A Literary Life

Interpreter of Maladies (Jhumpa Lahiri)

This selection of stories centered on the Indian/Indian-American culture (dots, not feathers) was simply written yet vivid. Though I enjoyed it and read it quickly, I can’t help but shake the feeling that I could have gotten just as much out of it had I been reading it while bouncing up and down on the stair master. In other words, the book seemed to be a placeholder, something to do to keep my eyes busy that didn’t permeate much further into my head. And though I could be wrong, none of these stories will wind up haunting the corners of my mind, which makes me wonder why it received the Pulitzer. But ah well, I don’t give out the prizes. (Or maybe I’m distracted, who knows?)
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars - Vacation reading

The Known World (Edward Jones)

Owned, whipped and barely surviving slaves on one hand, and the profit-driven, learned and hoop-skirted masters on the other. When we picture this dichotomy, we know which side is white and which is black: The white man holds the black 3/5ths of a man under his shiny boot. Jones, however, tips that idea of slavery on its head in this (based on a true) story of black slaves in the pre-Civil War era south.

This interesting slight of hand, turning the fabric of the folk narrative of slavery inside out, is probably enough reason that Jones won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel. But even without the culturally relevant story line, Jones narrative style would have cinched it. His characters are smooth and quiet, yet reflect amazing depth, and the story weaves in and out of the past — even within the same paragraph — in the same way that memory abruptly comes to the surface, often more relevant in the present moment than it was at the time.

The Known World is a longer book and definitely more in the vein of literary fiction, meaning the story will not progress as fast as some would like and the ragged ends are never neatly ties, morals offered on silver platters. But that’s the way I like it, and that’s why I continue to read the Pulitzer winners, for the feeling you get when you read one paragraph, one sentence over and over again out of admiration, when you wish you could hang it on your wall like a Monet or Klimt, when letters strung together change you.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars – Hardcover book club selection

The News from Paraguay (Lily Tuck)

The following synopsis is from this book’s publisher and my notes are the (somewhat negative) comments in bold.

The year is l854. In Paris, Francisco Solano — the future dictator of Paraguay — begins his courtship of the young, beautiful Irish courtesan Ella Lynch with a poncho, a Paraguayan band, and a horse named Mathilde. (The band proves the most alluring of the characters mentioned. I enjoyed the style of the writing: shifting quickly back and forth between characters, short thoughts from each that are disconnected and separate, yet together form a rich tapestry of thought and experience.) Ella follows Franco to Asuncion and reigns there as his mistress. (Oh yes, quite haughtily. Though she seems to have normal intelligence, I wanted to yell at her through the page for her flatness and self-imposed impotency.)

Isolated and estranged in this new world, she (stupidly) embraces her lover’s ill-fated imperial dream — one fueled by a heedless arrogance that will devastate all of Paraguay. (Perhaps she could have stopped the little despot from turning a good story, with a very well done narrative style, into a war tale. I don’t like war stories.) With the urgency of the narrative, rich and intimate detail, and a wealth of skillfully layered characters, (true, true and true) The News from Paraguay recalls the epic novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. (Ha! Um, I beg to differ. Granted, the book is constrained because it attempts to stick to history — again, making it too much of a war story for my taste — but Marquez and Llosa show much more imagination and keep the reader glued to the page, unsure of the ending. This ending was ill-fated from the beginning. Only a reader who enjoys watching the inevitable bad end arrive remains fascinated. I simply skipped ahead to count the pages until, guess what, everyone dies or winds up miserable.)

I use other’s words because:

1. It’s been a long time since I finished the book, and therefore have little to say.
2. I was disappointed that this National Book Award winner left me with little to say.
3. If I had to use my own words, I would have simply settled for a shrug of the shoulders and the (pseudo) word: Ehh.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars - Vacation reading

Empire Falls (Richard Russo)

So a lot of time has gone by since I read this book, time full of a lot of shit and — at the same time — a lot of nothing. But suffice it to say that I haven’t had the mental energy to catalog my reading material lately. Because of the time gone by and my energy level, then, I will keep this brief.

I was recommended this book by co-workers, who enjoyed it, and I have to say I enjoyed it, too. Russo chronicles the story of a small town, once thriving thanks to a local textile factory owned by a local Kennedy-like “royal” family, but now shrinking and shabby due to the factory’s closure. We follow the lives of the “royal” family, the family of the man who runs the local diner and others in their everyday quest for, well, happiness. Basically, it’s a family- or town-based epic story, but without the simplicity and plot-driven characteristics of such stories. Every character is unique and carefully wrought, every plot point character-driven and interesting (despite the entrance of some hot-button issue twists, which I won’t reveal for those who want to read the book).

