My review in under 50 words (under 100 if you count parentheticals):
It was a lot like Nobody’s Fool, only with a more robust plot and less Paul Newman (not because he wasn’t in the movie adaptation, which apparently he was, but because I hadn’t seen it and thus couldn’t properly picture him while I was reading). Still thoroughly enjoyable, though, if you enjoy stories about economicaly decrepit towns where the residents have rich if depressing interior lives.
I’ve been told by a reputable source that this book can be really hard to get into. And it really does lack any of those clingy hooks that make you feel committed to finishing a book whether you like it or not. It’s unrelentingly smooth, actually, with Russo rubbing the edges off the moments of drama by doing things like removing the main characters from the moment or even removing the event from the direct line of the narrative: instead of handing the reader a scene with an angry husband, a rifle and some punching, Russo literally stops the narration just before anything happens, and only shares the resulting chaos in ensuing casual conversations among the characters, and when something does finally happen at the horsetrack, our protagonist is in jail and misses the whole event. Although they’re all eventually revealed to us in the slow but inexorable way that gossip moves, we miss out on a steamy phone call between a mother and her son’s mistress, more than one affair and a death and only learn retrospectively about a little boy’s penis getting slammed by a toilet seat.
So it’s not that nothing happens, so much, as that the protagonist, a kind of charming and kind of jerky, down on his luck 60-something jack-of-all trades named Sully, doesn’t really see the point in worrying about it when big things do happen. He slips from mishap to mishap, occasionally punctuated by a bout of good luck and usually dulled by a steady diet of beer and greasy spoon food and often commented on by the townspeople who either despair of, rely on, or dismay of his very presence. I found the lack of self interest, on the part of Sully and on the part of the book as a whole, utterly charming – although it didn’t hurt that I know that he was played by Paul Newman in the movie, and nothing says charming like Paul Newman, RIP. It’s not a book worth slogging through, but only because slogging is so antithetical to the very nature of the book.
The afterword to this copy of The Mill on the Floss describes it as “earnest, moral, and long” which, I have to say, aren’t necessarily my three favorite literary adjectives. But I was 80% sure that there wouldn’t be any dragons, and I figured I was due for an earnest novel after wallowing in fantasy and all that modern ironic stuff. I also really loved Middlemarch, although I read that a long time ago and on a train across Greece, which may have impacted my state of mind.
The Mill on the Floss is, as promised, an earnest story about Maggie Tulliver, a young girl growing up in semi-rural England in the early 1800s, faced with a temperament that is strictly at odds with the rest of her family, an intellectual curiosity that is rarely fed and, as time goes on, financial problems with her family and a remarkable number of romantic complications for a book that ends before she hits her 20s. Throughout the book, Maggie strives to align her desires and views of the world with those of her family and lovers (used throughout the book in the least physical way possible) and constantly comes up short; it is in many ways an epic story of her vacillating between passion and asceticism and never finding a balance that wins her the approbation of the brother she loves kind of desperately – indeed, she seems to sink from one social mistake to the next pretty rapidly.
The most curious part of reading this book for me was how little I was able to root for any of the characters. I’m not sure if I couldn’t pull myself into alignment with a Victorian sensibility, or if Eliot wrote them as intentionally unsympathetic, which is sometimes the sense I got from her narrative voice, or if she was just trying to capture the reality that some situations are just untenable, that when a young girl is asked to accept or reject the friendship of her father’s enemy’s son that it’s impossible to pick a side between the virtues of friendship and those of family responsibility. Maggie is faced with a series of harshly unpleasant choices, particularly for a sensitive teenager (a category that didn’t really exist in the 1820s, of course), and rather than wanting desperately for her to make one choice or the other – if she makes the happy one, it’s a romantic novel, if she makes the unhappy one it’s a tragedy – the reader instead must suffer alongside her as she dreads making either one. (Apparently George Eliot herself had a long relationship with a married man, making her something of an expert in these inescapable moral and emotional quandaries). I’ll agree that the book is earnest (and long!) but it’s certainly not moral an Aesopian, proscriptive kind of way: rather, it exposes the fragile emotional center of morality and how it fails to take into account the complicated relationship between personal desires and social demands. It’s pretty emotionally gripping, but if you need resolution, prepare to be disappointed.
