The beginning is slow, but stick with it. There are a lot of scenes sitting around a room over drinks philosophizing, and Frank definitely loves the sound of his own voice.

“This whole country’s rotten with sentimentality,” Frank said one night, turning ponderously from the window to walk the carpet. “It’s been spreading like a disease for years, for generations, until now everything you touch is flabby with it.”

“Exactly,” she said, enraptured by him.

“I mean isn’t that what’s really the matter, when you get right down to it? I mean even more than the profit motive or the loss of spiritual values or the fear of the bomb or any of those things? Or maybe it’s the result of those those things; maybe it’s what happens when all those things start working at once without any real cultural tradition to absorb them. Anyway, whatever it’s the result of, it’s what’s killing the United States. I mean isn’t it? This steady, insistent vulgarizing of every idea and every emotion into some kind of pre-digested intellectual baby food; this optimistic, smiling-though easy-way-out sentimentality in everybody’s view of life?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

“And I mean is it any wonder all the men end up emasculated? Because that is what happens; that is what’s reflected in all this bleating about ‘adjustment’ and ’security’ and ‘togetherness’ — and I mean Christ, you see it everywhere: all this television crap where every joke is built on the premise that daddy’s an idiot and mother’s always on to him; and these loathsome little signs people put up in their front yards — you ever notice those signs up on the Hill?”

“The ‘The’ signs, you mean; with people’s name in the plural? Like ‘The Donaldsons’?”

“Right!” He turned and smiled down at her in triumphant congratulation for having seen exactly what he meant. “Never ‘Donaldson’ or “John D. Donaldson’ or whatever the hell his name is. Always ‘The Donaldsons.’ You picture the whole cozy little bunch of them sitting around all snug as bunnies in their pajamas, for God’s sake, toasting marshmallows. I guess the Campbells haven’t put up a sign like that yet, but give ‘em time. THe rate they’re going now, they will.” He paused here for a deep-throated laugh. “And my God, when you think how close we came to settling into that kind of an existence.”

“But we didn’t,” she told him. “That’s the important thing.”

Wow. The ego is mind-blowing, and the sexism there more than a little apparent. Well, part of that is certainly the time period. I’d love to discuss that element of the book with someone else — whether the author’s goal is to speak to society’s and his wife’s emasculation of Frank as the source of his troubles, or perhaps that his ego and fear of emasculation is what blinds him to his real troubles. Veddy veddy interesting, IMO.

No matter what the author’s intent — in the end, it doesn’t really matter — this books is one that gets the gears turning. It sums up the frustration of the American dream so precisely and deeply, making you both love and hate it’s characters, making you cringe at their pain while you kind of root for their downfall. Yates succeeded in depicting my ambiguous feelings about this country of mine with simple but evokative prose and characters that will whisper in my ear for some time to come. Brilliant.

What ever happened to Yates, who was apparently quite popular in his time? I may have to pick up another of his novels.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

I’m going to note right now that this is me, and a lot of readers — I’ve heard — think David Foster Wallace is overly intellectual, incredibly dense and even unreadable. So be it for those readers. But if the worlds that Wallace creates were real, as real as they feel to me, it’s a place I would certainly visit, fit right in. Those other readers just don’t have to come.

Case in point, let’s talk about Weight Watchers. Picture a very large fat man sitting at a restaurant table explaining why he’s trying to get even fatter in an attempt to swell to the size of the universe, not an atom to spare. Watch your fingers, he’s hungry!

We each need a full universe. Weight Watchers and their allies would have us systematically decrease the Self-component of the universe, so that the great Other-set will be physically attracted to the now more physically attractive Self, and rush in to fill the void caused by that diminution of Self.

Yes, you can read it twice. There’s no shame in that.

Oh the fat man? He’s joined by a colorful cast of weirdos and nutcases. A woman whose body temperature won’t regulate itself, so has to be in a room that’s 98 degrees. Patients strapped in chairs that move along an electronic track at a psychiatrist’s office. A talking, cursing parrot. A one-legged druggie who keeps his stash in his prosthetic. There’s a manmade black-sand desert in the Midwest. A group of escaped senior citizens may or may not be trying to take down a baby food company. You get the point. This is crazy stuff. And crazy stuff brilliantly written.

For instance, character Rick Vigorous describes an emotional (Lolita-esque) memory of riding in the car with his neighbor’s teenage daughter, who he has a little crush on.

In the passenger window beside her were reflected at an angle the images of the oncoming cars and trucks, and there was her image, there, too, waiting; and the cars and trucks bore down in the window and emptied head-on into her reflection, were swallowed and exploded, and out the back of her reflection into my sleepy face came fragments of lights, the street made pale, and a wash of scent.

Yes the scent really came off her head, not off images exploding into light in glass; I am not a complete shitty fool.

Ha! You see that, what he did there? Went off on a flight of fancy and then cut it back to earth. I hope I’m not the only one who has read this book that laughed.

Obviously, I think this is a fantastic book and I loved pretty much every minute, feeling a little sad when I reached the end. But just like his more famous novel Infinite Jest, it’s one I’ll treasure for a long time. Jest is probably better in the big scheme of things, but Broom is shorter and less menacing for certain for readers who’ve never attempted Wallace.

