Author:

2012, The Dial Press

Filed under: Literary, Historical

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I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that began with a more aptly chosen pair of epigraphs. Lurking in the front pages of Jennifer duBois’s debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, you’ll find these two gems:

All of us are doomed, but some are more doomed than others.

–Vladimir Nabokov, from Ada, or Ardor

And if in this wide world I die, then I’ll die from joy that I’m alive.

–Yevgeni Yevtushenko

The novel’s action takes place at the extremes of optimism and pessimism expressed here. Everyone in this book is doomed (some more so than others), and yet the main characters never give up on trying to make something out of their inevitable descent, looking for answers to long-buried questions, looking to leave a mark, however faint, on history.

In 2006, after Irina’s father dies from Huntington’s disease, a debilitating genetic disorder which she is predisposed to develop as well, she finds an old letter he sent to the Russian chess world champion, Aleksandr Bezetov, back in the 80s. In the letter, her father asks “what is the proper way to proceed” when playing in matches “that have been lost from the start.” He never received a reply from Bezetov.

Approaching the expected age of onset for her inherited disorder, Irina decides to spend what time she has left seeking answers to her father’s question. With a half-hatched plan, as selfish as it is romantic, Irina cuts ties at home in the United States and takes off for St. Petersburg to track down a chess master turned presidential candidate.

Written with a humbling emotional intelligence, A Partial History of Lost Causes contrasts personal struggles against historical conflicts. While Irina is searching for a broader narrative for her life, something to which she can dedicate her remaining days of cognizance, Aleksandr is locked in a political prison of his own choosing. Campaigning against the “democratically” elected Vladimir Putin, Aleksandr receives regular death threats for his opposition to the autocrat’s reign. Unable to leave his apartment without a small army of bodyguards and handlers, he finds little relief from a marriage gone stale and regret as fresh as a first love.

“You haven’t lived in a place unless you have at least one major regret there,” Aleksandr’s old friend Ivan tells him in the Soviet days of their youth, in the city that was once Leningrad. It’s one of my favorite lines in the book for the way it encapsulates the issues of tragedy and ownership that link and animate both Aleksandr and Irina. Presences from their pasts haunt them as they progress into their joint future, making nostalgia for lives that never were into the enemy of the present. Personal regret, it turns out, isn’t nearly as regrettable as the effort to banish it by sacrificing the lives we are leading, while there’s still so much to do, while history still races on.

Irina and Aleksandr make an intriguing if unlikely pair of lost causes. The plot staggers somewhat from the effort required to crash their storylines together, but it recovers for a surprising and surprisingly thrilling set of closing chapters, and thematic echoes between the dual narratives remain strong throughout. For anyone interested in chess or Russian history, or prone to profound musings that border on the uncomfortably comic, this is an easy read to recommend.

If that doesn’t sound like your particular shot of vodka, you might keep your eye out for Jennifer duBois anyway. She’s a young writer making an ambitious debut, and I’m sure readers everywhere can look forward to more from her in years to come.

Similar reads: Super Sad True Love Story (Gary Shteyngart), There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby (Ludmilla Petrushevskaya), The History of Love (Nicole Kraus).

Harper Perennial, 2009

Filed under: Literary, Short Stories

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Love Begins in Winter appeared on my desk wrapped in silver paper this past Christmas. It wasn’t on my wish list, but I accepted it with all the love that was intended from someone who had a hunch about me and about this book. You might consider my review a belated thank you card for a favorite gift, or else a form of retroactive wishing for what I have already been given.

These are rare and wonderful stories, subtle in tone, ambitious in scope, and Romantic in vision. Each one performs a precise balancing act that spans multiple settings, voices, and perspectives, a feat rendered all the more impressive by a general lack of flash in the writing. Van Booy’s prose is direct and unadorned, as enjoyable to read as it is challenging in its depiction of conflicted emotions.

But perhaps my favorite thing about the writing here is the boldness of it. “Music is only a mystery to people who want it explained,” says Bruno Bonnet, the cellist who narrates the title story. “Music and love are the same.” Van Booy’s characters are prone to lofty speculations like this, and the success of these five stories lies in their ability to support their most challenging observations, persuading readers with precise, evocative detail.

