Author: Jenny Lawson

2012, Putnam

Filed Under: Nonfiction, Memoir, Humor

Find it on Goodreads

Jenny Lawson is an insane person. It’s a wonder her husband hasn’t drowned himself. Of course, when you’re talking about a memoir by someone who has zero historical impact on the world, insane is good, because insane is entertaining.

Here’s the plot of Lawson’s book: she grew up, went to college, got married, had a kid. She and her husband both work from home in Texas. And occasionally she’ll do weird things like buy a giant metal rooster welded together from oil drums. She’s got a thing for taxidermy (note the dead rat Hamlet on the cover). There aren’t any lessons to be learned from her, or deep insight to be gleaned. Luckily, she is very funny. Lines that seem to come out of left field are plentiful, like this:

I just bought a fifty-year-old Cuban alligator dressed as a pirate.

Lawson’s humor is right up my alley, it’s acerbic and sarcastic. Moreover, lines like that alligator bit in fact play smoothly into the subject at hand. Many of the episodes described in this book are awkward situations she bumbles or word-vomits her way into due to severe social anxiety. She does an excellent job of laying out her weird logic as she retells it, making each vignette compelling and entertaining.

On more than one occasion my panicked rumblings were so horrific that everyone was rendered speechless, and the silence got more and more palpable, and in desperation I just blurted out my credit card number and ran to the bathroom. I did this both because I hoped yelling random numbers would make baffled spectators suspect that I must be one of those eccentric mathematical geniuses who is just too brilliant for them to understand, and also because I felt a bit guilty for making them have to listen to the whole “I may or may not swallow needles” story, and if they wanted to charge their wasted time to my credit card then they now had that option.

I found this book pretty hilarious from start to finish, even if the earlier chapters outshine the balance of the book. The story of Stanley the Magic Squirrel in the third chapter, which recounts a time as a young girl when her taxidermist father woke up Lawson and her sister with a talking squirrel in a cracker box, is never exceeded. (The squirrel turned out to be a piece of roadkill her dad rigged into a grotesque puppet.)

As the memoir goes on, topic matter gets a bit more serious–miscarriages for one–but the strength of Lawson’s storytelling keeps the mood in check. If you like the sort of nonfiction that David Sedaris is known for, or enjoy things like The Moth, you’ll find this book fits in nicely with your preferences. Similarly if you’ve ever felt yourself feeling like an outsider in what ought to be fairly commonplace situations, Lawson’s perspective will certainly make you smile.

Similar Reads: Open-Eyed Sneeze (Martin), Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (Sedaris), Running with Scissors (Burroughs)

Author: George R.R. Martin

2005, Bantam

Filed Under: Fantasy

Find it on Goodreads

“Disappointing” best summarizes the fourth installment in A Song of Ice and Fire. I was thrilled by the previous book and delighted to see that Martin was finally starting to tighten up the plot lines. He focused his story within the broad boundaries that he’d established and poised the reader for a strident and exciting resolution. The forces of fire and ice were drawn together in what promised to be the burgeoning climax.

Instead, A Feast for Crows is predominantly an unwelcome tangent. New characters are introduced in the prologue, which is Martin’s normal pattern. However, where previous prologues have served to heighten and focus the main story line, this one opens a doorway to a continuously expanding world and endless possibilities.

Martin’s style has never lent itself to a riveting pace. He usually advances his story incrementally and adjusts the pacing to heighten the drama in certain moments. However, this book is flat. Very little advancement occurs along the main plot. He ties up a few loose ends from previous installments, but generally he just plods along, focusing on characters that have been to-date mainly incidental. I assume some of these characters will  play bigger roles in future installments, but that’s not enough to satisfy the readers anxious to follow their favorite characters.

