Chamber Four

Author: Ian McEwan

2010, Nan A. Talese

Filed Under Literary

McEwan’s newest book is also his funniest. This is a phrase, in so many words, that I read about this book a lot as it was approching release. And it’s true, this book is has some quite humorous moments. McEwan is a great writer, with a keen eye for detail and razor intuition. But he’s never been someone that comes to mind when I think of funny. In fact, the books of his that I’ve read (The Cement Garden, Atonement, Saturday, On Chesil Beach) are for the most part quite serious. So I began this book unsure what to expect. Was he writing a comedic novel? Would it stray far from the McEwan I like so much?

He’s not and it doesn’t. And that’s a good thing.  …
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Author: Kurt Vonnegut

2005, Seven Stories Press

Filed Under Literary, Nonfiction

Calling these pieces essays would be misleading.  They’re more like rants, and, like most rants, they sometimes sound repetitive and oversimplified.  But these rants are backed by too much gravity and experience to be dismissed.  In tone and style, they offer everything fans have come to expect from Vonnegut, spare, humorous prose, overflowing equally with compassion and venom.  In content, A Man Without a Country offers an unfiltered look into the mind of a master craftsman with a hell of a lot to rant about.

When the book came out in 2005, Vonnegut already saw so much wrong with the direction the US had taken into the twenty-first century.  After everything he had seen and done in the twentieth century, he damn well wasn’t going to keep quiet.  From American exceptionalism in general, to the Bush administration in particular, Vonnegut decries the recent actions of a country which he feels has abandoned him and the principles he once went to war to protect. …
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Author: Justin Evans

2007, Shaye Areheart Books

Filed Under Literary, Horror

Eleven year-old George Davies might be an insane schizophrenic, or he might be able to commune (involuntarily) with actual Satanic demons. That’s pretty much the crux of this book. It’s not an original premise by any step, and the general plot plays out pretty much exactly as you’d expect it to. It sounds like a recipe for a bland, recycled story, but it turns out to be anything but. A Good and Happy Child gripped me like the classic demonic scary movies of the 70s—”The Amityville Horror,” for example—did when I was young.

When it comes to movies, I’m a horror fan through and through. I like them silly and campy, and I especially like the good-versus-evil, misinterpretation-of-Christianity variety. However, when it comes to books, that same campiness tends to turn to schlock, and religious stuff in books too often reads as pretentious. So I don’t read much horror, but when I do, I gravitate towards the more atmospheric and brooding (Poe, Lovecraft, The Turn of The Screw). Justin Evans utilizes a little bit from both sides of the fence, striking a nice balance between tropes and mood, and because of that his book succeeds. …
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Author: Ian McEwan

2007, Jonathan Cape

Filed under Literary

I had mixed feelings about McEwan when I started Enduring Love.  I hesitated to pick it up because Atonement had left such a mixed impression on me.  Right after I finished it, I found that novel to be heartbreaking and beautiful, but the more I thought about it the more annoying I found the virtuosity of the writing and the tidiness of the structure.  I felt like I had been tricked into reading a book that could’ve been better than it was.

But Enduring Love kept coming up in my novel workshops, and after an argument with a friend about McEwan I decided to give it a shot.  While it didn’t have nearly the same impact on me as Atonement, it didn’t leave me with any of the same cloying afterthoughts.  I found it easier to enjoy the deftness of McEwan’s prose independent of any heavy-handed intertextual design.  The story is compact and compelling, and it convinced me that McEwan was worth a second look, and probably a third and a fourth. …
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Author: Ian MacLeod

2004, Ace Trade

Filed Under Sci-Fi, Literary

Once I arrived at graduate school, I immediately discovered that people read “literate” and “popular” writing differently. Those two terms, and the spaces between them, go by a lot of names. “Character based” vs. “plot based” is a big one. I once heard a newcomer (of more seasons than myself) say he was there for the “serious fiction program.” I wondered which part of my education (or my writing) I wasn’t taking seriously.

Both sides have their merits and their pitfalls. I can’t say that every book I’ve read is Dostoevsky, but that doesn’t mean I hold it to any less rigorous a standard. Any book should entertain and inspire with equal measure. It pays to stay receptive to any work of fiction that is written well.