In Love Begins in Winter, “Tiger, Tiger” best showcases the characteristic boldness in Van Booy’s writing. At first, the story appears to be a tale of parallel relationships, the narrator and her boyfriend considering a deeper commitment at the same moment that his parents’s relationship has come undone after decades of discontent. And it is partly about that, but the story takes a strange turn when the narrator discovers the lost writings of the family doctor, Dr. Blix Felixson.

Dr. Felixson’s musings, along with the narrator’s own experiences as a child and then as a pediatrician, transform “Tiger, Tiger” into a meditation not only on love but on innocence as well. The rest of the story is interspersed with excerpts from Dr. Felixson’s journals:

People’s expectations of coupling may be too grand, and thus disappointment, loneliness, and often pain are the inevitable adjuncts of something we thought would be the ultimate answer (an emotional cure-all) to our ongoing fears….

Humans must learn not to blame each other for being afraid, disappointed, or in pain. We perhaps might learn to view those we have special feelings toward as being our companions rather than our saviors, companions on the journey back to childhood….

Every adult yearns for some stranger, but it is really childhood we miss. We are yearning for that which has been stolen from us by what we have become….

These pronouncements could easily come across as a heavy-handed way of developing the themes of the story, all the more so for introducing a voice from outside of the narrator’s experience to deliver them. And perhaps they are heavy-handed, but the mysteries being addressed here–the nature of innocence, the purpose of love–are large enough, fundamental enough, to stand up to a little heavy-handedness.

This kind of directness requires courage in the face of abstraction and confidence in the power of the story itself to stand up under the gravity of its own grandest aspirations. In the end, the power of “Tiger, Tiger” is derived not only from the worldview of Dr. Felixson, but in seeing how the narrator interprets his wisdom and enacts it in her life, a life that may after all be very different from the examples that have been set for her.

Each of these stories is similarly built to bear up under weighty considerations: death, grief, love, loss, and time. They offer readers ambitious ideas about life and then send their characters around the world and into the past to find out what might be true for themselves.

Similar reads: The Secret Lives of People in Love, by Simon Van Booy; The Book of Life, by Stuart Nadler; The Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri

Author:

2010, Random House

Filed Under: Literary, Humor, Sci-Fi

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Set in a near future as absurd as it is familiar, Super Sad True Love Story depicts a narcissistic America, drunk on credit, obsessed with youth, and largely ignorant of its relationship with the rest of the world. The government is run by the monolithic Bipartisan party, and no one much cares what the military does in Venezuela so long as the never ending stream of hypnotic information keeps scrolling across their “äppäräti.” It’s funny the way Russian literature, blight, or accidental death can be funny.

I’d call it dystopian literature except that in many ways Shteyngart’s novel doesn’t go far enough in reimagining our world to qualify. “Äppäräti” are juiced up smart phones, new fashions are obscenely revealing, and everyone loves shopping. Dystopian literature shows us our world is  stranger than we imagined by drawing out similarities with a world that appears unrecognizable on its surface; Super Sad True Love Story pretty much shows us our world exactly like it is, only worse.

For all the elaborate trappings of its near future setting, Super Sad True Love Story is less affecting as satire than (like the title suggests) as a oddly simple love story. Lenny Abramov, an aging, balding book addict with dreams of immortality falls for Eunice Park, a twenty-something Korean-American beauty and a true product of her times, image obsessed, outwardly confident, inwardly self-loathing. That Shteyngart manages to cut compelling characters from these types is a testament to his talents as a writer; that Lenny and Eunice manage to find consolation in each other is a testament to the strangeness of intimacy.

Lenny and Eunice first meet at a party in Rome right before Lenny returns to the States. They spend the night together, an event which he considers a religious experience, but which she sees as a “lesser evil” than going home with another older guy at the party. Lenny invites her to live with him in New York that same night. Eunice accepts only after this other thing she has going with a guy in Rome falls apart, so why not move in with an almost stranger who worships her rather than returning to her abusive father and cowed mother in Fort Lee?

It’s not the most promising beginning in the history of romance, except that it turns out to be exactly what they both want. Eunice tries to explain her decision to a friend:

When we were walking down this pretty street in Rome I noticed Lenny’s shirt was buttoned all wrong, and I just reached over and rebuttoned it. I just wanted to help him be less of a dork. Isn’t that a form of love too?… I think of him going down on me until he could barely breathe, the poor thing, and the way I could just close my eyes and pretend we were both other people.

