2008, The Dial Press

Filed Under: Literary, Historical, Romance

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (I’m going to call it GLAPPPS from here) is an epistolary novel occurring immediately post World War II. At its heart, it’s a subdued romance, though on the surface it’s a tale of community and friendship and bravery and belonging. Not really my kind of book. Still, I liked it.

Juliet wrote a column for a London newspaper during the war. When she hears of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie society, she becomes intrigued by the name alone–as, I admit, I was with the title of this book. She writes letters to a number of the inhabitants of the small British island, and slowly begins to cultivate fondness for, then relationships with, many of them. Most especially the kind and quiet Dawsey Adams (who, I should note, reached out to Juliet and informed her of the society in the first place).

The society originated on the occupied Channel Island as an excuse to have dinner parties under the noses of the Germans. As the occupation stretched, and with it the lack of news from the mainland, the false literary pretense of the group became real, a connection to culture and community. Eventually the pigs they were eating in secret ran out, along with much of the rest of the island’s food. The society continued, with the dinners replaced with the best they could come up with: most creatively, potato peel pie.

This is a sound little love story. I took some gripe with it mainly because I didn’t really like Juliet that much. She is relatively clueless, and for an author, she’s terrible at reading and evaluating the people around her. My sense was that this was supposed to be a nod to the old romances by the likes of Austen and Brönte, where passion roiled under a surface that required things be muted for decorum’s sake. (I understand that is a gross generalization, but you get my drift.) Here that is not really the case. Yes, much of the story takes place during the German occupation and control of a British community, but Juliet’s story comes after. So her reactionary letters concerning her feelings for the different suitors in her life come across at times as naïve, sometimes to the point of stupid.

This occurs outside of her romantic interests too. Perhaps the most interesting character in the book is Elizabeth. Elizabeth was a transplant to Guernsey, who quickly became a central figure in the community, she even founded the society that so captured everyone. Despite giving birth to a German soldier’s child, she was sent to a concentration camp, not to return. For the meat of the book, the letters Juliet shares with the Guernseymen piece together Elizabeth’s story, and through her the story of the island during wartime. Even once Juliet begins supplanting Elizabeth’s life–she stays in her cottage, cares for her orphaned child, all the while sharing stories about her daily–Juliet can’t pin what her book should be structured around. Eventually, her editor figures it out for her, and Juliet’s reaction is effectively a facepalm.

My frustrations with Juliet aside, this is a pleasant read and a nice romance. This book practically screams bookclub (I didn’t check, but I bet Oprah’s picked it). There’s a lot of feel-goodery here, even with some of the darker themes and events it touches upon. But while it’s not exactly my type of book, I can’t fault it for that. Fans of Austen and her kind will find something to enjoy with GLAPPPS, especially if those who are in search of an unstrenuous beach read for August.

Similar Reads: The Book Thief (Zusak), The Lover (Duras)

[This review is of the unabridged audiobook edition]

[This novel is a C4 Great Read.]

Author: J.D. Salinger

1961, Little, Brown & Company

Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories

I suspect many of you have already read this book, either because it was assigned in school way back when, or because gobbling up J.D. Salinger is an American teen rite of passage. I, it shames me a little to admit, never did. But now I have. Good on me.

This is going to be a real brief review, and not even much of a review. More of like a signpost point to why you should read this. It’s short, it’s funny, and it’s superbly written. I guess that’s about the sum of it. I’ll go on though.

Franny and Zooey is comprised two short stories (originally published in the New Yorker—in fact, there’s a bunch of good Salinger in their archives, like the novella, Hapworth 16, 1924, unpublished outside the magazine) attached together. As a whole, it makes up about 100 pages and 5 scenes.

Most of the action involves Zooey (his real name is Zachary) spouting from a soapbox to his sister, Franny, or his mother, Bessie, about his sister. Franny is suffering from what would now probably be called a quarter-life crisis. She finds herself halted by spiritual and existential confusion, unable to remove herself from her parents’ couch. Zooey has plenty of opinions on this—and life in general.

