Author:

2012, The Dial Press

Filed under: Literary, Historical

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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: Alison Bechdel

2012, Houghton Mifflin

Filed under: Memoir, Graphic Novel, Literary

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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

2012, Ecco

Filed under: Literary, Historical

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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

[This outstanding collections of short-stories is a C4 Great Read.]

Author: Eugene Cross

2012, Dzanc Books

Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary

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If Dzanc books isn’t on your radar as a go-to press for outstanding collections of short stories, it should be. Once a year, for the past three years, a collection by Dzanc has blown me away. Lauran van den Berg’s What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us was my gateway drug, and the way she combined the far-fetched and everyday made the collection one of my favorite books I read in 2010. In 2011, I read Knuckleheads, by Jeff Kass, laughing at the sometimes lunkish characters while shaking my head with recognition. So when I picked up Eugene Cross’s collection, Fires of our Choosing, I knew I was in for something good.

Cross’s book does not disappoint. A combination of Phillip Meyer’s American Rust and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’s Son, Fires maps the lives of working-class men and women who often find themselves a dice-throw away from being down-and-out, problems with love, family, and alcohol complicating perpetual crisis of the wallet and the heart. 

It would be easy to call Cross’s characters losers, but only in the most literal sense: almost everyone in this collection has lost something or someone–a father, a sibling, a wife, direction, hope. In “The Brother,” a house painter haunted by his past is forced to give his girlfriend’s addict brother a job and a second chance. In “The Gambler,” a recent widower finds solace in the familiar circus of a local casino. “Harvesters” follows a man following the harvest, trying to win over a woman he has jilted before, and will jilt again, his departure as predictable as the seasons. If these sound predictable, they are anything but, and Cross continually wrong-foots readers, keeping them guessing until the last page.

Stories by Ron Rash and Bonnie Jo Campbell, who often cover similar, bleak ground, can act as a series of downward strokes when collected, which can be exhausting to read, but Cross’s stories are more varied, and Fires largely avoids this. Some of the most effective stories are the ones where Cross leaves behind the familiar and branches into different voices. “Rosaleen, if You Know What I Mean,” which chronicles a boy’s failed rebellion in the face of his dissolving family, and “Come August,” a brief story told as a second-person address that tells of a babysitter who finds her life irrevocably changed when she steals a few moments of sleep, are two of the most arresting stories in the collection.

Opening “Eyes Closed,” the story of a two-bit pool hustler hoping to pay rent with a big score, Cross writes that “Bars and pool halls were not places you went to turn your luck.” His characters know this, yet these are the places they are drawn to, where their luck changes momentarily before inevitably running out. These are the places in Erie, Pennsylvania, that Cross brings to life so well, the places his characters might find dignity and grace in the incremental victories gained against life’s uphill struggle.

Similar Reads: American Rust, by Philipp Meyer; Jesus’s Son, by Denis Johnson; Burning Bright, by Ron Rash; and American Salvage, by Bonnie Jo Campbell.

Author: Mark Leyner

2012, Hachette

Filed Under: Literary, Humor

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Where to even begin with this book? This novel, if you want to call it that, is brilliant, perplexing, uproarious, and a little bit sad. One thing is certain: this is a superb bit of writing, and example of a writer at the top of his game, whose abilities with the written word put many of his contemporaries to shame. The rest is pretty much up for interpretation. If you want to glean more than just pretty bits of style from this book, come in prepared to to use parts of your brain you probably haven’t exercised in a while.

