The Paris Wife

I absolutely love Paris; I’ve only been there twice — both for short periods –  but I think it’s the most amazing city in the world.  And I’m slowly (as I read more of his work) becoming enamoured with Ernest Hemingway.  So Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife, which tells the story of Hadley Richardson, Hemingway’s first wife, whom he married in Chicago but moved with to Paris, was a pretty safe bet.

I hadn’t realized that Hemingway’s final work, A Moveable Feast (which I have not read), was a memoir that told of his time in Paris with Hadley and the generation of literary intellectuals hanging out there at the time — Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and others.  McLain, having read A Moveable Feast, has opted in her book to tell the other side of the story — Hadley’s side — from the first person, relying on correspondence, notes, and incredible amounts of research.  And as you read The Paris Wife, you can’t help but think that Hadley is writing it herself.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Hemingway and Hadley’s marriage didn’t last; most who have even a passing familiarity with Hemingway know that he had many wives (four) and an untold number of lovers outside of his marriages.  But at the end of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway notably said that he would have rather died than have fallen in love with anyone but Hadley.  He ruined their marriage, but it appears that when he looked back on his life, he realized that she was his one true love.

This story is so well-written that it leaves me deeply torn.  The first Hemingway book that I read was The Sun Also Rises, and only through reading The Paris Wife did I realize that Sun was based on actual events involving Hemingway, Hadley, and a group of friends who traveled to Pamplona together.  I don’t know how I would have felt if I had read them in the opposite order; had I read Sun reflecting on how Hemingway was characterizing events and his friends as characters, I might have thought entirely differently about that book.  As things stand, I have a deep admiration for Hemingway — both for his writing, and for what he accomplished; he was sort of like a method actor, but as a writer.  It seems that all of his stories are based on things that happened in his life, and he purposely put himself in those situations to live the events, thereby being better able to write about them.

And while that is an admirable feat, arguably requiring tremendous courage, you cannot help but start thinking that he was a world-class ***hole.  He deliberately sabotaged friendships and played one-upsmanship games with people who went out on a limb for him to help him along, both professionally and personally.  It’s hard to like him as a person, although it’s impossible not to be interested in him as a character.

Hadley, on the other hand, demonstrated such strength, devotion, and loyalty, that you cannot question that she is a heroine.  And I am happy to have learned that she subsequently remarried and lived a wonderful life with her second husband.

If Hemingway, Paris, the Jazz Age generation, or biographical material interest you, you should read this book.  It’s fantastic.

Ready Player Two

Our fearless leader Tim’s review of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One inspired me to add that one to the stack, and what a great add it was.  If Tim was Player One, I guess I’m Player Two.

If you’ve read anything at all about Cline’s book, you probably know that it takes place in the year 2044, in times where our society is a disaster.  We don’t get enough information from Cline to necessarily call it dystopian (a la Brave New World), but suffice it to say that despite advances in technology, times are tough and some significant sector of society is slumming it.

Our protagonist, Wade Watts, is one of those people who is slumming it.  He is an overweight social outcast who lives with some extended family and countless guests in the “stacks” — vertically stacked trailer homes — outside Oklahoma City.  But Wade’s escape from the horrors of day-to-day life, like many others, is to log in to the OASIS, a virtual world that allows users to create a virtual identity and live in a virtual world with virtual friends, virtual toys, and virtual joy and excitement.  Even though Watts is poor, he at least has a computer and the necessary equipment to log in to the OASIS (where he also attends high school virtually), which he does in his secret hideout inside a van at a nearby junkyard.

So far, so good, right?  Standard futuristic blah, blah, blah, right?  Well, this is where Cline takes his novel into a direction that, while not completely original or unexpected, is flawlessly executed.  The man who founded the company that created the OASIS, James Halliday, has passed away and in his will has disclosed that he’s hidden an “easter egg” somewhere in the Oasis, and that the user who can find the three virtual keys to pass through three virtual gates to access this easter egg will inherit his fortune (including the OASIS).  This sends the entire world into a tizzy as companies, teams of individuals, and independent “gunters” like Wade Watts, a/k/a “Parzival”, put aside their lives to embark on a quest for the easter egg.

To this reader there were two elements of Cline’s story that struck a chord.  The first, which might only resonate with me and others from my generation, was that Halliday was a child of the 1980′s, and so his clues and the tasks that users must accomplish to advance in their quest are all tied to the 1980′s.  Movies, tv, music, video games, etc.  So it was unavoidable for me to try to test my own skills as we went along.  I didn’t fare as well as I would have thought.

The second really cool thing about Cline’s book, and this would be equally valid for any reader regardless of how much you know or care about the 1980′s, was how Cline blurred the line between the real and virtual worlds.  As players’ avatars interact with other avatars, and as greed and hostility manifest themselves in the OASIS, it becomes clear that certain participants aren’t playing fair and are using their money and power in the real world to gain an advantage.  This includes monitoring real people’s behaviors, and eventually murder.  Alliances that are formed in the virtual world extend into the real world, and mystery and adventure ensue.

No spoilers here, other than to say that once the story got going, it was literally (meaning I mean it) a virtual (meaning I read it on my Nook) literary virtual-reality page turner.

The Terror of Living

No, the title of this post is not a teaser to lead you into a deep, moving essay I’m writing about the world we live in; it’s the title of Urban Waite’s debut novel.  The Terror of Living came recommended to me by Goodreads in the same slew of recommendations that offered up Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, a critically-acclaimed novella that I found rather disappointing.  So why would I listen to those recommendations again, you might ask?  Well, I’m all about giving second chances.

And Waite’s book isn’t bad.  It isn’t particularly special, but it’s not bad.  It’s a suspenseful crime thriller that takes place around Seattle and the Canadian border.  Phil Hunt is a man with a past who has been making his living smuggling drugs.  Bobby Drake is a smalltown deputy sheriff whose father was also a deputy sheriff who fell to the dark side.  Drake messes up a deal that Phil works on, and then a slew of rather stereotypical characters come into play:  “the lawyer” who faciliated the drug deal; Hunt’s friend and drug-smuggling boss Eddie; Driscoll, the experienced DEA agent; two nameless Vietnamese men trying to recover the drugs; Roy, one of Hunt’s friends from their stay in prison together; Hunt’s and Drake’s innocent wives; and Grady, the ruthless serial killer sent to find and kill Hunt.

