What I'm Reading...

title:  NW

author:  Zadie Smith

published:  September 2012

genre:  literary fiction

NW has been my subway read for a few days now, and thus far, the seven years we've had to wait since On Beauty were well worth it.  Abstract and lyrical and refreshingly honest.  I'll let you know what I think once I finish.

title:  Joseph Anton: A Memoir

author: Salman Rushdie

published:  September 2012

genre:  memoir

I started reading Joseph Anton in honor of Banned Books Week, because, let's face it:  The Satanic Verses is pretty much the ultimate banned book (and also, in my opinion, one of Rushdie's finest works).   About a year ago, I saw an older documentary that focused on the controversy created by the novel's publication.  The documentary did a thorough job of explaining why some felt so strongly about the book, but I've wondered what living under a fatwa for almost ten years was like for Rushdie.  This book answers that question, and then some.  I'm about 200 pages in, and I'm finding it fascinating so far.  

title: The Polish Boxer

author: Eduardo Halfon

published: October 2012

A few months ago, I stumbled across the Kickstarter page for this book and was intrigued, so I was really excited to see it up on LibraryThing's Early Reviewers list.  I have a feeling, knowing my book-specific ADD, I'll start reading it before I finish the other two.

What are you reading this week?

Review: Desperate Characters by Paula Fox

title:  Desperate Characters [purchase here]

author:  Paula Fox

genre: literary fiction

pages: 156

published: 1970

source:  New York Public Library

"Monday had always been a terrible trouble--once she had tried to stay awake all Sunday night to forestall her mother's grim and unforgiving presence in her doorway--but she had fallen asleep just before dawn, to be awakened two hours later by her mother clapping her hands relentlessly over the bed, her face shining from her morning scrub, dressed in a starched house dress, saying over and over, "Early risers are the winners."  It had been thirty years since Sophie had been roused by that derisive applause; she had not yet discovered the nature of the prize her mother's words had once led her to believe existed.  Perhaps winning had simply meant the tyranny of waking others."  (p. 147)

Some authors are amazing at creating a compelling story.  Others, at creating compelling, realistically-rendered characters.  Few are adept at both.  Paula Fox's Desperate Characters places her firmly in the character-development camp, and inhabits a place in the spectrum somewhere between Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, a novel that is super character-driven but where a ton happens, and Teju Cole's Open City, which is almost entirely character-driven and very little happens.  

As I read this book, the opening line from Anna Karenina kept popping into my head ("All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."). Jonathan Franzen loves Desperate Characters, and its influence on his writing is obvious.  Franzen is the patron saint of unhappy-middle-class-white-families, and often his characters are so intricately and realistically rendered that they're often polarizingly (I like to turn things into adverbs) unlikable.  In fact, I know of more people who stopped reading The Corrections because they hated everyone in it, than I know people who finished it.  All of Fox's characters that make up Desperate Characters' unhappy-middle-class-white-family are fairly self-involved, which, at least for me, created enough space that I found it hard to empathize with them.  Usually, self-absorbed characters can be a turn off for me, but Fox's skill was so evident that, for once, surprisingly, it didn't matter.  

The story follows Sophie and Otto, a middle-aged married couple, who are each unhappy in their own way. I would argue that it's not that they're unhappily married; it's that they're unhappy, and also married.  Their unhappiness seems to go beyond how they feel about the other.  In the first few pages of the story, Sophie, the main character, is bit by a stray cat.  The entirety of the action takes place over the course of several days, during which the bite swells and everyone and their mother tries to persuade her to get it checked out by a doctor, an idea Sophie staunchly resists.  At the same time, Otto, a lawyer, has parted ways with his longtime legal partner, Charlie, and Charlie isn't taking the separation well (i.e. he gets drunk. And makes creepy phone calls).  For such a short span of time and only 156 pages, a lot happens.  Otto and Sophie attend a party.  Charlie gets bombed and shows up on their doorstep in the middle of the night.  Sophie has lunch with an old friend who has one of the most dysfunctional, codependent divorce situations I've ever encountered in literature.  They catch the stray cat.  No one gets much sleep.  


