Contemporary Noir Done Again

Book Reviewed: Driven, by James Sallis

In January I read James Sallis's neo-noir Drive, and I loved it.  It was fun, expertly paced, violent, brutal, and surprisingly moving at times.  Since then, I have also become a big fan of the film version of the book.  The film version of Drive is really stylish, and although it differs greatly from the novel, it managed to pin down the awesome noir tone just right.  Rarely do I love a book and its film adaptation equally; this may the only time that this has happened to me.  Anyway, I was surprised to find out that Sallis just published a sequel to his now-famous book.  I saw it sitting on the New Books shelf at my library, and I grabbed it right up.  When classes ended last week, I knew Driven had to be the first book I would read for fun. 

Driven takes place seven years after Drive ends.  Driver has now taken up the name Paul West, and just as he thinks his life has gotten somewhat more normal (including an engagement to a super-understanding girl), things go bad again.  Driver looks for revenge and finds that things aren't quite what he thought they were, much like in the first book. 

I have to admit I didn't enjoy this sequel as much as I enjoyed Drive.  The writing is still excellent - with those brisk and cutting little sentences, but I just didn't get the same feeling of total immersion here.  I know I will love a book when it makes me ache inside - not necessarily with emotion, but with the ache of being so completely inside someone else's creation and knowing I no longer have control over what it does to me.  Drive made me ache.  Driven does not.  The plot wasn't quite as tight, even hard to follow in spots.  And the bittersweet tone that Drive managed so well felt a little more forced in this book.  It was fun to read, but it wasn't as satisfying.

Note:  I thought the ending of Drive was great, that it ended the book on the exact right emotional and intellectual beat.  So I wasn't exactly clamoring to know more about Driver, even though I loved him as a character.  Maybe that's why this sequel just didn't quite get to levels of greatness for me?

Where Things Are Awesome

Book Reviewed: Where Things Come Back, by John Corey Whaley

My friend Amy (she of the often-great book recommendations, and the author of this great blog) recommended John Corey Whaley's award-winning debut teen novel to me a few weeks ago.  She sold me with three things that are important to the book's protagonist, Cullen Witter: Sufjan Stevens, zombies, and the use of the word ass-hat (one of my all time favorite words in the world, by the way).  I loaded into onto my Kindle at once, and although it took me awhile to finish because of boring grad school stuff, I have to admit: This book is pretty damn good.

I knew I was going to love this book only a few pages in, when Cullen says this about himself: 

Being seventeen and bored in a small town, I like to pretend sometimes that I'm a pessimist.  This is the way it is and nothing can sway me from that.  Life sucks most of the time.  Everything is bullshit.  High school sucks.  You go to school, work for fifty years, then you die.  Only I can't seem to keep that up for too long before my natural urge to idealize goes into effect.  I can't seem to be a pessimist long enough to overlook the possibility of things being overwhelmingly good.

I'm not sure I've ever read anything that so perfectly describes the inside of the teenage brain.  This passage could have been written by me at the age of seventeen (not that I would have put it together in such a simple and eloquent way as Whaley).  Nothing is worse than the realization that you're not the cynic you think you are.  The world hurts a hell of a lot more when you're an idealist.

And this summer of Cullen's life hurts a whole lot.  Not long after some annoying bird expert claims to have seen the long-thought-extinct Lazarus woodpecker in the Witter's small Arkansas town, Cullen's smart and thoughtful little brother, Gabriel, goes missing.  Intercut with this story is that of a young Christian missionary, the missionary's impressionable college roommate, and the pain of a romance gone bad.  It's hard to see how these two separate stories are going to connect, but they come together in an incredibly poignant way in the end. 

Cullen and the people around him are what make this book.  Cullen is funny and sincere but because he wants to cut himself off from the horrors of the world around him, he often slips into a third-person voice that helps distance himself.  What could have seemed like a gimmick (particularly as Cullen often imagines the people around him becoming zombies at the same time) instead pays off wonderfully in the book's moving final paragraphs.  This novel also features one of my new favorite BFF characters, Lucas Cader.  Lucas Cader is the strongest of friends, charming and loyal, but with his own tragic backstory that only makes him that much more interesting.  And Cullen's mother is really well-written.  Mother characters in teen novels aren't always portrayed well, but Whaley gives Mrs. Witter a rich inner life of which we only catch brief but enlightening glimpses.

Where Things Come Back is a very rewarding book.  I've thought of it often since finishing it last week, about the strength of its brevity, its tricky narrative moves, and its warm view of teenagers in a small rural town.  Also, it has the best use of ass-hat I've yet encountered in literature.  I'm going to be throwing this one in with The Book Thief as a great teen read that should be experienced by all age groups. 

Jason-ed

Book Reviewed: Low Moon, by Jason

I've reviewed several of Jason's books on here before, so I won't go into all the reasons I'm obsessed with his graphic novels.  Just know this: I'm obsessd with Jason.  Even his books or stories that I don't love are still more interesting than a lot of things out there.  He knows how to tell a good story, and his art is always incredibly clever.  And in the best Jason stories, there's some really emotionally satisfying moments. 

I interlibrary-loaned Low Moon just because I was in the mood to read some short graphic novellas, and I hadn't read this one yet.  As usual, I finished it almost as soon as I picked it up (these things read really fast).  Low Moon collects five of Jason's shorter works: "Emily Says Hello," "Low Moon," "&," "Proto Film Noir," and "You Are Here."  Jason's work is sometimes too clever or ironic for its good, which is why "Emily Says Hello" and "Proto Film Noir," both of which are deeply weird, didn't quite work for me.  But the other three were engrossing and poignant in their own ways.  And in the case of "Low Moon," funny as hell. 

"Low Moon" is a Western in which people ride bicycles instead of horses, and instead of having shoot outs, sheriffs and bad guys duke it out on chess boards with life and death consequences.  Jason is clearly a major film buff (most of his best stories play with basic film concepts and build on image as if storyboarding an interesting shot), which pays off wonderfully in this particular piece.  "Low Moon" is a classic western, and it's not afraid to comment on its own ridiculousness.  If I introduce anyone to Jason anytime soon, I'm going to recommend "Low Moon" as a great place to start.  It's so funny and quirky and charming.  I loved it. 

I didn't love "&" or "You Are Here" quite as much as "Low Moon," but they were pretty good on their own, too.  "&" has a dark humor that undercuts the story in a way that actually gave me a nice surprise at the end, in which two intertwining stories finally come together.  It's a cute little piece.  "You Are Here," on the other hand, has a lot in common with one of my favorite Jason books, Hey, Wait..., which, for those of you who haven't read it, is an incredibly sad and strange look at grief and guilt.  "You Are Here" isn't quite as starkly beautiful as Hey, Wait..., but it's still a very human depiction of remorse and how we live (or don't) with our most banal choices. 