Leyner’s book is the sort of fictive work I used to read in grad-school literature classes. It is obtuse nearly to the point of being cryptic, but there is a method to the madness. If you’re willing to put in the time, you’ll find it worth your while. This is because, while there is not too much plot to speak of (I’ll get to that shortly), the book is bursting at the seams with substance. Structurally it’s a bit like a spiritual cousin to James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is an epic poem that isn’t a poem. It flips between genres and writing styles like channels before a bored couch surfer blankly clicking a remote. Some sections are stream of conscious prose, but there are also lists, book blurbs, sing-songy rhymes, tabloid grab lines, text message interchanges, and more. Through a combination of the expert writing I already mentioned and a savage wit, Leyner makes each varying piece work for the whole like a perfectly calibrated tourbillon. Out of context though, it probably just seems mental, like these “Excerpts from Eulogies”:

“This was just the aristocratic, autoerotic attitude of those whose hot buttocks were the pure products of the imagination of the Gods who’d invented the platitude.”

“Ike—marionette, umbilicated to his Goddesses, murmuring in a language garnished with umlauts.”

“His birth as an object of divine desire, and his death—the Goddesses sated—supine and on fire, hated by his neighbors.”

“This shit’s retarded. It’s The Ballad of the Severed Heads. ‘It’s not toasted, it’s Pop-Tarted,’ Ike boasted to all his drug-addled, big-dick bards (the Upper Penis Committee) from the Upper Peninsula and Jersey City…”

The basic gist is that Ike Karton is going to die today. He’s going to eat breakfast, then get shot later on, probably either suicide-by-cop or gunned down by a Mossad agent. This is going to happen because he is a plaything of the gods. What gods? you may ask. Well, the book opens with a long, more or less insane introduction of a pantheon of gods and demigods who reside above the Burj Khalifa. They are created in the mold of the Greek and Roman deities, but these gods rule over every zany thing from balloon angioplasty and the movie Maria Full of Grace to, well, nutsacks. These gods, in particular XOXO (also known as El Cucho or Kid Coma, the god of head trauma, concussions, dementia, alcoholic blackouts, and about a zillion other things), are messing with the book as it is being told/written. The entire narrative is structured in this hyper-meta way: everything is being relayed through various styles and by choruses and characters and different narrators simultaneously before, while, and after it occurs.

I’m not sure I can describe it any better than that. Leyner pretty much lays out as solid description of the structure as you can get as part of his “What Makes Ike a Hero?” list:

G. Ike is the hero of the epic who simultaneously recites and reacts the epic of which he is the extemporaneous, albeit inexorably doomed, hero. This is why scholars frequently refer to Ike as the “Möbius Stripper,” i.e., the man whose lascivious dance (i.e., “his life”) is performed for the delectation of masturbating Goddesses.

This book is very funny, very stimulating, and completely ludicrous. It isn’t a book for everyone. If you’re looking to pass the time on a train ride, look elsewhere. But if you are up for some dense and experimental fiction firing on all cylinders, you will love this book.

Similar Reads: Palafox (Chevillard), Tristram Shandy (Sterne), Ulysses (Joyce)

[A review copy was provided.]

2012, Graywolf

Filed under: Literary, Fantasy

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Kevin Barry is a wonderful stylist, a rare talent in the prose department. He writes City of Bohane in a gritty patois largely of his own making, halfway between Dashiell Hammett and A Clockwork Orange. Even so, it never gets too precious or contrived, and it never feels like Barry is reaching. That’s a very difficult feat, and the fact that Barry manages it for the entire novel without missing a beat, well, that’s nothing short of remarkable.

It’s a shame, then, that once you delve into the rich prose, there’s nothing inside worth getting to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Was lookin’ for ya, Wolf.”

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

“Ain’t, Wolf.”

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

Mad eyes swivellin’ in the Wolfie-boy puss.

“Said I ain’t seen her, Wolf.”

“Fuck she ai ‘n’ all, like?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harper Perennial, 2009

Filed under: Literary, Short Stories

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Love Begins in Winter appeared on my desk wrapped in silver paper this past Christmas. It wasn’t on my wish list, but I accepted it with all the love that was intended from someone who had a hunch about me and about this book. You might consider my review a belated thank you card for a favorite gift, or else a form of retroactive wishing for what I have already been given.