Normally, I wouldn’t review a fantasy novel, largely because I often feel a tiny bit shameful about reading them. I think it’s because I spent such a large portion of my pre-teenage years gleefully reading and re-reading, well, books that had dragons in them (and other things! I also read other things about, like, Okies or Vietnam or depressed poets). As this was the same time that I listened to New Kids on the Block and pegged my jeans and had giant, pink, plastic-framed glasses, I am suspect about all of my judgment from that time. Also, the library tends to shelve romance, science-fiction, fantasy, and mystery paperbacks altogether in the side of the main room they might as well label “books for people we assume don’t enjoy real literature.” So, I’ve tried to hide my recommendations under the labels of cyberpunk (Gibson) or indefinably good (Bull), but the sordid truth remains that sometimes I really do enjoy a long, epic saga and sometimes those come with magic or ogres or, yes, a dragon or two.
The Dragonbone Chair, and its attendant sequels, is really not as dragon-y as the title would suggest: it’s (as the genre demands) the very long story about an unlikely hero (a kitchen scullion named Simon) and a bunch of his unlikely companions (a princess, a troll and his wolf, a bunch of dukes and knights, and some mysterious immortal folks) trying to save their moderately unlikely world from total annihilation. Despite his twee tendencies toward the names in his alternate universe (do you really have to you’re your winter months ‘Novander” and “Decander’?) and an unappealing tendency to including the lyrics to ballads his characters are singing to pass the time, Williams actually avoids a lot of the pitfalls that can come from following the strict boundaries of the genre (and, believe you me, in that misspent youth I read plenty of books that wallowed in those pitfalls). He compelling conveys that characters can have doubts and misgivings without being paralyzed from action and he doesn’t shy away from the absolute misery of participating in an epic quest – lots of eating crappy food and sleeping in the forest and getting lost in the dark and not knowing if your loved ones are safe. And he tries to keep the dei ex machina to a bare minimum, which is quite a feat if you’re going to include immortals and dragons and the like.
Phew. I feel so much better for having gotten this secret reading habit off my chest. Maybe I’ll go dig out some peasant blouses and listen to Paula Abdul.
Chuck Palahniuk, whose name I have really no idea how to spell and even less idea how to pronounce, is best known for writing the book Fight Club, but I also think fondly of him as a local literary superstar from when I lived in Portland. In addition to his novels and non-fiction essays, he’s also written some travel guides of the Northwest and made more than one appearance at Powell’s while I was in the area.
Lullaby is a super dark short novel about an investigative journalist with a tragic and shady past who gets caught up following clues he’s found at the home of six infants who died of SIDS and ends up having to confront the power of his own suppressed emotions – but in rapid, action packed way. Along the way, he meets up with a real estate agent who sells haunted homes, her new-age, semi-nudist assistant and the assistant’s anarchist boyfriend. Palahniuk doesn’t spend much time lingering on emotional fallout but, like his narrator, pays attention to the tiniest details and paints a vivid picture of people’s internal lives nonetheless; I was particularly struck by the simmering rage he manages to convey as the real estate agent marks a path through a furniture warehouse by gouging deep lines and arrows into furniture with her expensive rings. Palahniuk doesn’t worry too much about making the characters loveable or charmingly quirky, but they do come across as depressingly real possibilities – not the kind of people you like to think of yourself as, but the kind of people you worry you just might be if you weren’t able to get your priorities quite in order.
Stranger Than Fiction is a collection of essays which Palahniuk groups into “People Together,” “Portraits,” and “Personal” – which is to say, stories about groups, stories about individuals, and stories about Chuck. Like Lullaby, the writing is crisp and spare, short sentences in short paragraphs and not really dripping with adjectives. I found the style slightly hit-or-miss in this context. “The People Can,” about life on a navy submarine, really benefited from the style, which felt like it captured the constrained life of six months under water, but “Frontiers,” about steroid use, just felt herky-jerky and unfinished and “In Her Own Words,” based on an interview with Juliette Lewis, just made me feel like Lewis was kind of a jerk – which I imagine was not the intention of the piece. Still, Palahniuk (I think I’m finally getting the hang of typing that) really endeared himself to me over the course of the book, which gives a charming view of what his life has been like, struggling to be a writer and then being faced with unexpected success, dealing with his father’s murder and trying to make sense of what people do to make themselves happy. And the book is worth reading if only for the introduction, which is a really insightful take on whether or not writing is a solitary venture.