As I mentioned, I struggled to like both Sophie and Otto.  Sophie, through her persistent passivity, seems to be her own worst enemy.  Otto is all opinions all the time, though he doesn't come across as the most reflective person.  But even for their unattractive qualities, both were wholly presented and developed over the course of the narrative; even if I didn't like them per se, I still found them compelling.  I wanted to see what happened to them next, not because I cared about them, but because I wanted to follow Fox where she was going.  I can see why Franzen returns to this piece again and again.


Also, in terms of craft, Fox is a technically astounding:

"Sophie stood motionless in the hall.  The living room looked smudged, flat.  Objects, their outlines beginning to harden in the growing light, had a shadowy, totemic menace.  Chairs, tables, and lamps seemed to have only just assumed their accustomed positions.  There was an echo in the air, a peculiar pulsation as of interrupted motion." (p. 47)

I mean, damn.  What an image!


Rubric rating:  7.5.  Strong.  I'll definitely pick up more by Fox in the future.

Review: Zipper Mouth by Laurie Weeks

title:  Zipper Mouth [purchase here]

author:  Laurie Weeks

pages: 167

genre: fiction

publication: 2011

source:  New York Public Library

"Outside my window it was cold, bare trees shaved in a bitter wind.  Or maybe it was summer, who can know.  The TV's dismal flow leaked across my sheets. Jesus, close eyes. What did the day used to be like. I drifted to a memory of a happy time when I brought home a poem in second grade about clouds. "Clouds" was misspelled:  The fluffy clods are floating in the sky.  My mother's loving laughter, my beautiful young mother, at the time she would've been thirty-one, her laugh a fizzy feeling, both of us dissolving into giggles, sadly ignorant of the bloody five-car pileup of life I was hurtling blissfully toward." (page 159).  

I came to Zipper Mouth in a roundabout way:  I was reading an awesome piece over at The Awl on the merits (and inherent problems) with author readings and book tours, and I really enjoyed reading the thoughts contributed by Laurie Weeks and Tao Lin.  When I researched Weeks, I quickly found out that parts of Zipper Mouth had appeared in Dave Eggers' The Best American Nonrequired Reading, I immediately put a hold on it at the library.  (Those of you who are fluent in my particular brand of literary snobbery know that I take the recommendations from "The Daves" very seriously, "The Daves" being David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers and David Sedaris.  They walk among the gods who reign supreme in my personal pantheon of prolific prose-makers).  Per usual, Eggers' recommendation was spot on.  

The narrator of Laurie Week's Zipper Mouth has a problem  several problems:

1)  She has a substance abuse problem.  Her drug of choice:  ALL OF THEM.  Heroin, speed, coke, booze, weed, nicotine...if you can crush it, snort it, or smoke it, apparently it either has been or will be in her at some point over the course of the narrative.

2)  Due to said substance abuse problem, she has an employment problem (she seems to gain and lose various temp jobs throughout the text) which, combined with the substance abuse problem, results in a financial problem that leaves her unable/almost unable to pay her rent/bills or, at one point, buy a bagel for breakfast.  Her ability to stretch even the smallest amount of money while ensuring the purchase of some sort of illegal substances boggles the mind.  

3) And to top if off, she has an unrequited love problem, as she's hopelessly infatuated with her best friend, Jane, a straight girl who gets high on the attention and free drugs that come with said infatuation. 