Eunice wants to believe that people can change, and Lenny wants to be changed. He wants her to grant him some of her apparent ease in a world out of which he is rapidly aging; he wants her to make him “less of a dork.” His willingness to give himself to her transforms desperation into heroism, because in his heart he believes he can save her too.

On the morning Eunice arrives from Rome, Lenny gives himself a little pep talk:

Lenny, I said aloud. You are not going to screw this up. You’ve been given a chance to help the most beautiful woman in the world. You must be good, Lenny. You must not think of yourself. Only of this little creature before you. Then you will be helped in turn… if you show her that adult love can over come childhood pain, then both of you will be shown the kingdom.

The exchange between Lenny’s openness and Eunice’s guardedness drives the novel through personal and geopolitical disasters, and the possibility that two terribly matched people could find solace in each other (even a doomed solace) amidst a crumbling world is the novel’s most powerful statement. Many of the other characters you could’ve set on fire, and I might not have noticed. (In fact, some of them do go up in flames.) But Lenny and Eunice create something between themselves that I won’t soon forget.

Similar reads: Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, and The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken

Author: Jennifer Egan

2010, Anchor Books, Random House Inc.

Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories

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The Internet probably doesn’t need another glowing review of A Visit from the Goon Squad, but I wanted to write one anyways, more for myself than anything else. Because I do love this book even though parts of it irritated me. Parts of it irritated me deeply, and yet I finished it in just a couple of sittings and then went around recommending it to friends and blathering about the story written as a series of power point slides.

When I first flipped through Goon Squad, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses” caught my eye like a campus streaker: I couldn’t help looking again even though I wasn’t really sure I wanted to. I assumed the power point slides featured in a larger work, but when I realized that they actually comprised their own 75 page story, I prepared for the worst. Here come the gimmicks, I thought.

And I wasn’t wrong about the gimmicks; this book (whether you call it a novel or a collection of linked stories) is full of odd formal tricks and devices. I was just wrong about how well they’d all work in the end. Goon Squad is an ambitious experiment in narrative structure, successful in the extremes of its inventiveness and its willingness to overthrow all of our expectations about time.

I didn’t know it then, but I first encountered Goon Squad almost two years ago when a friend sent me something to read while I was recovering from surgery. “Safari” is about a domineering record executive named Lou on an African vacation with his kids and his new girlfriend. The story’s greatest strength lies in the shifting relationships between the characters which set the stage for disasters still yet to come when the vacation is over. The omniscient narrator reveals the future in short flashes that become more frequent towards the story’s close.

When I first came across Lou in “Ask Me If I Care,” Goon Squad’s third story, deja vu sent me skimming through the rest of the collection. “Safari” was the next story in sequence, and I reread it with a redoubled sense of doom, knowing not only the reveals about the future offered by “Safari” itself but a whole additional cast of characters who Lou was destined to cross.

I remembered, too, the exchange my friend and I had about the way “Safari” collapsed its timeline. My friend had mixed feelings about Egan’s “flash forwards.” He felt they opened the story to an epic narrative sweep, but sometimes it felt like a cheap way of “tacking on dramatics without really developing a story.”

On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 3:10 PM, Eric Markowsky <> wrote:

Cheap is often a good word for these kinds of flash forwards. They can undermine a story by rendering the narrative present unimportant compared to the drama of the future. I’m okay with it here because I don’t think the story relies on it too heavily. They only appear towards the end, and though they certainly change the way you read the conclusion, the final moment happens in the narrative present and offers its own brand of drama.

Unearthing this exchange in 2012 felt strangely like collapsing my own timeline, the same way that rereading “Safari” two years later did. I could see the way I read the story then and the way I read it now simultaneously. I still agree with my old assessment of “Safari” as an individual story and the way that time works in it, but I see now that my previous assessment has nothing to do with “Safari” or with time as either works in Goon Squad.

Goon Squad is a continuous narrative with no narrative present. To say it flashes forwards or backwards misses the mark; there is no singular reference point from which to flash forwards or backwards. Each story begins somewhere new, and each subsequent story is embedded in the details of those that have preceded it. The collective story of Egan’s ensemble cast isn’t plotted so much as it’s collaged, overlapping characters in setting and time so they hide and reveal each other in turn.