I have many happy memories of devouring Dahl’s young-adult novels and short stories – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, of course, but also Matilda and James and the Giant Peach and The Witches. They were all particularly satisfying for a child because they coupled fairy-tale-level evil adults (child-eating witches and child-torturing headmistresses and child-abusing aunts) with charmingly realistic, if astonishingly clever, children who managed to wrestle happy endings out of horrid situations. In his short stories written for an adult audience, Dahl maintains the same cleverness but gleefully abandons happy endings for brutal irony of the type O. Henry would have appreciated.
Forgive me for ruining one of the stories in the service of a review, but if I may illustrate: the contrast is most distinct when one compares the short story “Champion of the World” with the children’s book “Danny, Champion of the World,” which offer two permutations of the same plot, about poachers catching pheasants by feeding them raisins stuffed with sleeping pills. The plan is clever and seems to go off well for both sets of protagonists, but no one seems to have planned for what will happen when the birds wake up. While “Danny” (as I recall, aided by Wikipedia) ends with some absolution for our plucky youngster, who is able to still get his revenge on the evil pheasant hunters and walks away with a few pheasants for dinner, in the short story an infant (in whose carriage the sleeping birds were hidden) is terrified by a cloud of pecking pheasants and the poachers resign themselves to a failed endeavor.
And so it goes for Dahl’s heroes: hoisted by their own petard, generally, with a real “n” shaped story line. Someone is down on their luck, plots himself into good fortune and then, inevitably, runs afoul of the laws of the universe. The form could get a little repetitive, and as a reader you quickly find yourself looking for the flaw in the plan, trying to anticipate how a scheme to buy antiques off of unwitting farmers or extort money from widows or store one’s brain after death could go awry. But Dahl is really an enjoyable writer, and unfailingly just that much more clever than the protagonist and so the stories fly by but still evoke a pained wince at each final turn.
This collection also contains a very different genre of stories, from his collection “Over to You,” which are realistic (and presumably semi-autobiographical) recountings of British pilots during WWII. While they’re also well-written and richly characterized, I found myself skimming them in a haste to get back to the more dramatically ironic stories in the rest of the book.
When I decided to read Skipping Towards Gomorrah, I thought I’d better pick up Slouching Towards Gomorrah too, in order to be fair and balanced and all that (side note: apparently the phrase is a reference to a book of Joan Didion’s essays, titled Slouching Towards Bethlehem, but I had to draw the line about how many books to include in this essay somewhere, even if Joan Didion insists on intruding herself on every book review I write). Unfortunately, I grossly overestimated my tolerance for Robert Bork’s brand of morality, and so I only made it through the first ten pages and even at that, felt like I’d been repeatedly beaten over the head with a hard-cover copy of Atlas Shrugged for hours. Bork – the only Supreme Court nominee whose last name has become a verb, that I know of, although I’d be curious to know what it would mean to “Ginsberg” someone – is pretty much a jerk, which I knew, but he’s also an inconsistent and confusing jerk, which was more than I could take. The major complaints he lays out in (the first ten pages of) his introduction are that liberalism is 1)too egalitarian (think affirmative action) and 2)too individualistic (think legalization of marijuana). To counter these trends, of course, he recommends that the right-thinking citizens of the country press for it to be, respectively, more individualistic (merit alone should determine college admission) and more collectivist (the right of the many to protect their children from drugs should supercede the right of the few to get high). I’m not quite sure how you’re supposed to figure out which side to be on, unless you read some comprehensive listing by a ratified neo-conservative. Honestly, the whole mess made me really sympathetic to the libertarians who, if nothing else, are vehemently consistent in their reasoning.
(Ten pages of) Bork’s book also made me increasingly appreciative for Savage’s funny, light, and just-a-touch meaty book. Committed to the idea that the founding fathers really meant it when they promised us “the pursuit of happiness,” Savage chases down happiness – or at least takes a good long look at other peoples’ happiness – in the form of the seven deadly sins: going gambling to get a look at greed, or spending some time at a swingers’ convention to understand lust. On the whole, it’s a meditation on whether anybody else gets hurt if a few million Americans decide to pursue some happiness, from being fat to shooting guns to going to a gay pride parade (high on ecstasy, natch).