I really enjoyed Low Moon, and if I said it once, I'll say it a hundred times more.  You all need to go out and read Jason ASAP.  You won't regret it. 

Contemporary Noir Done Right

Book Reviewed: Drive, by James Sallis

There's a lot of things that can go wrong in contemporary noir, and I'm not talking about the plot of the stories.  I'm talking about the writing itself.  Lazy characterization (often reverting to type); cutesy, overly-stylized writing; and too much reliance on mood or tone can all prove fatal to today's noir.  It's easy for this to happen when contemporary authors try too hard to show their love for an popular old style.  For all these reasons, I've never been a particularly big noir fan.  Too often, the high-conceptness of it gets to be too much for me.  But man, has James Sallis proved me wrong in my belief that all contemporary noir is overreaching. 

Drive is a ridiculous book.  Ridiculous in its great writing.  Ridiculous in its artful narrative construction.  Ridiculous in its surprisingly deep incite into the protagonist's mind.  You've probably seen posters or trailers for the new film version of Drive, starring the always-welcome Ryan Gosling.  Well, forget about the movie.  The book is its own thing, and it's pretty damn cool. 

At just over 150 pages, Sallis gets straight to the nitty-gritty, following a bad night had by our main character, a movie-stunt/get-away driver named...well, Driver, obviously.  The book begins right in the thick of things, with the fallout of a double-cross.  From there, Sallis goes back and forth in time, giving us not only the full story of this botched job, but the story of Driver, too.  Driver is fascinating in the way Sallis portrays him.  The book is told almost completely in action.  We see all of Driver's actions, but we almost never get all the way inside his head.  It's a master study of the whole "show, don't tell" advice writers get drilled into their heads.  In fact, this may be the single best example of that advice that I've ever seen.  I'm insanely jealous of the way Sallis handles his writing.

Admittedly, I had a hard time following the plot, even though it's relayed so tightly.  For some reason, in all forms of media - film, books, theater - I have trouble dealing with action plots, especially ones that involve double-crossings and whatnot.  Plot is not my strong point.  Luckily, that hardly mattered this time around.  Would I probably have been just that much more in love with the book if I had known what was going on?  Yeah, probably.  But overall, it didn't matter much to me.  Because I was too in awe of the way Sallis sets up the chronological narrative.  The book weaves forward and backwards in time, so that some chapters set up Driver's tragic backstory, then move right back into the current plot.  It's handled extremely well, and without confusion.  Also, Sallis uses all the potboiler language of the classic noir, but he does it in such a way that it seems artful rather than cheesy. 

I really enjoyed Drive.  I am currently recommending it to every other person I know, although no one seems particularly interested (I blame the movie for this, although I am excited to see it when it comes out on DVD next week).  Seriously, people, read Drive.  It's a lot of fun, but there's also some real meat to it. 

The Art of Noveling

Book Reviewed: The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach 

It might be uncool to say now, but back in the day, I used to be a huge John Irving fan.  Irving's novels are self-contained worlds; all the people you could possibly need to spend time with were right there in front of you, with nice and neat story arcs tied up in 500 pages.  It's been a while since I read a thick, meaty contemporary novel like that.  I didn't realize how much I missed those kinds of books until I picked up Chad Harbach's beloved 2011 novel, The Art of Fielding.

Harbach's book got a lot of press when it dropped at the end of the summer, and I had a friend who read it and liked it a lot, so I knew it existed.  But it didn't really land on my radar until it began making every single best-of book list at the end of the year.  Every critic had the same thing to say about why they chose it: that it was a book full of great characters that a reader genuinely could care about.  Damn, I thought, I guess I'm gonna have to give this book a try.

Oh, this book is so good.  So very, very good.  At the fictional liberal arts institution of Westish College in Wisconsin, football/baseball player Mike Schwartz recruits Henry Skrimshander, a super-talented shortstop who never thought he'd go to college.  Schwartz helps shape Henry into a dutiful student and athlete, but he can't stop fate from intervening in the form of a throw gone wrong.  After said throw, Henry finds himself in a downward spiral that seems to pull everyone in: Schwartz, Henry's preternaturally calm roommate Owen, school president Guert Affenlight, and Guert's daughter, Pella.  As these characters make increasingly erratic and often self-destructive decisions, the book just pulls the reader in more and more.

I really enjoyed the experience of reading this book.  The characters are put together so well, and with such love, that you can't help but want the best for them.  Of course, this means everything bad that happens to them makes you want to throw the book across the room (which was really a problem, considering I was reading it on a Kindle).  When I was trying to decide if reading this book would be worth my time, my friend who had read it months earlier told me it was rewarding but required an incredible amount of empathy.  Man, was he right.  The final 100 pages or so began to feel like the sweetest, slowest torture possible.  I managed to finish this 500+ page book in four days because I couldn't stop at chapter breaks.  I obsessed over this book to the point that it began to make my stomach hurt some nights.  I adored Mike Schwartz so much that every time he showed up on the page, my palms sweated.

I don't think The Art of Fielding is a perfect book.  The last few chapters edge awfully close to over-sentimentality at times (although the book's final lines are well-earned and poignant), and the only female character - Pella - seemed awfully underwritten compared to her male counterparts.  But what the book does well - its strong writing, its amazing characters, its bittersweetness - is done so well that these issues barely register.  In some ways, this book encapsulates a certain kind of small, liberal-arts college experience so well that I could barely distinguish itfrom my own said experience.  How many times did I feel like Henry during my career at DePauw?  More times than I care to count.  This book is full of so many realistic, even painful, details that it makes up for some of the book's more fanciful plot points. 

I cannot recommend The Art of Fielding enough, especially for those of you who went to small Midwestern colleges or who are really passionate about something that might not come as naturally as you might have once imagined.  Yes, I just described myself.  That's how good this book is.  It's about my least favorite sport in the world, baseball, and I still managed to find myself in it.  I almost never feel this way about novels anymore.  God, I loved this book. 

Creepy But Slightly Overrated

Book Reviewed: Anna Dressed in Blood, by Kendare Blake

I got a Kindle from my parents for Christmas, and so far I love having it.  It's cheaper and easier for me to buy romances and new books, and my library has digital lending, which means I can now access library books on the go and carry them around in one place.  I will still be buying trade paperbacks and poetry in paper form, but the Kindle should do wonders for my reading habits, I think. 