Almost in recognition of the shortcomings in this book, Martin’s letter drafted in 2005 indicates the material he drew from to create A Feast for Crows derived from something so sprawling it would have to be delivered in two tomes. He sought some balance that was never achieved. An attempt was made to provide a cohesive structure to the book, but it only goes so far. The symmetry between the beginning and ending of the book provides only the illusion of structure and the wandering nature of the material between only exacerbates the sense that this symmetry was contrived.

Worst of all, the principal characters are left out entirely: Jon Snow, Daenerys, Stannis, Melisandre, Varis, and, yes, even Tyrion. (With the previous installment ending so dramatically, leaving out Tyrion in this story is simply criminal.)

Overall this is a story of Martin’s women: Arya, Alanye (Sansa), Arianne Martell, Brienne, and Cersei Lannister. Samwell is given a fair amount of attention and Martin devotes numerous chapters to the internal fighting for leadership among the Ironborn. This latter story would have likely been better received had it been woven into the context of advancing the main story line.

Alayne Martell, the ambitious princess from Dorne has a compelling story. But much like Martin’s attention to the Ironborn, one can’t help but wonder if her story is yet another tangent. We follow Brienne, who while unique as a character, is never really developed. Brienne’s issues and struggles remain constant. The reader merely follows her on her quest, which is an unsatisfying one at best. Arya Stark is given a good deal of attention, and while Martin continues to develop her character successfully, her story line advances only marginally over the length of this book.

Cersei dominates this story; however, despite all the time invested, she never is developed into a complicated character. Instead she remains a flat, evil queen. Granted, Martin does a great job of portraying her follies and setting her along a course of ruin, but the fact that she remains such a shallow character detracts from any satisfaction we may feel as she gets her just desserts. Jamie Lannister, her brother, plays a much bigger role in this story and he’s really the only saving grace in this otherwise dull installment. Martin finally starts to put some meat and depth into his character. The more  I read his story the more conflicted I feel about his cruel actions against young Bran in the original installment.

Still, it’s a shame Martin faltered with this volume after delivering so many pages of solid entertainment in the build up. But hope remains for the next book. In the same 2005 letter, Martin’s indicated much of the second part of this two-part volume was already written. So, why then, would it take six years to deliver the next installment? I can only hope Martin learned from the folly of A Feast for Crows (or a stern developmental editor was brought on board).  All the excitement that I carried from the end of A Storm of Swords rots on the vine in this book.

Most readers who have invested the time will likely read this story. So, in a sense this review may serve only as a means to temper the expectations of the loyal fan. I certainly wish mine were tempered. A Dance of Dragons will benefit from my expectations being low, but if the story line doesn’t find better direction, then I fear his readers may start to fade as once did the dragons of Westeros.

Similar Reads: A Game of Thrones and A Clash of  Kings(Martin); The Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien); Eye of the World(Robert Jordan)

Author:

2012, The Dial Press

Filed under: Literary, Historical

Find it at Goodreads

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).

Author: George Mann

2008, Snowbooks

Filed Under: Mystery, Historical, Sci-Fi

Find it on Goodreads.

If you’d listened to our most recent podcast (you didn’t, because the recording got messed up, so you might never hear it at all), you would have heard me say this was a Sherlock Holmes-y book that was sort-of-but-not-really steampunk. I was half correct; full of airships and clockwork automatons and laudanum benders and Queen Victoria on an artificial lung crafted from bellows, it’s squarely steampunk. But to define it as that would be to sell it really short. Rather than relying on the setting, Mann writes a good story, leaving the setting to seep in around the edges.

Before we go any further, I have a confession to make. There’s a blight on my reader’s record, a mark of shame I really need to correct. I’ve never read any of the Sherlock Holmes books. From what I’ve picked up (thanks mostly to Gregory House), this book shares a lot in common with Doyle’s beloved mysteries.

Maurice Newberry is a detective and an “agent of the Crown.” He’s not an actual cop, but is good chums with the head of Scotland Yard in addition to packing royal credentials as a sleuth. He lives alone, and spends long hours in his study, often reading books on the obscure or occult, and his hobbies include laudanum and deductive crime-solving. His Watson is a Miss Veronica Hobbes, a sharp and fairly courageous woman, who compliments Newberry nicely. (Her character is fairly nuanced, and quite possibly the strongest in the book.)