This is why “Great Rock and Roll Pauses” works so well: structurally, the power point slides may be truer to the project as a whole than most of the book’s more conventional stories. The form allows events to coincide physically suggesting a variety of relationships in time. Descriptions written inside four overlapping circles suggest simultaneous realizations. Observations embedded in concentric circles suggest a ripple of thought radiating out from an initial idea. Each layout offers a slice of time, inviting readers to explore it along multiple axes instead of a singular line.

The book has its missteps–“Selling the General” struck me as so tonally different from the rest of the work that I felt like I’d watched twenty minutes of “Bananas” in the middle of “Annie Hall”–but the cumulative effect of Goon Squad is stunning. When I finished, I felt as if I’d lived as many lives as there were characters. I started turning back through the pages immediately, like going through the pages of an old scrapbook looking for memories I might have missed but which, I was certain, were still there somewhere.

Similar Reads: Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell; The Known World, by Edward P. Jones; The Imperfectionists, by Tom Rachman.

Author: Joan Leegant

2010, W.W. Norton & Co.

Filed under: Literary

Wherever You Go is set primarily in Jerusalem and the surrounding territories, though it focuses on the lives of three Americans with complicated relationships with Judaism. Yona wants to reconnect with her extremely devout sister; Greenglass, once saved from a life of drugs by religion, is suffering a crisis of faith; and Aaron aims to prove to his father and the rest of the world that he is a worthy son of the Holy Land.

Each of the individual narratives works well enough at first, but they never come together in any sort of a satisfying way. When the strands do begin to intertwine, about two thirds of the way through the book, their interactions seem more convenient than anything else, providing the characters with contrived opportunities to bring their stories to some kind of closure.

For me, the biggest disappointment was the failure to make the most of the setting. Wherever You Go does very little to evoke any kind of a textured world or to convey any sense of what makes Jerusalem and the rest of Israel unique. People eat falafel and cucumber and tomato salad. Most of the Israelis are “from central casting.” It’s very hot. That’s about it.
In fact, many of the book’s descriptions focus on how Jerusalem and the territories are just like anywhere else. The territory settlement where Yona’s sister lives looks “like a planned community in Florida,” a description which is nicely undercut by details like “passengers alighting bulletproof bus number 170,” but for the most part there’s too much of the former and not enough of the latter. The descriptions insist on the setting being just like anywhere else without accounting for why that might be surprising or interesting.

The book’s greatest strength lies in its characters. Greenglass is compelling and likeable. Aaron is compelling and infuriating. Only Yona seems a bit flat, but that also seems to be her problem with herself; she doesn’t like herself much or have much faith in herself, which only makes her appeals to her sister all the more desperate. These characters could be the cast of an interesting novel, but they would need to interact more in a setting that seemed as alive as they are. As it is, they don’t work together nearly well enough to carry the novel.

Recommended reads: For books that abound with vibrant settings, try W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants or E.M. Forester’s A Passage to India.

[A review was requested and a review copy provided. Ms. Leegant has also contributed writing to Chamber Four, and an advertisement for this book has appeared on the site.]

Below, you’ll a find a few more reasons to celebrate some of the

Author: John Paul Stevens

2011, Little, Brown and Co.

Filed Under: Nonfiction, Memoir.

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In case you hadn’t heard, it’s Supreme Court Season again, which means our nation’s top judges are now hearing cases that will affect your life. Holding top billing, we have The State of Florida (and 26 other co-signing states) v. the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which will test the constitutionality of last year’s controversial healthcare overhaul. But this is only one case of many, and, as Atlantic legal correspondent Garrett Epps points out, the majority of the cases the court will hear this session “have huge practical impact but are devoid of drama.”

You might say the same thing about Five Chiefs. Without an ounce of sensationalism or any inflammatory rhetoric, it offers an insider’s perspective on the deliberative processes of our nation’s foremost deliberating body. Stevens presents a historical survey of the Court under each of its seventeen Chief Justices, focusing on the five who sat during the years he was personally associated with the Court, from his clerkship in 1947 until his resignation in 2010.

It’s an eye-opening look at how the Court actually works, from the influence of the Chief’s management style to the long-standing traditions meant to foster cordiality between people who are paid to argue with each other. Five Chiefs won’t keep you up at night, but it will make you think about how we decide some of the most important questions facing the country today… so maybe it will keep a you up at night.

