“Had Its Moments, But Mostly a Disappointment”

The Testament by John Grisham

I’m not sure what I was expecting from this. Someone told me that anyone familiar with the law would see how poor Grisham’s books were, legally speaking. I’ve only had a year of law school, but I didn’t notice anything glaringly wrong with the legal material. All of the problems were with everything else.

The story starts out interestingly enough – an eccentric billionaire commits suicide and leaves nothing to his spoiled children. He leaves everything to an illegitimate daughter who is working as a missionary in South America, but who wants nothing to do with the 11 billion dollars. What ensues is a legal battle for the ages.

The best parts of the story are all about the legal maneuvering. There is a 20 page span concerning the depositions where Grisham hits his stride. Essentially, anything relating to law is where the book is strong. Anything relating to character depth and anything emotional is poorly done, even formulaic. He did not even need to bother with the ending since it had been telegraphed for so long.

Gone are the days where Grisham was the master of the legal thriller. This book is one of the many that have grown a part of his slow descent…

Stunning

"Bright Lights, Big City" by Jay McInerney

Writing in the second person can be draining - the constant balance between the character and the reader and having to maintain both the distance and the familiarity is something few writers tackle other than in short stories (Junot Diaz is the perfect example). But Bright Lights, Big City manages to produce the first “great” second person narrative that I can think of. From the very first pages where McInerney throws us into New York night life, we are confronted with a character who is both strange and familiar who is moving in a New York that is both strange and familiar. As a fact checker at a major publication who is getting over the fact his wife, who happens to be a model, has left him, the protagonist struggles with a dual desire to be isolated and comforted by others.

What is most striking about this book is the prose. It is both clean and smooth and has a way of moving you back and forth between action and description. This book can be read in a single night and you find yourself so attached to this guy who is as messed up as can be, yet you feel so sorry for him as he confronts his brother, uses more drugs than you can imagine, and struggles to write a novel. He is the anti-hero spawned in a world after the Beats made names for themselves, and I can honestly day that this novel may be a stronger piece of fiction than On the Road or even Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me.

This is a gem and should be treated as such.

Fictional Satire at its Best

England, England by Julian Barnes

I wish I were older and/or had better knowledge concerning England. Everything I know at this point consists of the scant details spoon-fed to me in high school and a history survey in college. But even with this limited knowledge, Julian Barnes’ England, England is a wonderful satire, one that even such as myself was able to enjoy.

The novel tells the story of the strangely brilliant Sir Jack Pitman, who builds an island “England, England,” which is a small miniaturized version of England that attracts tourists from all over the world. Packed within a few square miles are scaled down versions of all that the rest of the world views as inherently “English.” From Robin Hood and Buckingham Palace, to pubs and Princess Di’s tombstone, the small tourist attraction professes to include everything a tourist would want to see in England but in a quarter of the time.

Much of the novel is told through the eyes of Martha Cochrane, a middle-aged woman with the kind of outsider’s point of view that is both strange and comforting once it’s thrown into this plan to create Pitman’s dream island. Her views on sex, relationships, and just about everything is told, along with the rest of the novel, in the type of dry humor much of the world has come to associate with the British. I found myself laughing as Barnes described some of the historical possibilities including Robin and his Merry Men being a group of homosexuals and other such reinterpretations.

Though I found this novel wonderful, I can see a lot of people not liking it. Barnes’ prose is dense and makes it impossible to skim. And many parts of the novel include really elaborate descriptions, which for some may seem over-elaborate and possibly boring. But, if you’re a fan of old English literature like Dickens or of dry British humor, you will certainly enjoy this book. I did.

Some Quotes:

“Why did love seem to come with a subversive edge of boredom attached, tenderness with irritation?”

“What if I suggested that England’s function in the world was to act as an emblem of decline, a moral and economic scarecrow?”

“Dr. Johnson had put it better, of course: they had lost that tenderness of look, and that benevolence of mind.”

Like a Well-Oiled Machine

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

There is something almost infuriating about how well Ian McEwan writes. In many ways, there was something very machine-like about reading Amsterdam because of how smoothly the prose and shifts in perspective worked so effortlessly. When reading most fiction, even good and great fiction, you often find yourself seeing passages that don’t work as well or the actual seams connecting plot points the author is trying to move through. But here, there is none of that, and McEwan, with arguably a more deft touch than he exhibited in Atonement, outlines the relationships of his characters so wonderfully that it is hard to see what happens until the very end where you feel chilled to the bone.

The novel opens at a cremation for a popular woman who died of a degenerative disease. Present are at least three former lovers and a husband whom they all mocked. Clive, a celebrated composer, and Vernon, the editor for the Judge, a British daily, meet and rekindle their friendship. Both have fond memories of the deceased, who really stands as the woman who brought these two men together. From that point on, the two men find themselves yearning for one another’s company until a series of events leads to the dissolution of their friendship, and ultimately, their dooms.