Set mostly in NYC's Lower East Side, the novel itself is a nonlinear collage of images, scenes, lists, memories, amends and letters (to dead celebrities like Sylvia Plath, Vivien Leigh, and Judy Davis, and to her very much alive addict friends) that work together to create a rich, vivid picture of the narrator's life.  The protagonist, though presented in a reflective yet unselfconscious and nonjudgmental manner by the author, at times seems to embody the verb "waste":  she wastes her potential, her intelligence, her passions and talent; she wastes her heart on a woman who isn't going to love her in a healthy way; she is literally wasted for most of the book.  As the reader (and as an overly empathetic being),  I couldn't help but feel for her, to want more for her. Though flawed (and aren't we all!!), the protagonist is so warm, so genuine and funny (!!!) and unpretentious, so realistic and raw and reflective and aware that I rooted for her every step of the way.  And THANK GOD that Weeks has created a piece of work that pushes the reader out of a passive comfort zone, to really feel something, even if that something is, at times,  discomfort and anxiety.  (sidebar:  FACT: after reading the scene in which the protagonist wakes up, hungover, only to realize that she vaguely recalls she may or may not have a test that day ("What fucking test?  In what banal way with nonetheless enormous consequences was I about to fuck up today?" (page64)), I woke up at 2:24am in a cold sweat and could not for the life of me fall back asleep before I had reviewed and re-reviewed my "to do" list no less that 13 times and I was reasonably sure that I hadn't dropped the ball on anything. THAT'S how much I empathized with the protagonist...I actually adopted some of her anxiety as my own. You know you have an empathy problem when you start taking on the stress of the fictitious...).  

I loved Week's utilization of multiple and alternative forms for her narrative (lists, flashbacks, letters, etc).  It reminded me of Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad in terms of how successfully utilized and how incredibly contemporary those choices felt (n.b. for those of you who haven't read A Visit From the Goon Squad yet, DO!  It's phenomenal!  There's an entire chapter done a as series of power-point slides that illustrates my point and, stylistically, works wonderfully!).  My favorite list came on page 46:

"10 Bonus Accomplishments of Today

1. Battled Satan

2. Didn't smoke pot(so far)

3. Swept floor, tied newspapers

4. Organized four files

5. Went to work in spite of spirit being broken on Rack of Menstrual Pain

6. Ate broccoli, 'the colon's broom'

7. Endured lengthy conversation with X; faked waves of empathy

8. Didn't smoke for three hours after getting up

9. Walked to the gym instead of taking a cab

10.  Celebrated diversity"  

I actually do the same thing when I'm feeling especially unproductive and/or am feeling the desire to be self-congratulatory.  Here's mine from today:

Jack's 10 Bonus Accomplishments of Today

1.  Wrote email from bed to Marketing at 5:33am (to make up for email I forgot to send before I left work yesterday...ooops)

2.  Only had 1 1/2 cans of Coke despite running on less than 5 hours sleep

3.  Wrote Zipper Mouth review, which has been at the top of my "to review" pile for at least a week and a half

4.  Remembered to take all 6 supplements

5. Called Mom; experienced genuine empathy

6.  Remembered to ask Mom for Grandma's new email address

7.  Cleaned off couch (i.e. the world's largest, most comfortable junk drawer)

8.  Requested Pinterest invite

9.  Made a dent in the dirty dishes

10.  Celebrated diversity

This one was mostly self-congratulatory ;)

I would also be remiss if I didn't talk about how damn beautiful the language was!  Weeks is so skilled at putting together some infuriatingly gorgeous sentences.  Comme ci: 

"I couldn't focus.  Nicotine deprivation revealed to me what a vacuum I was, what a suction machine of need and desire.  God I love everything, I thought, gazing out my window at passersby several stories below.  Blossoms dripping from the trees, robins in love warbling among the peeping spring budlets, trash spilling festively from an orange dumpster...That emaciated visionary walking his mangy dogs beneath the ginko trees  like he did every day in a paradigm-shattering costume of sandals and socks beneath an overstretched Speedo and bare rib cage--I worshipped him.  The periwinke sky and its cloud scallops arched up from behind the jumbled gothic architecture of rooftops across the street.  I loved that shade of blue, what a sharp sensation it produced in my lungs!  What chemical floodgate does a color open in your mind?  Love leaked from my pituitary and converted on contact with my bloodstream into panic and I was swelling up, threatening to leave the ground and float off fast.  I needed a cigarette, the tap-dancing kind, three feet long."  (page 48)

C'est magnifique!  

Rubric rating: 8.5.  Can't wait to read more from her!!!  