It was a fun book, one that read easily but without condescending to the reader, an absorbing book that took me away to a world just as complicated as my own, but more interesting. I suppose it took me to the place I needed to be when so much (and yet so little) was going on — a REAL place with REAL people who lent insight into the REAL world that I live in.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Book club selection

Three Junes (Julia Glass)

A debut novel and winner of the National Book Award in 2002, this smooth yet artful book can’t really be called a page-turner. Your eye doesn’t jump around as if caffeinated, unable to wait for the next bit of dialog or plot twist. Instead, Three Junes is more like sinking into a feather mattress or a warm, mountain stream — the words feel soft and gentle yet artful and deep, as if you are being immersed in a story, in someone’s life. Or in this case, the lives of a whole family told over the course of three non-consecutive summers and three different points of view.

There is the widowed Scot taking a holiday in Greece, his three sons dealing with their own lives over the course of the father’s funeral, and then a family friend, who brings both geography and theme full circle. The premise may seem thin from that description. But, again, this is not a plot-driven book. Instead, it delves into the personalities of the characters — who are all very imperfect and human and interesting and sympathetic — as they deal with issues we all must face, like familial bonds, recognizing love, reproduction, sexuality, confidence and fear.

I love that there is no beginning, middle and end to this story, no neatly tied strings. Ideas and themes and coincidences interweave, and go uncommented upon by the narrator, letting the reader absorb the information and make their own inferences. Such writing makes the reader feel as if they are having a personal experience, a journey, rather than being led by the hand along a set path with a set conclusion that the author expects you to arrive at.

Well-written. The kind of book that I am always happy to read and someday hope to write.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars - Hardcover book club selection

Ship Fever (Andrea Barrett)

A friend is someone with whom you share the important things in your life, including books. (And if books are not an at-least-somewhat-important part of life, we will most likely not be that close of friends. No offence. Really.) Even so, friends don’t always share the same taste in fiction. When such tragedies occur, it doesn’t often come to blows — unless you insult The Hours or The Road, of course. (Just kidding, Pam!) Even better are the times a friend recommends a book, a novel you’ve never heard of before, and you find a little gem of fiction, something you can both google over as if it’s a shared experience.

This book was such a find for me, lent to me a friend who swears by National Book Award winners, and is a series of somewhat-interconnected short stories and the title novella. Vivid, unique and unexpected, these stories circle and dodge around the theme of science, especially the late 19th- and early 20th-century natural sciences: the time of Darwin, of aristocratic men grabbing butterfly nets and carefully pinning new species to velvet-lined shadow boxes, of drawing-room scientists, of adventure to new continents in search of unknown species. The stories describe the thin line between a fiery passion for science and a belief in magic, telling the tales of men and women who find the world is still more complex and powerful than the flimsy tools of science, who are abandoned in dark jungles and desperate situations, betrayed by the logic they so desperately believed in.

Ship Fever is a great read, one that makes me also want to begin following National Book Award winners. I’m thankful for the recommendation, and will turn around to recommend it to other friends who’d like to share an experience.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars - Hardcover book club selection

The Accidental (Ali Smith)

A stranger appears at an English family’s summer home, a stranger that everyone in the family thinks belongs to someone else. She is somehow fresh, comforting, magnetic, saying to your face what may be on your mind but hasn’t yet crossed the tongue. This mysterious stranger, the “Accidental” title character, changes the family’s world: by playing with the girl, sleeping with the boy, not sleeping with step-da and insulting the mother.

This well-written book plays with words in the minds of all four characters. I know, I know. I just went off recently (The Emperor’s Children) about the ways fiction using multiple narrators annoys the hell out of me. But in this case, each character speaks only from within their own thoughts and experiences — which intersect, interact and collide with each other’s realities along the way. Many writers resort to multi-POV stories because they cannot subtley convey a plot twist, piece of exposition or meaning from one limited set of eyes, using the technique to tell a story. Instead, Smith uses her characters to show the story to readers. Each narrator’s story is somewhat complete in itself, yet the weaving together of experiences allows the reader to discover the whole truth of the novel for themselves.
Truly this book, a finalist for the Booker Prize, is skillful, witty, deeply felt and beautifully rendered.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars - A hardcover book club selection

Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)

It took me six weeks to finish this book, which I believe is a personal record. I’ve spent more than six weeks trying (and failing) to finish a book when I was younger, before I was wise enough to know when to throw in the towel, even if the books was supposed to be classic, change-your-life good or the favorite tome of someone I admire. (See here or here for examples). But unlike those paper weights of unfinished (sometimes undecipherable) prose, I loved this six-week long adventure, every one of its 981 pages. That’s 1,079 with the footnotes. Yes, it’s fiction and yet it has footnotes, but we will get to that later.