The siblings are the youngest of seven precocious and genius children, who grew up on academic tests and regular appearances on a radio quiz show known as “It’s a Wise Child.” They are smarter than most of the world around them, a gift that comes with the price of dissatisfaction with their role in the larger world, depression derived from living amongst perceived mediocrity.  It’s a realization that no matter who you are, you are a very small piece in a much larger whole, and the need to accept that. Franny wants to partake in the world without feeling let down with its banality. It seems the challenge Salinger is putting out there for Franny to face is how to love the world for what it is without condescending to it.

This sentiment is crushing the young Franny; it’s one Zooey is aware of and actively tackling/evading. If you can’t or won’t cope (remain a “freak” as Zooey puts it), it can have effects such as reclusion or suicide, as evidenced by two of their brothers. It’s a sentiment felt at one time or another by (I’m guessing) most every teenager and young adult that ever had half a brain. Because of this, Franny and Zooey is not unlike Salinger’s masterpiece, Catcher in the Rye. The situation might not be the same, but the subject at hand, and the characters delivering it, are supremely relatable to readers of a certain age.

That’s not to say this is merely a kid’s book; nor is it YA. It can speak to a broader audience. I’m not a teenager any longer, but I still tore through this book in record time. I’m pretty sure I’m going to go back and read it again in the very near future. Franny and Zooey is a fun and funny and interesting read. It’s a gread read. So give it a shot.

Similar Reads: The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger), A Zoo Story (Albee), On the Road (Kerouac), The Complete Stories of Ernest Hemingway (Hemingway)

Author: Ted Conover

Vintage Books, 2001

Filed under: Literary, Nonfiction

When Ted Conover wanted to write a book about the lives of prison guards, he started the way most journalists would: he asked the New York Department of Correctional Services (DOCS) for access. They denied him permission.

Considering Conover’s methods as a writer, he probably wanted to be denied. He’s an immersion journalist—one who embeds himself in the lives he wants to chronicle. He becomes one of his subjects. So after the DOCS said no, Conover became a “Newjack,” or a rookie guard, at Sing Sing, one of the most notorious prisons in the country. Newjack is the result of Conover’s experience.

At it’s core, Newjack reads like a travel narrative, and Conover’s experience is a journey. Conover guides us through the prison block, and shows us its inhabitants. He explains his training, and he points out how it left him mostly unqualified for what he would encounter within the walls. He tells us about Sing Sing’s infamous history—its menacing wardens, death chamber, and well-used electric chair—and he shows us how life inside is still just as nasty as it was when Sing Sing was the death penalty capital of the country.

Like any journey, Sing Sing holds several unforeseen complications for the traveler. Conover’s job is to maintain control and order, and quickly he finds that control and order aren’t easily accomplished. The men he must watch over will take advantage of any of his hesitations. It isn’t long into his first shift that he realizes the power and responsibility of his situation are weighty:

Gates had to be unlocked for the prison to function smoothly—and then, at the right moment, to be locked again. Sing Sing was a place of, probably, over two thousand locks, many with the same key. The cardinal sin, the one thing that you were never, ever to do, was lose your keys. A lost key could fall into an inmate’s hands. A lost key was a disaster.

Conover often finds himself treading a line of oppression, and he perpetually questions the moral implications of his decisions. And sometimes—like when an inmate punches him through the bars, or another one hits him with a handful of feces—he forgets about morality altogether. Conover’s struggle is one of balance, a search for the grey area between right and wrong, good and bad, and it will change the way he interprets the world for the rest of his life.