Waite is a straight-shooter as a writer, not getting caught up in tricky prose or overworked language, and he is very good at one of my favorite things:  writing short chapters.  The book jumps from chapter to chapter, checking in on what’s happening with different characters, pretty much in real time relative to one another.  So there are lots of breaks, each of which represents a good stopping point to put the book down and know that when you pick it up again you won’t be in the middle of a specific scene.

This is a quick and easy read, and it’s not not good.  It’s just not a standout; there’s nothing here that is wholly original, and perhaps because I’ve never been to the Pacific Northwest, the storylines and backstories didn’t sink in with me in a way that moved me.  But if you like the thrill of the chase without being bogged down by deep symbolism, this might be right up your alley.

Train Dreams

I read a couple of shout-outs to Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams and was immediately intrigued.  Described as [paraphrasing here] an epic novel squeezed into a novella, with sprawling descriptions of the great Pacific Northwest and one man’s life among the loggers in the early twentieth century, etc., it sounded positively grand (and perhaps even Steinbeck-esque).  And as I began reading, Johnson’s style of prose instantly reminded me of Tony Earley, of whom I’m a huge fan, and whose Jim the Boy and The Blue Star are some of my favorite books.

However, not too long into the book, I realized a significant difference between Earley and Johnson — namely, that Earley’s storytelling grips you and brings you into the protagonist’s world in a way that creates a meaningful connection that moves you and leaves you desperately rooting for his success.  However, Johnson’s approach with his main character, Robert Grainier, is so distant and unemotional that I was dragged along wondering where I was going and why I was going there.  As Grainier returns home to find that his entire town had been burned to ash and his wife and daughter were nowhere to be found, the only tug at my heartstrings that I felt was due solely to my role as a husband and father, and can’t be attributed to Johnson’s description of the scene.  Grainier is a loner, and it’s almost like Johnson makes a conscious decision to distance him from the reader.

Johnson’s prose is truly beautiful, but the lack of any connection to his character left me disappointed; this is exacerbated by the lack of any real arc to the story of Grainier’s life.  It’s a sad, lonely tale, and the inability to feel any empathy for Granier or to believe that Granier sees any meaning in his life makes it a cold read.  This book is a quick read, and perhaps a second read (or another set of eyes) might surface more than I could get out of it.

The Whore of Akron

The Whore of Akron, by Scott Raab, is not for everybody.  Not because it’s not interesting or written well enough, but because the topics covered here won’t necessarily resonate with anyone who hasn’t suffered through the historically unfulfilled and unlucky life of a Cleveland sports fan.  Having grown up a couple miles west of Cleveland and having done my undergraduate work at CWRU in Cleveland, I know the story and the feeling all too well.

I left Cleveland in 1990, but I’ve carried my loyalty and passion for Cleveland sports with me ever since, including the self-loathing and “Why me?” attitude that accompanied watching my beloved Indians take a lead into the bottom of the ninth inning of the 1997 World Series against the Florida Marlins only to see one of the best closers in the game blow it and then witness the Tribe lose it in extra innings.  Cleveland has not won a sports title since 1964.  We’ve come oh so close, but haven’t sealed the deal.  And it’s been a painful journey.

Raab now lives in New Jersey, but he grew up in Cleveland and was actually at the NFL Championship Game that the Browns won in 1964.  In this book, he addresses the cult of Cleveland sports through the city’s experience with LeBron James.  And he does not pull any punches.  As a journalist who’s fortunate enough (or not) to be able to get media credentials to sporting events, and as a lifelong Cleveland fan, he got to come along for the seven-year ride LeBron had through Cleveland, starting with the Cavs winning the lottery and selecting the local superstar from Akron with the #1 overall pick in the 2003 NBA draft and then “culminating” (for lack of a better word) with “The Decision”, LeBron’s primetime special in the summer of 2010 in which he ended months of suspense by announcing that he was “taking his talents to South Beach”, gathering the world together to witness him driving the proverbial dagger through the collective hearts of Cleveland fans.

Excuse me — I started talking like Scott Raab for a second there.  But that’s what this book can do to you, particularly if you’re from Cleveland, or if you’re the type of sports fan who can empathize and appreciate the struggles the city has gone through.  Raab engages in a look back, re-examining some of the things LeBron did during his tenure in Cleveland and casting doubts upon LeBron’s motives all along the way, portraying him as a selfish, greedy, unsympathetic villain who never cared for or wanted to be in Cleveland in the first place.  And Raab uses the events that unfolded around and after The Decision, including LeBron’s first season with the Miami Heat, to corroborate the suspicions he raises.

This book is clearly an indictment of LeBron James, and no one should go into it expecting any sort of objectivity.  But if you’re in the mood for some scathing, claws-out, vilification, this is your book.

Inside Scientology

I’ve always been curious and perversely fascinated by Scientology; not in the sense that I want to join, but rather that I want to understand what exactly it is and how it came to be.  We’ve all heard stories about L. Ron Hubbard and how the religion he invented was actually the result of a lark stemming from a bar bet or something like that, where he succeeded in tricking people into buying into a theory that we’re all the spawn of aliens who landed in a volcano millions of years ago, etc.  Inside Scientology:  The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion, by Janet Reitman, is the result of years of painstaking research and analysis by the author in her attempt to publish the first-ever comprehensive history of Scientology.

Reitman’s book starts with a biography of Hubbard, the science fiction writer who invented Dianetics in the early 1950′s as an alternative to psychotherapy and then lost Dianetics through bankruptcy but re-emerged by repackaging his theories as Scientology.  Based on how his life is described by Reitman, how anyone believed anything Hubbard said or wrote is absolutely beyond me.