Believe me, from the bottom of my heart which beats faster for this man, David Foster Wallace was an amazingly gifted author with a unique, agile and playful mind. I won’t go further into his death, because it truly saddens me, except to say that even if he’s gone, I’m glad he existed. When someone reaches that far inside your head and seems to truly understand you, perhaps even to share a lot of your major personality traits, it’s a really moving experience.

Sniff. Blub. Seriously. I love him this much.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

Like most kids, I used to wonder what it would be like to be blind. I’d close my eyes and see if I could make it to the kitchen, to the bus stop, just by counting steps. Losing my sight, that plunge into emptiness and infantile helplessness, is the scariest of all disabilities for a book-junky like myself. But never did I take the fantasy as far as to imagine that the blindness could be contagious, that when everyone has gone blind, there are no good samaritans to help you across the street or to teach you braille, no one left to reorient you to the world, no one with the eyes to look into a microscope and find a cure. In this novel, Saramago takes that blind world to its inevitable destination: a world where other people don’t really exist unless you bump into them, where names no longer matter and homes are forever lost, where shame for your actions is a thing of the past and inhibitions fly out the window. In this dark world, it’s difficult if not impossible to perform the most basic human functions of eating, cleaning onself and even shitting — get used to the word, readers, because you’re in for a heap of shit here.

Through the eyes of the doctor’s wife, the one unfortunate person who keeps her vision in the novel, we have this pure helplessness and chaos thrust upon us. The rape and murder, the theft and betrayal, the starvation. But mostly the filth, of unwashed bodies and excrement-slick city streets and rotting corpses and putrid food. While she’s not the narrator of the story, the doctor’s wife leads the reader along much like her husband and the other blind people in her care, taking us by the hand and guiding us through this vile and primitive place that was once a civilization.

It is this feeling of being guided and herded, just like those afflicted with the white blindness, that leads me to shout out, “DON’T go see this movie.” Boycott it now and pretend it was never made, folks, because there is no way in hell or Hollywood that the frightening, feral world of this Nobel Prize-winning novel can be reproduced visually. I’ve never before perceived that as readers, we are essentially blind. It is only through other’s words — through the artform of storytelling — that people, places and situations are painted in our minds. But Saramago obviously grasped this concept of the reader as sightless, and he uses the idea like a sharp weapon to make the book a searing experience. And with odd formatting — little puncuation, fewer paragraph breaks and no quote marks — he furthers that feeling of unfamiliarity, of strange newness and disorientation. Staring at a white page dotted with words really does feel like the white blindness, the doctor’s wife our only point of reference and we hang on tight for fear of becoming lost. How, tell me, could this feeling of blind terror of words on paper ever, ever be reproduced on the big screen?

[W]e went down all the steps of indignity, all of them, until we reached total degradation, the same might happen here albeit in a different way, then we still had the excuse that the degradation belonged to someone else, not now, now we are all equal regarding good and evil, please, don’t ask me what good and what evil are, we knew what it was each time we had to act when blindness was an exception, what is right and what is wrong are simply different ways of understanding our relationships with the others, not that which we have with ourselves, one should not trust the latter, forgive this moralizing speech, you do not know, you cannot know, what it means to have eyes in a world in which everyone else is blind, I am not a queen, no, I am simply the one who was born to see this horror, you can feel it, I both feel and see it and that’s enough of this dissertation, Let’s go and eat. No one asked any questions, the doctor simply said, If I ever regain my sight, I shall look carefully at the eyes of others, as if I were looking into their souls, Their souls, asked the old man with the eyepatch, Or their minds, the name does not matter, is was then that, surprisingly, if we consider that we are dealing with a person without much education, that the girl with the dark glasses said, Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.

I know, I know. I’m a maudlin reader, forever falling in love with books about difficult subjects. And I’m also a literature snob, reveling in complex and unique writers, all dense sentences and poetic license. So of course this book is right up my alley. But all that aside, I can’t imagine anyone taking this literary journey and not being shocked at the new human experience Saramago plucked from his imagination and made real. Hip-deep in this book, you can not help but be amazed — as I constantly am — at the power and the art of words on a page.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

But I’m self-aggrandizing, I know. The sharp, artful voice and aching melancholy of Cormac McCarthy has been there since he set pen to page, continued to be there as he won the National Book Award and wasn’t discovered when MY eyes met his words. All the Pretty Horses, written in 1992, proves that. However, I can’t help but feel again that I have stumbled upon something momentous, something meant just for me in a small way, something beautiful that will make my eyes twinkle and my voice sigh when I try to convey just how remarkable an accomplishment All the Pretty Horses is.

But McCarthy describes that startling feeling of discovery better than me in his stark, biting dialog.

“I never knowed there was such a place as this.
I guess there’s probably every kind of place you can think of.
Rawlins nodded. I wouldn’t have thought of this one, he said.”

In this case, the two main characters — teenagers from Texas ranches who travel into Mexico looking for work as cowboys — have found a level of pain and misery and degradation previously unimaginable. Their coming-of-age trek has been blown off course by the harsh desert wind, slapped about by the hand of fate, which knocks out of them the idea that they’re entitled success, happiness, even life. It all begins with a chance meeting with a younger stranger who claims his name is Blevins, and that one chance snowballs through love, talent, destiny, friendship, hope and crushing loss until we wind up in a place that’s brutal and bloody yet truthful.