Newjack’s greatest accomplishment is Conover’s empathy, his ability to bring humanity to a setting that dehumanizes the inhabitants on both sides of the bars. The guards in Conover’s book are more than key-bearing enforcers. They are men and women with families, who struggle through the same moral uncertainties he does, who want to be good guards and good people, who mostly are in this line of work not because they enjoy being in charge but because they need the paycheck. The inmates on Conover’s cellblock aren’t faceless crimes or forgotten statistics. Many are genuine and likable, looking for someone to talk with. Admirably, Conover doesn’t shortchange the inmates he doesn’t like, or those who try to take advantages of his naiveté. He portrays them as individuals, as men, men who are motivated by making their monotonous Time go by more quickly, or at least differently than the day before.

Conover’s accurate portrayal of how prison feels is also great:

You feel it along the walls inside, hard like a blow to the head; see it on the walls outside, thick, blank, and doorless; smell it in the air that assaults your face in certain tunnels, a stale and acrid taste of male anger, resentment and boredom. You sense it all around in the pointed lack of ornamentation, plants or reason for hope—walls built not to shelter but to constrain.

It’s not a feeling most will ever experience or understand—a feeling of utter solitude complicated by utter hopelessness. Yet knowing that feeling will make companionship and hope more vibrant. Everyone deserves to know how that feels; it’s why, at least literarily, you should walk in the boots of a “newjack.”

Similar Reads: Stylistically: Coyotes (Conover), Thematically: Falconer (Cheever), The Execution of Tropmann (Turgenev)

Author: Millard Kaufman

2010, McSweeney’s

Filed under: Literary, Mystery, Thriller

Misadventure is a terrific book. Its author, the late Millard Kaufman, was McSweeney’s's famous “boy novelist,” renowned for publishing his first novel, Bowl of Cherries, at 90.

While this is only his second novel, Kaufman’s been writing his whole life. He worked in 1950s Hollywood as a screenwriter, and it shows. Misadventure hovers somewhere between mystery and thriller—let’s call it “suspense”—and its tone and feel are reminiscent of Tinseltown’s Golden Age.

It’s a book that isn’t shy about having an intricate, twisting plot, but it still gets its drive from vivid characters and the way it dives headfirst into conflicts, one after another.

Jack Hopkins, a grousy young realtor, headlines the show, but he gets upstaged more than once, by a sleepy boss and his boorish son, by a rival’s eccentric (and possibly homicidal) ex-wife—virtually every character is a character, in the ’50s sense of the word. I won’t list more so as not to spoil their entrances.

As for the plot, I’ll tell you only as far as it took to get me hooked (don’t read the flap copy, it’ll spoil half the book). Jack gets sent out to see about selling a house for a Mrs. Norton, who’s secretly about to divorce her husband. Jack’s unhappy with his wife, and he’s immediately smitten by Mrs. Norton; he ends the meeting by asking her out. She says no. He responds:

What the hell, I thought. “We don’t have to have dinner,” I said. “But I want to sleep with you.”

They start an affair, immediately, in the house she wants to sell. Jack soon finds out that she’s not “Mrs. Norton,” she’s Mrs. Hunt, the wife of his biggest real estate rival. Then he finds out her husband beats her viciously, and she asks Jack to kill him. But then he meets Mr. Hunt:

One minute with Tod Hunt told me his wife was a mythmaker.

That’s just some of what happens in the first thirty pages. Throughout this rat-a-tat plot, the real dazzle comes from the writing itself, especially Jack’s rubbery, hardboiled voice, which manages to exude philosophy and spirit even as it always, always entertains.

Here’s an example of what should be a straightforward passage, turned captivating in Kaufman’s hands (and Jack’s voice). Gayle, Jack’s long-suffering wife, is reading a book in a tree. He’s feeling fond of her, and decides to climb:

I worked my way through the branches. They looked cool and inviting, the limbs of veined silver, the bark of velvet, the leaves as fragile and soft as fine linen.

A delusion and a snare. The trunk was full of sharp little warty protuberances which cut my hands. The boughs were pustulated with oozing sap. The foliage was coated with viscid dust. Why is it that trees, venerated by poets and peasants alike, are so fucking filthy? I made it, finally, to the side of my darling, to be greeted by an unruffled silence.