In the novel’s early going, there are three primary plot lines. Firstly, there is some sort of plague brought over from India. It is ravaging the slums, and is effectively a small, but obviously hazardous, zombie outbreak. Secondly, there as been a string of murders in Whitechapel, seemingly perpetrated by a glowing blue policeman’s ghost. Thirdly, an airship crashes catastrophically, killing 50, and no sign of the brass automaton pilot is to be found.

It’s fairly obvious of course, being the sort of book this is, that these three strands will eventually be braided together. The fun is in following Newberry and Hobbes as they solve the case(s). So I won’t spoil any of that. As it plays out, this book delivers from every angle. The characters are well rendered. The dialogue has a decorous, almost too-proper politeness to it, one that any fan of Victorian literature will probably find as charming and funny as I did. There are plenty of exciting action scenes, as well as cerebral “Aha” moments. The writing fits the novel’s historical motif well, never underwhelming but rarely going over the top either. The sci-fi elements are plentiful, but don’t overstep their welcome–or worse become so over-concerned with plausibility as to drag down the tone.

This is a fun, engaging book that I think may be criminally underlooked due to genre. Don’t let the steampunk setting repel you, the setting is crucial to the story, but in no way the reason for its success. If you like mysteries and adventure stories, you’re almost certain to enjoy this book.

Similar Reads: The Map of Time (Palma). Also, check out this cool Kickstarter project Nico came across.

Author: Micky Spillane (with Max Allan Collins)

2012, Titan

Filed Under: Mystery

Find it on Goodreads.

Max Allan Collins, it seems, is making a habit of rewriting “lost” manuscripts left to him by deceased crime writers and releasing them with his name ahead of the original author. A little weird, but to his credit, this is the second such work of his I have read, and the second that I enjoyed.

Lady, Go Die! (it’s a cludgy reference to Lady Godiva, let’s get that out of the way) is a sequel to the very first of Mickey Spillane’s famous Mike Hammer books–I suppose the former sequel is now the third in the series. As you might expect, it’s a hard-boiled gumshoe mystery, full of gansters and goons, underground casinos, pretty women with chips on their shoulders, and murder. This book walks the genre line faithfully, so don’t expect anything groundbreaking or revelatory, but if you want a quick-to-read mystery full of fistfights and cheesy wisecracks, this certainly delivers.

For instance, it’s full of lines like this:

I went to my bed where I had tossed my suitcase. I opened it, and slipped the .45 Colt automatic out od its sling where it slept like a baby on my clean underwear. But babies can wake up screaming…

Hammer is on vacation on Long Island, trying to pull himself out of an alcohol-soaked depression in the wake of the events of the first book (which I haven’t read). Trouble just seems to find him though, as he stumbles upon three cops “interrogating” (with their fists and boots) a homeless man in an alley, asking him about a missing woman he may have seen. Poochy is his name, and Hammer comes to his rescue. The next day the missing woman turns up dead, naked, and bloated, draped on the back of a horse statue (hence the title).

The woman, it turns out, was in bed with the mob, and running an illegal casino in her dead-husbands mansion. Hammer finds himself in the middle of a tangled conspiracy full of mobsters, crooked cops, and a possible serial killer mixed in. Saying more than that will spoil the fun.

You know if you like these kinds of books or not. If you like to relax with this sort of mystery now and again, Lady, Go Die! will keep you happy for a few hours.

Similar Reads: The Thin Man (Hammett), The Comedy is Finished (Westlake), No Rest for the Dead (Gulli, ed.)

[A review was requested and a review copy provided.]

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: John Connolly

2011 Atria Books

Filed Under: Young Adult, Humor, Fantasy, Horror

Find it on Goodreads.