Some have criticized the book for its melodrama and overt ethical condemnations, but I see no problems with it whatsoever. One could criticize Dickens, Tolstoy, and Nabokov for the same reasons. The debates that McEwan presents are an integral part of the story, something that only adds texture to the lives of his characters.

This novel surely deserves the Booker Prize and your attention.

Some great quotes:

“A great man, Clive Linley. To air differences and remain friends, the essence of civilized existence, don’t you think?”

“He knew from long experience that a letter sent in fury merely put a weapon into the hands of your enemy. Poison, in preserved form, to be used against you long into the future.”

Makes Dan Brown Look Like a Genius

The Templar Legacy by Steve Berry

Dan Brown can be blamed for the sudden proliferation of books dealing with quests, historians, and the search for treasure, knowledge and power. The problem is that as much as I am loathe to admit it, Brown is a much better writer than most of the people putting out similar books.

Berry’s outing is about as bad as it gets. He tells the story of the Templars, who have been driven into hiding and have long since vanished from the world. The Templars are in search of the Great Devise, a supposed secret concerning the life of Christ that will allow them to come out of hiding and shatter the Church that drove them under. Cotton Malone is a used bookseller and ex-federal agent who gets caught up in this mess and has to help stop the Templars. What ensues is a race to solve a series of clues and a chase scene about as short and uninspired as a walk to the grocery store and back. I really wish I had more positive things to say about this, but in a market that is already saturated with Dan Brown clones and National Treasure spin-offs (even spoofs), there is no need to produce any more of it.

Don’t bother buying this. I’m sure you’ll be able to find a copy in a 25 cent bin like me.

Some quotes:

“It has served us well, this myth of Christ”

“She’d only recently satisfied a loan used to finance Mark’s college and graduate school. Her son had several times offered to assume the debt, especially once they were estranged, but she’d always refused. A parent’s job was to educate their child, and she took her job seriously. Perhaps too much, she’d come to believe.”

“There much to be said for devotion. A man can seriously accomplish much when the woman he loves supports him, even if she believes what he does is foolishness.”

Enjoyable, But No Kite Runner

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

Similar to The Kite Runner, Hosseini’s latest novel deals with illegitimate children in an Afghanistan reeling from turmoil and change. This time, Hosseini focuses on the female perspective by recounting the lives of Miriam, an illegitimate daughter of a wealthy cinema owner and business man, and a woman named Laila, whose parents are killed in a rocket attack. Both women, in the span of 18 years, end up married to Rasheed, a shoemaker who ends up beating them both relentlessly. The women try to escape from their husband’s rule. All of this takes place against the backdrop of the Soviet Union leaving Afghanistan and the subsequent Taliban takeover.

I ended up reading this book incredibly quickly, as the prose and the pacing is well done. You really do fly through everything. But what bothered me about the book was the same thing that bothered me about Kite Runner – everything seemed like it was written by someone who wanted to provide a perfectly balanced story that had to end in a somewhat neat package. Both of Hosseini’s books, although filled with tragedy, telegraph the redemption that saves the newest generation. I can understand the desire to end on a hopeful note, but there is something too artificial about the way that Hosseini goes about executing his vision.

Overall, this is a decent read, but one that does not live up to his previous outing.

A Quote:

“In that week, Laila came to believe that of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.”

The Wondrous Writing of Junot Diaz

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

I had the pleasure of listening to Junot Diaz read from his first collection Drown a few years ago at Hunter College and even then, I found myself excited to see what he could do with a novel. His prose, especially in the sarcasm and humor he is able to include, is phenomenal. After reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I can understand why it took Diaz so long to write it. I can only hope it does not take him another ten years or so to write something else.

This novel chronicles the life of a first-generation Dominacan-American named Oscar who loves his comic books and science fiction, as well as the many women in his life – namely, his sister, mother, and grandmother. Diaz frames the novel, which is more like a series of vignettes, as relating to a fuku, or a curse that has been placed on Oscar and his family that leads to much heartache and tragedy. Oscar, and those around him, struggle with what it means to be Dominican, so in that sense this book is a part of the transculturation/diaspora literature tradition carved out by writers such as Cristina Garcia and Julia Alvarez; yet at the same time, this book moves beyond that tradition by including so much humor, wit, and a modern-day sensibility that marks this as the start of a possibly new tradition, one that blends historical fact, mysticism, and fan-boy adoration all into one.

I really cannot say enough about this book and firmly believe that anyone who reads this will be a fan. The Pulitzer Prize Committee made the right decision.

Some Quotes:

“Her rage filled the house, flat stale smoke. It got into everything, into our hair and food, like the fallout they talked to use about in school that would one day drift down soft as snow.”

“You always think with your parents that at least at the very end something will change, something will get better.”

“Juan, the melancholic gambler, who waxed about Shanghai, as though it were a love poem sung by a beautiful woman you love but cannot have.”

