role in at least one of them.  We’ll see, I suppose.  It’s interesting, though, to’ve read this novel AFTER the so-called “Karla Trilogy” – because I already know what happens next.  When the first double-cross is revealed, in the courtroom scene, I was convinced that it had something to do with the mole at the Circus (whose identity I shall keep anonymous for those reading the series in order).  And knowing who that was, although he didn’t appear in the novel at all, felt thrilling to me!  Even after it was revealed that that was not indeed the case – the play was far different although still stunning – I was thinking about how there was a larger game at play, so many things going on behind the scenes.

The literal end of the novel, of course, directly precipitates the intermediary happenings – the things that come before Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy begins.  So there’s that literal connection – it was delightful to see Control alive and doing his thing – but also the broader connection: that sense that this was the Cold War and all of this shit was happening on a level far above what any individual player could comprehend.  Leamas’ indignity at the end is only all too right – but what else could he’ve expected?  To actually know all the facets of the game?  Certainly not.

There’s quite a bit of interesting morality questions to be raised here.  Even today, we still treat the West as Good and the East as Evil when we look back.  Perhaps it’s just the long-standing love for James Bond – perhaps it’s the fact that we ‘won’ and history is (despite what Julian Barnes might posit) still written by the victors.   But we all too often neglect that throughout history (today not being an exception), every ‘side’ in every conflict has always been willing to indulge lesser villains in order to score some sort of upper hand.
(SPOILERS are probably inevitable now)

So someone like Mundt, a Nazi, is an acceptable ally – because he isn’t a Red and he’s feeding us information.  This, despite the fact, that he killed all of Leamas’ agents.  This is what fires Leamas up at the end and it’s perhaps the most important part of the book, this question.  Because you take it away and you’ve still got a damn fine spy novel – but with it, you’re faced with an ethical and moral question that must’ve just rocked people’s world’s when the novel originally came out in the early 60s.  It’s a question that rocks people’s worlds today, if you get them off their devices long enough to think about it.  It’s similar to the controversy around Mike Daisey’s show The Agony & The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs: Mike lied, yes, but the fact is we’re all lying to ourselves.  We’re allowing injustices to occur – what’s the greater injustice: that he punched up his story or that terrible things are absolutely totally happening at Foxconn and we don’t care because we just need our little black gadgets?  What’s the greater injustice: that Control lied or that he did it to preserve an intelligence asset who’s not a nice person?  These are all bad things – but sometimes we have to do bad things in order for good to win out.  But that’s not a nice thought to have to reflect on, is it?  Leamas isn’t scot-free, either, remember: he was lying too, to the Reds, in order to get revenge.  How do you square that?

Rating: 5 out of 5.  For sheer brilliance, really.  It’s smart, it’s fast, it has some excellent action, raises some major questions, and mostly it just keeps ratcheting up slowly but surely until the final moments – and then the book is done. There’s no falling action.  It ends, decisively, as so many of le Carré’s novels do (looking at you, Our Kind of Traitor) – without a thought for the bow.  I’m happy to agree that this may well be the best spy novel ever written – because it is simultaneously so cool and utterly revolting.