A Naked Singularity, by Sergio De La Pava. Reviewed by Paul Ford in the Slate Book Review.

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.

Making Babies, by Anne Enright. Reviewed by Judith Newman in the New York Times.

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.

In One Person, by John Irving. Reviewed by David L. Ulin in the L.A. Times.

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.

The Vanishers, by Heidi Julavits. Reviewed by Buzzy Jackson in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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.

In brief: Christopher Buckley’s latest political satire, reviewed in the NYT. … A nice remembrance of Maurice Sendak at the BN Review. … The Seattle Public Library hid books all over their city for young people to find. … Flavorwire protests libraries banning Fifty Shades of Grey by offering other books to ban? Uhhh… And finally, James Patterson “produces” (i.e. doesn’t write) 12 books a year, and now authors are pressured to write more, instead of better.

Author: Alison Bechdel

2012, Houghton Mifflin

Filed under: Memoir, Graphic Novel, Literary

Find it 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.

Here’s a small example. One passage finds Bechdel discussing her mother’s affinity for Norah Vincent, a right-wing lesbian stunt-pundit who had begun to draw cartoons and had once beaten Bechdel for a prize. Bechdel finds herself paralyzed by jealousy, and expounds on this jealousy. On its own, that’s a small, somewhat overblown moment.

But later she recounts her mother’s pregnancy with her, how it might not have been planned—she notes that the pill was approved by Congress six months after her conception. Reading her father’s letters to his mother, she finds him a doting, generous man, with big plans to travel with his young wife as soon as he got out of the Army. This is nothing like the man she remembers, seen most frequently in this volume delivering cruel one-liners or in the marks he’s left on the house from throwing things during his rages.

Bechdel remembers a conversation she had with her mother, and surmises that her father might have asked her mother to get an abortion—children would’ve ruined their plans for travel. This moment, she hypothesizes might have crystallized her mother’s pro-life philosophy… the philosophy that, all those years later, led her to gravitate toward a pro-life lesbian thinker that her daughter hated and envied. It’s this kind of whorl, performed over and over through the book, that makes it special.

Bechdel also repeatedly uses themes beyond therapy. She plumbs the lives of Virginia Woolf and Donald Winnicott, noting various ways in which they were linked—geographically and by publishing house, for starters—though they never knew each other. Bechdel also returns to touchstones as varied as the theater, the transitional object, her habit of retouching her cheeks in pictures to make them appear pinker and healthier, and the practice of evacuating children from wartime London to houses or hostels in the countryside where they would be safe from bombs.

She peppers the narrative with informational tidbits about each of her hobbyhorses (the Narnia series began in a countryside child-evacuation house, Winnie the Pooh was the archetypal transitional object, etc). But the book really becomes something special when Bechdel braids all these themes together in certain twisting passages.

One of them begins during a flashback, when Bechdel (then 26 or so) goes to pick up her longtime girlfriend, Eloise, who’s a mechanic. Bechdel has just begun therapy, having that day returned from her first session with her new favorite therapist, a woman named Jocelyn who has essentially relieved her depression in one visit. Bechdel subsequently went out and bought the book The Drama of the Gifted Child, by Alice Miller, which will not only change her thinking but will also lead to her decades-long interest in psychoanalysis, and it introduces her to the work of Donald Winnicott, one of the load-bearing columns of this book.

This is what the next two pages looks like (click any image for a full-size version):

Beyond the discovery of Winnicott, these pages begin Bechdel’s search for her own “true self,” another major theme. Winnie the Pooh is a transitional object, and reading that book will lead to Narnia, from which Bechdel jumps into a discussion about the practice of evacuating children from wartime London to children’s hostels in the countryside. As it turns out, Winnicott worked as a therapist at such children’s hostels—a later anecdote gets into that.

Additionally, Eloise and Bechdel call each other “Beezum,” after Bechdel’s childhood teddy bear—another transitional object. And Bechdel’s refusal of sex and ignoring Eloise in the first page (even as she’s reading about the true self’s “state of noncommunication”) foreshadows their messy split.

These kinds of nested connections can continue in patterns for pages at a time, and the result is captivating.

Even so, this book is far from flawless. Bechdel has a tendency to over-intellectualize a lot of what happens, and she can be wincingly self-indulgent and dramatic at times, like this two-page spread about the guilt she feels when her mother calls her old number one night and can’t get ahold of her:

In fact, Bechdel might be the least likeable memoirist whose memoir I’ve really liked.