And if there’s one thing that Savage is careful of, it’s hypocrisy. Of course, he has the advantage of having read and been disgusted by Bork’s book, but his chapter on gun ownership in particular recognizes how difficult it is to draw the line between personal-freedoms-that-make-you-happy and personal-freedoms-that-imperil-everyone-else (of course, he’s much more concerned about people’s safety than their everlasting soul). Savage is not an unrestricted hedonist, but he’s clear about his logic. And even if he hadn’t been, his book is a lot more fun than Bork’s.
This book was a genuine pleasure: compelling and gripping and interesting and engaging. I know I’m being a little empty in my compliments here, but I was just so pleasantly surprised by how good it was that I’m in a hurry to make it clear that I liked it a lot – in fact, I’m looking forward to getting just enough distance from it that I can read it again, but more slowly this time and with a little more lingering over the details I might have skipped in a hurry to find out what the hell was going to happen to these delightful characters.
Quite the opposite of Life of Pi, I kind of thought Territory was going to be not very good, judging by its book jacket description: “Tombstone, Arizona in 1881 is the site of one of the richest mineral strikes in American history, where veins of silver run like ley line sunder the earth, a network of power that belongs to anyone who knows how to claim it.” I mean, it’s no tiger in a life boat, right? But here was my chance to have learn, once and for all, about the consequences of judging a book by its cover – after picking it up three or four times off the library’s “Staff Recommendations” table and putting it back down, I was finally convinced by the blurb on the front from Neil Gaiman, whose work I love: “Emma Bull is really good.” (I will also add that only after finishing the book did I realize that I have actually read, and reread, another novel of hers, in a totally different style, and that I also quite enjoyed that one.)
On the surface, Territory is a fantastical historical fiction novel, about what might have been going on in the town of Tombstone leading up to the gunfight at the OK Corral, if it were the case that certain people had magical powers. See, even my description makes it sound pretty crappy, or at least fluffy and stupid. But the historical landscape is flawlessly researched and seamlessly introduced to the reader. And each of the characters emerges as so strikingly real that the element of fantasy doesn’t seem fantastical at all: if Wyatt Earp can bend the people of Tombstone to his will with his mind, well, it’s not all that much odder than the frontier justice being meted out to cattle rustlers or suspected cattle rustlers, or the way women have to handle their precarious position in a town full of well-armed and mostly drunk men, or the mysterious workings of Tombstone’s Chinatown. The moral center of the book is Mildred Benjamin, a Jewish widow raised in high society in Philadelphia, with dreams of being an author and a pragmatic mind set – and Bull’s choice to give so much attention to this woman in a novel about a gunfight would also seem fantastical, but it’s not a feminist revision of history where we learned that the women were calling all the shots (pun intended), because the novel is also populated with Chinese prostitutes and brazen mistresses and subdued wives and ceaseless gossips, to Mildred is just one face of what women could actually have been doing in Tombstone in 1881. You know, if certain people had magical powers.
Like Neil Gaiman’s excellent American Gods, there’s something refreshing about how Bull inserts the magical into the mundane, reminding me that it’s possible to read science-fiction that’s not overwrought or too caught up in its own cleverness. And that when it’s not, it can be a real joy to read in its own right.
I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I thought this book was too clever. Normally, I’m a big fan of clever –subtle hidden messages, extended allegories, clever names, social satire. I chuckled every time Neil Stephenson referenced his Snowcrash hero/protagonist, Hiro Protagonist. I read deeper messages about mid 20th century European politics into Lord of the Rings. I slogged through all of Moby Dick (OK, I skipped a few of the whale chapters). Plus, Life of Pi had the added bonus of being a Booker Prize winner – the Booker is awarded to the best full-length English novel by a writer in the British Commonwealth of Nations or Ireland – and I’m usually so cowed by the credentials of Booker winners that I’m willing to at least pretend I like their books, in casual conversations. I’m not sure I totally understood Ian McEwen’s Amsterdam (the 1997 winner), but I understood why it won.