These are rare and wonderful stories, subtle in tone, ambitious in scope, and Romantic in vision. Each one performs a precise balancing act that spans multiple settings, voices, and perspectives, a feat rendered all the more impressive by a general lack of flash in the writing. Van Booy’s prose is direct and unadorned, as enjoyable to read as it is challenging in its depiction of conflicted emotions.

But perhaps my favorite thing about the writing here is the boldness of it. “Music is only a mystery to people who want it explained,” says Bruno Bonnet, the cellist who narrates the title story. “Music and love are the same.” Van Booy’s characters are prone to lofty speculations like this, and the success of these five stories lies in their ability to support their most challenging observations, persuading readers with precise, evocative detail.

In Love Begins in Winter, “Tiger, Tiger” best showcases the characteristic boldness in Van Booy’s writing. At first, the story appears to be a tale of parallel relationships, the narrator and her boyfriend considering a deeper commitment at the same moment that his parents’s relationship has come undone after decades of discontent. And it is partly about that, but the story takes a strange turn when the narrator discovers the lost writings of the family doctor, Dr. Blix Felixson.

Dr. Felixson’s musings, along with the narrator’s own experiences as a child and then as a pediatrician, transform “Tiger, Tiger” into a meditation not only on love but on innocence as well. The rest of the story is interspersed with excerpts from Dr. Felixson’s journals:

People’s expectations of coupling may be too grand, and thus disappointment, loneliness, and often pain are the inevitable adjuncts of something we thought would be the ultimate answer (an emotional cure-all) to our ongoing fears….

Humans must learn not to blame each other for being afraid, disappointed, or in pain. We perhaps might learn to view those we have special feelings toward as being our companions rather than our saviors, companions on the journey back to childhood….

Every adult yearns for some stranger, but it is really childhood we miss. We are yearning for that which has been stolen from us by what we have become….

These pronouncements could easily come across as a heavy-handed way of developing the themes of the story, all the more so for introducing a voice from outside of the narrator’s experience to deliver them. And perhaps they are heavy-handed, but the mysteries being addressed here–the nature of innocence, the purpose of love–are large enough, fundamental enough, to stand up to a little heavy-handedness.

This kind of directness requires courage in the face of abstraction and confidence in the power of the story itself to stand up under the gravity of its own grandest aspirations. In the end, the power of “Tiger, Tiger” is derived not only from the worldview of Dr. Felixson, but in seeing how the narrator interprets his wisdom and enacts it in her life, a life that may after all be very different from the examples that have been set for her.

Each of these stories is similarly built to bear up under weighty considerations: death, grief, love, loss, and time. They offer readers ambitious ideas about life and then send their characters around the world and into the past to find out what might be true for themselves.

Similar reads: The Secret Lives of People in Love, by Simon Van Booy; The Book of Life, by Stuart Nadler; The Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri

Author: Mark Carp

2011, Xlibris

Filed Under: Literary, Short-Run

Written in the serviceable prose-style of a newspaper reporter that keeps the reader turning the pages, Mark Carp’s new novella, Cain, Abel and the Family Cohen, tells the story of the rapid rise and breathtakingly precipitous fall of Jonas Cohen, the youngest child of Rabbi Abraham Cohen.   Related largely in the first person by Jonas himself (with a couple of minor but confusing switches in point of view in several places), Carp takes us through the beginning of the recent financial crisis when the housing bubble burst, financial institutions tanked and the economy went to hell.  Jonas, a recent college graduate and hotshot financial analyst, has just joined the Frick Group, a New York hedge fund where he had interned for several summers.

A precocious investment analyst, Jonas foresees the downturn in the housing market when he arrives in New York to begin his job (his family is from Baltimore where his father leads a congregation) and notices the vastly overpriced properties.  He quickly does his research and advises his boss, A.J. Buckner, about the imminent decline in prices and advises him that the Frick Group should begin “shorting housing indexes,” a maneuver to maximize shareholder profits by betting on the decline in housing prices.  A real estate broker by day, Carp writes with authority about this in a concise and enlightening manner while furthering his plot.