And somehow beautiful:

“He picked out the smallest doe among them and shot her … The sky was dark and a cold wind ran through the bajada and in the dying light a cold blue cast had turned the doe’s eyes to but one thing more of the things she lay among in the darkening landscape. Grass and blood. Blood and stone. Stone and dark medallions that the first flat drops of rain caused upon them. He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he’d first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he’d presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he’d not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”

Only McCarthy could explain to me this masculine strength and honor and adventure so deftly, me! Who usually shies away from Westerns and is allergic to horses. Even I can see how the stark lines (and again, stark prose) of the landscape and of these characters’ lives are somehow more telling, more primal than every flowery, curl-i-que tale. The latter rely on embellishment and literary trickery to establish depth. Whereas the pure, beautiful depth of McCarthy’s work aches in your bones and raises goosebumps on your skin.

I’m afraid to say there’s going to be lots more Cormac McCarthy on my plate and on my bookshelves in the future. Anyone know which one I should tackle next?

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

It is the story — duh — of Oscar Wao, the first-generation son of a single mother from the Dominican Republic. While the Dominicans (especially the men) have a reputation for masculine prowess and womanizing (I don’t know Spanish that well, but the book must have at least six Spanish words for pussy vagina), Oscar is instead an overweight and over-vocabularied nerd of the highest degree. Sci Fi and fantasy novels, comic books, anime: You name it, Oscar loves it, and the narrator inserts these great nerd references whenever humanly possible. Check out the geek speak when describing the binding thread of the Oscar’s family’s story, a supposed curse or fuku placed on Oscar’s grandfather but common in many Dominican stories:

“It’s important to remember that fuku doesn’t always strike like lightning. Sometimes it works patiently, drowning a nigger by degrees, like with the Admiral or the U.S. in paddies outside Saigon. Sometimes it’s slow and sometimes it’s fast. It’s doomish in that way, makes it harder to put a finger on, to brace yourself against. But be assured: like Darkseid’s Omega Effect, the Morgoth’s bane, no matter how many turns and digressions this shit might take, it always — and I mean always — gets its man. “

Yes, this book won the Pulitzer Prize. And yes, it cusses like this on almost every page. And hell yes, I love what the world of literature is coming to. (No sarcasm here. I promise.) Diaz can be simultaneous crass and erudite. While cussing can often be juvenile, Diaz uses it like a cultural weapon and proves he’s doing it deftly, purposefully. The below, for instance, is a description of Oscar’s mother as a girl:

“I mean, what straight middle-aged brother had not attempted to regenerate himself through the alchemy of young pussy. And if what she often said to her daughter was true, Beli had some of the finest pussy around. The sexy isthmus of her waist alone could have launched a thousand yolas.”

An allusion to Helen of Troy and the word pussy on the same page? With vocab biggies like isthmus and alchemy? Wow, or rather Wao.

And while Oscar may be a lumbering, pitiful and heart-rendingly sweet geek, he’s still a Dominican, passionately interested in women, who thinks girls “were the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega, the DC and the Marvel. Homes had it bad.”

I loved joining Oscar on his quest for romance, in his depths of self pity and despair. I loved watching the present and the past of the story unfold, seeing the patterns but being left wanting more, wondering, my mind tripping back over the story to make connections. But perhaps above all, I loved this witty, bantering voice Diaz masters in the narrator. He’s part David Foster Wallace with his footnotes and educated allusions, and he’s part street-level shit talking at its finest, silver tongued and savvy. It’s simply excellent prose, even if you get a little confused at the Spanish sections — don’t worry, everything absolutely vital is translated. Much like Oscar’s life, the novel was wondrous, taking the nitty-gritty everyday and sprinkling some magic dust and cuss words to take it to the next level of meaning.

Can I put this on our wedding registry? Anyone?

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

This Booker Prize-winning novel definitely deserved its accolades. Though it took me much, much longer than normal to get through the book (my fault, not the novel’s), I loved every little description, every meaningful encounter, every private thought. Though the story ostensibly revolves around a tragedy of youth where a young relative visiting from England dies, the tale encompasses so much more and paints a thoughtful portrait of India during that time period.

Communism and unions and the division of wealth are seen in the family’s ownership of Paradise Pickles and Preserves. Gender roles appear in the “men’s needs door” allowed in the uncles bedroom, contrasted against his sister who left her drunken husband, who is considered immoral. Westernization: Is everything foreign more valuable than what comes out of India, including people?

But yet, the overwhelming theme is loss, tragedy and guilt. Not an uncommon theme, I admit. But the talent of Roy, her offbeat yet poignant descriptive ability, brings the theme to a higher level. Take, for instance, her description of Estha, who retreats into silence in reaction to his cousin’s death:

Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It send its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, emtombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it.

I absolutely love the irreverence of Roy’s language. Random capitalization. Repetition. Her unique titling of people and things: Estha becomes Ambassador Pelvis with his special-occasion puff; Rahel is labeled a fountain in a Love in Tokyo due to her hairstyle. Roy reaches into the brain to pull out descriptions I would never have dreamed of, but that immediately bring images to mind. For example, the twins’ mother’s appearance is gauged in toothbrushes. As she stares in the mirror, she thinks she could definitely hold one under the fold of her bottom — several even — but her smaller breasts couldn’t support one.

