This is a quirky little piece from the brand-new Slate Book Review. It contains a few oddities like a big block quote in the early going, and a bar graph detailing how many pages the main character spends at different activities. These quirks befit a massive (600+ page) debut novel full of lists, anecdotes, asides, court transcripts, and other digressions. Another peculiarity: De La Pava self-published this book in 2008, and it was only recently picked up by the University of Chicago Press (more on that here). That alone makes it worth a look. Find this book at Goodreads.
Newman kicks off with this eye-catching opening line: “No subject offers a greater opportunity for terrible writing than motherhood,” and then proceeds to explain that writing well about children is hard because child-rearing is so mind-numbingly boring. On the shortlist of qualities I prize in book reviews, “acerbic humor” might be at the very top. Find this book at Goodreads.
Ulin finds Irving’s latest—which follows the life of a bisexual man over the course of four decades—good, but too familiar and ultimately unbelievable. His meditation on the modern-day role of sexually political novels like this one is well worth reading, shame that Irving’s novel does not seem the same. However, Jeanette Winterson, in the New York Times, takes a more favorable outlook. But then Ron Charles breaks the tie on Ulin’s side. Find this book at Goodreads.
Julavits’s latest mixes a pitch-black tone with a markedly silly setting: a liberal arts college for psychics. Sounds like it has enjoyable passages that don’t quite cohere. Oh, and a completely inappropriate cover. Find this book at Goodreads.
This impressive graphic memoir is a great book, but not in any way I think I’ve read before. The bulk of the novel consists of Bechdel’s therapy-related endeavors. She remembers episodes from her childhood in terms of various infant-development theories, she recounts her own therapy sessions as an adult, she interprets her dreams, she recounts conversations with her mother, and she quotes frequently from academic papers about psychoanalysis. In fact, the act of creating the book itself might have been therapeutic for Bechdel, because, as she says, “for both my mother and me, it’s by writing… by stepping back a bit from the real thing to look at it, that we are most present.”
Are You My Mother? is not funny, and the events it recounts are never earth-shattering—especially not compared to the central events of her first book, Fun Home, about her father’s closeted bisexuality and his suicide soon after Bechdel herself came out to her parents.
Instead of relying on these more traditional elements of story, Bechdel indulges her considerable talent for eliciting Nabokov-like patterns from the randomness of the world. She weaves a web of interconnected narrative tidbits—plucked from the entirety of her own life, as well as the lives of her parents, the memoirs and novels of Virginia Woolf, the work and life of Donald Winnicott, and many others—that echo and expand the smallest narrative hiccup until it ripples across the entirety of her existence. … Continue reading »
I’ve been in a long, dark reading drought lately. I’ve been reading only mediocre books, it seems, for months now. I could barely remember what a great read felt like when I got hooked by Immobility.
It begins with a well-used premise, albeit one I’m a sucker for: a man wakes up with no idea where he is, what he’s doing there, or who he is. As the answers come in fits and starts, the questions of his identity and place in the world become dreadful, ominous, and traumatic.
His name, they tell him, is Josef Horkai. He’s been “stored,” as it turns out, which is dystopian lingo for cryogenic freezing. As he regains his wits, he instinctively, almost unconsciously, tries to murder one of the men who woke him up. He fails only because he falls off the bed; he’s paralyzed from the waist down. … Continue reading »
Christopher Priest has been writing about the Dream Archipelago for more than 30 years. The Archipelago is a fictional island chain between a cold, Europe-like land of technology and deferred warfare, and an Africa-like place where the fighting actually happens. This latest book about the islands comes across as a guide to 53 of their unknown number, but it also contains a nearly indescribable mystery woven in. This is a crazy, intricate book, and a great review at the new LA Review of Books site. Find this book at Goodreads.
On one hand, this is a historical novel about the death of one of Hitler’s super-henchmen, Reinhard Heydrich. Simultaneously, Binet inserts a writer-narrator with serious qualms about the book he’s writing. It’s an interesting twist for a historical novel, and well-handled in this quick review. Find this book at Goodreads.