A Not So Fitting End...

Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card

Before reading this, I already knew what to expect having already ingested the previous three books in this series – Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, and Xenocide, so I’m not sure what exactly about this book was a disappointment. Card finally gives us a kind of end to Ender’s 3000 year life and many plot points that arguably should have already taken place in Xenocide. Unlike the ending to the Harry Potter series, we are not left feeling a sense of sadness and loss at losing a character we have already followed for a thousand pages. Instead, we get another failed attempt at a philosophical science fiction novel. The dialogue is almost endless, one of my major criticisms of the last two books, but here, the religious and spiritual debates reach a crescendo, for me, it was almost too much and almost forced me to stop reading the book. But alas, having loved Ender’s story, maybe only in the beginning to be honest with you, I had to see how everything played out.

I cannot decide whether Card’s note at the end of the book, where he tries explain what it is he was and is trying to do and where he discusses the work of Oe and Endo (both authors I adore), was a good idea or a bad one. For those having read the previous two volumes and presumably this one since you see the note at the end, you already figured that he had an intense interest both in Asian culture and writing and in creating some kind of moral pedagogy in his work. Unfortunately, his finished project does not stand up as well to other writers who have successfully done it—Endo, Oe, C.S. Lewis to name a few—because the philosophy and religion and other spiritual aspects of the novel are so in-your-face and all-consuming that the plot and the storylines disappear.

Anyways, at least I can say that I’m done with this book series…

Interesting Quotes:

“Life is a suicide mission.”

“Do the dead tips of fingernails feel bad when you pare them away?”

“It’s all fictions anyway. We do what we do and then we make up reasons for it afterward, but they’re never the true reasons, the truth is always just out of reach.”

Science Fiction Philosophy

Xenocide by Orson Scott Card

In the middle of my last law school exam, someone looked at my copy of Xenocide and asked me if I had been disappointed by the direction the series had taken. Although stressed from the upcoming exam (anyone who has survived their first year of law school can understand), I looked at him and told him that I was disappointed, especially considering how remarkable the book that started it all - Ender's Game - had been.

At some point, Card decided, or maybe it was in him all along, that a book of science fiction philosophy would be more appealing than continuing the epic adventure of Andrew Wiggin and his family in the same kind of fast-paced, exciting prose. For those familiar with Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time Series, this book is the kind of filler that you find in the last few books of the series. Don't get me wrong, if science fiction philosophy were a genre unto itself, then this would do very well; however, considering how almost monumental the first book was, this shift (started in Speaker for the Deadi) is incredibly disappointing. If I wanted philosophy and discussions concerning the human psyche I would turn to Sartre or the Bible. But Card is not content with advancing the story and instead gives us 300 pages of fluff.

Maybe I'm being too hard, but I've really been expecting something more from this series. Some things do happen - Ender et al figures out how to travel faster than the speed of light, the piggies and the humans learn how to tame the descolada virus, and we are introduced to a world called Path where certain individuals can commune with the gods. Unfortunately, that's almost all that happens. The buggers, humans, and piggies are still stuck on Lusitania and the fleet has yet to arrive. That is how the book starts and that is how it ends.

For those who want an end to the series, you, like myself, have to march on, but for those who have finished Ender's Game should read Ender's Shadow and possibly move on to something else.

Some interesting quotes:

"Every day all people judge all other people. The question is whether we judge wisely."

"Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we never get it out? Territoriality. My wife. My friend. My lover."

"Parents always make their mistakes with the oldest children. That's when parents know the least and care the most, so they're more likely to be wrong and also more likely to insist they are right."

Uninspired

Girl in Landscape by Jonathan Lethem

Based on some of the comparisons on the back of the book, you would think that Lethem's science fiction novel was some sort of masterpiece. One critic went so far as to compare the book to Nabokov's Lolita. I'm not sure I see the comparison other than a very subtle, as in so subtle you not only barely register, but truly do not care, current of sexual tension that reveals itself at the very end of the book. I still for the life of my cannot figure out how this was published to so much acclaim, other than the theory that the book picked up steam after he published Motherless Brooklyn (which actually was a magnificent book, one that deserves all of the acclaim it has received).

The novel is about Pella Marsh and her dysfunctional family living in some post-apocalyptic future. At some point, the Marsh's, following the death of Pella's mother, relocate to another world that was once inhabited with a super-evolved race that, other than a few stragglers, went off to colonize the rest of the universe. I think part of the disappointment is the lack of concrete description. So much is left unsaid, and although the writing school mantra "show don't tell" works with books dealing with things that are familiar to us, here, in a world where there is nothing to anchor us but the writer's descriptions, anything short of a full-blown explanation (peppered with descriptions and what not) of what it is we are supposed to be experiencing. Although some of the concepts are highly interesting, there is simply too much missing from this book for it to be nothing more than an early outing from a now celebrated and much improved writer. John Gardner said that your first novel is something that should be locked away in your desk, never to see the light of day, and I wonder if Lethem should have done that with this book.

