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By Nico Vreeland, on January 24th, 2012 [This nuanced autobiographical novel is a C4 Great Read.]
 Author: Justin Torres
2011, Houghton Mifflin
Filed under: Literary
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
An avalanche of hype covered this book when it was published last summer. Its flap copy claims it is “an exquisite, blistering debut” full of “magical language” and “unforgettable images.”
That’s not exactly accurate, but it’s on the right track. Torres is not an especially gifted prose stylist; he falls into a fairly standard contemporary “young fiction” voice. Clipped sentences, long lists, lightly abraded grammar—all the hallmarks are here. It’s not bad, just not very unique. Like this:
These days, I sleep with peacocks, lions, on a bed of leaves. I’ve lost my pack. I dream of standing upright, of uncurled knuckles, of a simpler life—no hot muzzles, no fangs, no claws, no obscene plumage—strolling gaily, with an upright air.
You could’ve plucked that paragraph from a dozen debut novels this year. Luckily, Torres has a much more unique skill. He’s not a wordsmith, and not really a constructor of sentences, but there is poetry in his characters.
We the Animals should be rightly called a novella, both because it barely breaks a hundred pages, and because the story it tells features no real arc. Instead, Torres sets out to portray the emotional life of a young, poor family (evidently based on his own experiences growing up), and the nuanced web of relationships stretched among each of its members.
Three boys live with a listless, spineless mother, and a sometimes abusive, sometimes magnetically charismatic, sometimes absent father. The boys, their father is quick to tell them, do not belong much of anywhere.
We the Animals is about not fitting in and about loving your parents, and hating them, loving your family and hating them. It’s about being the smart one in the family, and also the weak one. It’s about the whorl of emotions that come up when there’s not enough for everybody. It’s about trauma. The traumas from outside are tough but predicatable. Those traumas that come from within the family are devastating.
It’s a simple tale about three brothers trying to find their way in the world, and it’s simultaneously an infinitely detailed catalog of familial strife. And it’s one of the few books in the world still available as a library ebook. So there’s no excuse not to read it.
Similar books: Love and Shame and Love, by Peter Orner; The Believers, by Zoe Heller
By Sean Clark, on January 23rd, 2012 Author: Raymond Chandler
1939, Alfred A. Knopf
Filed Under: Mystery, Literary
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
As part of my quest to immerse myself in the mystery genre, I’ve been asking what books to pick up. Chandler’s books came up frequently, so I started with his first and most famous. For reasons that become immediately apparent upon reading, this is a seminal work in modern detective stories, and Phillip Marlowe (Chandler’s recurring protagonist, though this is his first novel) is the quintessential gumshoe. He’s tough, clever, wisecracking, and suave (and he drinks a lot).
Marlow is hired by a dying billionaire to uncover a blackmailer. He ends up embroiled in a large plot with many players. This is a hardboiled detective novel through and through. It’s full of socialites with dirty laundry, lowlifes with secrets, gamblers, pornographers, racketeers, and murderers. But it also has much greater literary chops than I expected. While there’s plenty of now-cliche hyperbole (“She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a businessmen’s lunch”), there’s also more eloquent writing found throughout. Lines like this:
Her eyes were wide open. The dark slate color of the iris had devoured the pupil. They were mad eyes. She seemed to be unconscious, but she didn’t have the pose of unconsciousness. She looked as if, in her mind, she was doing something very important and making a fine job of it. Out of her mouth came a tinny chuckling noise which didn’t change her expression or even move her lips.
The billionaire’s two wild daughters are at the heart of the blackmailing scheme. Eventually Marlow stumbles upon the younger daughter, drugged, naked, and posed for a camera. Beside the camera, a dead man. As he follows the case from clue to clue and suspect to suspect, Marlowe continually observes scenes with keen detail, giving the reader not just a visual, but a subtle sizing up of every person and place.
It’s not an overly literary book by any means, though. Roughly halfway through the book, the case seems pretty sewn up. But a few details nag at Marlowe, and acting on a hunch, he uncovers a whole ‘nother layer of plot. Here the book really kicks into hardboiled gear. I won’t spoil anything, but bodies pile up and Marlowe both deals out and receives plenty of pain. He keeps a cool head through it all though, eventually unravelling the mystery. Everything ties up in a very satisfying conclusion. I was caught a bit by surprise, but not due to any deus ex machina curveballs by Chandler. Just turns out Marlowe was a better detective than me.
This book is short and awesome. If you like mysteries and crime fiction at all–even if all you’ve read is Steig Larsson–and you haven’t already read The Big Sleep, go for it
Similar Reads: The Thin Man (Hammett), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Larsson).