And unlike heavier works by just-as-gifted authors, the words alone are not the only joy of the novel. The story itself will make you ache, both in its occasional sweetness and innocence as well as its tragedy. The guilt, whether deserved or not — in this world, tragedy almost seems inevitable — is palpable. But sometimes the best of books make you feel the worst, right? And despite it being the author’s first novel, this is definitely one of the best.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

Every thread, every thought is woven together so gracefully. There was a moment at the kitchen table when I read the last page where the art of the novel hit me full force, making me see how this narrator’s personality and world view effected not only way we are told the tale, but the tragedies and triumphs of the plot beneath. In a way, Stevens is the ultimate unreliable narrator: Without artifice or intentional deception, we nonetheless see that his story is not the WHOLE story. While he spends time documenting the philosophy of his profession and his absolute dedication to it (the persona is a suit one never removes except when utterly alone, he notes), the reader sees what the unperceptive, dutiful butler doesn’t: what is really happening in the world, who the people around him truly are, their emotions, their desires.

Take, for instance, Steven’s experience on the road trip the novel centers around. Having rarely traveled far from his employer’s estate and never for simple pleasure, he observes the “greatness” of the scenery in such a unique way, what becomes a very signature way of the character.

“And yet what precisely is this ‘greatness’? Just where, or in what, does it lie? I am quite aware it would take a far wiser head than mine to answer such a question, but if I were forced to hazard a guess, I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of the beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of it own beauty, of its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it. In comparison, the sorts of sights offered in such places as Africa and American, though undoubtedly very exciting, would, I am sure, strike the objective viewer as inferior on account of their unseemly demonstrativeness.”

Demonstrative scenery? I say! Another great instance is how, because of the jovial character of his new American employer Mr. Farraday, Stevens attempts to master the art of making witty retorts, something too casual and unplanned to be easy for him.

A certain incident “is as good an illustration as any of the hazards of uttering witticisms. By the very nature of a witticism, one is given very little time to assess its various possible repercussions before one is called to give voice to it, and one gravely risks uttering all manner of unsuitable things if one has not first acquired the necessary skill and experience. There is no reason to suppose this is not an area in which I will become proficient given time and practice, but, such are the dangers, I have decided it best, for the time being at least, not to attempt to discharge this duty in respect to Mr. Farraday until I have practiced further.”

The personality of Stevens is so alive and real, despite the obvious typecasting as “the butler,” partially because he doesn’t see himself as a type. Where he is blind, we can see and we can ask. Has he really reached the peak of his profession? Has he really become the ultimate butler he so lovingly describes? Or has his whole life been subsumed within this duty? Is his success actually a failure? Can we not love this character wholly and completely anyway, even as we ache for him?

As I said, the poignancy of this device hit me hard on the last page, at which point I burst into satisfied tears, confounding The Boyfriend. “I thought you really liked the book,” he said. “Oh yes,” I sniffed and blew unattractively into a tissue, relishing the emotion the book released.

Ishiguro, like a star athlete, makes perfection seem so simple. A good author can take a pile of letters, a collection of words, a string of sentences, and create with these simple tools a unique and solid experience, something as real to a reader as a friend, a memory or a souvenir of an eventful vacation. Though I’m a library rat, this is one book I will consider buying, just so the sight of it on the shelf can renew that flood of emotion and amazement this talented author created in me. Just so the joy — and pain — will never leave me.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

You see, Asher is not an ordinary boy walking the well-worn rut of self-exploration. He’s an Orthodox Jew in a sheltered Brooklyn community who wears ear locks, eats kosher and believes that everyone has a purpose, a role to play in the world, a mission bestowed upon his by the “Master of the Universe.” And this purpose is communal, for the good of all. So when Asher exhibits a talent for drawing from the time he can hold a pen, this talent is seen as child’s play, something to dabble in, but also something that could grow to be dangerous, a manifestation of evil instead of good.

Asher doesn’t draw pretty pictures. “The world is not a pretty place,” says Asher. Eccentric to the point of near autism (did anyone else see that?), the boy is able to reveal emotion and meaning with the stroke of a pen or the swish of a brush. Unless he is able to release it, this meaning wells up inside of him and threatens to burst through the dam of his flesh. But when he releases that meaning, it can often hurt his mother and father and his community, the people he holds dearest to his heart.

Is art selfish? Can we thwart our destinies, the talents given us at birth? Is it better to be a great man or a great artist? Is it possible to be both? The words stream across the page like paint across Asher’s canvas, as if the writer is also battling these concepts in his head, reaching within himself for the story only he can tell, no matter how painful it is. Reaching inside for his truth as Asher finds his — a truth that may shock his community, wound his mother and turn his father against him forever.

A powerful tragedy, this book left me with an aching in my own intestines and an urge to search my own soul for my artistic destiny, my purpose, my art. It reminds me that creation is simultaneously an act of destruction, that we cannot have one without the other. And it makes me want to make that sacrifice, even while my tears for Asher are still on my cheeks.