This is all background to the fact that the first book I bought for my Kindle was a teen paranormal romance.  Kendare Blake's Anna Dressed in Blood made NPR's best-of-2011 young adult books list, and the book's description sounded right up my geeky alley.  Cas Lowood, a teenage ghost hunter, goes to Thunder Bay, Ontario, in pursuit of an infamous ghost with the creepy moniker of Anna Dressed in Blood.  Cas is cynical and avoids attachment, focusing only on his goal of one day going after the spirit that killed his father.  In the meantime, he travels all over North America, hunting down violent ghosts.  Basically, this book's set-up sounds like Supernatural fanfiction.  Which is exactly why it appealed to me.

However, when Cas gets to Thunder Bay, his plans don't quite work out.  First, he accidentally makes some real friends with the popular but loyal Carmel and dorky, lonely Thomas.  Then, Anna doesn't turn out to be what Cas expected.  Yes, she's a violent killer.  But that's only because of a complicated and tragic past that trapped her in her haunted house.  Cas eventually falls for and helps Anna, but when his own scary past catches up with him and his new friends, he struggles to figure out just what his new life of friendships and a false sense of security might mean.  Anna Dressed in Blood is the first part of what looks to be a longer series (the next book comes out sometime in 2012), so it's got a rushed ending that isn't wholly satisfying.  Also, while I couldn't help but like Cas, I had trouble with the character of Anna.  It's easy to see how their two lives would endear them to each other, but I'm not sure I quite believed the romantic angle in the second half of the book.  Same goes with the budding relationship between Thomas and Carmel.

Anna Dressed in Blood is not a great book, and I'm not exactly sure why it got so much end-of-the-year praise.  Despite that, it was still a fun read.  There are some genuinely terrifying moments in this novel, and Blake knows how to write creepy in a way most pure horror writers can't even manage.  (This might actually be one of the book's weaknesses: the horror stuff is so good that you can't help but wonder why the book wasn't geared more toward that genre).  I think the relationship between Cas and Anna has the potential to expand in more interesting ways in the later books, though, so I will probably follow the rest of the series as it goes along. 

Note: I am once again working at the library and if any paranormal-reading teens ask me for recommendations, I am throwing this one their way for sure. 

Bittersweet Family Tale

Book Reviewed:  The Family Fang, by Kevin Wilson

The last book I blogged about came by the recommendation of a friend.  My latest read was also recommended to me by a friend.  If there was an award for the person in my life with the best book advice, it's Amy.  (After all, she talked me into The Book Thief and turned me into a Captain Wentworth girl).  And she once again hit the nail on the head when she told me she thought I'd like Kevin Wilson's first novel, The Family Fang. 

The Family Fang is a story about family and art and how those things do or don't intersect.  Caleb and Camille Fang are famous performance artists who use chaos to create reactions that they deem "art."  They force their children, Annie (Child A) and Buster (Child B), to join them.  The book revolves around the now grown-up Annie and Buster, who still show irreparable damage from their years of being involved in horrifying art projects.  At the book's beginning, Annie is a somewhat famous actress whose reputation has begun to spiral out of control.  Meanwhile, Buster, a freelance journalist, has been shot in the face with a potato gun.  With no money to pay his medical bills, he moves back in with his parents, whose performance pieces have gotten less popular and more pathetic over time.  Eventually, Annie comes home to lick her wounds, too.  Then, just as Annie and Buster get used to their sad new lives, their parents disappear.  Are they dead, or is it just another one of their art projects?

Kevin Wilson somehow manages to skirt the fine line between tragedy and comedy, never straying too far into one side.  The flashback chapters show some of the performance pieces the Fang family took part in, and they are masterfully done.  I literally could not stop cringing through the flashbacks.  They make you feel impossibly bad for A and B.  The book's other chapters take turns in the third-person-narrated worlds of Annie And Buster.  I couldn't help but love the awkward and luckless Buster, although I do think Annie was a better-drawn and more complex character.  The book's resolution is extremely bittersweet, and I'm still not sure I'm on board with it (I'm talking about the penultimate chapter; I liked the last chapter a lot).  Without giving anything away, let's just say that I was surprised by how dark Wilson was willing to go with his portrayal of Caleb and Camille. 

Although I found the ending a little rushed, I really enjoyed The Family Fang.  It's funny, sad, and well-written, a perfect way to spend a long weekend. 

Right Book, Right Time

Book Reviewed:  The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker

Every once in a great while, a book swoops in and saves your life.  Okay, maybe it's not quite that dramatic.  But occasionally, a book does come along at just the right time and makes life marginally more bearable.  This is exactly what happened when my friend Evan lent me Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist last week.

I've been complaining a lot about contemporary poetry lately.  Here I am, studying the art and craft of poetry, and it's doing nothing for me.  I love writing poetry, and I love reading it even more.  But the second people start talking about contemporary poetry, I want to crawl into a hole and die.  It's such a loaded topic.  All these super-smart, artsy types constantly asking you what you read (a question I have grown to hate from the bottom of my soul), and then looking at you with disdain when they don't like your answer.  Poetry has suddenly become exhausting.  So a couple weeks ago, I came very close to throwing in the towel.  I forgot what it was that drew me to poetry in the first place.

Then Evan brought up Nicholson Baker one night and told me he thought The Anthologist would be just the thing.  It had been so long since I'd read for fun that I jumped at the novel at once.  Woohoo, contemporary fiction!  I was giddy with the idea (which, I realize now, is a sign of my own pathetic behavior earlier in the semester).  In a lot of ways, I had built hopes far too high for this book to satisfy.  Luckily, it started right out of the gate running on all cylinders, beating these ridiculous expectations.

I honestly could not have read a better book at a better time.  The Anthologist hit home in a way that was refreshing without being depressing, a rare balance to strike.  It's entertaining enough to be fun, smart enough to be enlightening.  The novel is told from the point of view of Paul Chowder, a mildly-successful free-verse poet.  Chowder has been trying to write an introduction to an anthology of rhyming poems, and he just can't do it.  Distracted by the end of his relationship with a woman he really loved, distracted by his own frustration over poetry, he just can't get his life together.  As the book goes on, and Chowder's spilled-out monologues about poetry become more and more discursive, it's hard to imagine it's ever going to get better for this poor bastard.  Of course, Baker knows what he's doing, and the ending hit all the right notes.

There are so many great moments in this book.  The discussions on what good poetry is, for starters.  The ghost of Theodore Roethke wandering down the street.  The way Chowder keeps injuring himself over and over again.  The lovely final sentences.  The unassuming quality of the prose itself. 