By Nico Vreeland, on January 5th, 2012  Author: Yannick Murphy
2011, Harper Perennial
Filed under: Literary
Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
The first few pages of The Call can be a bit discombobulating. The main character, a 40ish man named David, is a veterinarian in rural New England. He answers calls from surrounding farms and ranches, and drives out to tend to different animals. The novel takes the form of David’s work diary, in which he records the calls he takes, his actions, the results, and his thoughts along the way. Like this:
CALL: A cow with her dead calf half-born.
ACTION: Put on boots and pulled dead calf out while standing in a field full of mud.
RESULT: Hind legs tore off from dead calf while I pulled. Head, forelegs, and torso still inside the mother.
THOUGHTS ON DRIVE HOME WHILE PASSING RED AND GOLD LEAVES ON MAPLE TREES: Is there a nicer place to live?
Quickly, the pages of the diary become a place for David to ponder and exposit about his life and the world. The form of the diary—with its procedural headings that David coopts to better reflect his own experiences—becomes a counterpoint for his interior life.
It’s a “voice-driven” novel in the sense that the voices of characters, especially David, form the experience of reading it. Luckily, David’s voice is charming and calm and occasionally funny, and that experience is a pleasure. …
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By Charles Rammelkamp, on January 4th, 2012 Author: Jessica Anya Blau
2011, Harper Perennial
Filed Under: Literary
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
10 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
Jessica Anya Blau’s Drinking Closer to Home is a sort of amped-up Anne Tyler novel, the story of a funny, chaotic family that fumbles its way to loving and supporting one another despite personal failings and the usual resentments that occur in families. Think of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant on steroids – or without any clothes on!
In Tyler’s 1982 novel, Pearl Tull, the 85-year old matriarch ruminates, “Something was wrong with all of her children. They were so frustrating – attractive, likable people, the three of them, but closed off from her in some perverse way that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. … She wondered if her children blamed her for something.” This could be Louise Stein’s reflection after she suffers her “massive” heart attack in Santa Barbara, California, in 1993, and her three children return home from their east coast locations to be with their mother and father, Buzzy, over the course of the next two weeks as Louise receives treatment. Only, Louise couldn’t care less what her children think of her, in the last analysis, as much as she loves them. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on December 16th, 2011 Author: Joan Leegant
2010, W.W. Norton & Co.
Filed under: Literary
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
4 |
| Entertainment..... |
3 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
Wherever You Go is set primarily in Jerusalem and the surrounding territories, though it focuses on the lives of three Americans with complicated relationships with Judaism. Yona wants to reconnect with her extremely devout sister; Greenglass, once saved from a life of drugs by religion, is suffering a crisis of faith; and Aaron aims to prove to his father and the rest of the world that he is a worthy son of the Holy Land.
Each of the individual narratives works well enough at first, but they never come together in any sort of a satisfying way. When the strands do begin to intertwine, about two thirds of the way through the book, their interactions seem more convenient than anything else, providing the characters with contrived opportunities to bring their stories to some kind of closure.
For me, the biggest disappointment was the failure to make the most of the setting. Wherever You Go does very little to evoke any kind of a textured world or to convey any sense of what makes Jerusalem and the rest of Israel unique. People eat falafel and cucumber and tomato salad. Most of the Israelis are “from central casting.” It’s very hot. That’s about it. …
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By Sean Clark, on December 15th, 2011 Author: Bradford Morrow
2011, Pegasus
Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
The Uninnocent is a collection of dark, but not morbid, stories which grow from or end in acts that on the surface seem quite vile: fratricide and murder, incest, animal cruelty, etc. Through skillful characterization and just the right quantity of acerbic humor, Morrow manages to take topics rooted in drear and craft enjoyable stories. Plausibility is not always there, and sometimes the plots work out a bit too conveniently, but as long as realism isn’t what you’re looking for, you’ll come away from this collection quite pleased.
My favorite of Morrow’s techniques is a temporal slight of hand he pulls a few times. He’ll set something up, then subtly skip ahead to an outcome, leaving the reader tantalized. For instance in the space of a page from “Ellie’s Idea,” we learn three things about Eleanor Mead: she is (or at least was) married, then that she is in some sort of moral if not actual trouble, then that “Waking by herself still felt strange.” What she’s fretting over and why a married woman is alone is left for the story to fill in. Similarly, in “The Enigma of Grover’s Mill” the teenage narrator, in talking about a girl he’d been spending time with, mentions kissing her “again” in the first reference to them ever kissing–leaving a big gap for the reader to fill in. This does a wonderful job of helping to characterize this secretive loner of a narrator in particular. …
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By Roman Gladstone, on December 9th, 2011 [This collection of gritty flash fiction is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: Meg Pokrass
Press 53, 2011
Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
10 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
Damn Sure Right is a collection of 88 (by my count) flash fiction pieces in about twice that number of pages. In general, flash fiction is to fiction kind of like what haiku are to poetry: hard to isolate one from all the others and appreciate it on its own. You need to take the collection as a whole since some flash fictions are more successful than others. This is not to say that Meg Pokrass’ collection is “uneven,” but some of the stories are better than the others, and when they’re good, her stories are really good, terrifically comical at the same time that they are poignantly tragic, all in the space of a page or two.