FYI:  There's a great interview with Weeks here at The Rumpus on Zipper Mouth.  

ZERO willpower: the overwhelming state of my "to-be-read" pile

I should not be allowed to walk into a library unattended.  It's worse than when I'm left unattended at Strand.  Because the books at the library are free.  I ALWAYS walk out with far more than I could possibly read before they're due.  I walked in to pick up Paula Fox's Desperate Characters (which had come in from my epic holds list), and walked out with Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and Dana Spiotta's Eat the Document.  

Now my current "to-read/to-be-finished" pile consists of those, as well as Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (which I'm almost finished.  Damn good book!) and a halfway finished The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family, which weighing in at 600+ pages is a bit too unwieldy to take on the subway.  At least my chronic book ADD hasn't taken me too far off course from my 30 Before 30 self-imposed challenge...

Review: When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man by Nick Dybek

title: When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man [purchase here]

author: Nick Dybek

genre: fiction

pages: 304

date: due out in hardcover April 12, 2012 

source:  I received an advanced reader's copy from Riverhead Books via 

LibraryThing in exchange for an honest review.

This evening, the conclusion of Nick Dybek's debut novel left me on the verge of doing two things that I seldom do:

1) missing my subway stop

2) crying in public

I say "on the verge of" because, though teary-eyed, I was narrowly able to squeeze out of the closing doors.  Damn you, Dybek!

Point being: When Captain Flint Was Still A Good Man was THAT captivating a read.  Especially the last half. Straphangers, you have been warned.

Dybek's story follows fifteen-year-old Cal during a pivotal time in his life in Loyalty Island, a seaside community that owes their livelihood to the winter king crabbing season in Alaska and the Gaunt family.  When John Gaunt, the patriarch whose very lineage is the core of town mythology, passes away, the fate of the town is left  in the hands of Richard, his prodigal son.  What Richard decides to do with the crabbing fleet will have huge ramifications, and what happens next begs the question:  how far would you go to protect and preserve your way of life? 

In what could have been merely a typical boy-becomes-man/coming-of-age story, Dybek manages to uniquely and originally tackle some pretty major themes/issues:  loyalty; honor; moral relativism (sidebar: the majority of the book metaphorically lives in a moral "gray area" and literally takes place in one of the grayest areas of the country. Pretty damn perfect); the fact that, to some extent, we all end up becoming our parents (sometimes the best of them, sometimes the worst) despite our youthful Sisyphean efforts; sacrifice; self-determination..

Dybek's strength is the story, and in the deliberate, minimalistic voice which he expertly wields to tell it. (By minimalistic,  I mean that I was pleased that there wasn't any noticeable excess, that stuff that some debut/newer authors tend to pack into their work to make it seem more "writer-ly".  The telling fit the tale).  And the characters Dybek creates are as complex and dynamic as his prose is deliberate and tight.  He's created multiple scenes that have stuck with me throughout my reading of the book.  One occurs fairly early on, a scene where Cal's mother (to call her a music-lover would be an understatement) asks Cal to pick a record for them to listen to as they cook and dance to celebrate the finding of Cal's father's boat, which had briefly lost radio contact with the outside world.  Cal selects Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time** (because he liked the title).    I *wish* I could put an excerpt here, but I have the uncorrected proof and am thus not supposed to quote from it. Womp womp (says the sad trumpet).  Regardless, super powerful image (the dichotomy of Cal and his mother celebratory dancing and the haunting musical selection) , and one of many, in this precise, incredibly tight narrative. 

Mini-spoiler:  if you're expecting a feel-good, warm-and-fuzzy ending, this is not the novel for you (hence my hasty, leaky-eyed narrow escape from the N train this evening).  From page 290 on, even though I KNEW in my gut what was about to happen, the last 14 pages were CRUSHING and left me feeling so incredibly conflicted.   Well done.

Rubric rating: 7.5.  Impressive debut.  I'm excited to see what the future holds for Dybek. 