While he may have been a charismatic and engaging guy, he is portrayed as a pathological liar who never even came close to doing one tenth of the things he claimed to have done.  He told people he was a former explorer, researcher, war hero, sea captain, and a multitude of other glamorous titles, none of which were true.  But that didn’t stop people from buying into his theories of self-exploration and self-help.  After his health began to deteriorate, he secluded himself in a secret compound in California.  When he passed away in 1986, the organization was taken over by David Miscavige, by all accounts a less “crazy” but seemingly more ruthless leader, who seems to have focused far less on thinking of Scientology as a religion, but instead as a business.  And he appears to use and abuse his power to exercise unrelenting control over the Church and its members.

While this book is heralded as the first full journalistic history of Scientology and as an evenhanded account, even the most objective, evenhanded reading of it can’t mask the fact that Scientology seems to fit every stereotypical characteristic of a cult.  It is absolutely terrifying to read what people who’ve been indoctrinated into Scientology have gone through, and even more terrifying to think that sane people can be held captive the way that they are.

The Church of Scientology has got money coming out its eyeballs.  It was able to get itself classified by the IRS as a religious organization and thereby achieve tax exempt status (and the ability to maintain its books as confidential).  If you think you’ve felt pressured to tithe beyond your means by your church, you have no idea.  Individuals pay freakish amounts of money to be “audited”, something they must do to reach “Clear” status and advance along “The Bridge to Total Freedom”.

As members advance, more and more secrets of Scientology are revealed to them, and they apparently become even more eager to learn what’s behind the next level of advancement.  I would say that you can’t make this stuff up, but apparently you can, and apparently people will buy into it.  And all along the way, the Church of Scientology is just collecting that money and supposedly using it to further its mission to “clear the planet”.  But as you read this book, you see how that money is used for selfish, crazy purposes to satisfy the whims of Church leaders, and how the hierarchy of the Church fosters corruption and abuse of power.

There’s an entire chapter in the book dedicated to Tom Cruise, the most outspoken of the celebrities who’ve joined the Church of Scientology.  Celebrities have long been an avenue the Church has used to grow its appeal, and the things it does to court celebrities would blow your mind — complete with spending millions of dollars to renovate one of its compounds before Cruise’s first visit there.  The leaders who meet with Cruise fake their way through a bunch of stuff specifically to make it look like Scientology is perfect for Cruise, and they continue to cater to him outside of the normal protocols until he’s hooked.  Of course, when he reaches OT3 level and learns that the stuff about the aliens is actually for real, he freaks out and backs away.  But they get their hooks back into him and allegedly mastermind his divorce from Nicole Kidman.  It’s just bizarre — even more bizarre than you can imagine.

Scientology has reportedly used spies and secret operatives (including the largest domestic espionage case in history), fraud, frivolous litigation, and all sorts of other unscrupulous means to continue its growth, gain more power, and build more wealth.  This book explains it all through anecdotal evidence and data collected from current and past members.  Absolutely fascinating stuff.  A must read for anyone with any interest in American culture.  If you’d like a taste of what the book has to offer, check out Reitman’s original article for Rolling Stone that lead to this book.

The Visible Man

I really like Chuck Klosterman.  I like his essays (e.g., Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs), and I like his fiction (e.g., Downtown Owl).  Plus I get him mixed up in my mind with Chuck Close, a super cool artist.  So he’s got it going on in my book.  When I saw that he had published a new novel, The Visible Man, I pushed it straight to the front of the queue.

Those of you who follow my reviews probably know by now that I don’t like to work too hard when I read; I like great characters, great stories, and great prose, but I don’t like to make my brain burn extra calories trying to figure stuff out — give it to me straight, doc.  Which makes The Visible Man a dark horse for me, because Klosterman takes an unorthodox approach to telling this tale.  But it worked, even for me.

This story centers on two characters:  Victoria Vick, an Austin-based therapist (although not a doctor), and a patient, referred to as “Y___”, who seeks her out for treatment.  The reason I don’t know the patient’s name is that the story is told through correspondence and notes from Vicky, which she has ostensibly submitted to her publisher, and in which she protects the patient’s identity by giving him this “name”.  Y___ reaches out to Vicky for “treatment”, although it is clear from the get-go that he has every intention of setting the rules of engagement for their relationship, beginning with the demand that they meet via telephone.  And it is also clear from their earliest sessions that Y___ has a huge ego, to the point where it’s not clear why he’s seeking counseling in the first place.

Y___’s issue seems to be that he needs a confidential sounding board to tell his stories to — stories that he’s arrogant and proud of — and which in the hands of someone other than Klosterman might have turned this into some weird science-fiction novel.  See, Y___ comes from a background in military and scientific research, and a specific project on “cloaking” technology that he finished by himself after the project was shut down.  He’s come up with a technology for making himself appear invisible (by bending light around his body and other things that you and I wouldn’t understand, and which he makes clear to Vicky that she wouldn’t understand either).  And he’s been using this technology to spy on people, particularly when they are alone, to try to divine the essence of human personalities — who are we when no one is looking?

The existence of this technology and the way Y___ uses it become the focus of the counseling sessions, and eventually weave their way into the actual personal dynamic between Vicky and Y___.    I won’t spoil the story, but I’ll vouch for Klosterman’s uncanny ability to approach what makes people tick in interesting and unusual ways, and I’ll also vouch for the fact that you won’t put this book down once you pick it up.

City of Thieves

City of Thieves, by David Benioff, is the first book I acquired based solely on a “recommendation” from Goodreads.  And if this is any indication, I suspect there will be many more to come.

This is the most complete page-turner I’ve read in a long time.  It is entertaining, suspenseful, moving, sad, and funny, all at the same time.  The book opens with the author trying to learn more from his beloved grandparents about their history, knowing that they are Jewish immigrants who survived World War II in Europe.  When his grandfather gets our author alone, he begins to tell the story of his adventures during the Siege of Leningrad during WWII, and the remainder of the book is the tale he tells.  (I couldn’t help picturing the opening scene of The Princess Bride.)