Filler, but Decent Filler Nonetheless

New Spring by Robert Jordan

I picked this up after recently hearing of Robert Jordan’s death. He died having yet to finish his epic Wheel of Time series, but luckily, left notes and the necessary materials needed so that someone else can finish it. As a fun, I’m on the fence as to whether or not someone else should finish it – Although the series had been lagging from Books 7 through 10, Book 11 was much better and we had the chance to see glimmers of the younger Jordan, the one who ushered us into his world years ago, so who would want someone else finishing his work for him? Better it go unfinished. On the other hand, if he did indeed leave enough material, thousands of fans are waiting for the concluding volume of this series. I still have yet to decide what I would prefer (although the choice is already out of my hands as someone is working on it as we speak). My only fear is that George R.R. Martin may never end up finishing his A Song of Fire and Ice Series (although I don’t know how many volumes it is supposed to be, so may this next volume is the last). As an aside, I feel bad concerning the fact I worry about whether these authors are finishing up their epics rather than being concerned over their health, but those two concerns are severable and you can feel bad both for the writer as a person and his work.

So, here in New Spring, Jordan gives us a prequel – namely, how Moraine and Lan met one another and became Aes Sedai and Warder. We are introduced to young versions of Moraine, Siuan, and other Aes Sedai all before Rand’s birth, as well as the events that begin Moraine on her long journey to find the Dragon Reborn. In many ways, while reading this, I felt a certain sense of familiarity come over me – as if I was coming home so to speak. Much of this series is something I grew up with since it has spanned so long, and being introduced to younger versions of these characters was a nice addition to the series.

My major problem was the rushed feeling of it. The first hundred pages really has a nice balance to it, but suddenly, when confronted with the climax, it seems as if Jordan wanted to finish it as soon as possible. The bonding between these two pivotal characters is both formulaic and superficial and I was disappointed that more did not happen.

But, I’m glad I read this and think fans will at least get some pleasure out of this. More pleasure, at least, than some of the later volumes of the series.

A Different Kind of Sequel

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card

I actually first read Ender’s Game when I was in college, much later than when most sci-fi and fantasy buffs come across Card’s classic. I actually started using it with students I tutored in middle school as a way of trying to get them hooked on reading. It almost always worked.

In Speaker for the Dead, Card fast forwards 3000 years. In the aftermath of Ender’s victory over the buggers, instead of being honored as being a savior, he is vilified as one great murderer. The fault for this is his – after the final battle, Ender had gone off and found the hive queen and learned all about the bugger race, realizing that the buggers had never been enemies to begin with. He ends up writing a treatise that casts him as the villain and reshapes his own legacy. This book finds humans making contact with a new race and trying to correct the mistakes from the past.

Reading Card’s sequel, although one has to use that term loosely, was both an entertaining and ultimately disappointing experience. Critics have hailed this as a better written book, which is hard to argue against. The moral and religious overtones are explicit, as are the attempts at showing the emotional depth and pain many of the characters feel. But is it better than its predecessor? Sadly, it does not even come close. The success of Ender’s Game was in its innovation and creativity. Here, Card seems as if he’s struggling to become more of a literary writer, a writer with something to say. His point of view is well-received, but it is too heavy-handed. He may as well have written a philosophical treatise.

Overall, you don’t have to read this thread of the Ender series to have closure. Stick to Ender’s Shadow and the more recent thread following Ender’s brother than this and the two books that follow it.

Murakami Strikes Gold...Again

Over the course of a single evening, Murakami weaves together the stories of two sisters, one of whom is in a perpetual sleep-state and another who lives on the fringes, reading books in late night diners, an amateur trombonist, and a love hotel called Alphaville where a Chinese prostitute is beaten by a computer programmer who goes days without ever seeing his wife or children. The regular loneliness all of the characters, yet when you read about them on the page, you always can’t help but wonder why it is they are so lonely or why it is no one in the fabric of Murakami’s world, people are not all over them.

The narrative goes back and forth between the two sisters – Mari and Eri – and you keep reading at a faster and faster pace so as to find out how the two storylines intersect. Reading Murakami is as addictive as everyone says it is. I’m in my first year of law school and was still so engrossed that I finished this book in less than two days.

Both long-time Murakami fans and new ones alike will marvel at this work.

An Improvement from the First

Eldest by Christopher Paolini

Like the first book in the series, there is something oddly addictive about fantasy, even formulaic and somewhat predictable fantasy. Maybe that’s why there will always be a market for it – you may know what is going to happen, but you speed through the pages anyways, curious to both reacquaint yourself and see if the story will present some surprising twists and turns (this is why George R. R. Martin remains the best fantasy writer present – his books are full of twists, turns, and actually strong prose, something absent from most fantasy books).