As for her drawing style, she says of it, “The kind of drawing I do has to be meticulously planned, every line has to convey some information.” I can see that, but the subject matter in this book does not often lend itself to such meticulous planning. There are hundreds of panels of her talking on the phone or to a therapist, panels that could be virtual Xeroxes of each other. Only a rare few are really beautiful or eye-catchingly creative.

In a sense then, this book is riveting, unique work. In another sense, it’s the dry whining of an overprivileged suburbanite with few real problems. I found it to be the former, but I couldn’t argue hard against the latter.

In the end, Bechdel’s whirling, braided tangle of patterns and connections won me over. A narrative continuum like this, so precise and intricate, so creative and yet so logical, is a wonder to behold. And perhaps that wonder is caused more by beholding Bechdel’s indirect effort—the years of her journal-keeping, the hours of transcribing her conversations with her mother—than by real enjoyment of the story at hand.

Still, even if it’s not for everyone, it’s a remarkable book.

Similar reads: Asterios Polyp, by David Mazzucchelli; Blankets, by Craig Thompson; Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel; Big Questions, by Anders Nilsen

Author: Brian Evenson

2012, Tor

Filed under: Sci-Fi

Find it at Goodreads

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.

The world is in the midst of a nuclear winter, after an apocalyptic event they call the Kollaps. The leader of the small, underground community in which Horkai wakes is an awkward man named Rasmus. Rasmus’s father found Horkai many years ago, fried nearly dead by intense radiation. Somehow, Horkai survived, but he contracted a disease that’s paralyzing him by inches. It’s taken his legs and threatens to move up his spine and kill him, except for special spinal injections that slow the disease’s spread.

That’s why he was stored, Rasmus says, to slow the spread of his disease while they look for a cure. They haven’t found it yet, but they have need of his services in the meantime.

“‘You were a fixer,’” Rasmus says, “‘a detective of sorts.’” A violent man, evidently, one who wouldn’t flinch if dirty work needed doing. The perfect man, it turns out, for a special mission.

By this point, I was hooked. Evenson’s prose and his character work aren’t mind-blowingly special, but he sketches out a gritty dystopia filled with creepy, unnerving people and a potent sense of dread hanging over everything. Evenson excels at creating characters who have something wrong with them, but something you can’t quite put your finger on (and Horkai can’t either).

Often these characters don’t seem to be entirely human—like the twin men, called “mules,” who carry Horkai on his mission. They talk endlessly of “purpose” and don’t seem to understand the world properly. There’s something mysteriously off about these two, Qatik and Qanik, but Horkai can’t quite figure it out. His conversations with them, however, get philosophical and often quite funny. Like this conversation after the trio runs into a stop sign:

“What does it say?” asked Qatik.

“Have you never seen a stop sign?” asked Horkai.

Qatik shook his head.

“Can’t you read?”

Within his hood, Qatik shook his head again. “Neither of us can read. But I can recognize letters.”

Beneath him, he felt Qanik nod. “It’s not important for everyone to read,” said Qanik. “Some read and some do other things. We all have our purpose.”

“Who told you that?” asked Horkai. “Someone who can read, I bet.”

In this way, Evenson explores the idiosyncrasies of this new world in an entertaining style that makes the pages fly by. And mystery infuses everything, like why Qatik and Qanik need biohazard suits to spend even a day in the outside world without dying, but Horkai has no trouble with drastic radiation or, say, getting shot.

The answers, when they eventually come, can be picked apart slightly, but they’re solid enough that they don’t sour the page-turning entertainment of the journey.

In the end, this isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s a very solid little piece of sci-fi, a simple idea well-executed, and the most fun I’ve had reading in several months.

Similar reads: Machine Man, by Max Barry; Pure, by Juliana Baggott; The Glister, by John Burnside; Genesis, by Bernard Beckett

The Islanders, by Christopher Priest. Reviewed by Paul Kincaid in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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.

HHhH, by Laurent Binet. Reviewed by Alan Riding in the New York Times.

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.

Dial M for Murdoch, by Tom Watson and Martin Hickman. Reviewed by Peter Wilby in the Guardian.

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.

The Wind Through the Keyhole, by Stephen King. Reviewed by Brian Truitt in USA Today.

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.

Definitely

Canada, by Richard Ford (out 5/22)

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.

Are You My Mother?, by Alison Bechdel (out now)

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.