Everything in Misadventure happens like this, with verve and cynicism and wit, and a barging, entitled protagonist who’s not afraid to get mad at the illusions of the world, or the people that get in his way.

This book does suffer from a lackluster ending, and most of its depth comes from Jack’s little pronouncements about the world. But still, to the very end, it’s great fun watching Jack gallumph about, making his snap decisions about people (and often being wrong), watching him square off against everybody.

Jack (or maybe Kaufman) is kind of a drama dowsing rod: he goes straight for it, always and without dawdle. As it turns out, that makes for a pretty good novel.

So, once again, Misadventure is good. Read it.

Similar books: For another mystery that’s more about the prose, try Robert Coover’s Noir.

For another thoughtful, stylish book about a realtor—these two more thoughtful than suspenseful—read The Sportswriter or Independence Day, by Richard Ford (only in the second one is he a realtor, in the first one, not surprisingly, he’s a sportswriter).

This also reminded of Light House, by William Monahan, which is out of print but worth the trouble.

2005, W.W. Norton & Company

Filed Under: Literary

Nicole Krauss was recently named one of the “20 Under 40” writers in the New Yorker’s summer fiction issue.  After reading The History of Love, it’s easy to see why.  This is a beautifully crafted, multifaceted novel about love, survival, and deceit.  The writing is consistently strong across a number of distinct voices, each one funny and lyrical without being indulgent.  It’s a pleasure to read, and a pleasure to know that such a talent is at work today.

Leopold Gursky is a lonely aging immigrant living on his own in Brooklyn.  Alma Singer is a lonely teenage girl living with her withdrawn mother and eccentric brother also in Brooklyn.  Besides geography, all that connects them is a book called The History of Love, a book about another Alma and all the ways to fall in love with her.

The chapters told from Leo’s and Alma’s perspectives carry the novel.  A third omniscient voice provides important backstory, the history behind The History of Love, how the manuscript came to be published and how it made its way into the lives of the main characters.  These chapters are essential, but they play mainly a supporting role.

Leo is a willful stereotype of an elderly man.  It’s a role he plays to perfection, in part because it’s who he is, and in part because it’s the only role left for him to play.  He keeps to himself, worries constantly about his own imminent death, and makes regular public scenes in cafes and shoe stores.  “All I want,” he says, “is not to die on a day when I went unseen.”

Alma is obsessed with outdoor survival and her mother’s sadness, a state of perpetual mourning for Alma’s father who died when she was seven:

She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met.  In order to do this, she’s turned life away.  Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air.  Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have species named after her.

It’s their desires, their need to make change, to connect, that drive the novel forwards.  Where it’s going isn’t always clear, and a fourth voice appears towards the end in a sort of ad hoc way to guide things along, but the final moments are well-earned by the depth of the two main characters alone.  The History of Love is equally a history of loneliness, and the two feelings follow each other throughout the novel, one trailing the other like a shadow.

Similar reads: Man Walks Into a Room (Nicole Krauss), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Jonathan Safran Foer), Let the Great World Spin (Colum McCann)

[This novel is a C4 Great Read.]

Author: Bernard Malamud

1966, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Filed under: Literary

I didn’t know much about Bernard Malamud before I read The Fixer. I’d heard his name before, but that was where it ended. Not one of his books appeared on any syllabus in any class I took in undergrad or in graduate school, and only one person ever recommended him to me. So now I’m a little miffed that I’ve only just discovered him. How did I miss this? Forget that Malamud won a couple of National Book Awards and the Pulitzer, forget that there’s a PEN award named after him, this is just some of the best prose I’ve ever read. His name belongs next to Saul Bellow and Phillip Roth, and The Fixer belongs next to some of the most important books of the 20th century.

Yakov Shepsovitch Bok is a man without a ruble to his name, a poor Jew from the Pale with dreams of making a life for himself in the capital of Kiev. There, he finds work and a little education. He seems on the verge of turning his life around until a young Christian boy is murdered, and Yakov becomes the State’s only suspect.