Paul Chowder isn't always likable, and it's easy to accuse him of trying too hard to revert to an old poetry world that can never be regained.  But I didn't care about any of this when I was reading the book.  I just want to read Chowder's thoughts on poets and poems for the rest of my life.  Make no mistake; this is a book best enjoyed by only the nerdiest lovers of traditional poetry out there (aka, me).  But it's also a novel about a man coming to terms with himself.  It's not all pretty phrases and well-planned meter.  Sometimes poetry and life are both about the messy stuff, about cutting your finger while slicing bread, about crying in the middle of a packed room. 

It's ridiculous to say that a Nicholson Baker novel made me believe in poetry again.  But we can't always pick the things that mean something to us.  When I was eight years old, an older cousin gave me Judy Blume's Superfudge and turned me into a reader.  Superfudge seemed like it was written for me and me only.  It's that feeling that made me a writer in the first place.  It's nice to have another book remind me of this seventeen years later.  Sometimes it just takes the right book, that and the right person to drop it into your hands. 

Adventures in Re-Reading: Frankenstein

Book Re-Reviewed: Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley

Because us first-year MFAs were the last people to sign up for classes in the Graduate English Department back in August, we got stuck with the leftovers.  I wasn't entirely sold on the class I got - British Romanticism and the Sciences of Life - but it wasn't the worst option either.  Overall, I'm glad I took it.  My professor is funny and smart, and I'm getting a taste of a literary history I know nothing about.  Unfortunately, old poetry and essays about the emergence of science as a legitimate field of study aren't exactly my thing.  Nevertheless, the reading for this class hasn't been all bad.  Best of all, we got to do Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a book I've always liked.

This is the third time I've read Frankenstein.  The first time was back in high school, and I loved it.  It was as angsty and full of guilt as any melancholic seventeen-year-old writer could want.  The second time was in college, in a modern European history survey class.  Now, here I was reading it again, this time to study its connection to science in the late-18th/early-19th centuries.  I fell in love with it all over again.  Frankenstein is a super-solid book, I'm happy to report.

If you've somehow managed to escape your various levels of education without once touching this book, here's the general plot: temperamental, snobby Victor Frankenstein goes to college, learns how to create life, builds a hideous monster, and then pays for his actions for the rest of his life.  One of the most remarkable aspects of Shelley's novel is the way she layers three narratives into such a short book.  The book begins with Walton, an explorer up near the North Pole, and his letters to his sister.  Walton finds a dying Victor Frankenstein and brings him aboard the ship.  Then, we get the narrative in the voice of Victor.  Finally, in the middle of the book, we spend a few chapters in the voice of the "monster."  The book has its faults, but the construction is ingenious.

Is Frankenstein full of massive implausibilities?  Yes.  Is it brimming with an almost ridiculous amount of emotional hysterics?  Yes.  But who cares.  It's a fun, fascinating read that says more about its time period than just about any other piece of Romanticism out there.  I highly recommend it. 

Turgenev vs. Tolstoy (or, the Dual That Never Happened)

Book Reviewed:  First Love, by Ivan Turgenev (Note: The copy I read does not include a translation credit, not even in the library records for the book.  I apologize for this oversight.)

When I find myself having conversations about Russian literature, I often meet people who claim they don't read much 19th-century Russian lit because the books are so long and complex.  To this, I always suggest that they go out and read some Ivan Turgenev.  Turgenev did not do big books.  Most of his work is made up of  stories, novellas, and short novels.  A couple of years ago, I read his most famous book, Fathers and Sons (which is incredible, by the way), and could not believe how much Turgenev managed to cram into those 200-some pages.  That particular novel manages to touch on some major themes about family and loyalty and lifestyle choices but does it with surprising brevity.  Obviously, this puts Turgenev in direct contrast to my favorite Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy.

Tolstoy is not a minimalist.  He's the literal God of his own work.  I have never known another writer so obsessed with controlling how his books are read.  I'm not even talking about the overtly philosophical sections his books often contain.  When I talk about his OCD over his own work, I mean to suggest that his worlds are so fully constructed that they allow very little readerly intervention.  In War and Peace, entire pages are devoted to describing a particular room.  His created worlds are so all-encompassing that they end up controlling the way you read the book.  This isn't to say that you can't analyze Tolstoy's novels while you read them.  In fact, that's about the only way you can approach them (although I will always argue that he's actually a lot of fun to read once you get used to his style).  But there's no negative space, not like the kind we often see in Dickens, another writer of big books (who always seems to know when to quit while he's ahead when it comes to description, I think). 

I think this is one of the reasons my brain starts to short out when I place Turgenev and Tolstoy next to each other in any given context.  They are just so different!  This extends to their personal lives, as well.  They were "friends" who constantly disagreed.  Tolstoy once even challenged Turgenev to a dual, only to end up taking it back.  It's hard to imagine that they ever managed to be in one room at the same time.  Where Tolstoy is all about control and filling all the imaginable spaces of his fiction, Turgenev relies an awful lot on the reader's ability to imagine the world the characters inhabit.

Last week, I read one of Turgenev's most famous novellas, First Love.  It's a fairly simple premise.  Vladimir Petrovich remembers his first love as a sixteen-year-old living in the countryside.  Stuck somewhere between childish emotions and adult desires, Vladimir ends up falling for the slightly older girl next door, Zinaida.  Zinaida is poor, tempestuous, and magnetic.  She has a variety of suitors constantly trying to get her attention.  Zinaida seems especially fond of Vladimir, although she ultimately sees him only as a child.  As the story continues, we get a revelation involving the actual love of Zinaida's life, then follow this revelation as it affects Vladimir over time.  It's a breezy read, but it has a lot going for it, especially in the final thirty pages, when things get particularly interesting.

Like he does in Fathers and Sons, Turgenev just barely sets his scenes, letting the character interactions take up all the figurative room.  And in First Love, he gives narrative control over to his protagonist, in whose first-person voice we see all the action.  It's as different from Tolstoy as you can get.

In the literary dual of Turgenev and Tolstoy, there is no clear winner.  Obviously, I am a Tolstoy fanatic.  But the things I hate about Tolstoy - his constant philosophizing, his obsession with specific family ideals - are the very things that Turgenev so artfully avoids.  If Tolstoy is the God who controls how his books are read, then he also acts as the ultimate judge of his worlds.  Turgenev never seems to judge his characters.  They just exist as they do on the page, which I appreciate.  Tolstoy is a better writer because of just how immersing his books are, but Turgenev gets points for allowing the reader to do his or her own thing with what the author chooses to give.