Tamil Tigress: My Story as a Child Soldier in Sri Lanka’s Bloody Civil War, by Niromi de Soyza (out 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.

Maybe

The Listeners, by Leni Zumas (out 5/15)

Zumas’s first novel carries a fairly unexciting premise—about a woman from a sad childhood who’s having career struggles—but the prose is billed as “hallucinatory” and “far-out.”

The Chemistry of Tears, by Peter Carey (out 5/15)

Peter Carey has won the Booker prize twice, and he’s been shortlisted three other times. Dude can write. In this one, a museum curator mourns the loss of her married lover by rebuilding an automaton. Reactions have been mixed, but Carey’s resume makes it worth a long look.

The Lower River, by Paul Theroux (out 5/22)

Paul Theroux’s new novel follows Ellis Hock, a white American man who spent four years in Malawi in the Peace Corps. When his wife leaves him, he returns to Africa to find the work he did in tatters, and to find himself unsure of whether his new journey is “an escape or a trap.” Going by two-sentence synopses, this is my favorite premise from this month’s slate of Maybe novels.

Bunch of Amateurs: A Search for the American Character, by Jack Hitt (out 5/15)

Expanding from an idea of America as a collection of obsessed amateurs inventors (cf. Ben Franklin and his kite), Hitt interviews eccentric amateurs across the country, from a woman splicing genes in her kitchen to a man building a next-generation telescope in his trailer. Hitt, a frequent This American Life contributor, has a nose for interesting stories, and it sounds like these fall into that category.

The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World, by Nick Harkaway (out 5/15)

In addition to recently publishing a massive new novel, Harkaway has also been working on this nonfiction book about “the relationship between culture and individuals and technology and science” and a whole lot more. I’m a bit stalled with his novel, but even so, this piques my interest. Here’s more about it.

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, by Andrew Blum (out now)

As former Senator and ragecomic bobblehead Ted Stevens taught us, the Internet is a series of tubes. Andrew Blum follows those tubes underground and across oceans in an effort to explain and enumerate the physical infrastructure of the modern digital world.

The Newlyweds, by Nell Freudenberger (out now)

Freudenberger, one of the vaunted New Yorker 20 under 40, turns in a much-hyped new novel about a Bangladeshi woman who finds love online and moves to New York to marry. It’s billed as an arranged-marriage story for the 21st century. Not exactly my cup of tea, but Freudenberger’s pedigree makes it an interesting book to keep in mind.

Home, by Toni Morrison (out 5/8)

A veteran of Korea who returns to America and is forced to confront the racism and pain of his upbringing. Early reviews, like this one, have found Home too slight, and not Morrison’s best effort.

In One Person, by John Irving (out 5/8)

Irving’s latest concerns a lonely bisexual man, trying to make himself “worthwhile,” which doesn’t exactly sound riveting. It’s gotten a luke-warm reception.

No

I Suck at Girls, by Justin Halpern (out 5/15)

The Shit My Dad Says guy is back, minus his funny dad. Leaving, according to my math, shit.

2012, Ecco

Filed under: Literary, Historical

Find it at Goodreads

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.

The cove of the novel’s title lies in backwoods Appalachia and the locals believe it to be cursed. The closest patch of land to it is farmed by the Shelton family, which has dwindled, in the midst of World War I, to only two members: Hank, a young veteran who lost a hand in Europe, and his sister Laurel, who is pretty and very smart, but the target of a lot of town mockery because she was born with a large “birth stain” across her shoulder blade, and so the locals believe her to be a witch.

The Sheltons are unlucky, no doubt: their parents died too young, in nasty ways, and their farm barely survives each year. But their luck starts to change when a grungy young man named Walter washes ashore on the Sheltons’ property. He can’t speak, but can play the flute beautifully. The Sheltons figure out that he was on his way to New York when something happened that he can’t seem to communicate, and doesn’t want to.

That something, Rash shows us, was that Walter was imprisoned and escaped, nearly killing a man in his flee.

Still, on the Sheltons’ farm, Walter is a godsend. He helps Hank rebuild the fence and dig a well, and falls in love with poor neglected Laurel. Always, though, the secret of his imprisonment—and what he did to deserve it—hangs over all their heads.

Meanwhile, a poncy rich army recruiter drums up anti-German sentiment in town, and so fervently that even the college’s foreign language instructor faces the town’s wrath for having the audacity to know German.