This second volume in Paolini’s trilogy is an improvement on the first – you can feel his writing and his pacing mature. Eragon is sent off to the elves, where he and Saphira train in preparation for the cataclysmic battle that will come in Book III. Paolini does something that reminds me of early Robert Jordan – he tries to present multiple perspectives, but has problems making any but Eragon’s compelling. His rendering of other characters and their somewhat uninteresting perspectives made me skim as fast as I could to get to the Eragon storyline. I hope that with his final book, he will have become better at pacing and balancing between his characters.

Overall, a decent fantasy read that will certainly entertain you, but may not quite impress you.

Human Tragedy in the Great War

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

This, one of Hemingway’s first, is said to be the best American novel to emerge from World War I. Against the backdrop of a war-torn Italy and soldiers on the front-line tired of fighting, Hemingway presents a love story between Lieutenant Henry, an ambulance driver, and Catherine Barkley, an English nurse. What amazes me the most is the way Hemingway’s short prose manages to convey so much pain and anguish. The characters’ disdain for the war really does bleed through everything. And the prose never shifts its pace or diction – Hemingway uses the same short, descriptive sentences to describe a scene and to describe the death of a character.

I’m not sure I can see many weaknesses in this novel except one thing – the sheer annoyingness of Catherine. There were so many instances when I wanted to slap her for her constant repetitiveness. I would argue there are few heroines who come across as irritating on the page. And yet, regardless of this, you ultimately root for the two characters as they retreat from the on-coming German army and then flee into Switzerland.

I only wish more writers today were writing stories as wonderful (and ultimately tragic) as this one.

Some great quotes:

“You’re my religion. You’ve all I’ve got.”

“We never get anything. We are born with all we have and we never learn. We never get anything new. We all start complete.”

“No, that is the great fallacy; the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”

Formulaic, Yet Addictive Fantasy

Eragon by Christopher Paolini

I had long talk with a friend about this book and we both came to the same conclusion – this is as formulaic as it gets, not all that creative in any sense, and yet you find yourself speeding through the book anyways. All of the predictable fantasy tropes are present – the young boy who knows nothing of the world, lives in an isolate portion of an empire, yet has a destiny to become great, is chased out of his home by evil powers, and soon becomes a great hero that is rejoiced throughout the land. This may as well have been a children’s version of the first book in Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Time” series. Anyways, the book follows Eragon and his dragon Saphira as they navigate a war between two factions – The Empire and the Verdan.

I do want to emphasize that it’s a great book for younger readers and is the kind of thing that will hook twelve-year olds and capture their imagination. It will hopefully inspire them to try other fantasy series and hopefully branch out into other genres. But is Eragon “good”? Not so much…But it will still entertain and be a decent edition to the fantasy canon.

Fun TV Fiction

Deception Point by Dan Brown

Dan Brown, for many, has been the thriller writer for the past few years. The Da Vinci Code and its prequel Angels and Demons both did incredibly well and helped him eclipse even Stephen King and John Grisham for a time.

This outing is similar to his other three books – a big conspiracy, a race to solve some problem with world-wide ramifications, and some sort of code-breaking/problem-solving component. Here, the plot revolves around NASA’s discovery of life on other planets. A meteor found embedded in the Arctic is discovered by scientists with fossils of giant bugs that look to confirm life outside of Earth. Swirling around this discovery is an intense political confrontation between a president who has been hammered on excessive spending, especially on NASA, and an up-and-coming senator willing to do whatever it takes to be elected.

I finished the book in two days, which gives you some sense of the sharp pacing of Brown’s book. In many ways, I wished “literary” writers took a page from the Dan Brown’s and John Grisham’s of the world – literary fiction and beautiful writing/prose does not mean that the pace has to plod on and on and a plot has to be limited to the mundane, the every day.

Overall, this book was entertaining up until the last 50 pages where Brown had to find a way to neatly wrap up his many plotlines. The tension is well-done and this is certainly the kind of book you can read between books that actually require you to think and engage with the text, which is what I did. Don’t expect to be blown away, but enjoy being able to turn your brain off for a few hundred pages.

Slow and Underwhelming

Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee

I often wonder if there is a drop-off after a writer wins the Nobel Prize. At some point, I’d like to sample of books from writers who have won the Nobel directly pre-dating their win and directly following it. I wonder if winning the prize somehow makes it impossible to push yourself and your writing because you have already arguably won the literary prize of prizes. If so, I will immediately send a letter to the committee and tell them not to award Ian McEwan, Philip Roth (well, maybe awarding him the prize he has clearly been waiting for will get him out of his slump), and Haruki Murakami anytime soon because I think they each have so much good writing within them.