What impresses me most about Five Chiefs–especially in today’s political climate–is its tone. Whether discussing the Court’s Christmas party or his 90-page dissent in Citizens United (which held that limitations on corporate campaign contributions violated First Amendment protections), Stevens is evenhanded and reasonable, even affable. He has nothing but respect for his colleagues and the institutions and traditions of the Court.

He does, of course, have his own opinions about the Court’s work, and he makes no effort to hide them. He spares a few paragraphs to rehash his thinking on Citizens United and some other notable cases, like Jones v. Clinton or Bush v. Gore, and he makes room to discuss his objections to the originalist interpretation of the Constitution flourishing in the Robert’s Court:

Though we do, and should, rely heavily on the wisdom of individual judges in making countless decisions interpreting and applying rules of law, judges are merely amateur historians. Their interpretations of past events, like their interpretations of legislative history, are often debatable and sometimes simply wrong. Historical analysis is usually relevant and interesting, but it is only one of many guides to sound adjudication.

On the whole, though, Five Chiefs has no obvious agenda. The book isn’t trying to sell readers on Stevens’s judicial philosophy or convince anyone to go back and retry cases where he dissented. His judicial philosophy and his dissents are all included, but they’re secondary to the main task of relating the history of the Court, its leaders, its decisions, and its impact on our republic.

When discussing specific decisions, Stevens doesn’t shy away from a little legal speak. It can take time to parse some of his sentences if you don’t have any training in contract law:

There, the Court held that it was proper to review such cases unless the state court made it clear that there was no federal issue to be decided by including in its opinion an unambiguous statement that its decision rested on an adequate and independent state rule.

But if you can read sentences like that without running off screaming into the night searching for a comma, then there’s nothing here that should turn you off from Stevens’s memoir. For anyone interested in history, politics, government, or the Constitution, I’d recommend putting in what little extra effort some of the subject matter requires. Five Chiefs is well worth it.

Similar reads: for a look at Stevens in someone else’s words, check out John Paul Stevens: An Independent Life by Bill Barnhart.

[A review copy was provided.]

2011, Little, Brown and Company

Filed Under: Literary.

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For fifty pages, I was hooked. Henry Skrimshander is a small-town kid with an almost supernatural sense for playing shortstop. He’s discovered at what might have been the last game of his career and recruited to play for Westish College, a small D III school in Wisconsin. Under the guidance of Mike Schwartz, the Westish teammate who discovered him, Henry rises into the ranks of the nation’s best college players. His future seems bright and assured.

Then we’re introduced to Guert Affenlight, the President of Westish College. He’s an interesting guy, but his story doesn’t really have as much to do with Henry as Henry’s roommate, Owen, and there’s Guert’s daughter, Pella, who’s fleeing a failed marriage. Also, Schwartz is having some problems figuring out his life after graduation.

The writing is solid throughout, the characters are convincing and likable enough that I never felt totally dissatisfied, but I often found myself pushing through chapters wondering when all of this was going to get back to Henry, because (surprise) his bright future might not be such a sure thing after all. Unfortunately, Henry’s perspective and his trials on the diamond occupy less space as the novel progresses, and the work as a whole suffers for it.

Now maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. I know most books about baseball are not really about baseball. Baseball becomes a vehicle for exploring conflicts societal and historical and philosophical and so on. The Art of Fielding is no different. In the end, it isn’t really about baseball; it’s about the pursuit of perfection and what it does to people.

But the book is at its best when it keeps baseball front and center. All the best scenes happen in either the locker room or on the field. Harbach does an excellent job bringing the the drama of the game to life, building suspense with pacing and expertise, narrating the significance of every pitch like the best play-by-play announcers.

Beyond providing drama, baseball makes a perfect vehicle for exploring the conflict between human fallibility and ideal perfection. It’s a game that requires incredible patience combined with an ability to react with coordinated speed, precision and strength. The smallest misstep or misreading can cause game-changing errors. His growing awareness of this slim margin of error drives Henry like few characters I’ve come across in literature:

Henry knew better than to want freedom. The only life worth living was the unfree life, the life Schwartz had taught him, the life in which you were chained to your one true wish, the wish to be simple and perfect. Then the days were sky-blue spaces you moved through with ease. You made sacrifices and the sacrifices made sense.

