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By Sean Clark, on October 21st, 2011 Author: Glen Duncan
 2011, Knopf
Filed Under: Horror, Literary
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
It seems like trying to write a “literary” book in the sexy-supernatural genre is the authorial movement du jour. Lately, many authors are hoping to cash in on readers who like Twilight but are too ashamed to admit it. Justin Cronin’s The Passage, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, and Lev Grossman’s The Magician King are just three recent novels that try to adultify trending YA themes. Duncan is in the same boat, but he more or less succeeds where others have fallen short.
Why? Well, basically because the writing is pretty good, and the plot avoids being overwrought. (Neither The Magicians nor its sequel (while enjoyable) were very well-written; The Passage was a structural mess.) So let’s begin with the writing. Duncan is no Henry James, but he’s read him and it shows. He finds a great balance between action and tangent and he tinges his narrator with just enough snark. Most importantly, he has bouts of eloquence without looking like he’s trying too hard. …
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By Charles Rammelkamp, on October 14th, 2011 Author: Mark Wisniewski
2011, Gival Press
Filed Under: Literary.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
At first when I started reading Show Up, Look Good, I wanted to compare it to Bright Lights, Big City, the Jay McInerney tour de force from the 1980’s, partly because of the similarity of the cadence of the titles but also because of the hip sensibility and the dark sense of humor common to both; both stories take place in New York City, as well – glamorous Manhattan, specifically. But once I got further into the story I started to think of the protagonist, Michelle, a girl in her mid-thirties from Kankakee, Illinois, come to “make it” in New York, in terms of Holden Caulfield, the runaway of The Catcher in the Rye. Both characters have a personal sense of honor and both see through phonies.
Even Michelle’s language sometimes sounds like Holden’s: “…but what really killed me about this whole ‘Have you read so-and-so’ game,” she tells the reader while describing the so-called literary workshops of a pretentious roommate she has in the Village, “…if everyone there read every book they said they’d read, none of them could have written a word.” Things were always “killing” Holden, too, with their absurdity or hypocrisy. (“Sensitive. That killed me. That guy Morrow was about as sensitive as a goddam toilet seat,” Holden observes about a prep school classmate ). Elsewhere Michelle makes the similar Holden-like observation:
…it killed me how many times in my thirty-four years I’d gotten along with people but kept cruising toward being alone.
But all this searching for somebody to whom to compare Wisniewski’s work amounts to a reviewer’s way of introducing him to readers. Who is he “like,” and will readers be warned or welcomed by the comparison? The blurbs compare his work to Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Elmore Leonard, Ruth McKenney (My Sister Eileen). One even does compare Michelle’s picaresque adventures in New York to Holden Caulfield’s. In the end, though, we might just as well take Wisniewski on his own terms because the story and characters don’t necessarily fall into these neat comparisons. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on October 13th, 2011 [This globe-trotting technothriller is a C4 Great Read. Find it and other C4 Great Reads on our Great Reads shelf at Powell's.]
 Author: Neal Stephenson
2011, William Morrow
Filed under: Literary, Thriller
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
A few weeks after Reamde came out, there was a bit of a kerfuffle about the ebook edition being full of typos. This is not surprising. The paper version has more than its share of typos, too. Not an overwhelming amount, perhaps two dozen mistakes over a thousand pages. But more than you see in most professionally published books.
I can entirely understand these errors. Reamde runs a thousand pages, roughly 400,000 words, and it was published just three years after Stephenson’s last novel. In addition, it’s a globe-trotting thriller, steeped in real-world facts and places, technology and tactics. And it has its own built-from-the-ground-up online virtual world.
It took me three weeks just to read this thing, let alone proofread it. I can’t even imagine editing or writing it. So a few mistakes are certainly forgivable. But they tell of Stephenson’s attitude toward writing, which has emphasized, in the past decade, length above all, moreso than ensuring the highest sentence-to-sentence quality possible.