And in the end, it all comes down to what I love most about Russian novels.  In my praise for Tolstoy's Resurrection last winter, I mentioned that what made that book for me was its depiction of quiet, domestic moments.  Those small, seemingly unimportant scenes are what allow for the feelings of devastation Tolstoy's books always create in me.  Turgenev works in the exact same way.  He's an author who's at his best when he's concentrating on the little things people say, the small acts they commit for good or bad.  This is the genius of Russian literature, whether we're talking the hulking beasts of Tolstoy's oeuvre or the short one-offs of Turgenev: that they handle the big and small with equal attention, thereby creating reading experiences that never fail to absorb me. 

More Egan

Book Reviewed:  The Keep, by Jennifer Egan

After reading and admiring Jennifer Egan's award-winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, I decided it might be nice to read some of her other work.  Her previous book, The Keep, won a lot of critical acclaim when it hit shelves in 2006, and I thought the premise sounded especially promising.  Unfortunately, I think the book relies a little too heavily on the premise and lacks the depth of feeling involved in Good Squad as a whole. 

The Keep begins with thirty-something Danny arriving at a medieval-era castle somewhere in Eastern Europe.  Rootless and on the run, he's decided to go to the castle to help his cousin, Howie, turn it into an exclusive hotel.  As a teenager, Danny committed a cruel prank that separated him forever from Howie.  Now, as adults, they keep bumping into the past despite their attempts to avoid it at all cost.  These scenes at the castle are entrenched in gothic imagery and the supernatural.  There's a creepy and mystical old baroness who's trying to thwart the renovation.  There's a love triangle between Howie, his wife, and his assistant, Mick.  There's ghost stories and scary black pools and overly-idyllic villages. 

But this isn't the only story going on in this strange, meta novel.  We are told fairly quickly that the story of Danny and Howie is being told to us in first person by a prisoner taking a writing class.  This prisoner, Ray, has a crush on his teacher, Holly.  After the story of the castle and the story of the prison play out simultaneously in some unexpected ways, we get to see Holly's tragic backstory and get a glimpse at a world that might be more real than we imagined. 

This is a deeply weird book.  There's the layers of storytelling, layers that open the entire book up to themes of artifice and how we tell stories in order to comfort or absolve ourselves, with varying degrees of success.  As in the artful Good Squad, Egan does a nice job keeping all these plots up in the air.  Unfortunately, I had a hard time with this book.  I loved the first half, which seemed really inventive and had some amazing character and place details.  But I thought the second half dragged a bit, and I didn't care for the third section involving Holly at all.  The novel had been so careful in its earlier revelations that the last part just felt a little false to me in its confessional mode. 

When writers decide to tell different stories in a single book, there's always a risk that the reader will become so attached to one story that the others suffer in comparison. This is exactly what happened to me while reading The Keep.  I absolutely loved the castle stuff.  I dug the gothic influence and the creepiness factor of the castle itself.  And I thought the guilty, technology-obsessed Danny was the kind of bizarre and singular creation that only Egan could create.  But the parts involving Ray and Holly felt dull alongside this more interesting stuff.  I wanted the book to stay inside the world of Danny and Howie, and it didn't.  I felt like Egan set me up to be disappointed.  Needless to say, this is not a feeling I enjoy.

I thought The Keep was a cool book, and when I was into it, I was REALLY into it.  Unfortunately, it just couldn't hold my interest by the end.  Egan did such a great job stringing the disparate parts of the book together that she seemed to forget to ground the book in its best character bits.  It's fascinating to read this book and see the beginnings of the jumpy narrative style that would define A Visit from the Goon Squad.  It's even more interesting to see how much better Egan got in the four years between the two books. 

Potterphilia

Books Reviewed:  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, by J.K. Rowling AND Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, by J.K. Rowling

I came late to the Harry Potter world.  When I worked at a bookstore in high school, I experienced two midnight releases and still didn't understand why everyone was so obsessed with the series.  I couldn't fathom a reason why anyone, particularly people over the age of eleven, would care about a boy wizard and his strange, cutesy world. 

Of course, I would come to eat my own words.  During my freshman year of college, I lived in dorm full of Harry Potter nerds.  They loved the books and the series.  They loved the strange world in which Potter fans lived.  Finally, trying to see what all the hoopla was about, I watched the first four movies.  I ended up liking them so much that I decided to read the fifth book, then the sixth.  I went back and read the fourth, then got my copy of the seventh and final book on the day it was released, finishing it in a weekend.  I went back and read the third book as a college senior.  But somehow I never got around to going all the way back and reading the first two books.

Then the final movie came out last month.  I went to see it, and I couldn't believe that I had let my Potter-love lie dormant for so long.  How had I stopped thinking about this series all the time?  It's so much fun!  I decided it was time to read the first two books.  Before I knew it, I'd gobbled them up in less than a week.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone made me remember why I was a Potter fan in the first place: because of its world-building.  There are so many characters that it's a near-guarantee that any reader is going to find at least one they love or with whom they identify.  I'm not sure how well I can judge this book by itself, though, because I read it years after reading the later books.  Rowling is a certainly a capable writer, even if her prose is awfully flat at times.  But honestly, I'm willing to overlook this due to her excellent skills as the creator of an imaginary world.  The Harry Potter universe is so deep and wide that it's hard to believe it came from the mind of a single individual.  I loved this first book because it gave me a chance to see the beginnings of what would become a ridiculously complex place.  I enjoyed seeing Harry meet the Weasleys (oh Lordy, do I love the Weasleys), become friends with Hermione, and figure out that Severus Snape was the baddie.  Also, I'd forgotten how funny the books could be, especially in comparison to the later, abbreviated, more-angst-centered movies.

I didn't enjoy Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets quite as much as I enjoyed the first book, but that wasn't a huge surprise.  I don't think Chamber of Secrets ever really ranks as anyone's favorite Harry Potter book.  It just seems to lack something the other books have; I'm not quite sure what.  That being said, it was still a fun reading experience.  There's a lot more to the book than the admittedly bad movie version.  I am particularly sad that the ghost deathday party was cut from the film.

I love Harry Potter.  I don't care if that makes me uncool or whatever.  It's such a fun place to live inside for the hours you spend reading the books!  I cannot recommend enough that everyone avoid my mistake.  Stop making fun of Harry Potter and pick them up for yourselves.  It's totally worth it.


Notes:  Since I have Harry Potter on the brain, you can probably expect some other Harry Potter-themed blog posts in the coming months.  If you have any ideas for a Harry Potter topic, let me know!

There's a Reason This Book Won a Pulitzer

Book Reviewed: A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan

I believe that life is too short to read books you don't like.  If I start a book and it's falling flat for me, I stop reading it.  It's a great belief to have, and it's certainly saved me time for better, more interesting books.  But sometimes our deepest beliefs can fail us.  I finally picked up Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (this year's Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction) after months of putting it off.  This book came loaded with ridiculously good reviews, awards, and a strong word of mouth.  So when I found myself put off my the first 20 pages, I worried that it wasn't the book for me.  I sent a plea out on Facebook asking friends if it was worth continuing.  One of my writer/reader friends said she loved it and urged me to continue.  Thank God she did.  If she hadn't talked me into it, I might never have read this incredible novel.