Jonas’ predictions and advice pan out and he becomes something of a Wall Street celebrity, interviewed on business talkshow programs and consulted for his insights into the economy.  A wunderkind, by his own description.

Jonas is one of three children.  His older sister, Rachel, has also moved to New York, an aspiring actress with a role in a Broadway play, Middle of the Night. Jonas and his sister are close.  In fact, the whole family is close; at least, that’s how Rabbi Cohen sees it.  “Each of us supports the other, and because of that our lives will always have meaning,” he tells his children.  “Your family will always be your ‘home.’”  Famous last words.  But Jonas is certainly supportive of his sister and attends her rehearsals, where he meets and becomes involved with Frieda Katz, the cousin of Sidney Katz, producer-director of Middle of the Night.

Jonas also joins a synagogue where he meets Mr. Samuels, a wealthy benefactor who is impressed by Jonas’ chanting of an aliyah and takes an interest in him.  He refers to Jonas affectionately as a “yeshiva bucher,” a serious student of Judaic studies.  Through Mr. Samuels, Jonas also becomes involved with Samuels’ niece, Sylvia, a dental student in Philadelphia.

And this is where Jonas’ problems begin.

Carp does a remarkable job of trying to make an essentially unlikeable person (Jonas) seem sympathetic.  We all know the low esteem with which most people regard the legendary Wall Street sharks who made vast profits on the suffering of others.  As Jonas later tells a Congressional committee investigating Wall Street investors for making unconscionable profits, “We have a fiduciary responsibility on behalf of our investors to find opportunities and maximize their returns.  That’s what we’re in business for.”  Fair enough, but when it comes to the way he plays Frieda and Sylvia against one another, the reader’s compassion is further strained.

But even here, we can feel some sympathy.  By his own confession, Jonas has never been a ladykiller, but with his new-found celebrity all this changes.  Can we really blame him for finding it difficult to choose between two attractive women who are clearly drawn to him, charmed by him?  By the end of the novel, Jonas is a victim, a patsy, and he does merit our sympathy, but only in the way we feel sorry for a nebbish.

For indeed, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and when Jonah chooses Sylvia over Frieda, his brief success and well-being quickly unravel.  In a rather swift unfolding of events, Jonas sees his love life and his career implode, in part due to the treachery of the jilted woman but also – and this is where the title comes in – by his older brother, Isaac, a Maryland congressman.

Unfortunately, we don’t really know much about Isaac (Cain) except that he’s a politician who promises people what they want to hear and that he’s involved in an extramarital affair with Frieda.  What are his motives in sacrificing his brother?  The original Cain slew Abel out of jealousy when God rejected his offerings but accepted his younger brother’s.  Somehow this model doesn’t quite fit here, even though the two are brothers.  This may be quibbling, but still, if it’s part of the book’s title we really need to know more about the relationship between these brothers, but Isaac is mostly absent from the story.

Jewish themes abound in Mark Carp’s writing.  The Last Jew is a futuristic story about a pogrom 250 years in the future; The Extraordinary Times of Ordinary People is the story of Alvin Carpman, a German-Jewish émigré who escaped Germany after Kristallnacht; the protagonist of The End of Hell, David Kravitz, who helped liberate Dachau, is tormented by memory as he tapes his memoirs for a Jewish war veterans’ group.

Cain, Abel and the Family Cohen ends in such a way that the reader has an expectation that there will be a follow-up.  Indeed, this story of the Cohens has the feel of a saga that will continue.   So much of the story of Jonas, Isaac, and Rachel (not to mention Frieda and Sidney Katz) remains untold.

Similar Reads: The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, by Sloan Wilson, is a 1955 novel about the American search for purpose in a world dominated by business.

Author:

2010, Random House

Filed Under: Literary, Humor, Sci-Fi

Find it on Goodreads.