This is not to say that Reamde feels rushed or shoddily produced. On the contrary, it’s very very good—entertaining, immersive, thrilling, fun, educational and full of great characters. But it’s not Stephenson’s best work. His best, in my mind, is still Snow Crash, the revolutionary information-disease cyberpunk epic that made his name. Snow Crash is also a hefty read at well over 100,000 words—I’d guess 150K—but it’s less than half the size of Reamde, and it shows a different Stephenson than the one from 2011. …
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By Sean Clark, on October 12th, 2011 Author: R. William Bennett
2011, Shadow Mountain
Filed Under: Literary, Historical.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
5 |
| Depth..... |
5 |
I’ve been reading a bunch of Halloweenish books lately (you’ll notice werewolves and cemeteries in my upcoming reviews), and while Bennett’s retelling of A Christmas Carol does feature ghosts, it’s (somewhat obviously) a full-on Christmas story, probably even more so than its inspiration.
The story begins just a little before the events of Dickens’s classic. Marley is alive and a ruthless business man. He forsook any sort of interpersonal relationship for the almighty buck. He takes on a young financial prodigy as a partner (Scrooge audaciously refuses to apprentice), teaches him all he knows about being ruthless, then dies with only Scrooge begrudgingly by his side, waiting with impatience to sieze his mentor’s assets. But just before dying, Marley has an ephiphany, and he regrets his avaricious life.
Because of this final moment, Marley finds forgiveness in the afterlife. He does penance by wandering the world as a shade, dragging heavy, chest-laden chains that rattle behind him. Marley blames himself for Scrooge being and even crueler, more miserly dick, so he petitions the spirits of the afterlife to allow him to help Scrooge. If he fails, Marley will have to continue to drag his chains–and Scrooge’s–for eternity. From there the book is a faithful retelling of A Christmas Carol, written from the perspective of Marley, who, Bennett tells us, was always there, just invisible to Dickens’s protagonist.
Despite it occurring on a Christian holiday, I’ve always read A Christmas Carol as largely, like much of Dickens’s work, more about social contract and free will than any sort of lesson in piety. But Marley, and through him this book, seems more concerned with Scrooge’s eternal salvation. Scrooge’s redemption as Dickens wrote it was not a Christian repentance. He reforms his ways for the betterment of man, and finds personal reward in that offering. Bennett’s tale offers more of a trickle-down morality scheme, a golden-rule, pay-it-forward kind of thing. In the end, of course, the resulting message is the same: as Abe Lincoln once put it, “Be excellent to each other–and party on, dudes.” …
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By Eric Markowsky, on October 6th, 2011  Author: Chad Harbach
2011, Little, Brown and Company
Filed Under: Literary.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
6 |
| Entertainment..... |
4 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
For fifty pages, I was hooked. Henry Skrimshander is a small-town kid with an almost supernatural sense for playing shortstop. He’s discovered at what might have been the last game of his career and recruited to play for Westish College, a small D III school in Wisconsin. Under the guidance of Mike Schwartz, the Westish teammate who discovered him, Henry rises into the ranks of the nation’s best college players. His future seems bright and assured.
Then we’re introduced to Guert Affenlight, the President of Westish College. He’s an interesting guy, but his story doesn’t really have as much to do with Henry as Henry’s roommate, Owen, and there’s Guert’s daughter, Pella, who’s fleeing a failed marriage. Also, Schwartz is having some problems figuring out his life after graduation.
The writing is solid throughout, the characters are convincing and likable enough that I never felt totally dissatisfied, but I often found myself pushing through chapters wondering when all of this was going to get back to Henry, because (surprise) his bright future might not be such a sure thing after all. Unfortunately, Henry’s perspective and his trials on the diamond occupy less space as the novel progresses, and the work as a whole suffers for it.