All these things come to a head, and while Rash makes that climax good, it’s also simple and a little too pat. His style, too, is plain, and altogether the novel is a very fast read, but an equally shallow one.

The strength of Serena lay in the feeling of doom that Rash evoked in his depiction of a plagued logging camp. This time around, Rash tries to achieve the same sense of treacherous dread but instead of building it through events and characters, he simply tells us that people think the cove is unlucky—it doesn’t work nearly as well, and, unfortunately, neither does this novel.

Similar reads: Serena, by Ron Rash; The Marrowbone Marble Company, by Glenn Taylor; The Missing, by Tim Gautreaux

2012, Graywolf

Filed under: Literary, Fantasy

Find it at Goodreads

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.

The setting, like the prose, is beautiful and mostly pointless. It’s 2053 in the west of Ireland, but it might as well be 1930s Chicago, or 1880s South Dakota, or a noir Narnia (Noirnia?). It feels vaguely post-apocalyptic and fairly Irish, but neither of those facts are essential to the story Barry tells.

That story goes like this: the city of Bohane is run by gangsters. The biggest, baddest gangster is Logan Hartnett, called the Albino, the boss of the self-named Hartnett Fancy (“fancy” being slang for a violent, murderous gang). Twenty-five years before the action starts, Logan exiled his dear friend and business partner, the Gant, and he stole the Gant’s girlfriend, Macu, and married her. Now, the Gant is back for his city and his girl, and his return sparks a gang war.

That’s not a particularly original premise, but it could be good in the right hands, especially when played out with rambunctious style. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen here. When the narrator expounds on the love triangle, it becomes fairly ridiculous. The Gant, it turns out, only dated Macu for three weeks before Logan broke them up. Over the two and a half decades of the Gant’s absence, he writes her hundreds and hundreds of letters, sending her only one. She thinks even that single missive was kind of silly, because they are not star-crossed lovers—she has no feelings for him, and he soon realizes that he doesn’t even like her. Even so, for some reason, the Gant proceeds with his war against Logan.

The motivations of these various characters never add up, and Barry’s colorful prose doesn’t help. It’s the novel’s most enjoyable facet, by far, but too often it obscures the differences between characters or the action happening.

For example, here’s a sparkling scene-setting line:

In the dawn haze, the brewery lads were dreamy-eyed from hopsfume, while the slaughterhouse boys had been all the silver and shade of night up to their oxters in the corpses of beasts, filling the wagons for the butchers’ slabs at the arcade market in the Trace, and the wagons rolled out now across the greasy cobbles, and it was a gorey cargo they hauled

It’s an evocative, masterful style when applied to anonymous scenes like this, but when characters interact, they all do so in this style, which means they sound so similar as to be almost indistinguishable.

Like this conversation between two of Logan’s lieutenants, Wolfie and Fucker:

Narky look off the Wolfie-boy, Fucker reckoned, and rightly.

“Was lookin’ for ya, Wolf.”

“I been lookin’ for Jenni, ain’t I? You seen fuckin’ Jenni, yuh?”

“Ain’t, Wolf.”

“Said y’seen Jenni anywhere about, Fuck?”

Mad eyes swivellin’ in the Wolfie-boy puss.

“Said I ain’t seen her, Wolf.”

“Fuck she ai ‘n’ all, like?”

Taint of badness on the Bohane air had its various strands and jealousy was not the least among them.

Barry’s slangy prose is so distinctive that the characters blur together, and the nameless narrator with them. That weakness, though, would still be forgiveable if the story at the center were worth the effort of following it—but it leaves too much to be desired. After tensions build, Logan and the Gant choose up sides and the whole city erupts into war. That takes about five pages, slightly less page-space than Barry gives to in-depth descriptions of what everybody’s wearing during the fight.

That big fight happens less than halfway through the narrative. The rest of the book gives over to the particulars of the aftermath, especially how each side’s compromises come back to bite them, or at least mildly inconvenience them.

The fight itself? Nobody really wins. One side kind of does, but nobody central dies, and nobody even moves away. If this is a morality tale about pacifism, its primary lesson seems to be that even violence can be super boring.

The problem here is that Barry’s style overflows with panache and daring and plain old awesomeness… but his plot never grows past mundane. I’ll be waiting for Barry’s next novel, but this one is a miss.

Similar reads: Noir, by Robert Coover; A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess; The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon

Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, by Etgar Keret. Reviewed by Steve Almond in the New York Times.