 **n.b. Messiaen wrote this piece while interned in a German prison camp in 1940.  Super haunting.  Personally, my kitchen dancing usually involves 80s new wave or Otis Redding a la Ducky in Pretty in Pink, but to each his own.  You can listen to Quartet for the End of Time for free here, courtesy of the Luna Nova Ensemble.

30 before 30!

A week or so ago, I turned the big 2-9, and given that I only have just under 360 days left in my 20s, I'm putting together a literary bucket list of sorts:  My 30 before 30.  This is comprised of books I've either been dying to read, should have read by this point, or want to revisit with the perspective of age.


Classics:  
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald **
Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger **
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy **
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
Pale Fire by Vladmir Nabokov


Contemporary:  
Arcadia by Lauren Groff
Celebrity Chekhov by Ben Greenman
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe
Blindness by Jose Saramago **
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruiki Murakami
Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart 
Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta
The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
Men in the Off Hours by Anne Carson
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson **
The Descent of Alette by Alice Notely **
Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky
The Leopard by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
The Old Child and Other Stories by Jenny Erpenbeck
Spirit Seizures by Melissa Pritchard

Nonfiction/Essays: 
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
The Possessed by Elif Batuman
Zona by Geoff Dyer
Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford


** rereading


Of course I'll supplement with my typical diet of new releases and review all along the way.  Looking forward to getting started!!!

Review: Open City by Teju Cole

title:  Open City  [purchase here]

author: Teju Cole

genre: literary fiction

pages: 241

source:  I received an advanced reader's copy via Netgalley 

in exchange for an honest review.

"We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities.  The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float." (p. 144)

The past (if there is such a thing) heavily influences the present day of Teju Cole's novel Open City.  The novel follows Julius, Nigerian-born psychiatry resident as he walks around New York City's many neighborhoods during his off hours and ponders each area's unique history.  And that's pretty much the most action you get over the course of the novel:  Julius takes a lot of long walks.  He thinks about New York, his job, his few friends and his family.  He goes on holiday to Brussels, does more thinking, relays the experiences of the people he meets, and talks more about history.  Not much happens.  So if you NEED plot-driven, fast-paced narrative, this is not the book for you.

I, however, do not.  Cole didn't need a lot to happen to create a thought-provoking, quietly beautiful portrait of one man.

I loved the way that Cole gently held our hand as he slowly developed the character of Julius over the course of the book.  Julius, being a psychiatrist, was brilliantly and fittingly rendered as someone who looks at the world in a detached, almost clinical way, observing more than participating at times.  There are several lovely scenes were we learn a lot about Julius through watching him interact with strangers as he gathers their stories and experiences (as psychiatrists are so adept at doing in and out of their office).  One part of the narrative where I think Cole's talent in character development especially shone:  there's a chilling scene late in the book between Julius and the sister of a childhood friend named Moji (which I won't reveal here as to not spoil and/or influence your reading experience, but it starts on 223 in Part Two, Chapter 20, and ends on page 227) where she reveals something so personal and difficult to him, and his reaction to her revelation (to reference a specific story about Nietzsche) says an incredible amount about the inner workings of Julius' mind.  So much of the book was about "definition":  how our past defines our present, how an area or a people are defined by collective experiences, how others define us, and how we define others and ourselves.  

"To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone." (p. 178)

Rubric rating: 8.  This is one of those works that I feel like I'll come back to again and again, and each time, see something different and get a bit more out of it.  

Rapid Fire Reviews!!!!!

title:  In Red

author: Magdalena Tulli

pages: 158

genre: literary fiction

published: November 2011

source:  New York Public Library

Translated from Polish by Bill Johnson, the main character in Tulli's In Red is the fictional town of Stitchings.  Part portrait, part magical realism, Tulli creates a town from which there may be no escape, chronicling the life and death of an ensemble of the town's figureheads.  Chaotic, claustrophobic, and intensely lyrical, Tulli's strength lies in her insane command of language to create the mood and atmosphere of the piece.  