The pursuit of perfection affects the other characters, too, but it never feels as visceral or as immediate or as desperate as it does when seen through Henry’s struggles.

The others are imperfect, they know it, and they’re dealing with it in better or worse ways (except Owen, who seems perfectly imperturbable through most of the novel). They all have their moments, like when Pella earns her very first ever paycheck. She went from being the daughter of a college President to being the nineteen-year-old bride of a handsome, successful architect, and she receives her wages for washing dishes with a mix of exhilaration and shame:

It was embarrassing, how proud of herself she felt. The check proved she’d been alive these weeks, that she’d accomplished something, however trivial. This was why people grew so attached to earning money, even money they didn’t need. This was how they justified themselves. This was how they kept score.

Harbach is a talented enough writer that he’s capable of small moments of insight like this one at almost any point. My problem isn’t that the rest of the cast and their problems are uninteresting, just that they’re not as interesting as Henry. They’re not what I thought I would find when I picked up the novel and not what grabbed my attention through those first fifty pages.

There’s a lot to admire here, but the whole is somehow less satisfying than the sum of its parts. If you’re looking for a novel about baseball, be warned: you’re going to have to wade through a lot of other material (including a lot of Melville references). If you’re looking for a contemporary college novel about quarter-life crises and unending adolescence, well, I hope you like baseball.

A few good baseball books: The Natural (Malamud), 21: The Story of Roberto Clemente (Santiago), The Bullpen Gospels (Hayhurst).

2011, Regan Arthur Books

Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories.

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In seven longer-than-average short stories, Stuart Nadler takes on fathers and sons, lovers and ex-lovers, philandering philanderers, sibling rivalries, and orphans of all ages. These stories are expansive, opening landscapes of regret and redemption all along the Northeast Corridor. Each one boasts moments of hard-earned clarity rendered with a degree of precision that made me pause to admire their craftsmanship, craftsmanship I found all the more impressive for the complexity of the stories themselves.

While Nadler’s prose is simple and direct, the tales he tells tend to distort conventional relationships almost beyond recognition. In one, a girlfriend hires a surrogate temptress to test her boyfriend. In another, a man, his lover, her husband, and their children all add up to something like a family. In other hands, setups like these could easily descend into melodrama; in Nadler’s hands the result is something much less predictable and much more memorable.

In “Winter on the Sawtooth,” the narrator shares his wife knowingly, if not happily, with her lover. Their son, Josh, home from his first semester of college for Thanksgiving, isn’t crazy about the idea, and he’s not about to hide it. “Sawtooth” offers my hands-down favorite moment in the collection, and I can’t think of a better example of Nadler’s ability to pry a moment wide open, exposing it to the light of multiple perspectives. It’s this ability more than anything else that allows his characters to appear fully formed and finely flawed amid their sordid stories.

Having declared a truce, father and son, more like brothers or old buddies, sneak out to an abandoned mill to have a beer where the local teens drink. Josh wants to show his father pictures from his first semester, specifically pictures of a girl he’s met, Sarah. The narrator is pleased to be bonding with his son, but he can’t help feeling out of place playing with his son’s laptop in the middle of the woods.

At first, the narrator’s not sure what to make of what he’s looking at, standard college pics of parties and dorm life. But then:

My interest is piqued because of the sheer volume. He has so many photographs of Sarah. Pictures in which she is the focus, in which she is posing, in which she is wearing black tights and patent leather shoes, wearing merino wool and a foolish pillbox hat, wearing Levi’s and canvas shoes, wearing a loose green-and-white baseball-team ringer T-shirt. And there are pictures in which she exists by accident, as an incidental ornament in someone else’s portrait, a blurry figure in the back of a Chinese restaurant. For the few minutes I look, and for days afterward, I’m left with a dark, discomfiting regret that, for all my effort, I can’t seem to lose.

“Here,” Josh says. “Let me show you a picture from he day I met her.”

To have such a thing, I think.

Between the son’s enthusiasm and the father’s regret lies the gulf of a life lived, well in some respects, poorly in others, but past and passing regardless, and certainly not nearly as well documented as the life of his son. That Josh is oblivious to what an older generation might find amazing about something he takes for granted only compounds his father’s amazement. Josh sees what the pictures mean to him now; his father sees what they could mean to him later and envies his son.