The author’s grandfather, Lev, was a seventeen year-old living in Leningrad in a sprawling apartment complex during the Siege of Leningrad.  Lev’s father, a poet who had written some inflammatory material, had been taken away (never to be heard from again), and his mother and sister had fled the city; Lev stayed behind, feeling obliged to remain in the city he loved.  This was a time of fierce martial law, scarcity of food (residents had ration cards), and strict curfew.  Lev and his friends would see the light show resulting from bombings and anti-aircraft fire nightly, and one night they witnessed a paratrooper drifting from the sky toward their complex.  They were intrigued, and despite curfew, went to investigate.  The paratrooper was German and had apparently frozen to death in the sky; Lev and his friends searched the body and took what they could find from him, but as they were taking slugs of liquor from the dead man’s flask, Russian soldiers appeared.  As the youths tried to run back to their apartments, Lev was captured while saving his friend who had slipped and fallen.

The penalty for such a curfew violation was death, and Lev was certain that would be his fate.  He was taken to prison and put in a cell with Kolya, a talkative, handsome Russian soldier who had been accused of desertion.  The two are temporarily spared from execution by Colonel Grechko, whose beautiful daughter is to be married the following Saturday.  The colonel needs eggs to bake the wedding cake, and so he sends Lev and Kolya on a mission to find eggs.  If they can return with eggs in time, they will be released; if they do not, they will be found and killed.

The story follows the two as they scour Leningrad and surrounding areas on their quest; it is January, they’re on foot, and they have little in the way of supplies.  They are justifiably paranoid and fearful as they meet strange characters and live in constant peril, and they form a strong bond that makes you root for both of them like you’ve never rooted for anyone before.  In many ways this is a sort of buddy story/road trip novel, despite the lack of choice the two were given as to whether to be buddies or to take a road trip.

Like The Kite Runner, this was a story set in a foreign land and steeped in history that I sadly had little knowledge of or familiarity with; but like The Kite Runner, that only drew me in more.  I absolutely loved this book, and I give it two big thumbs up; if I had three thumbs, I’d give it three.

The Art of Fielding

I had seen a couple of unrelated but equally glowing blurbs about Chard Harbach’s debut novel, The Art of Fielding.  Since my Cleveland Indians had dropped out of the pennant race, I figured this might be a great way for me to get back into the baseball spirit.  This is a fantastic book — it’s well-written, it’s a great story, and it features an amazing cast of engaging characters (feel free to add more superlatives to that sentence if you like — they’re deserved).

The book opens with a focus on Henry Skrimshander, a scrawny but gifted young shortstop from somewhere in the Dakotahs.  Mike Schwartz, the brawny catcher and team captain for the Westish Harpooners, a Division III school from Wisconsin, happens to catch Henry’s post-game fielding practice ritual after a summer league game and sees enormous potential for Henry.  Schwartz somehow finagles a way for Henry to matriculate to Westish and join the baseball team.

While Henry and his deep-seated admiration for Aparicio Rodriquez, (a fictional shortstop for the St. Louis Cardinals who wrote a book entitled “The Art of Fielding”), are the initial centerpiece of the story, other characters weave in and out of center stage and draw the reader in.  There’s the aforementioned Mike Schwartz, an inspiring and motivational bear of a man who mentors Henry, Owen Dunne, Henry’s “gay mulatto roommate”, Guert Affenlight, the president of Westish who struggles with his sexuality, Pella Affenlight, Guert’s daughter who comes to visit after her marriage fails, and other members of the baseball team and campus fabric.  While Harbach shifts his focus from character to character, he never loses the reader and compels you to keep turning pages to see what might happen next for whomever is in your sights at that moment.

Each of our characters wrestles with one demon or another; most of these are part of that character’s fundamental make-up, with the exception of Henry, whose nebulous nemesis comes out of nowhere when the normally flawless fielder one day during a game mysteriously makes a wide throw to first base that sails past the firstbaseman into the dugout and hits Owen square in the face.  Henry is devastated, and begins for the first time to think while he fields and throws, undermining his natural skills.  Henry’s rise and fall and his struggles along the way form the backdrop for the others’ personal internal struggles.

The Art of Fielding features numerous common literary elements and themes — romance, conflict, redemption, etc. — but manages to incorporate them into a wonderfully compelling story without feeling unoriginal.  No vampires, no wizards, just a good read.

Moonwalking with Einstein

As I grow older, my memory seems to be eroding at an alarming rate.  And don’t think for one second that my wife hasn’t noticed this fact.  So when we were marauding through one of the closing Borders locations and she saw a book entitled Moonwalking with Einstein — The Art and Science of Remembering Everything at a bargain basement price, she marched right over to me and put it in my basket.

This book, by Joshua Foer, wasn’t exactly what I expected, but was nonetheless an enjoyable and pleasant surprise.  (Joshua Foer is brother to Jonathan Safran Foer and New Republic editor Franklin Foer – that last name seems to have some magical writing ability attached to it, no?) It’s a mix of journalism, scientific commentary, and memoir.  Foer is a freelance journalist who sort of accidentally stumbled onto some information about the “sport” of memory and subsequently secured an assignment for Slate to attend and write about the 2005 U.S. Memory Championships (yes, Virginia, such an event exists).  He met a fascinating cast of interesting characters at the event, and before he knew it he found himself caught up in the subculture of memory competition and began training to compete in the following year’s U.S. Memory Championships.

He wrote this book as he was training and being mentored by some of the folks he met in this quasi-secret society, and his story is a mix of research into the origins and historical significance of memory, the techniques used by competitors to memorize decks of playing cards, series of random digits, and poetry, some of the characters throughout past and present history who have either naturally or through the use of techniques shown incredible skill at remembering information, and his recounting of his own personal experiences.