Rubric rating: 7

title:  There But For The

author: Ali Smith

pages: 236

genre: literary fiction

published: September 2011

source:  New York Public Library

One evening, Miles Garth attends a dinner party at the home of Genevieve Lee, and between the main course and dessert, leaves the table, walks upstairs and locks himself in the Lee's spare bedroom.  And refuses to leave.  For about a year.

Smith tells the story from the perspective of four individuals with varying relationships with Miles, and through each, the reader is able to assemble a portrait of the man that is Miles Garth, and Smith's strength lies in her ability to at once create these personal pictures of each character while at the same time examining the themes of separation and connection.  

Rubric rating: 7

title:  The Psychopath Test

author: Jon Ronson

pages: 288

genre: nonfiction-psychology

published:  2011

source:  New York Public Library

Note to the single ladies:  I happened to have this book with me one Friday night as I waited to meet a friend at a bar, and three different men approached me to flirt/ask about the book.  Apparently, this book is a man magnet.  Unanticipated bonus ;)

While investigating the origins of mysterious packages sent to neurologists around the world, Ronson becomes fascinated with the DSM-V and the characteristics of psychopaths.  He wonders:  could some of the most successful and powerful individuals be, in essence, psychopaths?

I really enjoy Ronson's narrative style.  I felt like I was with him in his head as he discovered new information and revised his thinking, which is something readers don't usually get to experience in nonfiction.  Hilarious, thought-provoking, disturbing and insightful, The Psychopath Test is not to be missed!

Rubric rating: 8

Review: The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson

title: The Orphan Master's Son

author: Adam Johnson

pages: 443

genre: literary fiction

published:  Due out January 10th, 2012

source:  I received an Advanced Readers Copy from Random House

 in exchange for an honest review.

Close your eyes. Imagine, if you will, a country whose only law is the whim of its leader, a leader so self-aggrandizing and delusional that he would ask his people to believe that even the country's doves are patriotic enough to take a bullet for him.   A country that has installed mandatory loudspeakers in every home, loudspeakers that provide a constant barrage of propaganda and lies.  A country where anyone can be picked up off the street at end time and sent into the fields to perform hard labor.  A country where parents' fear can overshadow the love they feel for a child.  

Welcome to Adam Johnson's North Korea.

In an interview with Richard Powers, Johnson says the following:

"...North Korea is real.  And to read the agonizing accounts of its victims is like swallowing stones.  One of the striking things about these accounts is how much is missing--there's often little emotion, reflection, or expressions of personal desire.  Which brings us back to trauma narratives, a hallmark of which is the way their narrators can get stuck in a kind of survival mode that takes precedence over voice, memory, and insight.  When life is about survival, rather than being human, people are less able to speak in terms of yearning, growth, discovery, change and so on.  How do you gain a deeper understanding of a person who's been taught that expression is dangerous and that emotions can get you killed?  What do you do when the only person who can tell a story is the least able to do so? This is where the limits of nonfiction become visible.  And it's where we must turn to fiction, which focuses on what deprivation does to identity, memory and basic humanity."

The Orphan Master's Son tells the story of the role of identity and memory and it's affect on an individual's humanity, as well as the collective humanity and identity of a nation.  Johnson weaves the tale of the incredible life Pak Jun Do and his trials as pseudo-orphan, kidnapper, soldier, state spy and later, master impersonator.  

Love story, thriller, coming of age story, this book was EVERYTHING and has all the elements I look for in my literature: 

• lyrical prose
• compelling and dynamic characters
• strong narrative voice
• inspiring plot and electric actions

The world Johnson creates is so bizarre, so cruel, so dangerous that it's hard to look away.  I especially loved the second half of the book, where Johnson drops a giant talent bomb on the reader and demonstrates his absolute command of narrative and voice.  Each character, each moment WORKS in a way I haven't experienced in a piece in a long time.  When it comes out in January, move The Orphan Master's Son to the top of your "to read" pile!

Rubric rating: 8.  I will definitely be checking out Johnson's other works: Emporium, a short story collection, and his novel, Parasites Like Us. 