Take the steampunk genre. When it comes to mind, your imagination settles on something akin to a refined lady hiking up her skirt as she leaps between the cars of a moving train. Not what you’d typically find in a “narrative-heavy” read, where the emotional geography between characters counts for more than the shifting position of clockwork cities. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. When you pick up steampunk, you expect you’re about to experience the unlikely adventures of a time period that never was. But believe me, it goes both ways. I’ve seen steampunk narratives every bit as thick (and characters as deep) as anything you could find under the Penguin Classics label. And sometimes, even more so. …
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This book has been chosen as a Great Read

Author: Wallace Stegner

1938

Filed Under Literary, Historical, Western

A friend of mine loaned me The Big Rock Candy Mountain as the capstone to a conversation about Great American Novels.  Wallace Stegner is an author I’d heard a lot about but never read.  As a novice, I was a little intimidated by the bulk of the book.  My friend assured me it was well worth the 563 page commitment.  And it was.  That and more.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain is an American saga about the trials of the Mason family. Set against the historical sweep of the early 20^th century, the closing of the West, the First World War, the Roaring Twenties, and the Great Depression, Bo Mason leads his wife and sons in the reckless pursuit of their fortune, leaving his wife Elsa to salvage a life for all of them in the margins of her husband’s endless ambitions. …
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Author: Robert Löhr, translated from the German by Anthea Bell

2007, Penguin

Filed under Literary, Historical

Truth: Wolfgang von Kemplen was a lower-echelon Hungarian aristocrat who built a clockwork automaton of wood and iron in the late 18th century, and managed to deceive crowds of people (including luminaries like Johann Philipp Ostertag and Edgar Allen Poe) that it was a thinking machine that excelled at chess. Only years after Kemplen’s death was the secret compartment, which could hold a tiny man, revealed to the public.

Fiction: Just about everything that happens in this charming and at times gripping story about Kemplen’s machine, including the existence of Tibor, the devoutly Catholic dwarf from Italy, who excelled at chess and acted as the brain of the wonderous chess automaton.

In the novel, Kemplen enlists Jakob, a Jewish craftsman, and Tibor, a chess whiz who can fit inside the tiny compartment. Together the three men pull the wool over the eyes of an entire society. The machine, known as “the Turk,” gains notoriety quickly; as fame builds, so does pressure. You might think this would be a story about external forces pushing against a secret, trying to crack the nut, and the characters’ resistance to that. And there is some of that. But much of the dramatic tension derives from the relationship between the three men, their moral drives to keep or reveal the secret, and plenty of two-faced backstabbery. …
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Author: Ron Rash

Ecco, 2010

Filed under: Literary, Short Stories

Ron Rash excels at creating haunting, affecting portraits of emotion. They don’t often twist, and they don’t often surprise, but at their best (like his most recent novel, Serena, which I loved), they can be darkly riveting.

The short stories in Burning Bright—and they are quite short—largely rely on their premises. If the emotional territory he stakes out is rich enough to yield pay dirt in only a dozen or so pages, these too can be as compelling as Serena.

Rash manages that feat in only a third of the stories here. The rest of the time, unfortunately, there’s simply something missing.

…
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Author: Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean

Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009

Filed under: Literary

When it hit me that The Informers was, in fact, the text of a book written by the fictional protagonist, I wanted to kick it, and Juan Gabriel Vásquez, across the room. It always gives me a sinking feeling, to learn that I’m reading embedded text. A book within a book. Occasionally it succeeds, more often it fails miserably. In Vásquez’s The Informers, it … kinda works, kinda doesn’t. The result is a novel that is at times spirited and at other times flat and lifeless. It gave me that sinking feeling, but was just good enough to make me trudge on. …
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Author: Craig Nova

1992, Grove Press

Filed Under Literary

Dean Gollancz is a professional arsonist who helps clients defraud insurance agencies. He brings his teenage son Ray–an intelligent and well-behaved teen–on a few jobs to show him the ropes. Soon a professional relationship and camaraderie develop between the two, where before there had been little connection at all. This begins to fracture when they both have a sexual relationship with the same girl: Iris, one of Ray’s classmates. Iris leaves California to become a Vegas prostitute, and Ray leaves for college on the east coast. This leaves Dean alone. He drinks too much, and he becomes sloppy. His bravado deflated, Dean is exposed as the small-time crook his really is.

Ray is the strongest character in the book. He is unwaveringly true to his own set of morals, and much of the novel concerns him trying desperately to balance loyalties, both to others and to himself. The relationship that is ostensibly the crux of the novel (according to the jacket copy) is that between father and son. But most of Ray’s decisions, namely, to turn his back on his Ivy League education and commit arson for his father’s employer, a Mr. Wei, stem from his relationship to Ivy and his desire to seek her out. At times this relationship can feel forced or unbelievable, but observing Ray’s steadfast sensibility forced into difficult situations remains the most satisfying aspect of the novel. …
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