As it turns out, they say that anyone can compete in memory competitions — you don’t have to be a savant or have a photographic memory (which many of the members of this subculture don’t believe actually exists).  There are a variety of techniques for memorizing data, which date back to ancient times.  The most popular (if that’s the right word) is the concept of the “memory palace” — the use of the brain’s ability to remember spacial and visual images as a tool to remember data and facts.  As you process data, you envision a physical location that you know by heart (your childhood home or the street you grew up on), and as data enters your mind, you place each piece of data along a path through that location with some sort of visual image that ties back to the data point.  Then when you are required to recite the data back, you do a tour through that location in your mind and see those images, in that order.  Bizarre, but apparently effective.

Other techniques for remembering other types of data include assigning people, places, or things to the numbers and suits of playing cards or assigning images to sets of digits.  It sounds like hard mental work, but these people are brilliant at it.  At present, at least two Europeans have demonstrated the ability to spend less than thirty seconds looking through a shuffled deck of playing cards and then recite them back in order (apparently the best of the best memory competitors seem to come from Europe).

This book is an easy read, and I would share more details here if I could remember them.  Sadly, by the time I recognized the importance of building a memory palace to remember all of the information in this book, I was too far along to start.  And I almost forgot,  you can read Foer’s cover story on competitive memory for The New York Times magazine here.

The Family Fang

My wife and I clearly have different tastes in literature.  It’s not a question of right or wrong or whose taste is better, they’re just different.  One clear point of differentiation is that she really likes sci-fi/fantasy/vampire stuff and has read every series I’ve ever heard of in those genres; I, on the other hand, have tried a few times and bailed on various attempts in those veins.  So naturally, when she recommended that I read The Family Fang, by Kevin Wilson, I was rather dismissive, assuming it was a vampire book.  When she explained that it wasn’t, I opted to give it a try.  Good move on my part.

As noted, The Family Fang is most certainly not about vampires; rather, it is about a family with the last name Fang who are performance artists (or at least that’s how the parents, Caleb and Camille, would describe themselves).  Caleb and his younger wife/former student Camille, have dedicated their lives to art — not conventional art, but rather creating provacative situations that elicit reactions from unsuspecting people.  They refer to them as “happenings”, and these events take plenty of planning and scheming and are sprung on the general public in shopping malls or other public gathering places.  When Caleb and Camille have children, they are determined to incorporate their children, Annie and Buster, into their act.

The book focuses on Annie and Buster (also known as “A” and “B”, references to the roles they play in the various happenings), through a series of flashbacks intermingled with current events.  Both of the children are reluctant to participate in the lifestyle dictated by their parents, but they do as they are told.  As they grow older and mature, the tension between their parents’ wants and needs and their own individual passions and desires seems to drive a rift in the family.  Annie goes on to become a successful actress (and somewhat of a head case), and Buster becomes a struggling writer.

When circumstances compel the two children to return home to Caleb and Camille, the divide between parents and children evidences itself in the most extreme fashion — Caleb and Camille step out one day but don’t return.  When a grisly crime scene is traced back to them with evidence that they may have been the victims of a roadside killer, Annie and Buster are initially convinced that it’s merely another event staged by their parents.  As the police struggle to solve the crime, Annie and Buster begin their own investigation based on the assumption that their parents are pulling the wool over the public’s eyes.  With pretty hilarious and entertaining results.

Big thumbs up for this book.  Well written, with unique characters and a page-turning story.  Whether you like vampires or not, I think you’ll like this one.

The Unnamed

I read Joshua Ferris’s first novel And Then We Came to the End (read my review), which interested me mostly because I work in the advertising industry (which was the arena for that novel).  I wasn’t blown away by the story, but I also didn’t not like it.  I was kind of satisfied but underwhelmed.

Well, when I read the description of his second novel, The Unnamed, I couldn’t turn myself away.  The Unnamed tells the story of Tim Farnsworth, a successful New York City trial attorney who lives in the suburbs with his wife and daughter.  Tim suffers from a disorder that no one — not one of the experts anywhere in the world — can diagnose or treat; when it hits him, he starts walking and cannot stop himself.  He seems to go in and out of remission, but when it hits, it turns his entire world upside down because he can’t predict when an episode will happen or where it will lead him.  He usually ends up waking up behind a gas station somewhere and calling his wife to have her come pick him up.

As someone who suffers from Restless Legs Sydrome (I swear it’s real), I immediately empathized with Tim.  Not that my condition leaves me naked and shivering next to a dumpster in New Jersey very often, but at least I can relate to having your body do things that are completely outside of your control.  And with him, there wasn’t an easy prescription remedy to control it, and no one could discern whether it was mental, physiological, or both.  It got to the point where they were chaining him to his bed (I can’t imagine the agony of being restrained like that).

When our story starts, Tim’s condition had seemed to have gone away, but it returns, and he and his wife and daughter struggle to figure out how best to manage it as it not only disrupts his domestic life, but also his professional life.  As the story progresses, Ferris throws in a couple of red herrings here and there that I was disappointed weren’t resolved, but still I was riveted to the page trying to figure out what would happen to Tim.  The title of the book could refer to Tim’s undiagnosable condition, or it could refer to his alter ego, who emerges partway through the book as the enemy that Tim feels he’s facing.

Tim eventually embarks on a solo journey to try to beat The Unnamed, and much of the second half of the book tries to get inside his head as he struggles with reality and ownership of his actions.  I’ll admit that I wasn’t thrilled with the way the story resolved itself, but I also didn’t throw my Nook against the wall.  Ferris is a good writer, with a good idea for stories; I just wish I could relate a little better to how he ends them.

The Old Man and the Sea

I have to admit, I am absolutely dumbfounded at how little Hemingway I’ve read.  I read The Sun Also Rises a couple years ago (a copy I had purchased on my honeymoon in 1996 but had never bothered to read until recently) and felt like I got it; I figured out what all the fuss was about and why Hemingway was so highly-regarded.  Why I didn’t immediately line up the rest of his works in the queue is a mystery to me.  Hemingway’s ability to evoke imagery in the reader’s mind is unparalleled in my experience.