Review: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

title: Freedom [purchase here]

author: Jonathan Franzen 

pages: 562

genre:  literary fiction

published: 2010

source:  New York Public Library

I've been promising a review of Freedom for the past few weeks and have been negligent in my posting.  It was over 500 pages!  That shit takes a while ;)

As I've previously mentioned, I love me some Franzen, but I was most familiar with his short stories and nonfiction, and this was my first time reading one of his novels.  It did not disappoint.

In the ongoing debate about the future of/the possible death of the great American novel, one thing many agree on is the difficulty of creating characters and plot that are concurrently timeless and relevant. I'm sure I have nothing to add to that debate that would be original or poignant, but that notion kept popping into my head as I read.  I'm sure Franzen has weighed in, and I'd be interested to hear what he said.  In terms of Freedom, Franzen keeps the plot  and characters incredibly current, but there's a universal quality to the relationships he develops.  Timeless?  No.  The next great American novel?  Probably not. But incredibly generous and intelligent, which are qualities worth revisiting for years to come.

Rubric rating: 9.  Love me some Franzen. 

Review: Pym by Mat Johnson

title: Pym:  A Novel [purchase here]

author:  Mat Johnson

genre: literary fiction

pages: 322

originally published: 2011

source:  New York Public Library

First person narration can be tricky, but Mat Johnson has a sense of voice that rivals Junot Diaz. So clear, so compelling.  As I read, I wanted to follow Johnson's main character, Chris Jaynes, anywhere he went.  Until he decided to leave the States (and reality) far, far behind...

The premise of this book is really quite genius: the self-described token black professor at a small, predominately white liberal arts college finds himself without tenure after favoring teaching Edgar Allen Poe to authors of color.  The object of Jaynes' fascination is Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.  Johnson does an amazing job of allowing us into Jaynes' psyche as he deconstructs Poe's novel, which he sees as part of the "intellectual source of racial Whiteness."  In this part of the book, Johnson soars as Jaynes takes us through Poe's work and explains its literary and institutional significance.  Strong voice, compelling argument and raw social commentary. Near perfect.  Up until this point in the narrative, I was in love with this book.

Then we go to Antarctica.  Through a turn of events (which I won't cheat you out of discovering on your own), Jaynes is lead to believe that the incidents outlined in Poe's novel may not be so fictitious after all.  Given the opportunity to, in part, retrace Pym's journey and go to Antarctica, he accepts in hopes of finding Tsalal, an island of pure blackness (which Poe described with much terror) which Jaynes imagines to be the "last untouched bastion of the African diaspora."  Unfortunately, once the ship docks, Johnson loses me a bit.

My problem is not with the journey; my problem is not even with the sequence of events that border on science-fiction/disaster porn.  My problem is with the way the characters react (or don't) to these events.  Typically, when an author decides to dive into the realm of science fiction or adventure, as Johnson absolutely does in the last half of his book, either:

• the story takes place in a world where a specific set of magical/heightened/supernatural/etc rules and conditions are consistent and we, as readers accept them as the reality of the story OR 
• the story takes place in reality as we know it and something unusual/strange/supernatural/world-shattering happens, and the characters react accordingly.  

A beautiful example of this is House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski:  when the house starts shifting and changing, people freak out, then adapt, then re-approach their new reality.  In Johnson's story, when reality as Jaynes knows it is turned on its head, the characters just seem to keep moving through the plot without much reflection, except in terms of considering potential profit.  In addition, some pretty major occurrences are mentioned and then never reacted to thoroughly or revisited...which I think, in the end, is not a problem of story as much as an issue with character development.

Jaynes is a wonderful character.  Consistent.  Complex.  Evolving.  But he was the only one flushed out and developed to that extent.  The rest of the cast of characters seemed to be more like different sized shadows of people rather than fully realized individuals, with only 2-3 defining characteristics, as opposed to the dynamic, compelling personality given to Jaynes.   When they stand side by side as the same bizarre events unfold, it's hard to completely give yourself to the world Johnson creates given their reactions (or lack thereof).  