Each story in The Book of Life contains a few moments like this one, moments that convey before and after, as if the image were its own negative. Moments like these sometimes stood out even above the stories themselves, so that I find myself more eager to recommend the book as a whole over any particular entry in the table of contents. The length of these stories (the shortest is over 20 pages, the longest is over 40) and the care taken to develop character suggests that Nadler is comfortable in a longer format. According to his website, he’s working on finishing a novel. The Book of Life is very good; I’m betting his novel could be even better.

Similar reads: Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Packer), The Feast of Love (Baxter), The View From Stalin’s Head (Hamburger)

[A review copy was provided.]

Pretty much every night before I turn off the light, I read in bed for a while first. It’s a way of focusing myself for sleep, a way of driving off the stray concerns of day by replacing them with a singular voice. Mostly, this works for me, but I’ve learned over the years that reading in bed can be a dangerous proposition. I come from a line of pretty adept insomniacs to begin with, so put a good book in my hands and I’m apt to forget why I was in bed in the first place until it’s already 3 am. If the book isn’t good enough, though, then it just doesn’t do the trick. I lay my head down still full of whatever was hassling my mind during the day.

To that end, I’ve identified a certain kind of book that puts me to sleep in the best possible way. Each of these books comes doled out in small doses of strangeness, short, experimental pieces I can finish in a few minutes while I’m winding down and still take away something worth dreaming about.

Five Books to Take to Bed

5. The Weather of Words, by Mark Strand

This collection of “poetic inventions” presents one of America’s greatest living poets at his most nimble. It includes literary criticism, personal essays, prose poems, and fictional encounters with Jorge Luis Borges and a President who likes to read Chekhov to his cabinet. In whatever form it takes, Strand’s voice is always confident and compelling. He could write for the IRS and probably manage to make the tax code riveting reading. Thankfully, he has a lot more imagination than that.

4. Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges

Strolling out of an offhand reference in #5 and straight into the #4 spot, we’ve got Jorge Luis Borges with Labyrinths, a selection of short fiction, essays, and parables that will all stretch your dreaming muscles. These pieces mix content and form, melding science fiction with literary criticism and hiding a murder mystery in a work of philosophy. In the first story of the collection, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Borges describes the work of the inhabitants of Tlön, a planet invented by a vast conspiracy of intellectuals:

The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for truth or even verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature.

I don’t think I could describe the effect of reading Labyrinths better than that. These stories will astound you.

3. Forty Stories, by Donald Barthelme

Even more condensed strangeness. Most Borges stories clock in at under fifteen pages; many Barthelme stories rocket by in five or fewer. Each one is a self-contained dream, proceeding by a logic all its own, only to be overthrown by the start of the next piece. “The Educational Experience” takes readers on a quick tour through a museum of all of human trivia; in “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby,” the narrator and other friends ask Colby to help plan his own hanging; and an entire heard of porcupines tries to enroll in the same university in “Porcupines at the University.” These stories are so strange and so divergent, that the only way I could really tell you what they’re all about would be to go on describing each one individually, so I’ll stop now and let you find out what they’re about for yourself.

2. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

This one breaks the mold a little bit. While it is composed in a series of short descriptions of fantastic cities, the sum presents a complexly patterned vision of the empire of Kublai Kahn through the eyes of the great explorer Marco Polo. The book certainly merits some consideration as a whole, but the individual pieces still stand alone like brightly polished artifacts from the ancient world. Take Isidora, for example:

A city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors.

1. Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman

Without a doubt, my favorite book to read before bed. A novel only in the loosest sense of the word, these 30 stories follow the dreams of a young clerk working in a Swiss patent office during the same year he’s developing a new theory of time. (Sound like someone you’ve heard of before?) Each one is a separate meditation on a universe governed by different temporal laws. Time is a loop, repeated endlessly; time is a liquid, diverted by bends and obstacles in space; time has a perimeter, where it flies past at the speed of light, and a center, where it stops completely.

You might think Time would be too heavy a topic to ponder right before bed, but each of these dreams is only a few pages long, the prose is simple and direct, and the ideas are lighter than air. If this book doesn’t put you in a slower, more contemplative state of mind, then I don’t know what will.