I wonder know, reflecting on Coetzee and the arc of his work, if this book was published simply to publish. The first twenty pages are riveting, as gripping as a good thriller. When we are first introduced to our protagonist, he is just realizing that he has been hit by a car while he was riding his bicycle. This single moment changes his life. I really cannot emphasize enough how strong the opening was, how much potential Coetzee set up. And then it all self-combusts. Instead doing something memorable, we get something searching for concreteness. The redemption the character tries to find in others is so flat that I found myself rushing to finish it just so I could start something new. For those who love Coetzee’s past work, most notable Disgrace and Elvis Costello, this will be a major disappointment.

I can only hope that the Nobel has not forever ruined any chances of Coetzee pushing the literary envelope the way he has in the past.

Some beautiful quotes (at least he has not lost his ability to write beautiful and memorable passages):

“Don’t immigrants have a history of their own? Do you cease to have a history when you move from one point on the globe to another?”

“We do not need love, old people like us. What we need is care: someone to hold our hand now and then when we get trembly, to make a cup of tea for us, help us down the stairs. Someone to close our eyes for us when the time comes. Care is not love.”

“Once upon a time his heart was his strongest organ. Any one of its brother organs might let him down – bowels, spleen, brain, but his heart, tried and tested first on Magill Road and then in the operating theatre, would serve him faithfully to the end.”

A Marriage of Wit and Heartache

The Wife by Meg Wolitzer

Meg Wolitzer’s sixth novel contains by far one of the most memorable and unique voices I have come across. The “wife,” Joan Castleman, married to a world famous writer Joseph Castleman, is a woman whose keen wit and bitter sarcasm comes through on every page. Maybe what impresses me most about this novel is how the voice sustains itself for so long. How the extreme mixtures of anger, relief, love, and tenderness come together in an almost torrential downpour of prose. It was a novel for this generation, in the voice we would come to expect from someone in their mid-thirties. Yet Joan is over 60 years old and is in the process of reliving her marriage to her husband starting with the affair they had together while he was still married and an English professor at Smith. From there, we see Joan stand by her husband through his many affairs, as the wife behind the scenes that ultimately is the rock and the stable force in the family. I won’t ruin the ending, but it is one that will make your stomach twist and turn from a mixture of surprise, anger, and ultimately, respect and understanding.

It really is the voice that drives this novel. Wolitzer’s Joan is such a compelling character that you cannot help but really experience the ups and downs that have led her to where she is at the outset of the novel – on a flight to Helsinki with her husband who is about to win a big literary award, finally realizing it is time to end the marriage. The book is just over 200 pages, yet I found myself literally devouring each page at a breakneck pace. The Wife was actually listed as one of the most underrated books published in recent years and I can see why. I was thoroughly impressed with this and look forward to reading more of Wolitzer’s work.

Interesting Quotes:

“All of them, the novelists, story writers, the poets, desperately long to win. If there is a prize, then there is someone somewhere on earth who desires it.”

“Wives are meant to be sources of comfort, showering it like wedding rice.”

“These men who have so much, need so much to sustain themselves. They are all appetite, it sometimes seems, all wide mouth and roaring stomach.”

Brooklyn: The Borough of Life and Follies

The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster

Paul Auster’s Brooklyn Follies starts off being about Nathan Glass, a divorced recovering cancer patient who goes to Brooklyn to die, but quickly turns into an oddly touching story about Nathan’s nephew Tom and as the title reflects, the amusing follies that follow their reunion with one another. Auster’s love of Brooklyn has been well-documented and the book is one great homage to the history-laden borough. From a fake manuscript of The Scarlet Letter to a religious sect that swears of technology and embraces silence, Auster fills his book with so much absurdity that you cannot help but laugh. But no matter how many twists and turns the story takes, both believable and unbelievable, at no point do you question the fabric of Auster’s tale. In many ways, this is the most heart-felt, most touching of Auster’s many books, and I think it may end up being the most accessible and most well-received of his books. Although not his most original tale, it may be my favorite, if only because it has such a rich emotional core.

Some Great Quotes:

“I am not a heavy drinker, but there are moments in a man’s life when alcohol is more nourishing than food.”

“Intellectuals suck, Nathan. They’re the most boring people in the world.”

“Idleness breeds thought, and thoughts can be dangerous, as anyone who lives alone will readily understand.”

A Better Comic or Graphic Novel?

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman has long amazed people with his work in the comic book industry. His groundbreaking Sandman helped pave the way for the current mainstream acceptance of comic books as something not merely for children or meant to be an interest hidden from sight, so people did not judge you: Comics are suddenly more influential in the media, especially within the movie industry, than quite possibly any other creative form. When Gaiman crossed over into novels, many fans crossed over with him and his first novel, Neverwhere, met with some critical success.

Here, Gaiman describes the present day, but a behind-the-scenes look if you will. The premise is interesting, something straight out of a comic: America is teeming with gods, both the old, brought over with various peoples when they first came over to the United States, and newer ones, representing the exponential growth in technology. At the center is a man named Shadow, who is just released from prison and is the most important player in this struggle between the old and the new.