Set in a near future as absurd as it is familiar, Super Sad True Love Story depicts a narcissistic America, drunk on credit, obsessed with youth, and largely ignorant of its relationship with the rest of the world. The government is run by the monolithic Bipartisan party, and no one much cares what the military does in Venezuela so long as the never ending stream of hypnotic information keeps scrolling across their “äppäräti.” It’s funny the way Russian literature, blight, or accidental death can be funny.

I’d call it dystopian literature except that in many ways Shteyngart’s novel doesn’t go far enough in reimagining our world to qualify. “Äppäräti” are juiced up smart phones, new fashions are obscenely revealing, and everyone loves shopping. Dystopian literature shows us our world is  stranger than we imagined by drawing out similarities with a world that appears unrecognizable on its surface; Super Sad True Love Story pretty much shows us our world exactly like it is, only worse.

For all the elaborate trappings of its near future setting, Super Sad True Love Story is less affecting as satire than (like the title suggests) as a oddly simple love story. Lenny Abramov, an aging, balding book addict with dreams of immortality falls for Eunice Park, a twenty-something Korean-American beauty and a true product of her times, image obsessed, outwardly confident, inwardly self-loathing. That Shteyngart manages to cut compelling characters from these types is a testament to his talents as a writer; that Lenny and Eunice manage to find consolation in each other is a testament to the strangeness of intimacy.

Lenny and Eunice first meet at a party in Rome right before Lenny returns to the States. They spend the night together, an event which he considers a religious experience, but which she sees as a “lesser evil” than going home with another older guy at the party. Lenny invites her to live with him in New York that same night. Eunice accepts only after this other thing she has going with a guy in Rome falls apart, so why not move in with an almost stranger who worships her rather than returning to her abusive father and cowed mother in Fort Lee?

It’s not the most promising beginning in the history of romance, except that it turns out to be exactly what they both want. Eunice tries to explain her decision to a friend:

When we were walking down this pretty street in Rome I noticed Lenny’s shirt was buttoned all wrong, and I just reached over and rebuttoned it. I just wanted to help him be less of a dork. Isn’t that a form of love too?… I think of him going down on me until he could barely breathe, the poor thing, and the way I could just close my eyes and pretend we were both other people.

Eunice wants to believe that people can change, and Lenny wants to be changed. He wants her to grant him some of her apparent ease in a world out of which he is rapidly aging; he wants her to make him “less of a dork.” His willingness to give himself to her transforms desperation into heroism, because in his heart he believes he can save her too.

On the morning Eunice arrives from Rome, Lenny gives himself a little pep talk:

Lenny, I said aloud. You are not going to screw this up. You’ve been given a chance to help the most beautiful woman in the world. You must be good, Lenny. You must not think of yourself. Only of this little creature before you. Then you will be helped in turn… if you show her that adult love can over come childhood pain, then both of you will be shown the kingdom.

The exchange between Lenny’s openness and Eunice’s guardedness drives the novel through personal and geopolitical disasters, and the possibility that two terribly matched people could find solace in each other (even a doomed solace) amidst a crumbling world is the novel’s most powerful statement. Many of the other characters you could’ve set on fire, and I might not have noticed. (In fact, some of them do go up in flames.) But Lenny and Eunice create something between themselves that I won’t soon forget.

Similar reads: Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, and The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken

Author: Karen Lillis

2012, Spuyten Duyvil Novella Seriess

Filed Under: Literary, Short-Run

Karen Lillis’ gem of a novella is written in the form of a diary by an unnamed female over the course of three weeks in December, 2003.  It is not a diary in the sense of daily entries that recount the events of the day.  In fact, we know almost nothing about her activity during this time except that on December 24 the narrator, who lives in New York City (Brooklyn), boards a train for Washington, DC, presumably to spend the holidays with her family, though nothing’s ever mentioned, and on December 30, the final entry, she is about to board the return train.

Watch the Doors as They Close is a soul-searching exploration of an all-consuming love affair that has recently ended.  In fact, three days into the journal, December 14, the narrator writes,  “Anselm and I broke up a week ago – a week ago today, in fact.  On the phone, after he’d already left New York again to return to his mother’s house in Pennsylvania.”