But back to Johnson's genius:  he crafts the story utilizing the same structure as Poe's Narrative.  As I read, I kept noticing how Johnson took some of the most salient story elements from Poe's piece and reappropriated them for Jaynes' journey (if you're curious as to which story elements he chose, message me, as I don't want to give away any major plot points here!).  Super clever, and done in such a subtle way that it's in no way gimmicky or forced.

Rubric rating: 7.  I would love to read more by Johnson...as long as it's set north of Antarctica.

Review: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle by Vladimir Nabokov

title: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle  [purchase here]

author: Vladimir Nabokov

genre:  literary fiction

pages:  606 

originally published: 1969

source:  New York Public Library

A few days ago I finished Nabokov's longest novel, Ada, or Ardor.  Full disclosure:  I am, thus far, a Nabokov fan.  Despite his preoccupation with "budding nymphettes," (and by preoccupation, I mean full blown obsession) his prose is positively beautiful, rife with lyricism.  A joy to read, even when the story can't really be described as such.  Ava, or Ardor follows the life and loves of one Van Veen, as, at the tender age of fifteen, he meets and falls in love with the woman that will consume his every thought for the remainder of his life.  And the woman happens to be his sister, Ada.  

Told as a memoir as Van, in his nineties, looks back over the highs and lows of his love affair with Ada.  As if the family tree of the Veens weren't complicated enough, Nabokov sets this piece in a sort of bizarro-world, like earth, but not.  It's as if history's very timeline were picked up and deposited farther in the past.  God is called "Log."  Movies exist in the late 1800s.  The book is chock full of anachronistic cultural allusions.   Such a fun read in terms of the way that Nabokov creates the world of the story.

So, the prose was beautiful, the world of the story captivating...so what about the whole incest thing?  It's funny: I got swept up in Van and Ada's passion for each other.  I found myself rooting for them to be together, until I remembered that they're brother and sister, then it gets a little complicated internally...truth be told, there were several pages in the book that made me squirm a bit (ex:  Van's graphic and detailed description of his first sexual encounter with Ada). BUT if you can get past the incest aspect, it's a really riveting story of all-consuming love and heart-breaking passion.  

Rubric rating:  8.  Made me want to reread Lolita.

Review: Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta

title: Stone Arabia [purchase here]

author: Dana Spiotta

pages: 239

genre: literary fiction

originally published: 2011

source:  New York Public Library

Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta's third novel, follows Denise as she tries to gently hold together the pieces of a family as it drifts slowly in different directions.  Her mother suffers from a dementia she is adamant she doesn't have and Denise must come to terms with something more scary than becoming her mother:  becoming her mother's parent.  Her brother Nik, a *fascinatingly* complex character, lives by the mantra "self-curate or disappear," and has amassed an enormous collection of documents, recordings, etc, referred to as "the Chronicles," all fictitious, chronicling life how he sees it?  how he wishes it was?  And how does Denise deal with the pressure?  Displacement.  She begins to have excessively empathetic reactions to items in the 24 hour news cycle.

Spiotta's novel is riveting, refreshingly of the moment but at the same time, timeless in terms of the lives of the characters and the challenges they face.

One scene that I thought worked incredibly well was a scene in which Denise learns her mother has tried to shoplift and then refers to the cop as a "mick," behavior completely opposite of her character.

"Where in her brain was this coming from?  The doctor wasn't sure of the nature of her dementia, or how fast it would progress.  He just called it likely Alzheimer's.  He couldn't tell me what I could expect.  Anything was typical.  Anything was possible.  At first I didn't think it really mattered--they were all equally untreatable.  What difference did it make if it was this or that part of the frontal lobe?  But I wasn't quite prepared for this latest sign of deterioration.  It wasn't just forgetting the past or repeating the same thing over and over.  It was actually remixing and changing the wiring.  It was creating new things, it was changing her in real ways.  She wasn't just losing her social inhibitions, nothing as benign as that.  She was starting to get paranoid, and it made her someone else, someone a little mean.  It just didn't seem fair." (Spiotta, pgs 139-140)

Rubric rating:  8.  I can't wait to read Eat the Document and Lightning Field.