I thank the “Master of the Universe” for this book, for giving us the raw material and raw talent in the human plane to create it in all its stark beauty, and I thank Chaim Potok for channeling this creative truth — this *art* — onto the page where I could devour it. Oh, and one more thanks, again, to Maren, who gave me a book that I spent an entire Sunday reading. I haven’t found one of those books in quite a while.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars — Buy the hardcover

Chicago — the second largest American city at the turn of the 20^th century — full of marvels like horseless carriages, trolleys, skyscrapers and modern medicine. But also overflowing with immigrants, shysters, con men, crooked politicians, bribed policemen and, of course, prostitutes. By the tally of the 1911 Vice Commission, there were no less than 1,020 brothels in Chicago and 5,000 full-time prostitutes, and the Levee (the red-light district) raked in more than $16 million per year, which would amount to $328 million in today’s inflation-adjusted dollars.

Enter Minna and Ada Everleigh and the Everleigh resort. (Yes, yes, the ever-lay club. The pun is intended.) These two madams set out to elevate the profession, which they see as a necessary service to male society, a sex that they not-so-secretly disdain. Their harlots are fed gourmet meals, dressed opulently, cared for by a respectable physician, taught to recite Balzac and made never to drug, rob or otherwise con their clients. The Prince of Prussia drank champagne out of the slipper of a Butterfly, as the Everleigh’s harlots were known, and any visitor to Chicago (who had the money, of course) wanted to see the inside of the sisters’ carpeted, gold-plated, perfumed bordello.

But this was 20^th century America and the moral reform movement was already at hand, the same movement that would pass the Mann Act to prevent white slavery and make alcohol illegal for more than a decade. And so the free spirits of the Levee district and their bacchanalian attitudes clash with the street preachers, the stern lady do-gooders and the fiery spirit of moral uplift. I think we all know who wins.

Even if the reader knows that the brothel doors will one day be closed, Abbott is a masterful story teller. Never dry or dusty, she brings the lives of these ladies off of the page with sensory details, real dialog pulled from first-hand accounts and a burlesque sense of humor that it’s difficult not to share.

“Imagine yourself,” Bell (a Chicago-based preacher and reformer) wrote, “In this awful district with Satan and all his cohorts let loose, seemingly. The cursing of men and the screeching of dope-filled and half drunken women; the banging of electrical pianos; the honking of autos; the throngs of young men going like mad into these houses of horror, where the air is reeking with the fumes of dope and tobacco and millions of germs; where women are in their scanty attire with painted faces and colored and false hair, with their honeyed words and foolish prattling, calling and alluring men into their fearful clutches and then to awful sin and death perhaps!”

Ah yes, just imagine. How sordidly and wretchedly fun to read and imagine.

“Some days felt longer than other days. Some days felt like two whole days. Unfortunately those days were never the weekends. Our Saturdays and Sundays passed in the half the time of a normal workday. In other words, some weeks felt like we worked ten straight days and hand one one day off. We could hardly complain. Time was being added to our lives. But then it wasn’t easy to rejoice, exactly, realizing that time just wasn’t moving fat enough. We had any number of clocks surrounding us, and every one of them at one time or another exhibited a lively sense of humor. We found ourselves wanting to hurry tiem along, which was not in the long run good for our health. Everybody was trapped in this contradiction but nobody every dared articulate it. They just said, ‘Can you believe it’s only three-fifteen?’”

In addition to these darkly comic moments of perfectly understandable gloom, the book tackles the irresistibility of office gossip as well as it’s Schadenfreude (Jeez, I’ve always wanted to use that word!), our love/hate relationship with our jobs (we hate them until we have a chance of losing them) and how we spend more than 8 hours a day with people we will never really know. Yep, all those things and cancer, sexual trysts, office supply theft, antidepressants, mediocrity and success – or “so-called” success.

Is the book perfect? No. The “we” gets a little hard to carry at some points, and there are perhaps a few more pages that there needs to be to accomplish the same result. But I really, really liked this unique and experimental book. So much so that I now owe the local library $1.80 because I didn’t want to turn it in until I wrote this review (and I’m currently about 6 books behind on reviews. Freelance work is great, but drains your free time for sure). I hope to see more great books from this first time novelist.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hard cover

Henry DeTamble is a handsome guy if somewhat thin, smart and well-read, multi-lingual, a librarian. He’s also an expert lock-picker, able to violently kick the ass of those that threaten him and turns up naked in public places quite often. These last three character traits stem from the fact that Henry is a time traveler. And no, not in a Jules Vern or Back to the Future flux capacitor kind of way. Henry involuntarily skips through time like an epileptic experiences seizures, traveling more when he’s tired or stressed and can’t seem to keep a grip on the present. He carries nothing with him (hence the frequent nakedness) and cannot control where he winds up. Despite this lack of control and helplessness in the face of time and space, Henry is also uncomfortably aware of past and future events: who will die and when, of the bad choices his future self will make despite his knowledge that the decision will be disastrous.

While this involuntary time travel, treated as a physical disorder, is unique on its own, the author adds depth with the character of Claire, Henry’s wife. Claire met Henry when she was six in a small clearing behind her childhood home. Henry, on the other hand, doesn’t meet Claire until he is 28 and all his childhood visits to Claire are still in his convoluted future. So do Henry and Claire’s lives intertwine over the course of their non-parallel lives, and so is the nature of unconditional, destined love revealed through Niffenegger’s beautiful and concrete — though not romantic or sappy — prose. Sometimes, Claire is faced with two husbands of various ages in one time period. Other times, she is left alone for days, unsure of where or when or in what danger her husband is.