But Life of Pi was unrelentingly clever, and it started to grate on my nerves. I wouldn’t want to ruin the plot, but I think I can safely give away information that’s revealed by the front cover illustration: it’s the story of a young Indian man, on his way to Canada, who is stranded on a life boat in the middle of the Pacific with a Bengal tiger. But before we get to the meat of the story – and it was certainly a tasty plot turn, and a great idea for a novel – we have to sit through a fictional “author’s note” at the beginning, in which we are supposed to believe that the author actually met the protagonist and learned the story through him, a pretense maintained in intervals throughout the book without, in my opinion, much pay off character-development-wise. Martel also takes the first quarter of the book to let Pi expound on his religious philosophies, taking the reader aside to explain how Islam “is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion” (p.61), that “The presence of God is the finest of rewards” (p. 63), that “it is on the inside that God must be defended, not he outside…religion is about our dignity, not our depravity” (p.71). Martel seems to trying to coerce the reader into understanding the rest of the book as some kind of religious experience, but I found his machinations a bit heavy handed.
Once the book gets to the lifeboat, things definitely pick up and Martel’s tight, matter-of-fact prose style captures Pi’s terror and exhaustion quite well. Since the book is told mostly in the first person, the absolute clarity with which Pi recounts his horrors gives the reader a glimpse of the man he has become after this ordeal, as well. But Martel is not done with plots twists and turns, I think to the book’s detriment. I suppose this means my place on the Booker committee is getting revoked, but I think if you want to read a clever piece about tigers, you’d do just as well to stick with “The Lady or the Tiger.”
In line with William Gibson’s other novels, Spook Country is an only-just-futuristic science fiction story with technological innovations as the anti-hero focus. Although science fiction has a much longer history, Gibson is thought of as the father of “cyberpunk,” which Wikipedia assures me is characterized by a focus on “high tech and low life,” which sounds about right.
In Spook Country, Gibson’s focus seems to be virtual reality: the protagonist, Hollis Henry, is a retired rock musician trying to write a magazine article about artists in Seattle who are creating installation pieces that can only be viewed with a VR helmet. But she’s soon distracted by finding out the ulterior motives of the man financing her magazine, meeting up with the socially inept programmer who provides the technological structure for this art, and eventually by a mysterious shipping container that seems to be of interest to everyone in the book.
At the same time, Gibson introduces the reader to another plot line, with a diazepam addict strong armed into helping a shadowy government agent trace the actions of a Cuban-Chinese family in New York, who seem to be in the business of facilitating illegal transactions. If that sounds a little convoluted for the B-plot, well, it was. And “introduce” probably wasn’t the right verb, since Gibson does his best to make sure that the reader is just as confused as most of the characters are about the bigger picture of the novel. The few characters who do seem to know what’s going on – the programmer, the financer, the government agent and an old man working with the Cuban-Chinese family – are given the least characterization. I appreciate the focus on the cogs in the machine as much as anyone else, and like the idea of these technological advances allowing people to take part in convoluted conspiracies without totally understanding their role. But it seems to me that the advantage of giving us so many characters’ points of view would be to give the reader a better-rounded view of how events were unfolding, and instead I mostly found myself experiencing the same kind of bigger-picture-blindness from multiple angles. Similarly, Gibson occasionally gets a little distracted by all the shiny technological possibilities – having characters pass on secret information encoded in iPods, and having information being routed through all sorts of global networks – without all of those nifty tricks having a particularly great payoff, plot wise. Even the VR innovations don’t really seem to have been that important, at the end of the day. Gibson seems to just be trying to point out the reader how crazy technology could be, even technology we already have, and isn’t that wild? But it was too much of a distraction for me.
The strength of the book lies, for me, in some of Gibson’s characterizations and how he lets his characters blend technology and “low life,” like when Tito, the young Cuban-Chinese criminal, plays meditations to the vodoun gods on his iPod. Hollis’ relationship with her former band-mates also seems well cast. But the book still felt disjointed to me, unable to bring together its various strong points – Gibson’s great feel for technology, some compelling characters, and a passably intriguing mystery about the shipping container – at the same time. I enjoyed Gibson’s last novel, Pattern Recognition, much more, since it had a stronger protagonist voice, a better melding of the technology with the plot, and a mystery that actually kept me on the edge of my seat.