A Visit from the Goon Squad lives and dies by its construction.  There are two main characters that ground the book - music producer Bennie Salazar and his assistant Sasha - but each chapter takes place in a different time and place, giving it all the feel of a short story collection.  When we meet Bennie, he's turned into a bit of a hack producer, ruining all the promise he seemed to have when he was younger.  He's failing with women, family, and his job.  He's not entirely unlikable, but he's not someone you necessarily want to be friends with, either.  Meanwhile, his assistant Sasha is also a mess.  She's a compulsive kleptomaniac who doesn't seem at all comfortable in her own skin.  In the first two chapters, I judged these characters as a little too quirky and strange for my taste.  Then the third chapter kicks into gear and this book really gets moving.

Goon Squad is separated into chapters that jump back and forth through time, settling on different people with connections that reach into the past (or in the case of one chapter told entirely through PowerPoint slides, the future).  We get to meet Bennie as a young man playing in a band in California, his friends already lost in their youth.  We hear their voices, and from their stories we get the life of Bennie's hero, a morally-corrupt producer, and that man's children.  Then we see Sasha through the eyes of her suicidal best friend in college, then as a teenager in Italy struggling with her past while being reunited with her uncle.  We even get to see Sasha's future children.  This book is bursting with different people at different time periods, but it never becomes too confusing or off-track.  Instead, it enriches the experience of meeting these characters.

The "goon" in the title refers to time, the enemy of Bennie and possibly the savior of Sasha.  A Visit from the Goon Squad is as postmodern as that phrase implies, but it's also a very beautiful book featuring very real people.  At first, the East Coastness of the book annoyed me, but as the stories spread out, this becomes a book about what it means to live in the modern, digitalized America of our time.

I've read a lot of books I've liked in the last year, often for a variety of reasons.  But I'm not sure any of them quite left me with my mouth hanging open in awe like this one did.  I can't even imagine having the talent to put something like this together the way Egan did.  It's not a book I'd necessarily recommend to just anyone because it can be a little off-putting at times and the characters are awfully frustrating people.  But if you're a reader looking for something completely new and rewarding in its tiniest connecting details, then this is the book for you. 

Good and Moody

Book Reviewed:  The River King, by Alice Hoffman

After falling in love with Alice Hoffman's latest book, The Red Garden, I decided to go back and read her older work.  It's been a hit or miss experience, but in general, I think I can consider myself a Hoffman fan now.  Last month, I got online and read summaries for all of Hoffman's books, then put all the ones I was interested in on hold through the library.  It's been a fun process so far.

At the top of that list was The River King, a novel published in 2000.  The book sounded moody, filled with a wide range of character types - the kind of Hoffman I like best.  I was dead-on in this guess.  This is a book that thrives on the dark, passionate moods Hoffman builds through language and setting.  The book is filled with so many descriptions of water and damp and thickness that you can't help but feel like you're trying to walk through mud while reading it.  It's an appropriate effect; after all, this is a book about a suspicious drowning.

The River King takes place at a prestigious Massachusetts boarding school located in Haddan, a town that's always clashed with the school's residents.  We meet townspeople and school people alike, and both are filled with the good and the bad.  At the school, we have Carlin, a swimmer who's trying to hide how poor she really is in the middle of a bunch of rich kids, and August Pierce, a struggling loner.  Once tragedy strikes these two, they begin to affect others around them, particularly new photography teacher Betsy and Haddan cop Abel.  A student is found drowned in the river, and while others expect suicide, Abel follows his hunches and believes something more dangerous is at play.  The story unfolds through the affects of Abel's investigation and Carlin's grief, both equally important at keeping the drowned student's ghost afloat - literally.

Like most of Hoffman's work, this book is touched by both everday magic and the supernatural.  Although her writing is a little too on-the-nose at times, Hoffman certainly knows how to create mood through lush descriptions of place.  Her characters aren't always super-deep, but their feelings and actions really punch me in the gut sometimes.  I really enjoyed this book, with its depth of feeling and evocative dankness.  I wasn't totally sold on the ending, which felt a little rushed, but I was happy to see where each character ended up.  Overall, a lot of fun.  Expect to see at least one or two more Hoffman books show up here in the next month.  I think I'm addicted to them!

Tricky

Book Reviewed:  Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman

After finishing Wuthering Heights, I decided I needed to read a book that I knew would be completely different.  Something with a lighter touch.  So obviously, I turned to my old favorite, Neil Gaiman.  I know what you're thinking.  Beth still hasn't read every Neil Gaiman novel out there?  Nope, I haven't.  But now I'm one step closer because I settled on Gaiman's Anansi Boys as an anecdote to Heathcliff and Catherine.

Like American Gods, Anansi Boys is about the gods that live among us in the real world.  This book focuses on the sons of Anansi, the African trickster god.  Fat Charlie, an extremely average guy living in London, finds out his estranged father has died in Florida, and when he flies there for the funeral, he finds out from an old neighbor that he has a brother he doesn't remember.  Fat Charlie (who isn't fat, just a little soft and easily embarrassed) ends up meeting this brother, Spider, and things begin to spin out of control.  Spider is everything Fat Charlie isn't - confident, charming, and with powers like their father.  Spider wrecks havoc on Fat Charlie's life, and when Fat Charlie tries to get rid of his newfound brother, things get even worse.  In the meantime, love is lost and won, a conniving businessman commits murder, and trickster stories are shared.  The book ends up being about a man, Fat Charlie, who learns to be his true self.

Anansi Boys is quite funny, particularly in the sections focusing on Grahame Coats, Charlie's horrible boss.  As always, Gaiman's writing is smooth and easy to read, with a few nice moments between characters.  Overall, though, I thought the book was lacking in, say, the emotional complexities of American Gods or Coraline.  I wanted more scenes between Fat Charlie and Spider, as I thought this book would be more about the brothers' relationship than it actually was.  I can't say this is a Gaiman novel I'll go back and happily reread, but it was a pleasant enough experience.  And it washed the taste of tortured love affairs right out of my mouth. 

Book Baggage (Oh, and Tortured Love Affairs)

Book Reviewed:  Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë

Sometimes, the baggage we bring to books ends up being more interesting or important than the books themselves.  I'm talking about all the extra stuff you bring into a reading experience - your personal life, your reasons for reading the book in the first place, other people's thoughts about the book.  And sometimes, its the baggage that makes you decide to read the book at all. 