The Time Traveler’s Wife is not an easy story, where all threads are tied off in perfect, little square knots. That’s a good thing, too, because I’m not really a fan of squared off, neat stories. Instead, the book is a rich and complex, incredibly human story, despite the supernatural subject matter. And it’s a book that breezes through the eye, a quick read that keeps you glued to the bus bench, bathtub or wherever else you happen to be reading. It’s the kind of book that proves that books will never die, will never be sacrificed on the altar of television and computers and Progress with a capital P. It’s a book that reminds me why I read — to find these stories and people that are so real, that now exist in my head, that maybe somehow existed all along.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

We begin at death, of course, and it takes a while to grow into the mind and world of our main character — a doctor with an obvious secret, a palpable weight around his neck despite his newly acquired life. (Well, he does begin as dead.) We grow into that mind with the narrator, a separate character who is unnamed and unknown even to himself, who witnesses the world mute and impotent through the doctor’s eyes. Because the author takes the concept of the reverse flow of time so seriously and also thanks to the narrator’s innocent anonymity, we see the world in a whole new light. Relationships begin with fights, progress through sex and niceties, only to wind up with the participants slowing backing away from acquaintance. So does the thankful patient get worse as the doctor shoves part of a windshield through his face. The patient then walks out of the hospital angry and upset, waiting for a car accident to put him back together again — the doctor fucks him up, a car accident makes him whole again. So do dead ants heal themselves when they come in contact with a human boot.

“Never watching where they are going, the people move through something prearranged, armed with lies. They’re always looking forward to places they’ve just come back from, or regretting things they haven’t yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye. Lords of lies and trash — all kings of crap and trash. Signs say No Littering — but who to? We wouldn’t dream of it. Government does that, at night, with trucks, or uniformed men come sadly at morning with their trolleys, dispensing our rubbish, and shit for the dogs.”

Imagine the description of eating, of shitting. Or of money, which seems to be given to us wherever we go.

Now, imagine when back in time our main character will take us. I hate to be a spoiler, I really do, but I must hint that at some point, the world will again make sense to the narrator. At some major point in history, we will see our main character heal instead of hurt. We will see his secret and witness a point in time that is so vital, so visceral, that the clock of time maybe should have stopped and turned around on its axis.

Time’s Arrow was gripping, deep and artful. Sometimes the arrow hit the mark so hard that I was forced to stop reading for a moment, put the book down due to an overwhelming and revelatory emotion. It’s a wrench in the mental works I will never forget and also an example of literary artifice, some of which can be clunky and silly no matter how talented the author, pulled off brilliantly with wit, poise and insight.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

The Road begins in a post-apocalyptic America where soot and ash cover the world, blowing from place to place on the wind and falling down like rain, a world that is more vivid and believable because the author chooses not to tell us how it became so scarred. He removes the exposition and thereby allows the reader to suspend disbelief effortlessly, not dealing with niggling doubts about whether it could have “really” happened. Instead, we are all the sudden in that world, as stuck as the main characters of father and son in the bleak future, knowing that it does no good to ask why or how but only to soldier on.

For the father and son, this means trudging down the road in the direction of, well, hopefully something better. The father doesn’t know if it will be, the son only has vague ideas of what better even is, but both realize that without the motion of moving on, they will give up hope that “better” is possible. Yes, it is a dark vision. Take for instance the father’s thoughts on the purpose of continuing to struggle, the purpose of thought when it will never be known outside your own head:

No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reasonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.

Yet despite this darkness, and because of it, you are pulled along with these men and their love and dependence on one another. In their quest to remain human and yet still remain alive. As they attempt to find out why alive is better than dead.

(Son:) Can I ask you something? he said.
Yes. Of course.
Are we going to die?
Sometime. Not now.
And we’re still going south.
Yes.
So we’ll be warm.
Yes.
Okay.
Okay what?
Nothing. Just okay.
Go to sleep.
Okay.
I’m going to blow out the lamp. Is that okay?
Yes. That’s okay.
And then later in the darkness: Can I ask you something?
Yes. Of course you can.
What would you do if I died?
If you died I would want to die too.
So you could be with me?
Yes. So I could be with you.
Okay.

I don’t want to ruin this sparse, powerful story or style with any more commentary. I want to keep its mystery with me and hope that many more readers will, like me, find a memorable jewel of words and ideas in this novel. Polish it up. Put it on a mental shelf.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover.

This is a story about an America of the very near future, where the U.S. has basically annexed Mexico and Canada to form the Organization of North American Nations. They cede “The Concavity,” which is basically America’s toxic waste dump, to Canada, elect a Vegas-crooner ala Tom Jones to the presidency and do away with the numbering of years (i.e. 1999, 2000, 2001) in order to make a buck through sponsorship. Enter the Year of the:Whopper, Tucks Medicated Pad, Trial-Size Dove Bar, Perdue Wonderchicken, Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishwasher, etc. Welcome to the world of modern individualism, technological isolation, educated non-communication, bumbling social/political policy, post-post modern art, Canadian terrorism, and meanlessness existences full of humor and irony, if not true emotion.