These two opening sentences sell the review (and the book):
Even if you are familiar with the News of the World phone-hacking saga, you will be gobsmacked by this account. It is a tale of stupidity, incompetence, fear, intimidation, lying, downright wickedness and corruption in high places.
Damn. My only concern is whether I’m physically capable of reading 300 pages about Rupert Murdoch without killing myself. Find this book at Goodreads.
OK, so USA Today isn’t exactly The New York Review of Books, but in this case the medium fits the subject. King’s latest occupies a middle slot in his Dark Tower series. In a riff on The Canterbury Tales, the Dark Tower’s central hero, Roland the gunslinger, sits down with his companions around a campfire and tells stories. Almost certainly not a masterpiece, but neither should it be a clunker. Find this book at Goodreads.
Book trailer of the week: I’m stealing a page from Sean’s WBBR handbook. Here’s a pretty hilarious book trailer starring Neal Stephenson, for his new “group-written” book The Mongoliad.
[This feature is a brief summary of interesting books coming out each month. Follow it here. Click the pictures or the title links to find these books at Goodreads.]
Richard Ford writes impressively introspective novels. His Pulitzer prize-winning Frank Bascombe trilogy featured a sportswriter (who later becomes a realtor), ruminating on his life. Each novel in the trilogy takes place over the course of a holiday, and nothing much happens in the sense of plot beats—the narrative is almost entirely interior monologue. That seems simple and boring, but Ford makes even Bascombe’s most mundane thoughts riveting. So it’ll be interesting, then, to see what he does with this new storyline, which features murder, bank robbing, and a teenager trying to fix his criminal family.
Alison Bechdel’s first graphic novel/memoir Fun Home—about her father, who committed suicide shortly after he came out of the closet—won several awards, became a bestseller, garnered a slew of critical raves, and even caused a bit of controversy. Bechdel’s new illustrated memoir looks to raise the bar even further. Are You My Mother? focuses on, predictably enough, Bechdel’s relationship with her acerbic mother, and it’s been getting nothing but rave reviews. Even the joyless controversy-dowser Katie Roiphe loved it. It comes out today, so I’m probably reading it right now.
Niromi de Soyza grew up in an educated, middle-class family in Sri Lanka, but she joined the Tamil Tigers’ first female contingent at the tender age of 17. This book is the story of why she joined the Tigers, how she survived, and how she transitioned from that life to a relatively normal one with a husband and children. If you’re one of those people who say that only people who’ve lived interesting lives should write memoirs… yeah, this is for you.
I loved Ron rash’s gritty, atmospheric Depression-era novel, Serena, and I’m looking forward to the movie version, where the badass title character will be played by Jennifer Lawrence—lately Katniss Everdeen in the solid adaptation of The Hunger Games. But Rash’s follow-up to that electrifying novel, a lackluster collection of stories called Burning Bright, left me flat.
This latest offering disappoints in much the same way those stories did: it feels small and too quiet. In fact, The Cove feels like a short story idea stretched past its rightful size. It’s not bad, certainly, but it possesses only tiny patches of the dark tension and classic drama that made Serena so great.
Kevin Barry is a wonderful stylist, a rare talent in the prose department. He writes City of Bohane in a gritty patois largely of his own making, halfway between Dashiell Hammett and A Clockwork Orange. Even so, it never gets too precious or contrived, and it never feels like Barry is reaching. That’s a very difficult feat, and the fact that Barry manages it for the entire novel without missing a beat, well, that’s nothing short of remarkable.
It’s a shame, then, that once you delve into the rich prose, there’s nothing inside worth getting to.
Steve Almond turns in a characteristically insightful and entertaining piece about Etgar Keret’s new book of stories. Almond expounds about reality and publishing, and makes Keret’s stories sound pretty damn good—he calls them “exhilarating” and “funny,” and Almond has a keen sense of humor himself. He also, however, notes that Keret’s style is “unadorned” and “expository,” and that the collection as a whole is uneven. Still, a writer of Almond’s notable creativity noting the imagination of a collection, as he does here, is high praise indeed.