After some fits and starts and failures, beginning some books that didn’t resonate with me at all, I decided to go back to Hemingway, whose The Old Man and the Sea was perfect for my short attention span.  Not to mention that it won the Pulitzer in 1952 and was a driving force behind Hemingway’s receipt of the Nobel Prize.

The story tracks our hero, Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who has gone 84 days without catching anything.  He concocts a plan to go farther out to sea to try to catch the big one; when he actually catches a huge marlin, it drags his little boat even farther out to sea over the course of two days.  Hemingway tells the story of the epic battle between the two with such precision and with such detail to the specific tools Santiago uses and actions he takes that you can’t help but believe Hemingway himself was a fisherman in the Gulf of Mexico for thirty years.

This story is absolutely spellbinding, even if I wasn’t familiar with some of the nautical and angling terminology.  It was simply breathtaking to follow Santiago as his mental and physical limits are stretched beyond anything I’ll ever experience.  And the metaphor reflected by what happens to Santiago and the marlin is so moving and heartbreaking that I see it in every sad tale I’ve heard since, whether real or fictional.

You can bet your skiff that I’ll be lining up some more Hemingway soon.  I’ve decided that he will be the fallback whenever I hit a dry spell, because I know I can count on him.

That Book by Nabokov

After seeing that a survey of NY Times book critics had named Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, as the best work of fiction of the past 100 years, and knowing that I had heard Nabokov mentioned in song and that a band I like called Clare Quilty was named after a character in the book, how could I resist?  And that sort of sums up our narrator, Humbert Humbert, who is obsessed with young girls (whom he refers to as “nymphets”).

Nabokov is a good writer –  that many critics can’t be wrong.  However, the most striking thing about this novel is not Nabokov’s writing ability, but rather that the book was first published in 1955 in France and then in 1958 in the U.S.  The central point of the story is Humbert Humbert’s fixation on young girls, and eventually on one in particular, Dolores Haze (whom he nicknames “Lolita”).  While that concept may not seem particularly shocking today, I suspect it was as controversial as just about anything you could come up with during that era.  What a brave, gutsy venture by Nabokov.

Without giving the details of the story away (as if there’s anyone other than me who hadn’t read this before), suffice it to say that the things our narrator does to get close to Lolita are astounding.  And even more astounding is that as he rejiggers his entire life to be near her, the reader feels perversely sympathetic to him — he is our protagonist.  Yet stepping back, objectively, he is a disgusting human being who should be entitled to no feelings from us other than disgust, hatred, and anger.  And I imagine that is the beauty of the book and the reason the critics swoon over it — that Nabokov can essentially trick the reader into having feelings for this monster.

I honestly had a little bit of a struggle tracking the storyline here, knowing where our characters were and where they were going, but it didn’t really bother me.  I was turning pages as fast as I could to see where things were going.  And not — I repeat NOT — because I was excited to read some filthy pedophilic erotica, but rather because I was absolutely fascinated by this character (Humbert Humbert, not Lolita).  And the interesting thing to me is that there isn’t any “filth” in this book.  There’s conceptual filth, but not literal filth — there are no sex scenes per se, although conjugal relations are talked about — and so none of the words themselves are “dirty.”  And as I said before, it’s amazing how wrapped up you can get in such offensive subject matter without being offended, because of Nabokov’s gift for telling the tale through the eyes of our narrator.

I personally wouldn’t call this the best work of fiction of the last 100 years, but hey — I’m not a qualified critic.  I will say, though, that I feel a great sense of value and reward as I check the box on having read this one.

Update:  When we posted this, we didn’t know that Lolita was published on this date in 1958 nor did we know that it was “first book since Gone with the Wind to sell 100,000 copies in the first three weeks of publication.”

The Leisure Seeker

Fancying myself quite a seeker of leisure, I couldn’t possibly pass up a book entitled The Leisure Seeker.  When you couple that title with the font used on the cover (which I’m a total sucker for), it was a done deal.

Written by Michael Zadoorian, this is a fascinating road novel that follows an elderly couple, John and Ella Robina, as they travel from Detroit to Disneyland via Route 66 in their old camper, called “The Leisure Seeker.”  That snapshot in and of itself might not sound that compelling, but the situation is a little more complicated:  John is senile and suffering from dementia, and Ella has late-stage cancer and a plethora of other illnesses.  Knowing that they may be nearing the end, John and Ella sneak off without telling their two grown children or their doctors, who they knew wouldn’t have let them go.

The story is told by Ella, and above anything else (including being classified as a “road novel”), this is a love story.  Not a mushy young love story, but a story about a love that has been going strong for sixty-plus years.  John is losing it at a rapid rate — often not remembering Ella’s name, where they are, or where they’re going — but he can drive and still has a valid driver’s license.  Ella is in almost constant pain and is severely overweight, and her narrative brings the reader into her world of pill-popping, never knowing what her body will be capable of accomplishing, and dealing with the frustration of not knowing at any given moment whether her husband might wander off onto the freeway somewhere.  But in spite of their troubles and ailments, it becomes clear that their love is a force, a bond, that goes without saying.  There is no question about it.  Even when they argue, you never think for one second that their partnership is in jeopardy or that it ever was.  It’s like gravity — unseen, not talked about, but always holding them in place.

As you might expect, John and Ella encounter their fair share of trials and tribulations as they trek across the country.  Health problems, strange individuals, a countless number of Route 66 Diners (all with James Dean and Marilyn Monroe decorations).  But they soldier on, stopping at different campgrounds to set up for the night, drinking cheap homemade cocktails, cheap wine, or cheap beer while they sit outside the Leisure Seeker projecting slide shows on a sheet to look back at their lives.  When they reach California, a peace comes over them — a sense of accomplishment that puts things into perspective for them (or for Ella at least).

This book is an easy read.  Zadoorian isn’t fancy with his language, there aren’t multiple storylines running at once, and you’re never challenged to understand where you are in the narrative.  That style lets the story itself come to the forefront, and it’s a good one.

Next

Next, by James Hynes, follows an arc that’s been used before — it’s told from our narrator’s viewpoint over the course of one day.  But don’t let that fool you into thinking this story is garden-variety in any way, shape, or form.