From this simple premise, Malamud draws a story of compelling political and personal complexity. Set in the last decade of the Russian Empire, The Fixer offers a portrait of a society torn between emerging modernism and ancient superstition. Yakov becomes the obsession of an anti-Semitic culture ruled by a paranoid and oppressive government. In need of a public sacrifice, the State will go to any length to make him confess.

And Yakov, the half-educated handyman, makes a strange martyr. Full of self-loathing and doubt, he endures his imprisonment with a perseverant pessimism, believing he might be freed, knowing he won’t, but holding on in spite. Wanting at first only to survive, then later to kill his captors, and then to die, and then, again, to live, Yakov pursues all the options open to a man in leg irons who is strip-searched twice a day.

It’s a heavy read at times, full of brutality and ruminations on Jewish life, God, and Spinoza, but told with a bitter and self-effacing humor. Before leaving for Kiev, Yakov visits one last time with his father-in-law:

They sat in the thin cold house—gone to seed two months after Raisl, the faithless wife, had fled—and drank a last glass of tea together. Shmuel, long since sixty, with touseled grey beard, rheumy eyes, and deeply creased forehead—dug into his caftan pocket for half a yellow sugar lump and offered it to Yakov who shook his head. The peddler—he was his daughter’s dowry, had had nothing to give so he gave favours, service if possible—sucked tea through sugar but his son-in-law drank his unsweetened. It tasted bitter and he blamed existence.

From here, the plot proceeds according to the logic of a bad joke, setting Yakov up to think that life just can’t get any worse right before it does. The novel’s success lies in exhaustively imagining his suffering in a world that would not only create such suffering, but also for some reason seems to need it.

Similar reads: The Magic Barrel (Bernard Malamud), Invitation to a Beheading (Vladimir Nabokov), The Trial (Franz Kafka).

Author: Glenn Taylor

2010, Ecco

Filed under: Literary, Historical

The Marrowbone Marble Company is a sprawling, epic novel that spans nearly thirty years, following a man named Ledford as he fights in World War II, raises a family, builds a marble factory with his own hands, and, through it all, fights against racism. Taylor effortlessly constructs a detailed, nuanced world, and a host of characters both stoic and relatable. He also excels at pacing a narrative with such a long story window—each chapter is titled after a month, like “December, 1941,” and he often skips years at a time, but the result feels natural and fluid.

The problems here are more philosophical than technical. If you had to sum up Marrowbone‘s subject matter in one word, it would be: race. The titular marble company isn’t just a company, it’s also a racial safe haven where, in 1949 West Virginia, blacks and whites live and work together in equality and harmony.

Despite loud, sometimes violent protests from nearly everyone around him, Ledford (who is white) insists on racial equality in his business and his life. That’s well and good, if a bit simplistic, but the results stretch believability, to say the least. The way the sides are drawn up is reductive: everybody who’s in favor of Marrowbone (which becomes synonymous with non-discrimination and civil rights) is good and decent; everybody opposed is cowardly, evil, and slimy.

In the end, Marrowbone is more of an exercise in historical race-relations wish-fulfillment than a real drama. That keeps it from being the truly great novel it could’ve been, but it’s still captivating and certainly worth reading.

Taylor’s research is impeccable, and, for the most part, he doesn’t shy away from the nooks and crannies of the world he creates. He’s authoritative and confident when writing about horse racing and going to war, having dysentery and getting married, how to box and how to make a marble.

He creates nuanced characters (to an extent), and believable hardscrabble wilderness. There’s a tinge of the surreal or the fanciful, as well, and a hard, confident, muscular narrative voice:

A dwarf in maroon slacks swung open the factory’s service gate. Mack eased the big truck through. The sign on the fence pictured a smiling red marble, backgrounded by the silhouettes of skinny buildings and chimney stacks. This was Marble City.