Wilson’s latest book deserves attention simply by virtue of his resume, which Woodard details for almost half the review. Suffice it to say, Wilson is legit. In this latest volume, Wilson examines the nature and cause of altruism. The accepted scientific explanation for this, he says, is wrong, and the answer he now espouses explains, in one aspect, how religion itself is an evolutionary byproduct. Fascinating stuff.
I’m not sure I ever need to read another novel about the witness protection program (this one was more than enough), but I also have a terrible weakness for “noir thrillers,” and this one looks to fit that bill: a mob wife in witness protection (for ratting out her husband) learns she’s being hunted by both her husband’s people and a crooked U.S. Marshal. She flees to the edge of a continent, and gets help from a pseudonymous sailor named Gray. Depending on Epperson’s character work, this could be terrible or terrific.
We’ve gotten a bit behind over here at C4 HQ. We’ll be back next week with reviews and a new episode of the podcast. In the meantime, here’s a good ol’ fashioned links post.
Amazon is secretly supporting a number of literary organizations. But, they’re also turning up the heat on major publishers, so egregiously in fact that several of the major publishing houses are refusing to renew their Amazon contracts. This might just be the end of Amazon’s deathgrip on retail book sales… but I’m not holding my breath.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department is bringing charges againstApple and five of the Big Six major publishers (all except Random House), over whether their agency-model pricing agreement violates antitrust laws. Most of the publishers are settling (which will likely mean ending agency pricing), but Apple, Macmillan, and Penguin are going to fight it out in court. Macmillan, we should remember, is still run by John Sargent, the slightly reactionary CEO who both hates and doesn’t understand libraries. I’m not a lawyer, but I don’t think setting strict retail prices should be illegal—this battle might have big ramifications.
Apple believes in that agency pricing model so completely that they are the only major U.S. ebookstore that has refused to sell Harry Potter ebooks, because J.K. Rowling wants to set her own prices for them, but isn’t using agency pricing. Does that make sense? No, not really.
Lastly, remember how Random House isn’t being sued by the Justice Dept.? Not only were they the only major publisher to refuse the agency model, they were also the only publisher to continue to sell ebooks to libraries with no restrictions on the number of loans those libraries can make. Then—drama! Libraries were organizing to boycott the exorbitant prices Random House was demanding. Or… maybe they’re not. Sounds like Random House is still the best major publisher, but this library ebook situation is one to keep an eye on.
OK, that’s it for this roundup. We’ll be back with lots more stuff next week, so stay tuned.
[WARNING: This review contains minor spoilers about the premise behind Pure's setting.]
When I first read about Pure, it sounded a lot like Suzanne Collins’s wildly popular Hunger Games series, but for adults. As it turns out, that’s a fair description, but it entails as many negatives as positives. Both series (Pure is the first in, of course, a trilogy) follow teenage girls in post-apocalyptic dystopias who find themselves thrust into central roles in the fight between the haves and the have-nots.
The Hunger Games offers a simple premise and structure, with obvious good guys and bad guys. The main character, Katniss, has to survive a battle royale fight to the death with 23 other teenagers. The rich people who orchestrate the battle are evil, and the poor children forced to fight are good (mostly).
Along the way, Katniss’s progress can be tracked by how many children still survive, and Collins offers regular twists and turns that propel the plot. Collins’s prose is plain and slightly juvenile, as should be expected, and you could call just about any facet of the series “simplistic” without stretching the truth. The characters, the setting, the way the action plays out, the moral questions with easy answers—all of these aspects of The Hunger Games are as uncomplicated as they are primitively satisfying.
By contrast, Pure offers a messier, more tangled, much less satisfying dystopian world. … Continue reading »
A Naked Singularity, by Sergio De La Pava. Reviewed by Paul Ford in the Slate Book Review.