This is the story (mostly) of the Incandenza family. A professional grammarian mother and a optics expert/tennis enthusiast/film director/alcoholic father who commited suicide via microwave, who have three boys — a womanizing NFL punter, a disabled budding filmmaker and Hal, our (mostly) main character, who is a nationally ranked student at the tennis academy his father founded and a bit of a pot head. Hal, who …

“… himself hasn’t has a bona fide intesity-of-interior-life type emotion since he was tiny; he finds terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he is in there, inside his own hull, as a human being.”

The other cast of characters is filled out by a range of addicts, alcoholics and junkies who at one time or another inhabit the halfway house down the hill for the tennis academy.

This is the story of searching for meaning and finding none, of creating your own, of cracking jokes that are too serious to be funny and suffering tragic circumstances without getting the larger joke. It’s about depression and the substances or people we use to plug the gaps in ourselves. It’s about our burning hunger for entertainment, any entertainment to escape the self, and of the ultimate entertainment–an elusive film that is so perfect, it could infest humanity like a plague, bringing mankind to his knees faster and more effectively than any bio-terrorist WMD every conceived

“We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately — the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what?”

But mostly, this book is pure David Foster Wallace. Dense and intelligent without taking the world too seriously. Incredibly funny without being vapid. Very long sentences trailing into the distance, moving at the speed and with the course of thought, punctuated with volumious footnotes that bounce you in and out of the narrative, in and out of time, in and out of character’s minds, out of your mind in general. He oscillates between erudite words rarely found outside of dictionaries (my favorite repeated examples being prandial and fugue) and amusing, made-up constructions, tweaked pre- and suffixes, or misused nouns (like “polyesterishly”).

No, the novel is not for everyone. What 1,000-page novel is? But I enjoyed it immensley, envied Foster’s brilliance, and know that it will stick in my mental craw for quite some time, interupting routine thought patterns like a wrench in the works, forcing me to think in different circles, giggle at interior jokes no one else (who hasn’t invested the 1,000 pages) will get, and be a slightly different, more complex person with a new point of view on the world at large. Now that is the true hallmark of good fiction.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

No, you don’t need a passport to travel in this world. You just need a snarky sense of humor, a haughty (but light-hearted) contempt for advertising culture, a love of all things campy or retro (the colors turquoise and olive green, boomerangs as a decorative shapes, etc.) and, most importantly, a strong stomach. The food in this world, I admit, is rather bad. Do you know what an aspic is? Ha! You do now!

Something about those poor vegetables suspended in transparent gelatin, space explorers frozen in zero grav, is so very space age. Well, what was once considered space age. Learn new vocabulary words and much more with Lileks as your witty host. Find out what dish he calls, “pressed shank braised with smoker’s phlegm” or “Ring O’ Rectum Flan.” Dicover the power of ketchup and 7Up, the A1 guide to better sex, why smart people eat toast, and how to entertain guests at the late hour of–GASP!–10:00 p.m. Make fun! Make fun and have fun until your heart’s content or the book is finished–which happens way too soon. (Luckily there are loads more hours entertainment on www.Lileks.com.)
Says Lileks:

“We seem to think we’re the first people to roll our eyes at the commercial culture; we’re not. Even then, no one believed something just because the corporate cookbook said so. But these books don’t presume our disbelief–and that’s what makes them seem so honest and simple. The quality of the lie is purer; the nature of the fib is cheerful and straightforward. Did my mom believe any of these things would make her life perfect? Of course not. I think she kept these books for another reason. Some people smoked, some took pills, some ran to keep off the weight. Mom just looked at the pictures. The recipes kept her slim and lovely for one reason: she never made them.”

Perhaps it’s just bad photography. Maybe it is the attempts of industry to seep into the kitchens and recipe boxes of a new generation of post-War housefraus. Perhaps the use of new, modern food products and techniques was more important than the human palate. Who knows? But whatever the cause of all this disaster, I’m sure glad I am looking at a book rather than a steaming hot plate of some of this glop my mother or other innocent female (always female, you know) household chef tried to force down my gullet. Ummmm, I’m not really hungry. I had a big lunch, you see. And I sure am thankful for my darling Jen who gifted me this little gem of fun and fabulousness, inscribing it as follows:

You have so many pretty, tasty, dignified, and sane cooking mags and tomes, I think it’s time you had something like this. Regrettable? Yes. Awesomely hilarious? Also yes. Maybe someday you’ll invite me over for a heapin helpin of “Harlequin Spinach” or some kind of horrible aspic. Until then, enjoy!

Oh, I have. As for the aspic, well, do they still sell clear gelatin to send modern veggie slices into null grav? I shall have to scour the local grocer and you will be the first one to get an invitation when I do.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover

With all this glowing praise thus far, you will understand that I really looked forward to reading more of his work and decided recently upon his 1998 novel, “John’s Wife.” Why? It was on the shelf at the library. May not be the best reason but I gotta tell you I am thankful it was there because I was flabbergasted and amazed by this book. From the cover of the book to the last word (which is “Once,” not that that spoils anything), I was hooked. Again, Coover is his fabulist meta self, shifting narrator from paragraph to paragraph throughout a cast of characters who inhabit a nameless Midwestern (I think) town.