The plot is incredibly original and at the beginning, you really are drawn in. But then something goes awry: Gaiman creates an opportunity to dazzle us and really go into detail about these characters and creatures he has created, but instead leaves us with skeletal descriptions, leaning heavily on past conceptions of what these gods would have looked like in the present day. In some sense, you wonder if Gaiman’s writing is too dependent on an artist that is not there to provide some sort of visual context.

I myself bought this book because I needed a fast read, which Gaiman does provide. It’s mainstream fiction, something meant to entertain, but not challenge in any way. I think my disappointment comes from the potential Gaiman’s opening pages creates to the sudden drop off and lackluster ending. You want something bold and visionary and instead you are left with “bleh.”

Read this when you need a break, but don’t think that going in you’re getting something along the lines of Ender’s Game or even the Lord of the Rings.

Some interesting quotes:

“The room was freezing. It smelled of people who had gone away to live other lives, and of all they had eaten and dreamed.” (255)

“People only fight over imaginary things.” (427)

“He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after awhile, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.” (585)

Slow and Tedious

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

This is the first book by Neal Stephenson I have ever read, or I should say I have ever attempted to read. I got to page 400 and had to stop. I probably should have put the book down after 100 pages, but after so many glowing reviews and endorsements, most notably from the New York Review of Books, I thought I would give it as much of a chance as I could. What a mistake.

Maybe I should even go back farther in time – I purchased the book thinking it would be an incredibly fast read, something in the same vein as a Dan Brown or Stephen King book. I was sadly disappointed to find that all of the people who said that this 1000-page monstrosity would be a quick read were terribly, terribly wrong (I also found at least two other people who thought the same thing and I wish I had listened to them when they told me to stop).

The book bounces back and forth between World War II and the present day, between grandparents and grandchildren in an all-over-the-map techno-thriller that is simply too dense to be readable. The pacing can only be described as plodding. I find Dickens a quicker read.

I think I may have started reading this with the wrong-mind set and maybe I should give it another go in a few years. But for all those looking for a nice-light read, stay away. And for those looking for something that makes you think or something where you can enjoy the texture of the language, stay away as well. Go out and pick up some Virginia Woolf or even some Dickens. It will be time much better spent.

An Epic Comic If I Ever Read One

The Ultimates 2
Written by Mark Millar. Drawn by Bryan Hitch and Paul Neary
Collects Ultimates 2 Issus 1-6.

Unlike the previous Batman collection I read (see previous post), The Ultimates 2 collection was fantastic. Stories like these are what have started to bring people back to comics again following the disastrous market crash of the 1990’s when people became fed up with generic art and horribly written titles.

This arc picks up 12 months following the last Ultimates book and much has happened in the Ultimates’ universe. Bruce Banner is locked away and awaiting trial, Thor has broken away from the team, and Dr. Pym continues to try to find a way to rejoin the team. Captain America, Iron Man and the other Ultimates find themselves at the center of numerous debates concerning the problems with the American government and other nations pursuing super-powered groups and how they should be used, if at all. Although Bryan Hitch’s art is quite strong, what separates this book from many other things on the shelf is the writing. I used to be highly critical of many of the comics being sold because the writing was often weak and depended so heavily on the art to carry the book. Now, in many ways, books like this and the work of Bendis and Miller keep producing, comics have reached the point where the writing is as strong if not stronger than the art, making the medium that much richer and more entertaining. Millar does a fantastic job of keeping an epic feel to everything and at no point do we lose sight of how all-encompassing a team that contains many of Marvel’s most important icons should be. At the same time, we see the moments when everyone, including Captain America, seems all too human.

I think this is a fantastic collection and highly recommend it to seasoned and new comic readers alike.

Batman without the Backbone and without the Soul

Batman: Officer Down

Written by Greg Rucka et al. Drawn by Rick Burchett et al.

I’ll preface this by saying that I haven’t been reading much Batman other than the newest series by Frank Miller and Jim Lee (which, regardless of what comic sales say, has been an utter disappointment). After hearing such buzz about Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker’s work on Batman, I thought I would go ahead and try some of it out. Unfortunately, this outing was a major disappointment. Maybe I should have started with the No Man’s Land story-arc, but after this, I doubt that I’m going to even try that out.

This story-arc starts with Commissioner Gordon’s birthday, which ends with him lying in an alleyway with three bullets in his back and Catwoman standing over his body. In many ways, the story is a weak attempt at a mystery tale in the same vein as Identity Crisis. Batman and the rest of Gotham City’s masked must now come together and figure out what happened.