This is what happened to me with Wuthering Heights.  Somehow I made it through four years of high school and four years of being an English major without once touching this classic novel.  I've known lots of people who've read it, and I've known people who either hate this book with every ounce of their being or love it without reason.  (I even knew a guy in college who said it was his favorite book.  Had I read the book at that time, I might have known better than to harbor a bit of a crush on him in my last weeks before graduation).  Wuthering Heights is one of those books that inspires great emotions in people, be they positive or negative.  I've heard close friends rant against it until red in the face.  But there are writers I respect who adore this book.  One of my favorite Anne Carson poems, the epic "Glass Essay," is largely about Emily Brontë and her only novel.  It's one of only a handful of classic books that has such an omnipresence in contemporary culture.


And yet, none of this was quite enough to make me read Wuthering Heights So what changed my mind?  Netflix.  I got a Netflix account and found it was full of PBS Masterpiece Theater series.  One was a 2009 BBC production of Wuthering Heights that starred Tom Hardy as Heathcliff.  "What the hell," I said to myself.  "I might as well at least know what the hubbub's about."  HOLY. CRAP.  Even though tons of people have told me how they feel about this story, not a single person mentioned that it was absolutely crazypants.  I finished the series by tweeting that I found it so insane, I was sure I would never read the book.  Flash forward to a few days later, when I absolutely cannot get Wuthering Heights out of my head.  Suddenly, I had to drop all of my other reading plans and read this book.  It became an obsession.


For those of you who don't know, Wuthering Heights is the story of the tormented love affair between Heathcliff, a foundling, and Catherine, the somewhat wild daughter of the respected Earnshaw family.  This is only a part of the story, though.  Rules of class dictate that Heathcliff and Catherine can never really be together, so they torture themselves and others over this great loss.  Catherine marries the overly-patient and wealthier Edgar Linton and eventually dies at a young age.  Years later, Heathcliff, still taking out the horrible deals given to him on others through elaborate revenge schemes, forces Catherine's daughter (also named Catherine) and his super-annoying son, Linton, to marry.  The narrator of the story is Mr. Lockwood, who meets this second generation of assholes at the book's start, but the one who tells most of the tale is Nelly Dean, a maid for the Earnshaw and Linton families.  There's a lot of hearsay going on this book, that's for sure.

Why do I call this story crazypants, you might ask?  Well, let's start with the fact that Catherine's ghost might just be haunting the moors and its occupants.  Then there's Heathcliff digging up Catherine's body decades after she has died.  There's Catherine's older brother, Hindley, who is the cause of much of the book's misery.  Hindley comes home after his father dies to take over the manor of Wuthering Heights and tortures Heathcliff, making him a servant.  Hindley's son, Hareton, then has the same injustice done to him by Heathcliff in revenge.  It's amazing the way these people scheme against each other! 

Every single character in this book is deeply unlikable.  Nelly Dean comes off as a tattle-tale, Edgar Linton as a pushover, Linton Heathcliff as a whiny bastard, and Catherine Earnshaw as a jealous, inconsiderate hussy.  I can't even begin to mention what a complete and total monster Heathcliff is.  The only character for whom I had any sympathy was Hareton Earnshaw, who doesn't realize he's been done any wrong but who also seems like the only one of these people capable of an honest emotion. 

Yet, despite hating all these people, I found I couldn't hate this book.  In fact, I couldn't stop reading it.  It's an all-consuming novel, that's for sure.  Heathcliff and Catherine may not be worthy of my love, but they definitely deserve each other.  Their tortured pleadings of love and loss over one another are some of the richest sentences of pain I've ever encountered.  In fact, this book has some really lovely prose at times, particularly the last sentence, which is a perfectly unsettling finale.  I have never in my life been so confused over my feelings for a book.  I could never, ever call it a favorite.  It's too strange and dark and twisted for me.  But you know what?  I'm glad I finally read it. 
 
 
Note:  For those of you who have read this book, what did you think?  And were any of you like me and thought that you would've liked to had a peak in on those years where Heathcliff, Hareton, and Joseph all lived alone together in the Heights?

Weird, But In a Good Way

Book Reviewed: Stranger Things Happen, by Kelly Link

Kelly Link is one of those writers I really like but almost never recommend to others.  Her work is too strange and requires a mind that likes puzzles and mysteries.  It's not just an expression to say that Kelly Link isn't for everyone.  So while I loved this book (her debut collection), I offer a caveat: You might not like it.  You might even hate it.  But if you're feeling adventurous and fully immerse yourself in Link's world, you'll be greatly rewarded.

Link's short stories blend elements of fairy tales and the supernatural with mundane human experiences.  The weird and the heartbreaking exist in perfect harmony with one another.  Loss and love stand right beside ghosts and gods.  It's a strange world, but it's almost always beautiful.  It helps that Link is a truly great writer.  Her prose is pitch-perfect, and she knows what to describe and what to leave to the reader's imagination.  It's hard to believe that Stranger Things Happen is her first book, as it is so well done.

Some of the stories here hit me harder than others, and I tended to like the stories with the strongest emotional underpinnings.  My favorites in this collection include the Neil Gaiman-esque "Flying Lessons," which feels like an unknown section from American Gods.  I also enjoyed "Louise's Ghost," which is one of the most bizarre and yet realistic pieces in the whole book, with a killer ending scene.  It's a story about the lifelong friendship between two women, but it's also about death and longing and not being the person you want to be.  It also features a small, hairy ghost that moves between cellos.  This is what you get in a Kelly Link book, folks.  My favorite story, though, is "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose," which is the first in the collection and probably one of the less known works from it.  In it, a dead man who can no longer remember his name writes letters to the wife whose name he also can't remember.  As he tries to piece together what has happened to him, he writes of the guilt and love he carries with him from their relationship.  It's really heartbreaking, and Link does a great job of getting right inside her lost narrator.

I enjoyed reading Stranger Things Happen.  Kelly Link has only written two short story collections for adults and one for teens, but I wish she'd release something new every year.  She's too good to be silent for too long. 

What Goes Unsaid...

Book Reviewed:  A Month in the Country, by J.L. Carr

Once again, my library-loving friend has led me to a great book.  J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country is a short, poetic novel about, well, a month in the country.  Tom Birkin, a World War I veteran, takes a job restoring a medieval wall painting in a northern England church in 1920.  Birkin is affected both physically and spiritually by the war, and the summer he spends in Oxgodby is perhaps the closest he has come to healing his many inner wounds.  He meets a fellow veteran, Moon, who is also doing his own uncovering job: looking for a body buried hundreds of years earlier near church grounds.  Birkin also forms relationships with the minister's wife, Alice Keach, and a young girl and her family.  These friendships, as well as the countryside, act as a kind of balm for his soul, even though he must leave the place behind in the end.