Indeed, the journal begins, “This is the story of Anselm.  The story of Anselm as told to me.”  It’s this introspective inquiry that makes the choice of the diary form so compelling.  A diary is written for oneself, an attempt to make sense of one’s life.  To get a bead on her own life, the narrator must come to terms with her lover, the man with whom she shared a room for the past three months in an often tempestuous affair.

Anselm Vaughan Brkich-David entered the narrator’s life in a bar at 2:00 A.M. one night when she was “shit-faced drunk.”  If not the classic “love at first sight,” the meeting was so intense that they wanted to see each other again, and thus began the affair.  Only, who is Anselm?  This consumes the narrator for the duration of the novella, and in the end, despite the cataloging of his likes and dislikes, his travels, background, behavior, loves, obsessions, he becomes even more remote, more shadowy, less certain.  We watch the doors as they close over her certainties about the validity, the authenticity of their relationship.  (Who was that masked man?)

Anselm grew up in the dirt poorest area of Appalachia, in Pennsylvania coal mining country near West Virginia.  His father committed suicide, tormented by the effects of black lung disease.  His mother was crazy, his sister remote.  Yet Anselm, a musician and composer, managed to escape to Oberlin College and thence on a grand Bohemian tour that brought him to Paris, Vienna, and ultimately to New York.  Anselm’s life seems to be marked by the women with whom he is serially involved,  Meredith and April and Sandra and many others who appear indistinguishable to the reader but who are vividly individual in the narrator’s mind.  This is a diary, after all, not a novel in which characters are developed for a plot.  Indeed, the way the women blend into one another adds up to the narrator’s own doubts about how genuine her own relationship with Anselm was.

The narrator is a writer, and Anselm tells her she is “the first writer he ever met who had something to say.”  This has got to be self-affirming, heady.  Anselm even offers to collaborate with her on an opera, he writing the music, she the libretto, and off the narrator goes into a fantasy about Edna Saint Vincent Millay.  But is Anselm ultimately just another bullshit artist?  The reader wonders this as the narrator fears it may be true.  By the end of the diary she is comparing moments when they were “real” with each other and when they were being fake, and she even wonders if Anselm is a scam artist or worse, some sort of psychopath.

Still, the conviction remains that there must have been some sort of “spiritual” legitimacy at work.  It wasn’t a complete mirage, was it?  “Sometimes I felt like his emotional stenographer, like he was looking back over his whole life and dictating it to me.  I would wonder about his attraction to writers.  Did he want to hand his life story to someone else who might make sense of it?”

But of course really, it’s her own life she is trying to make sense of, isn’t it?

All of this is written as an intense groping toward the truth.  The narrator was raised as a Catholic and has a nostalgia for the confessional, its therapeutic effects.  “I suppose the strong instinct to write the tell-all comes from Catholicism, I thought upon waking today,” she writes on December 15.  “The concept of a Confessor is so specific, and doesn’t get replaced with anything else in society once you leave the Church.”  So in writing this confession, she tries to come to an understanding, which is the true nature of any diary, after all.  “I want the challenge of someone who cares enough to tell me the absolute truth.”

We do get glimpses of the diarist’s life in quick asides that give an insight into the feverish way her brain is trying to process the affair.  “I just got back from walking over to Bushwick to donate books to a new women’s library,” she writes on December 16.  “It reminded me of the story Anselm told me about the project he and a friend of his started to get Penguin to donate books to schools in Appalachia.”  This is a story about the good Anselm, constantly at war in the narrator’s head with the bad Anselm, a conflict which is ultimately never resolved, can never be resolved. All she can do, finally, is watch the doors closing….

By novella’s end, the reader does get a sense of closure, not in the way a plot reaches a resolution, but in a kind of resignation in the narrator’s one.  Not a small accomplishment for this kind of narrative.  Bravo, Karen.