What really irks me about this is the effort put in giving Batman a deeper emotional core, but everything ends up feeling rushed and underdeveloped. Batman standing over Commissioner Gordon’s hospital bed and barking orders wasn’t enough for me to see how deep a friendship the two men had. If it wasn’t for my familiarity with the Batman mythos, I would likely have no understanding of what was happening, with the result being I would likely never had finished reading the story. I’m certainly glad I did not buy the issues individually and purchased the graphic novel with a heavy discount. In many ways, this looked like a way of starting a new era of Batman in that the writers really change some of the familiar character dynamics we have all come to love. There are many reasons why the newest Batman movies have turned to the older material rather than the new stuff – the new stuff is awful.

Skip this. I wish I had.

"A Fine Disturbing Piece of Fiction"

The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan

Long before Atonement and Amsterdam, Ian McEwan was a fantastic short story writer. His work was tight and finely wrought I language evoking an older Hemingway. I believe that The Cement Garden was his first novel or novel-length work (In many ways this feels more appropriately categorized as a novella, although I’m not quite sure what the distinction would be other than length or a novella simply being the label put on a piece in the first place), but in it you can see the sparseness and attention to detail that is more commonly seen in a short story. Raymond Carver and Richard Yates, my two favorite short story writers, would have loved this tale. The book is, as most reviewers have described it, a sinister and chilling story about four orphaned children living in a large London high-rise during an unnaturally hot summer. That, unfortunately, is all I can say without revealing the plot, which I promise is so dark and yet so well-done that you will likely read this in one or two sittings. By the time I got to the end, even through you already sensed what was going to occur many pages previously, the way that all the threads and themes come together – death, sex, love, family, and childhood – you are completely satiated. Like any good short story, there is an open-endedness that allows one’s imagination to continue on with the tale, but without the feeling of being cheated and needing to see a sequel. McEwan should be well on his way to winning the Nobel, given that his early work as is shown here is as strong if not stronger than his more critically acclaimed recent outings.

"Diluting the Canon"

Everyman by Philip Roth

Perhaps 'Diluting the Canon' is too harsh. Many other reviewers have called Roth’s 27^th novel a masterpiece, a highly ambitious undertaking, and a book that is at once familiar and new (Publisher’s Weekly and The Washington Post’s Book World). But I cannot help but think this book, for all its ambition, is nothing more than a failed experiment, one that ultimately brings Roth no closer to his dreams of finally winning the one major prize that has still eluded him: The Nobel Prize.

The book, in many ways, is at least a structural success. We start at the funeral of our protagonist where three of the mourners express their sadness: the man’s daughter, an ex-wife, and older brother. From there, Roth takes us back in time to various points in the deceased’s life, including his childhood spent working with his brother in his father’s jewelry and watch store, a term in the Navy, multiple failed marriages and affairs, and most importantly, his many visits to the hospital. Roth refers to his protagonist as an ‘average man,’ in the hopes of somehow capturing a regular, maybe even normal, American existence. Yet Roth’s novel ultimately focuses to the point of obsession on the frailty of the human body. The protagonist’s life is framed by his many hospital visits, from a hernia operation to multiple procedures meant to clear out blocked arteries and other issues that arise throughout his body. At one point, the character has seven straight years with a major procedure. With the constant referencing and focus spent on detailing a person’s mortality, one can’t help but wonder if this is something Roth himself fears. I often find that at some point every writer has to produce something about human frailty and the weakness of the human body. Is this Roth’s attempt? Like Woolf, is he haunted by some end fast approaching? Or is this merely a book about a man and the slow process of dying. The title seems to provide both an answer and a great problem that goes unreconciled: if this is the story of an everyman, why the long diatribes focusing only on health and vigor. Are we meant to judge and eventually pity this man who cheated and failed in most aspects of his life? If this were a novel driven solely by plot and characterization, none of these things would be at issue. Yet here, where we are almost put on the spot to judge the outcome of this man’s life, set up masterfully by the funeral opening, we have to look at least on a more than superficial level at the judgments one inevitably comes to when you read a book by Roth, someone whose novels have always carried a certain political and moral charge to them. What we’re left with after weighing the thin book is not much of anything, really.

If this book was meant to somehow make Roth’s case for the Nobel that much stronger, I am sad to say that it has failed. The structure, the strongest, yet also the most flawed aspect of the novel, never allows us to care about the protagonist and what has happened to him, meaning that at no point do we ever reflect on some of the obvious fears we all share concerning our own mortality, something the novel seems to drive at from the very beginning. The ending seems too compact, a little too neat and tidy in that we are finally brought back to the operation that ends his life. There’s something too artificial in it and it really detracts from many of the weighty issues Roth sounds off on.

I will finish by saying that this is simply a book to read if you have nothing more pressing or urgent calling to you from the long list of books sitting on your bookshelf.

Some interesting quotes:

“As my father told us, when a pretty young woman wears a piece of jewelry, other women think that when they wear the piece of jewelry they’ll look like that too.”

“Now he sat beside her on the bed and took her hand in his, thinking: When you are young, it’s the outside of the body that matters, how you look externally. When you get older, it’s what’s inside that matters, and people stop caring how you look.”