Our protagonist’s name is Kevin Quinn, and he’s in a place in his life where he’s just not sure what he should do next.  He doesn’t feel that he’s accomplished what he wants to or what he’s capable of, professionally and romantically, and is contemplating making a big change.  On the day in question, he flies from Ann Arbor, Michigan , to Austin, Texas, for a job interview.  He does this without telling his live-in girlfriend (who’s out of town).  He’s also not sure what he will do if he actually gets the job.  But he clearly wants to challenge himself and his status quo, at least in his mind.

Kevin’s journey takes place shortly after a terrorist attack in Scotland in which a man named Kevin Quinn blew up a train station.  Paranoia about a terrorist attack, coupled with Kevin’s fear of flying, put him on edge during his flight, although he’s quite distracted by the pretty young woman next to him on the plane.

He arrives in Austin several hours early for the interview, so he decides to prowl the city to look for the woman who sat next to him on the plane.  As he behaves like a tenth-grader with a crush, he flashes back often to give details of some of the formative moments of his life back in Michigan.  I personally enjoyed not only the flashbacks to Ann Arbor, but also his activities in Austin as he epitomizes the hopeless, hapless buffoon trying to get lucky.  Thoroughly enjoyable and relatable.

Then, as you’ll note from any other review you read of this book, the final 50 pages of the story take you to a place that you have probably never put yourself in before.  I won’t give any spoilers, but the last part of this book might just blow your mind.  Big ups to Hynes for being able to tell the last part of this story in such a compelling and downright terrifying way.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

What can I say that I haven’t said before?  As an engineering major who never had to take an English class in college, who then went straight to law school where all of my reading time was spent on cases and legal treatises (I’m doing you a favor by not posting reviews of any of those), I missed out on a lot of stuff that everyone else read.  And so it is that I just read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

First published in the 1890′s, The Picture of Dorian Gray was the only novel published by Wilde, who was quite a dandy (as that word is often used today) Irish playwright and poet.  Wilde’s wild life has been the subject of much historical and literary commentary over the years, and so I won’t get into that, focusing instead on the story itself.

The title character of the story is a handsome young man that we are introduced to as the subject of a portrait being painted by Basil Hallward.  When  Hallward’s friend Lord Henry Wotton joins the mix and the three of them engage in conversation, the reader immediately recognizes three drastically different worldviews emerging.  Gray appears to be an innocent, naive, and impressionable youngster, Hallward a cautious, introverted conservative, and Lord Henry a flamboyant, opinionated soapbox philosopher.  Their discussion makes an immediate impact on Dorian Gray, who is deeply influenced by Lord Henry’s take on life, and the reader can instantly see the beginning of Gray’s transformation into a superficial, self-centered egotist (is that redundant?) who is focused solely on beauty, aesthetics, and art for art’s sake.  As part of this transformation, Gray realizes that his beauty will not last forever and begins to lament his fate, making a wish that he could retain his looks.

For those of you who don’t know (and I don’t even think I can call this a spoiler), when the portrait is finished Gray takes it home and begins to notice that the painting is changing and evolving while he himself is not.  Gray locks the painting away in an unused room in his estate so that his secret will be safe, and things seem to be set for him, right?  Well, not so fast.  As the story progresses, Gray begins to see the impact that his wish and his new worldview are having on those around him (including the woman he falls in love with), and his confidence and strength begin to wither.  One can guess where things will end up, and I’ll leave it to you to do so (or to read the story).

My critical commentary on the story really focuses on two specific elements:  Wilde’s use of dialogue to make social and philosophical commentary, and Wilde’s transgression into nowhere in the middle of the book.  As to the first, while I was completely enthralled with the conversation taking place in the beginning of the book — just completely floored by the depth of the statements made primarily by Lord Henry, dozens of which could each serve as the subject for a Master’s Thesis — it was also difficult to suspend disbelief while I read.  Did people really talk like that in the 1890′s?  Could someone seriously say that stuff extemporaneously?  Wow.

With regard to the second, there is literally (using that term literally) a huge chunk in the middle of the book that the reader could skip without losing anything; in this section Gray becomes a “collector” of beautiful things, and Wilde spends page after page describing the various objects and artifacts that Gray collects.  While I can understand the point of bolstering the character’s positioning as a lover of beauty, the rambling descriptions became tiresome.  If the story were made into a sitcom and the viewer didn’t have a DVR, that part is where I’d tell you to go ahead and use the bathroom or head to the kitchen to grab a snack — you won’t miss anything.

All in all though, I can see why this book has earned its position as an icon in the literary world.  Wilde is an incredible writer, and even though my understanding is that many of the theories espoused by Lord Henry in the book aren’t original to Wilde, the author’s ability to place them into dialogue/context is superb.  And Dorian Gray’s character is symbolic in so many ways that the reader cannot help but reflect on his meaning.

Elliot Allagash

Elliot Allagash by Simon Rich is an enjoyable, lighthearted read.  Rich has written for the Harvard Lampoon and more recently for Saturday Night Live, so I think that’s what you would expect.

The book is narrated by Seymour Herson, an unpopular kid at a not-so-illustrious private school in Manhattan.  The title character is an obscenely rich sociopath that Seymour befriends in Eighth Grade; Elliot has been kicked out of more schools than anyone can count, and this school appears to be a last resort for him.  They become friends solely because Elliot wants to test his own skills (and money) to see if he can make Seymour popular.

Hijincks and shenanigans ensue as Elliot concocts scheme after scheme, rarely revealing details to Seymour, instead just commanding Seymour to go along with whatever Elliot says.  Elliot uses his father’s wealth and connections, as well as his limo driver/jack of all trades “James” to lie, cheat, and buy Seymour’s way into the popular kids’ circle.

As Seymour’s star rises, though, he begins to question some of the collateral damage caused by Elliot’s plans, and tension mounts between them.  Suffice it to say that you don’t want to get on the bad side of anyone who can trick an entire school into liking the unpopular kid.