Forty one characters to be exact–I just counted. This movement between the 41 causes the plot to shift back and forth in time as well as reveal the past and future in tempting bits and pieces, crumbs of the pie so to speak. At times, the narration passes from person to person like the flu, moving with a touch or an interaction to the next person in contact. Other times, it revolves around a theme. For example, let’s see what everyone in town is dreaming tonight or let’s chronicle how everyone lost their virginity–when, with whom, with each other? Only one person’s name may be in the title (John) and the subject of that title (John’s wife) is never identified as anything else. That’s because despite the title, this is the story of an entire town. The stories of entire lives, successes, mistakes, humanity. The story of how different, similar and connected all of those individual lives are, to the point that maybe they aren’t individual at all. Maybe our own voices are not distinct in the crowd, and we thinkwe can hear ourselves only to stave off madness.

Of course, let me quote the author’s own words, told in the voice of the philosophical town librarian to her pharmacist husband after watching a monster movie:

“We like to think, even when we’re being reasonable, that there are fixed boundaries—to our bodies, our essential being, our homes and families, our towns and nations—it’s how we know or think we know we have a self. But maybe it’s all a mad delusion, maybe there are no boundaries and no selves either, our conscious life just a way of hiding the real truth from us because, simply, it’s too much to live with. We have to stuff it back down in the pit where the creepies live, if we want to function at all, even if functioning, as we call it, is possibly the craziest thing we do. Art, even bad art like Hollywood horror movies, puts us in touch with that truth by breaking down the boundaries for a moment, producing monsters we secretly know to be more real than the good citizens that eventually subdue them.”

I say I was hooked. Now, I don’t want to mislead you with that phrase. It did take me a bit over two weeks to finish “John’s Wife” and that is a really long time in Kate world. Therefore let me warn you that this brilliant, witty narration can also be thick and confusing. The first hundred pages, I had to keep referring back to see who was who in an effort to keep the names straight. And the in-your-head streaming of thoughts made me often pause to catch my breath so I read in short–but satisfying–bursts. The concept, which I am amazed Coover was able to sustain so well for so long, sometimes makes the reader think that they are losing track of the plot, a confusing sensation that makes you doubt your own abilities of comprehension.

But of course, the characters are thrown into that world of doubt, too, of doubting their eyes, their hearts, their own existence. In the beginning, the characters may have reminded me of my grandmother and her sisters and friends, who grew up in a small town in days she paints with the “good ‘ole” brush. But then we see sin, temptation, greed, orgies, homosexuality of both sexes (which no longer remind me of my grandmother, naturally). We see reformed sinners as well as the religious kind in disguise. Oh and it gets better. After that comes the supernatural. Ghosts, metaphysical experiences, medical abnormalities, alternate realities. Fire, giants, gods, art.

I think the reader is supposed to experience that sensation of disorientation. Lose the train of thought that is. Get lost in the coal smoke and see that the scenery rolling by is becoming more surrealistic. Like you are on the track to hell but everyone sees, no one denies it and the rest of humanity does not implode, vanish or in any other way prove that it is not really happening. So it is really happening. Your disbelief is suspended into the atmophere, or even over the rainbow into Oz.
Let me again quote the author in the words of the town newspaperman/hopeful author, who missed an issue of the paper due to a personal meltdown:

He had not, for the first time since he undertook the task, kept the record [published the newspaper], he knew that, but the record he had kept all these years, or thought he’d kept, was now, he found, dissolving on him, as though to teach him what he had always known—that words were not, as he liked to pretend, the stubborn monitors of time, adamant and fixed as number, but were time’s recombinatory toys and about as hard as water—and so to taunt him with the futility of his record-keeping mission… Art emerges, not from the seen, but from the longing for what is not seen.

Yet the reader keeps reading those futile words… and with gusto. Not because the words are facts, permanent and set. But because they are shifting, confusing, false and therefore totally human in a way that truth could never be.

Right? Have I lost ya? Well, can’t say that I blame you if I have. After all, it took me more than two weeks to digest it all and it is well worth the meal. I didn’t read a story. I read all the stories. Every story. I didn’t learn anything or have any revelations. Instead, I learned about the revelations behind the falsity of facts.

I was like Otis, the police cheif, whose…

… desire [was] now was to recapture that visionary moment just before, wherein, as he now recalled, his whole life as Officer Otis the guardian warrior had been revealed as a mockery, a self-delusion: what did his lifelong obsession with order and disorder have to do with this turbulent, radiant, and tender world which knew, at heart, no such distinction? … Yes, he had been ready at last to shed all artifice—to be a man merely of the here and now was to be a man closed out from eternity!—and to embrace, if it could be said to be embracable, the legendary abyss, which seemed to lie just beyond the war undulant flesh.

Two weeks. Yes, two weeks on one book is a long time for me, like watching a nine-hour marathon of Law and Order or The Sopranos (or some other deep show you like, doesn’t matter). You don’t regret it. In fact, you loved it. But it’s time to change the channel now, maybe towards some Gilligan’s Island or a nice game show. I think for my next book I will try out something fluffier, something that tells a nice story that moves from point A to point B and ends at point C. Not that such a linear plot means life, literature or art is so linear or logical or valid. But like the librarian character points out, we all need our little delusions and distractions.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars – Buy the hardcover