Mack nodded to the little man, a gesture that was not reciprocated. Instead, the man frowned and eyeballed Mack all the way through the gate. Even ten yards in, when Mack checked his sideview mirror, he had his stink-eye locked in.

That voice can occasionally dip into dullness, especially in the first third of the novel, but Taylor lays his plot well, and the payoffs are well worth a few waits. The real problem comes when that tinge of surrealism begins to tip into unrealism, and when our heroes are wholly protected from the realities of racist America.

For example, Mack, the first black person Ledford takes in, gets fired from his job because a white supremacist takes over the plant. That’s just about as far as the race-hate sadism goes in Marrowbone. Mack doesn’t get beat up, or tortured, or run out of town. He just gets fired.

Taylor loves his characters, that’s clear. He loves them so much that he can’t bear to make anything really bad happen to them. There are a precious few times when Taylor does let something bad happen—and those moments are without a doubt the novel’s most electrifying.

Unfortunately, those moments are also very rare. For decades, while Ledford and Mack integrate schools, and campaign against crooked politicians, and basically create a race-equal commune in the midst of a starkly segregated rural area, nothing bad happens to them. I mean, people call them names, but nothing happens to disturb the idyllic sanctity of Marrowbone.

In addition, all the bad guys get their just desserts, and all the good guys get along and love each other, and agree on almost everything. The philosophy of nearly every Marrowbone citizen can be summed up by the words of Mack’s young son, who gives a bit of an impromptu sermon during the first service at the church they build. Harold says:

“I think God made all people good and then some of em get taught bad.”

This is the novel’s spine; all the good guys live by it, all the bad guys think it foolish.

In a certain light, there are worse things than having starkly drawn teams. In practice, all that does is change the equation: despite the tone and voice, this is not a realistic novel, it’s a fairy tale (albeit it one that’s as fun as any guilty pleasure).

But, at the same time, this is 2010. Race is more complicated than this, and it deserves more than a revisionist historical novel in which a noble, perfect white man saves and embraces a handful of black people for no real reason.

On every other level, this is a very good novel, and Taylor is certainly a writer to watch. Hopefully, his next book will stare a little more fearlessly into the abyss.

Similar reads: In style, Serena, by Ron Rash. In subject matter, The Shawshank Redemption (the movie, I haven’t read the book).

1935, G. P. Putnam’s Sons

Filed Under Literary

There’s something I need to get out of the way before I begin this review in earnest. I know this book is pretty old, and that its readership is primarily an academic one that has some notion of the plot/theme going into it. However, the most important aspect of this book occurs on the final 2 pages. And the jacket copy spoiled it for me…

Publishers: please stop doing this.

Anyway, in the interest of writing a complete review, I’m going to do a 180 and touch on that which was spoiled, despite that plea to the publishers. But I’ll keep it contained and skippable. If you want to hear about this book, but keep the ending a secret, skip the last sentence of the next paragraph.

This is the least realistic Nabokov book I’ve yet read. That’s not a bad thing. I’m the last person to say a book needs realism to be good, but it’s lack here caught me by surprise. Cincinnatus C. is tossed in jail for “gnostical turpitude”–a term that makes little sense when approached practically, and less in the murky context Nabokov utilizes–and sentenced to death. The world in which this book is set is chock full of vagary and borderline nonsense, contradiction and doublespeak. Cincinnatus doesn’t fit in. He has a hard time believing in the world around him, making sense of it and contextualizing it. In the end (here comes the aforementioned spoiler), this disbelief manifests physically; the world around him dissolves revealing a new, or at least different, reality.

So yeah, that’s a little wacky. As is the whole book. Not much makes sense here: many of the characters are Mad Hatters in a mid-century dystopia. Invitiation is very different from the Nabokov works I’m accustomed to. Few and far between are the strings of alliteration and patches of flowery verbiage that seem to work for him and him alone. Instead this book read much more like many of the French and Irish novels I’ve read. Quite often I found myself thinking of different Sam Beckett novels and plays. For instance, my very favorite line is perhaps the most sparse, lonely, and un-Nabokovian Nabokov line I’ve ever come across:

Lost in sadness, Cincinnatus said nothing.