The whole book is compelling; Pokrass keeps you wanting to read more, even when some stories are less satisfying than others, not as cohesive. This is the challenge any collection faces, of course, poetry, short stories, essays, but with flash fictions, each is like a bump in the road, you haven’t invested too much time or commitment to any single one; you can put the book aside at any point and pick it back up again when you want.
Flash fiction partakes of all the classic story elements – a protagonist/narrator, conflict, and usually a sense of resolution, an image of completion, or explanation. Because the form is so compact, lots is left up to the reader to infer, and this can be the truly powerful thing about flash fiction, the way it engages the reader’s imagination, to fill in the blanks, connect the dots. …
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By Sean Clark, on December 2nd, 2011 Author: Ben Loory
2011, Penguin
Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
4 |
| Depth..... |
4 |
I really wanted to like this book. Though to be honest, my expectations were based entirely on the cover art and jacket copy praise-quotes. This collection, Loory relates in his Acknowledgments section, is the product of a writing workshop–perhaps if I’d known that beforehand I would have exercised more pause than I did.
Loory has his moments: he’s got a very nice way with words and is quite adept at turning a clever phrase. He is a very good writer–that is immediately evident upon reading his work. But this book’s marriage to its conceptual premise is its undoing. This is a 200ish page book full of mostly 2-5 page stories which all (all) follow the same structure. …
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By Sean Clark, on November 8th, 2011 Author: Umberto Eco
2011, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Filed Under: Literary, Historical.
Get the book.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
10 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
10 |
There’s but one fictional element to Eco’s newest novel: the main character. Every other character, conversation, and event in this dense novel is pulled from historical records, or else constitutes an amalgamation of real persons or happenings. This is Eco’s claim, and if true–and I’m inclined to believe it is–this book is even more impressive than it would be on a blind read.
Set in Europe in the last quarter of the 19th century, The Prague Cemetery tells the tale of Captain Simonini, a French-Italian document forger who works, more or less freelance, as a subversive agent for a number of different governments. His profession sometimes has him infiltrating radical groups in order to incite incidents (in hopes of swinging public or political favor back to the ruling party), and other times falsifying documents and news stories in order to influence public opinion or have someone tossed in jail. He’s a murderous villain, but Eco’s comprehensive and careful narration makes him easy to cling to as a narrator and as a character–in that regard he’s got a bit of Iago in him.
The improbability of a reader finding Simonini likeable is all the more exacerbated by his personal agenda. Simonini is ferverntly anti-semitic. The novel is steeped in the nationalist ideologies (and fear-mongering) that was so rampant in the decades building up to the great wars of the 20th century. Much of that boiled down to deeply anti-semitic movements across most of Europe. The Prague Cemetery opens with a chapter-long racist tirade, not only denigrating the Jews, but pinpointing and exploiting ethnic and cultural stereotypes and hateful prosaisms about every race and nation in Europe. By opening the book with a tearing-down of everyone, Eco cleans the slate for Simonini. He’s not a fascist, because he would hate the fascists too. Instead Eco has created a character that represents that dark part in our collective mindset, the one that, amongst other things and whether we agree with them or not, recognizes stereotypes and associates them with groups and cultures. …
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By Charles Rammelkamp, on October 27th, 2011 [This dense novel is a C4 Great Read. Find it and other C4 favorites on our Great Reads shelf at Powell's.]
Author: Tom Frick
2011, Burning Books
Filed Under: Literary, Historical.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
10 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
Set in the early 1800’s in Robin Hood’s territory, Thomas Frick’s The Iron Boys is a real tour de force that takes the mayhem of the Luddites who resisted the Industrial Revolution as its subject. The term “Luddite” has long been used to describe a person who resists technological change, but it’s a sure bet that not many are really aware of its historical roots as an unorganized, almost spontaneous insurrection against the dehumanizing tendencies of the emerging capitalist economy.
The Luddites flourished in the second decade of the nineteenth century in the Northern English counties of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. Ned Ludd, the mythical figure after whom the movement was named, was reputed to live in Sherwood Forest. The Luddites were crafts workers who largely had control over their lives and livelihoods until the advent of the textile factories, which dehumanized workers in the name of profits. Indeed, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was written to an extent as a reaction to Luddism, an eloquent treatise against the machine. Byron championed the movement in the House of Lords, a lone voice against the machine. The Luddites attacked the mills and smashed the machines that were ruining their autonomous way of life. …
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