It's a very internal book, and it's as much about what is unsaid as is said.  What Birkin doesn't say to others mirrors the ways us readers have to fill in holes based on what Birkin does and doesn't tell us in his first-person narration.  I once had a lit professor who explained that what made William Wordsworth interesting wasn't what he said but what he left unsaid.  Wordsworth would get close to saying something in his writing, then back away from it, almost in fear of what he might find in his words.  Birkin's narration reminded me of this idea.  There are startling and devastating sentences to be found in the midst of some lovely language here, but there's also something in Birkin that seems just beyond our reach. He talks about the war, and yet there's so much he never says about it.  I think this is the most clever device Carr uses in his novel.  This is a book where you have to read between the lines, and what you find there isn't always as cozy as you'd like it to be. 

I think A Month in the Country is a lovely little book, although I admit I wasn't as attached to Birkin as I would have preferred.  However, I will gladly add it to my list of wonderful books written with a beautiful sense of language and narrative derring-do.

Some Books Sneak Up on You

Book Reviewed: I Am the Messenger, by Markus Zusak

When I was half-way through Markus Zusak's young adult novel, I Am the Messenger, I still couldn't decide how I felt about the book.  I have a lot of faith in Zusak because he wrote a book I truly love, The Book Thief, and because his books have a kind of brave honesty to which I'm attracted.  So even while I entertained doubts about the plot and the writing, I still had faith that things would turn out okay in the end.  And of course, I was right. 

I should have known to trust Zusak.  Like his earlier books, the writing style is pretty choppy and a little too self-conscious at times.  The first-person narrative keeps it from becoming annoying, though.  Ed Kennedy, the narrator of Messenger, seems like the kind of guy who might actually talk in short, repetitive sentences.  Ed's a nineteen-year-old cab driver who admits he hasn't amounted to much.  His self-esteem is low, but he deals with life in a humorous and clear-eyed way that keeps him from becoming completely inert.  In the novel's opening pages, Ed stops a bank robber while out with his three best friends - Richie, Marv, and Audrey (with whom he's also in love).  After his heroic act, Ed begins getting ace cards in the mail, each one carrying three messages.  After he accomplishes the necessary acts that the messages tell him to do, he gets another card until he ends up with tasks that become increasingly personal.

The plot of this book keeps you going even when things seem implausible.  You're as eager to find out who's behind the cards as Ed is.  At least I was.  I liked being inside Ed's head, and I wanted things to turn out well for him.  As Ed becomes attached to the people he helps in his ordered acts, I began to like them as well.  That's why the book's final hundred pages make such an impact.  When he receives a card that asks him to help those closest to him, I had my gut in my throat in the whole time.  Oh, how I wanted everyone to be okay in the end!

This is one of those books that sticks with you after you finish it.  I enjoyed reading the book - and true to Zusak's awesome powers over me, I cried a few times - but I wasn't prepared for the way certain images and scenes came to mind while I laid in bed that night.  All of Zusak's books pack a surprising emotional punch, but he's not playing with emotions like a lot of young adult writers.  Rather, he sticks to the basic building blocks of a good story.  His principle characters are people for whom you want good things and his plots are complex enough to keep you occupied but simple enough for the reader to add his own shades of meaning.  By sticking to these simple concepts, Zusak leaves lots of room for the reader to become attached to certain moments in the book.  While I do think he has a tendency to overwrite, he is more than capable of adding a simple poetry to certain images - an old woman swinging her legs in a chair, a reserved young man gripping his steering wheel as he cries, one proud father talking to another.  I read Zusak because he writes big books in which the smallest things count the most.  That's not an easy thing to do.

I Am the Messenger is a book I expect to come to mind every once in a while.  It really sneaks up on you, even when you aren't sure what to think while you're reading it. 


Note:  This book's protagonist is a nineteen-year-old, which is quite a bit older than most young adult novel protagonists.  It made me think about all those arguments about whether or not The Book Thief deserved to be classified as adult literary fiction rather than being published as a book for teens.  I think Zusak's writing style fits the young adult "mold" (even though I don't like using those kinds of terms), but the ideas his books present work for all age groups.  I don't think it's wrong to classify him as young adult novelist, but I do worry that such a title makes it harder for adult readers to find his work.  Each book he's written has been better than the one before it, so if his writing keeps up at this exponential rate, he might finally get the wider audience he deserves.  One of the best things about reading all of Zusak's books is that you can literally watch him grow into a stronger and stronger writer over time.  I cannot wait for his next one!

Cutesy Pie

Book Reviewed: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

The title of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society really bothers me.  I hate this title.  It's too long, too precious, and "potato" is a cover word that I associate with "boring."  When I started reading this book for my book club earlier this week, I thought maybe the title was just an unfortunate mistake and that I was going to like the book anyway.  Well, in the end, the cutesiness of the title infused too much of the book for me to like it.

Things started off well.  Society is written as a series of letters between the protagonist - London writer Juliet Ashton - and a variety of people a year after World War II.  Juliet ends up receiving a letter from a man named Dawsey Adams, a pig farmer on the island of Guernsey, located in the English Channel.  Dawsey mentions the title society to Juliet, and she soon becomes intrigued by the society and all its members.  She exchanges letters with society members and friends from home, all of them becoming connected through their stories of survival and reading. 

At first, this is all very interesting.  I had never heard of the German occupation of Guernsey throughout the war, and I was fascinated by this little-known bit of history.  (Also, there's a lot of talk of books and reading!) And at first, the characters are endearing.  But by the end, it all got very twee.  I can tolerate a pretty good deal of sentimentality and even sweetness in fiction, but there's a certain point where cuteness becomes toxic for my reading brain.  Even some of the trashiest romances I read have more substance than this.  I feel a little bad disliking this book, as so many people do love it.  Let's just say I am not the ideal audience for this kind of thing, and it might be a bit hard for me to discuss at book club.  There's a certain kind of preciousness in books like this - about friendship and love and the power of positivity - that I just can't take.

Finally, I should mention the one thing that bothered me about this book more than the sugary sweetness.  It's supposed to be made up of letters by lots of very different people.  Then why do they all have the EXACT SAME WRITING STYLE?!  Different characters use different phrases and whatnot, but they all seem to break up their paragraphs and sentences in the same manner.  Also, they are all awfully descriptive in the same way, a trait that I don't even share with my other writer friends, let alone with people from a variety of backgrounds and educational experiences.  As a writer, this style problem bothered me so much that it made it a little hard to enjoy the book at all.