There are of course, still plenty Nabokovian fingerprints, such as this excellent description (of a zany moment quite typical of this book):

Throwing him the handkerchief, M’sieur Pierre shouted a French exclamation and suddenly was standing on his hands. His spherical head gradually became suffused with beautiful rosy blood; his left trouser leg slid down, exposing his ankle; his upside-down eyes–as happens with anyone in this position–looked like the eyes of an octopus.

All told, this is a very good book, and I enjoyed reading it. Despite its wobbly boundaries of reality, it is very tightly written. That is, there is a very different kind of authorial control going on here. A careful balancing act was required to make H.H.’s compulsiveness and lyrical flamboyance work together in Lolita. Instead Invitiation sticks very close to its core ideas. The plot of Lolita had to work very hard to contain the language, here the opposite is happening: the language reins the plot.

Though it might be hard to say precisely what, it is more clear here than in any of his other works (that I’ve so far read) that Nabokov has something to say about something. The obvious target is Soviet Russia. I’ll admit it though: to be honest, I don’t care that much. I read Nabokov for the language. Here it is subdued, efficient, effective, but not worse. (It is only fair to note that this could partially be a result of translation, but language of origin aside, there is far less world play exercised here.) In this novel Nabokov puts language to work in a way I haven’t seen him do before.

This is different than I expected, but it remains, of course, excellent.

Similar Reads: Molloy (Beckett), The Castle (Kafka), The Third Policeman (O’Brien), Hell (Davis)

Author: Robert Coover

Overlook Duckworth, 2010

Filed under: Literary, Mystery

If you’re a fan of postmodernism, I’m assuming you already have this book. I’m assuming it was delivered to your door—in an envelope marked only with a muted trumpet—by a nameless letter carrier you will never meet.

This review is for everybody else, everybody who didn’t get the muted trumpet joke (was it even a joke?). This is not an essay about postmodernism, its only purpose is to help you decide whether you should read this book.

In short, you should. Noir is very, very good. The mystery part of it is pretty hard to follow, but Coover’s enthralling writing, great humor, and boundless creativity make for a really fun read. And at barely 200 pages, you’ll be lucky to stretch it out for three days.

Coover writes Noir in the second person, which I normally hate. Coover pulls it off, though, and by the second half, I’d forgotten about it. I still find it somewhat extraneous, but at least it’s not obtrusive.

The novel’s hero—the person “you are”—is Philip M. Noir. He’s also kind of a moron. He’s a private eye, and not a very good one by the feel of it. Noir’s main method of detecting is getting drunk and tailing strangers based on hunches. He never really puts anything together himself, he relies on helpers—mostly the various women in his life—to do the thinking for him.

The mystery itself is a bit convoluted and tortuous. There’s a hot widow, a police chief who wants to lock Noir up, guys named Hammer and Snark and Rats and Staples, a host of women for Noir to lust after, regular beatings, and regular blackings out. Jumble all that up and you’ve got noir or Noir or Noir stew.

The case is not the point, though. Noir feels a bit like Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, or what Vice could’ve been, i.e., an approachable entry point into a brilliant author’s mind. The difference is that Coover keeps things compact and ticking along. Noir is a fireworks display of great writing, where Vice is more of a laser light show perhaps an hour too long.

If you read Noir only for the prose, you won’t be disappointed. Here’s a passage in which Noir decides to follow a panhandler for no reason:

You sidle along walls to be sure no one’s behind you, doing a sequence of spiraling 360s when crossing streets, which probably gives the impression of being staggering drunk, which you are. Blitzed. Smoked. Damn that bottomless Snark. The panhandler continues on his rounds oblivious to your boozy dance behind him, clutching his frosted doughnut. Looking for a bin to put it in maybe; trade it in for some brown lettuce or an old sock.