A direct follow-up to Connolly’s wonderful 2009 book, The Gates, Infernals delivers everything you could want from a sequel. It’s another great adventure, and delivers all the wacky characters and narratorial humor that made the first book so exceptional.

After helping to save the world from an invasion from Hell, Samuel Johnson, with his trusty dog Boswell by his side, is trying to get back to a normal life. It doesn’t last long. The leader of the failed invasion, Mrs. Abernathy (formerly the demon Ba’al before he was trapped in the possessed body of Samuel’s elderly neighbor), seethes in Hell. The Great Malevolence–Satan–has fallen into a weepy melancholy following the defeat, leaving the underworld open to a tumultuous civil war.

Abernathy, in an attempt to restore her standing as Hell’s #2 demon, as well as save her own hide by preventing the traitorous demon Abignor from usurping rule, manages to open a small portal to Earth long enough to capture poor Samuel and Boswell. They will be an offering to restore the spirits of The Great Malevolence.

Mrs. Abernathy’s shot goes awry though—she hits Samuel and his dog, but also two policemen, an ice cream man, and a van full of drunken midgets who travel around reenacting fairytales in shopping malls. At first, these drunken midgets (Angry, Jolly, Dozy, and Mumbles–known collectively as “Mr. Merryweather’s Dwarfs”), threaten to steal the show. It’s not often I find myself laughing out loud when I read, but these crass little characters did the trick.

As the characters traipse across the sprawling and desolate underworld in search of a way home, however, the spotlight is shared. Samuel’s timid bravery, the demon Nurd’s newly found humanity, along with a large cast of inventive and often funny support characters each have truly great moments from which the story draws strength. Indeed, what sets this book apart from lots of other YA is Connolly’s balanced and skillful writing. He’s a captivating storyteller, and moreover he’s developed a real knack for breathing life into his world through a sharp yet subtle wit.

As with its predecessor, Infernals is littered with footnotes. These are often informative, explaining, for instance, a certain lineage of popes, what the Higgs boson is, or the definition of the word “truculent.” Yet they are all filled with jokes, jokes usually just juvenile enough to be silly but not so infantile as to be unworthy of your time. Though the narrator is not named, and has no plot of his own, his constant presence and sense of humor is crucial to the experience.

Here’s the ending to a footnote explaining Ivan Pavlov’s famous experiments on dogs:

This is known as “conditioning.” You have to wonder, though, if the dogs eventually got a bit tired of the shocks and the bells and the absence of food, and made their unhappiness known to Pavlov. This is known as “biting.”

On top of it though, he manages to sneak in clever, even insightful lines:

the past is a nice country to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

Then, occasionally, it dips into downright good advice, revealing a motive on the part of the narrator that touches on endearing.

Most people will spend their lives doing jobs that they don’t particularly enjoy, and will eventually save up enough money to stop doing those jobs just in time to start dying instead. Don’t be one of those people. There’s a difference between living, and just surviving. Do something that you love, and find someone to love who loves that you love what you do.

It really is that simple.

And that hard.

(That was a footnote to a line about two reformed demons brewing cheap ale in the basement of a chemical weapons plant.)

These footnotes and asides build upon each other to give the book a sense of character and purpose that’s pretty rare in YA books lately. And beneath it all is still a charming adventure that strikes a perfect balance between childish fun and maturity of theme and emotion. If you haven’t read The Gates, give it a read first. But be sure to have this book at the ready; you’ll probably want to try and read them both in one sitting.

Similar Reads: The Gates (Connolly), The Mysterious Benedict Society (Stewart), pretty much anything by Terry Pratchett.

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

Author: Willie James King

2012, Tebot Bach

Filed Under: Poetry

Find it on Goodreads.

Willie James King, a widely-published African-American poet from Montgomery, Alabama, clearly writes in the long poetic tradition of western civilization, both thematically and metrically.  The poems in his second collection published by Tebot Bach, Autumn’s Only Blood, are elegiac and lyrical in tone.  Almost a dozen of the nearly fifty in this new collection are sonnets.