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.

Find it at Goodreads

The Social Conquest of Earth, by Edward O. Wilson. Reviewed by Colin Woodard in the Washington Post.

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.

Find it at Goodreads

Sailor, by Tom Epperson. Reviewed by Nancie Claire in the L.A. Times.

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.

Find it at Goodreads

In brief: The obligatory books about the Titanic, on the 100th anniversary of its sinking. … Can’t get too many review of Fifty Shades of Grey—the Guardian finds it “innocent” and “fresh,” which is kinder than calling it out of touch and timid, but means essentially the same thing. … Women might rule the world sooner than you think. … The final novel of Olen Steinhauer’s ambitious Milo Weaver spy series. … Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting prequel probably isn’t the greatest novel since Trainspotting. … Nick Harkaway picks three favorite books. … A murder mystery for kids?

• 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 against Apple 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.

• Rowling (who has announced the title and, uh, price, of her upcoming adult novel) only recently began selling her books in an official digital format. They are DRM-free (unless you want the Kindle version) and reasonably priced at $8-10. Harry Potter fans responded by buying hundreds of thousands of copies. Maybe this will finally convince publishers that DRM is an anti-selling point?

• 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.

2012, Grand Central

Filed under: Sci-Fi

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[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. Pure’s heroine, Pressia, lives in a dilapidated barbershop, hiding out from the OSR, a vicious pseudo-army that press-gangs all children into service on their 16th birthday. Pressia is old enough to remember the nuclear war that ruined her country and killed her parents. The Detonations, as they are called, had a semi-magical effect: each person caught outside found themselves fused to whatever objects were near them at the fateful moment. Pressia has a doll’s head where her right hand should be, another boy has tiny wings on his shoulders from a pair of birds who are now part of him forever.

The only people who survived without such deformities were those lucky enough to escape to a place called the Dome. Those intact people are called Pures. While the denizens of the Dome claim to be waiting to help the “wretches” out in the waste, nobody really believes them.

Already this is a messy premise. There’s no good guy, only gradations of evil. The OSR routinely embarks on “killing sprees” during which they kill people indiscriminately for practice. The miscellaneous other factions that Pressia meets along her quest each have their own twisted rules—one group of mothers kills every male they encounter. The people of the Dome, as it turns out, carefully orchestrated the Detonations, even programming the bombs to fuse people with objects so as to artificially create a subspecies to serve as a lower class.

I like the fact that everyone has some blood on their hands, especially in contrast to Katniss’s ability to more or less retain her innocence even as she wins a series of fights to the death. But when so many characters and factions in Pure are utterly amoral, none of them are very likable or relatable.

Furthermore, the exaggerated sociopathy of the Dome’s executives makes the whole premise feel cartoonish. I’m no genocidist, but it seems like you could find a more targeted way to eliminate 95% of the earth’s population without crippling your food supply and making it so you have to live in a bunker for the next six generations.

This lack of reasonable and/or heroic factions with which to side also has a disappointing effect on the plot. Pressia and an escapee from the Dome meet up after a little while, and then they go off to… do something. It’s unclear. Find his mother? Maybe. Find an alternative to the OSR? Kind of. In the mean time, mostly, they aimlessly wander around the wasteland, having small interactions with various factions, and slowly collecting individuals who have soured on the Dome’s hegemony.

Eventually, of course, Pressia and her companions will fight against the Dome, but that isn’t even under discussion in this first installment. The Pure trilogy will not be a set of stories that can each stand on their own, it will be three volumes telling one long story. Which means that this book feels the first act of a vast fantasy novel—a long wander through a beautiful, ruined wasteland for the sole purpose of setting up the action of later installments.

It is, however, beautiful. Baggott writes better prose than Collins, even if her portrayal of emotions is every bit as overwrought. Baggott’s violence is of the adult variety, too: much gorier and more graphic than Collins’s.

In the end, though, there simply aren’t enough payoffs for all of Baggott’s wanderings. If you wait until the entire trilogy comes out and then you crush through all ~1500 pages in one go, my guess is Pure won’t disappoint. But if you’re fresh off the Hunger Games, this first book won’t scratch the same itch. As it turns out, simplistic and satisfying feels a whole lot better than complex and pointless.

Similar books: The Hunger Games series, by Suzanne Collins; Salvation City, by Sigrid Nunez; The Gone-Away World, by Nick Harkaway