Here’s a passage after Noir knocks out an attacker:

He’s out cold. Your hurting head hurts more to think of how his head will hurt, but just desserts for the dickhead after what he did to you last night.

Also: I lied. I’m going to talk about the postmodern weirdness, just a bit. It starts off nicely sequestered in its own sections. Here’s part of one:

The city as bellyache. The urban nightmare as an expression of the vile bleak life of the inner organs. … Cities laid out in grids? The grid is just an overlay. Like graph paper. The city itself, inside, is all roiling loops and curves. Bubbling with a violent emptiness.

Soon enough, the weirdness leaks out into the narrative, and what starts as a straightforward detective novel takes a mind-bending turn past reality, into surreality and irreality. And Coover punctuates the narrative with postmodern thought nuggets—for example, the mob moll who becomes a human message board between two gangsters: they tattoo her with boasts and insults and pass her back and forth.

As for the plot, I don’t think I could tell you all the details of the actual case at the heart (or on the surface) of this novel. To be honest, I got a bit tired of its windings and overcomplications. But I never got tired of Coover.

I had a writing teacher once who said you should give your reader a treat on every page. It’s the kind of advice that feels silly, but sounds appealing, perhaps guiltily (not unlike cupcakes). Noir‘s greatest strength is that it offers a treat, without fail, on every single page—from each new entry in the baroque cast of characters to the dynamite short shorts wrapped in loops of the narrative, and of course (most of all) the ever-present humor.

So don’t expect a gripping mystery, but do expect a damn good book.

Similar books: For literary detective novels, check out: Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon; Bangkok 8, by John Burdett; and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon. For another great second-person voice, try Lorrie Moore’s hilarious debut story collection, Self-Help.

Author: Edward P. Jones

2003, Amistad

Filed Under Literary, Historical

It’s difficult to decide where to start discussing The Known World.  The novel opens and closes in 1855 on the plantation of Henry Townsend, a black slave-owner living in Manchester County, Virginia.  In between, the narrative casts so far into the past and the future that beginnings and endings seem to merge.  The past is ever present, and the future provides historical context for events yet to pass.  The Known World begins and ends in nearly every paragraph.

I admit it’s confusing at first.  The prose is full of time cues, reminding the reader of where the story is and of the order in which certain events fall.  You’ll probably have to reread early passages or even the entire first chapter, but once you get used to the rhythm of it, my guess is you’ll be hooked.  Jones’ manages to make all the temporal pointing sound like a refrain, and soon the novel starts to read like a long hymn to history.

The historical premise is fascinating and morally complex.  Henry Townsend, educated at the hands of his former master, William Robbins, becomes one of the wealthiest landholders and slave-owners in the county.  His father, Augustus, who bought himself and his family away from Robbins, cannot understand how his son could turn down this path.  As Moses, the slave overseer on Henry’s plantation, notes:

It was already a strange world that made him a slave to a white man, but God had indeed set it twirling and twisting every which way when he put black people to owning their own kind.

After Henry dies, the plantation is plunged into chaos.  His widow, Caldonia, tries to hold everything together while some of the slaves begin jockeying for better standing and others start disappearing.  The disappearing slaves cause a stir in the county at large, leading to a full-scale investigation of its most prominent citizens.

For a challenging read, this book is full of simple pleasures.  The writing is excellent, and the plot is surprisingly suspenseful considering how much of the future it reveals to the reader.  After introducing a number of characters and story lines, the novel manages to draw all its disparate threads into a tragic climax and resolution.  The Known World is worth reading and rereading, and then maybe rereading again.  It takes a little work, but the effort yields rewards, and the rewards are abundant.

Similar reads: Lost in the City (Edward P. Jones), Beloved (Toni Morrison), Let the Dead Bury their Dead (Randall Kenan)