…
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By Sean Clark, on October 5th, 2011 Author: Daniel Woodrell
2011, Little, Brown and Company
Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
6 |
| Depth..... |
6 |
A pervasive sadness oozes from this collection of semi-linked short stories. This book is a short, grim affair with most of its stories centered around poverty and violence, and most of its characters lacking education or, often, perspective. All this, bolstered by Woodrell’s sharp, atmospheric prose, makes for a very strong collection. …
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By Eric Markowsky, on September 16th, 2011  Author: Stuart Nadler
2011, Regan Arthur Books
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
7 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
In seven longer-than-average short stories, Stuart Nadler takes on fathers and sons, lovers and ex-lovers, philandering philanderers, sibling rivalries, and orphans of all ages. These stories are expansive, opening landscapes of regret and redemption all along the Northeast Corridor. Each one boasts moments of hard-earned clarity rendered with a degree of precision that made me pause to admire their craftsmanship, craftsmanship I found all the more impressive for the complexity of the stories themselves.
While Nadler’s prose is simple and direct, the tales he tells tend to distort conventional relationships almost beyond recognition. In one, a girlfriend hires a surrogate temptress to test her boyfriend. In another, a man, his lover, her husband, and their children all add up to something like a family. In other hands, setups like these could easily descend into melodrama; in Nadler’s hands the result is something much less predictable and much more memorable. …
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By Sean Clark, on August 26th, 2011 Author: Steven Millhauser
2011, Knopf
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
10 |
| Entertainment..... |
7 |
| Depth..... |
8 |
It’s been a few years now since Millhauser’s excellent Dangerous Laughter came out, so I was definitely eager to get my hands on this book and read some new stories by one of my favorite authors. We Others only contains 7 new stories, but this was hardly a let down. The new material is substantive and the 14 selected stories form a very fine compilation of stories I was happy to read again. Both new readers and his fans alike should be satisfied.
Millhauser often builds scenarios in commonplace settings, but somehow manages to give them the aura of a fairytale world (without the fairies). He is a fabulist, and for many of his stories his trick is to impose our real world, or some bastardization of it, upon that skewed reality.
Sometimes, stories like “The Invasion from Outer Space”–in which a yellow space dust made of single-celled organisms blankets the earth but doesn’t seem to cause any harm–pull this off through the first person plural, a tough voice to write in successfully. Through this lens readers can take in the oddity of the broad world before them and compare it with their own. Millhauser doesn’t need to set the stage in these stories, because the stage is his story. “The Next Thing” has a singular narrator but accomplishes a similar type of storytelling. It begins as a Wal-Mart-like megastore, evolves into underground habitations, then an entire corporatized town, and eventually an authoritarian government of a sort. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on August 25th, 2011 [This funny, character-driven cyborg novel is a C4 Great Read. Find it and other C4 favorites on our Great Reads shelf at Powell's.]
 Author: Max Barry
2011, Vintage
Filed under: Literary, Sci-fi
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
10 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
Machine Man began its existence as a kind of blog through which Max Barry sent readers one page a day of the novel in progress. Those readers, who had to pay after the first 43 pages, gave Barry feedback that he sometimes incorporated into the plot of the novel. He even let the cover be decided by popular vote.
This sounds crazy. I mean, crowd-sourcing a novel? That’s a train wreck waiting to happen. That backstory made me skeptical of the book, to the point that I almost didn’t read it. Luckily I eventually did, and the novel itself overcame my skepticism and won me over in a big big way, because the end result, Machine Man the finished product, is delightful.
For the record, I have previously used the word “delightful” zero times to describe a book, but it’s been a long time since I’ve read one that comes together this well. Machine Man has a fascinating plot, outstanding (and hilarious) writing, and one of the all-time best sci-fi protagonists ever. It’s easily one of the two best books I’ve read this year. Let me tell you why. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on August 17th, 2011  Author: Benjamin Black
2011, Henry Holt and Company
Filed under: Literary, Mystery.
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
A Death in Summer boasts no world-breaker plot, no nail-biting race to find a killer, and no chilling plot twists. In fact, for long stretches the mystery idles in the background, nearly forgotten as characters sit around and smoke cigarettes and talk.
For most mystery writers, that would mean the book fails. But Benjamin Black—or John Banville as he’s known when winning Bookers—isn’t most mystery writers. In his hands, such a premise becomes a pleasure, mostly because he’s such a damn good writer that simply existing in the world he creates will satisfy. …
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