There aren’t any deep life lessons to be garnered from these pages, but the story is an easy and entertaining read.  I would rank How I Paid for College by Marc Acito as my favorite of these schoolyard coming-of-age comedies that I’ve read as an adult, but this one is no slouch either.

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Parker.  Not only are they three women who’ve never been in my kitchen, they are also three notable female authors that I’ve never read.  As a chapter in my ongoing quest to try to read many of the classics that the cool kids probably read in high school or college, I figured I’d investigate these three.  First stop, Sylvia Plath.

Plath herself is regarded as a tragic heroine, having found herself in a failing marriage to another poet, with two children, in a foreign country, struggling with depression and (I think) borderline insanity at times, eventually taking her own life in 1963.

The Bell Jar is her semiautobiographical novel about a young writer who battles depression and insanity while in college.  The term “the bell jar” is used by Plath in the book to describe the feeling of madness, as if a glass bell jar is constantly hovering over you, sometimes completely surrounding you and stifling you.  Critical note:  this reminded me of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Bauby’s absolutely spellbinding and emotionally riveting story of his life after suffering a massive stroke that left him fully functional mentally, but physically unable to move anything except one eyelid, circumstances he likened to a butterfly in a diving bell, unable to interact with the outside world.  Second critical note:  everyone should read Bauby’s book; if it doesn’t move you, you aren’t human.

Now that I’ve started down the path, I suppose I’ll continue to draw parallels between The Bell Jar and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  The most significant common thread to me is that both books are fundamentally legitimate.  Legitimate in the sense that the authors actually went through the circumstances described in their works, and so they both speak from a place that most of us have never been and will never be.  So, unlike fictionalized accounts of strange events, or fantastical tellings of difficult situations, as you read these works, you know that the authors aren’t making it up.  And that gives their writing so much more credibility and leads their stories to resonate with the reader so much more than they would if they were told from the third person by someone who hadn’t experienced these things.

With Bauby’s book, this is pretty easy to understand, as each of us can imagine — or more properly, can’t possibly imagine — what it would be like to be trapped in your body with no ability to move, but with full recognition of your surroundings, full use of your brain, full recall of your memories and experiences, etc.  Plath’s situation is more complicated to me, because plenty of writers have written stories told from the perspective of a “crazy person”.  But Plath is able to tell her story and describe the emotional rollercoaster, feelings of paranoia, and skewed perspectives of a person who is losing it from the perspective of a person who was truly losing it.  And so going in to the book, you can’t help but lend a much deeper sense of meaning to what she says.  It’s not a psychiatrist trying to discern what’s going on inside the mind of an unstable person — it’s an unstable person with a gift for prose describing it directly.

The story that takes place in The Bell Jar is not, in my opinion, in and of itself, a particularly ingenious tale.  While the story of a young woman from the Boston area interning in NYC for a summer and then finding herself up against writer’s block when she returns home and eventually being admitted to an asylum isn’t necessarily your everyday run-of-the-mill plotline, it’s also not as clever or unique as some other masterworks.  However, what you know about Plath, and the knowledge that she is really talking about herself and her own feelings pushes this to another level.  In other words, if you read this in a vacuum (i.e., without knowing anything about Plath’s backstory), you’d probably give it a B, if only based on her simple but engaging style of prose.  But when you know the whole story, you understand why this book has earned its place in history.

Tropic of Cancer

I was bored one day and decided to stockpile a bunch of “classics” in my Nook’s elibrary, one of which was Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.  I had heard of it, knew it was well-known for one reason or another, but didn’t know much about it beyond that when I decided to start reading it.  Had I known more about it, I might have been a bit intimidated or [gulp] afraid to give it a go, as much of the commentary on it would place it (in my mind) beside works by other authors that I’ve never had the wherewithal to even attempt (Joyce, Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace to name a few).  Thankfully my ignorance was a blessing and I forged ahead.

I’ve often criticized authors that I believe “overwrite” — showing off with adjectives and metaphor until they beat each and every scene to death and lose sight of what’s actually happening.  If Miller weren’t so ridiculously good at this, I would accuse him of the same.  But he is that good.

Tropic of Cancer is set in Paris, my favorite city in the world — that is a great way to start off on my good side.  However, this story doesn’t follow a traditional narrative arc; rather — and this is what would have scared the bejesus out of me had I known it — Miller writes with a very stream-of-consciousness style that pays more attention to the narrator’s thoughts and observations than to linking elements of the storyline together.  As Miller tells the “story” of his struggles as a writer living in Paris around 1930, which involves a rotating cast of ancillary characters and particular places in Paris, you are completely mesmerized by Miller’s ability to put down on paper such deep thoughts.  I was positively spellbound at his gift for language.

Mind you, Miller’s gift for language involves some fairly racy language.  This novel was first published in Paris in 1934 but wasn’t published in the U.S. until the 1960′s, as it was the subject of obscenity trials and the like, because Miller uses plenty of “bad words.”  Many of these words have become so commonplace in today’s vernacular that they might not raise an eyebrow, but from what I gather, he was quite the trendsetter in establishing authors’ First Amendment rights.  A further qualification — while Miller uses some terms that would be offensive in many circumstances, they are not the focus of the book; this is not a book about anatomy or sex, but rather about his life and thoughts in Paris at the time, many of which involved anatomy and sex.

Speaking of beating scenes to death, the thought of an author using four full pages to describe an “epiphany” would cause me to start preparing the slings and arrows.  But here, Miller does just that in such a descriptive and meaningful fashion that I actually tried to read the entire passage to my wife while she was in the midst of reading another book.  That didn’t go over so well, but my point is that I was so moved by Miller’s writing that I couldn’t contain myself.  I won’t ruin the surprise for those of you who haven’t read the book — I trust that you will know it when you get to it (I think it’s the crux of the book).  For those of you who’ve read and remember the book, it’s the scene when Miller goes to Miss Hamilton’s brothel with a young Hindu accomplice and reaches a new understanding about the meaning of life.

This book may not be for everybody, but I loved it.