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

The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Klay (Michael Chabon)

Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize, this book by Michael Chabon is a sprawling story of two cousins, World War II, Judaism, the comic book industry, sexuality, masculinity and love. While the Pulitzer is always a reason to put a novel on my reading list, the fact that Chabon wrote Wonder Boys (a movie I adore though I admit *blush* I’ve never read the book) was an added inducement. With all of that in mind, this 650-page monster had a lot to live up to in my mind.

All-in-all, live up it did. It was a good book, one that sucked me in and kept my interest with round characters and plot twists. My eyes raced the words to see who would find out what happened first. It was the kind of book that makes me wish my lunch break were longer and makes my bath water grow cold around me, the bubbles popped and the water turning gray with soap. Yes, it was good….

And also very, how-you-say… boy. Honestly, that realization shouldn’t be all that surprising when you consider that the tale is woven around the concept of the comic book. The main characters write and draw the books; debate the characters and their greater societal value; discuss the unconscious lure of the tales for American youth with their violence and clear-cut morality; and, most importantly, adopt on the aspects of the their creations in their real lives. This is very interesting and compelling in portions, especially when Chabon links artistic endeavors to action: art as a weapon in a situation when you are otherwise powerless, the ability of art to change opinions perhaps even more than action itself. I also love how the disguise of art is exposed: that artistic creation is often the mask an artist wears, revealing more of the true self on the page than in reality.

But, much like a comic book, this approach does have limitations as well. For one, the foreshadowing, which is far from subtle and feels more like a cartoon, Acme anvil falling from the sky. KA-BLAM. I instantly knew who was going to fall in love with who, who was lying, what choices and actions would be pivotal later in the story, who was going to die, etc. It says a lot that I cared for these characters enough that my heart reacted to these anvils–No! Don’t say that, I would think. No! I like you too much for you to die. But most audiences don’t like being treated like 8-year-old comic-loving boys–we don’t like to be hit over the head with something as if we were stupid. We like to be surprised and, if the ending is going to be a happy one, I would prefer not to know that halfway through the book, reading the other half only to find out the specifics of that happiness and the route they were going to take to get there.

Very boyish. Predictable, in a way. I think Chabon does this consciously, mimicking the heightened sense of destiny, fate and morality that are the foundation of the comic universe. But it was very conscious to me as a reader as well, making me feel pandered to in some way. Plot points come around too easily, deserved success arrives, love will be thwarted at the most crusial moment, heroic actions spring from noble hearts, just desserts are served. Come and get ‘em!. By creating a comic book universe–one of such reverence, almost worship, for the art form, its creators and the golden age of its inception–Chabon made a story that couldn’t exist in real life, that was fake and over-blown at its core.

Wow. That sounds like a really bad review when, in fact, I did enjoy this book immensely. I enjoyed it as a rollicking romp through a world of a boy’s imagination, where obstacles crop up like icebergs but there is never any doubt about reaching port in safety. No doubts about the basic goodness of mankind, the love of friends and family, and, of course, the triumph of good over evil.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars = Buy the hardcover

Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides)

Incest, sex, gender, love, sexuality, abnormality, belonging, sex…. Oh, I said sex already? Sorry.

The novel by Jeffrey Eugenides (author of the Virgin Suicides) is the enthralling epic of a Greek family come to America and the tracing of their genetic blunders down to the third generation when–oops–a little something strange appeared. We are all a product of the past, a concoction of the events and characteristics of the people who came before. The narrator of this book just gets to consciously tag along, watching over grandparents’ shoulders like a disembodied, time-travelling fairy. From the old world to the new, from World War I to the 1970s, this narrator reveals rich, compelling characters that you love despite their faults, that your heart pangs for when you realize (before they do) what is truly going on.

Sit down, hold on, clear your schedule and make way for Middlesex: a book that won the Pulitzer Prize for damn good reason by an author who has never failed to disappoint me. Eugenides takes the family epic, a plotline usually reserved for light historical fiction or sweeping romances, and elevates it to the highest level of literary fiction. Jeffrey, if you are out there somewhere, will you adopt me/teach me/trade places with me? I promise to call you a genius everyday, bring coffee into your office and feed paper sheet by sheet into the back of your typewriter if you promise to pound out another book to entertain, fascinate and move me.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars = Buy the harcover