Dedicated to Troy Davis, an African-American man who was executed by the state of Georgia in September, 2011, for killing a police officer in Savannah in 1991, the collection begins and ends in autumn, in elegy.  Davis was convicted on sketchy evidence and maintained his innocence for over twenty years.  The book’s title comes from the dedication:

the spider lilies are

springing up all over

now, blooming, as if

they ought to be

this autumn’s only blood.

The spider lily, which blooms abundantly in the American South in autumn is a transplant from Southeast Asia, a flower full of the potent symbolism of tragedy.

The collection’s penultimate poem, “Even When the Earth Seems Fallow,” is a sonnet likewise set in autumn that echoes Keats’ famous ode in celebrating the fecundity of the dying season, the last rich burst of Indian summer, and promises an eventual rebirth.

Thus, as other reviewers have noted, an overall attitude of compassion truly marks King’s poetry, from the first page to the last.

Autumn’s Only Blood is composed of three sections, the first of which, “An Undeveloped Pasture,” dwells on the theme of justice – and injustice. Without pointing fingers, a handful of poems address the plight of Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, focusing on individual anguish, determination, and overwhelming sorrow.  Always located in specific situations,  the poems in this section are concrete, not an abstract depiction of social and cosmic unfairness or resistance.  Poems focus on Sierra Leone (“Dear Roland”), Buddhist monks in Vietnam setting themselves on fire (“Green Life”) as well as on the Haitians.

An epigraph from Martin Luther King Jr. opens this section, and a number of poems are located in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s.  There is even an elegy for Michael Jackson (“This Is Grief”) that refers to Dr. King.

But Willie James King knows that poetry is more than morality or calls to action, and in part two, “To Fill Up an Empty Page,” which deals with poetry itself, its creation and purpose, he notes in the poem with the same title,  “You confused being a poet/with being a preacher,” chiding himself for the occasional lapse into lecturing.  He further notes that in writing,

you only save your-

.

self, maybe one, or more

onlookers, if you are lucky.

Write! As if you are the last

.

human left in this broken

world, a world that you

couldn’t allow another to

further wreck, nor to fix.

Time and again, the poems in this section speculate about the writing process, where it comes from (“In Itself, A Poem,” “The Restless Heart”), when poetry comes (“Keeping the Owl’s Hours,” “Insomnia”), and finally its effects (“Then I Am Wowed”).  These are not instructions or guidelines for would-be poets – King is not “preaching” – but the reflections of an artist on the mysteries of his craft and calling.  “I Too Would Write,” with its echo of Langston Hughes’ “I, Too, Sing America” in the title, is a sort of funny/macabre sonnet about writing and celebrity, writing as an endeavor in fame and fortune, tempered with a thematic edge of “justice.”

The final section of Autumn’s Only Blood, “Steadying the Plow,” may be thought to exemplify what King is getting at in section two.  The poems are all rich, specific reflections of nature.  The three sections thus work as a kind of dialectic, announcing each new one – thesis, antithesis, synthesis.  The title of this third section comes from the sonnet, “Without Weeping,” in which the speaker contemplates a cow licking the afterbirth from her newborn calf.

Can compassion be the word for a cow

who seems to love the slimy afterbirth

she is licking from her calf’s weak body?

Perhaps it could be. I steady the plow;

it sinks deeper as I study the worth

of a child comforted in its crying…

Other poems in this section similarly regard animals in nature with a wise compassion – “Our Father’s Field,” “The Birds,” “To Let a Cockroach Go,” “Geese,” to cite several.

Poetry is “both/and,” not “either/or.”  Willie James King’s poems about justice are no less “poetic” than his nature poetry or his introspective verse.  They all add up to a complete expression by one of our truly sensitive and compassionate poets.

Similar Reads: Langston Hughes, Let America Be America Again

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