Baby Got Books

If a friend recommended a book that she described in her email as “a thriller translated from Danish, the story has broad psychological and moral themes” - would you be racing out to the bookstore? Probably not, but after my friend could not stop talking about this book - I decided to give it a go. And I’m so happy that I did. The Exception by Christian Jungersen is one of the best books I have recently read.

This book, a bestseller in Europe, is a fascinating study of human nature. The story is set in a non-profit organization that studies and disseminates information on genocide. This organization is only staffed by 5 employees and when a couple of them receive a death threat - the dynamics within their little office quickly spiral downhill.

Their first thought is that one of the war criminals that they have been tracking down is threatening them but through the irrationality of human nature, they quickly turn on each other. Each chapter is told from the viewpoint of one of the employees which allows the reader to see how the same incident or situation can be interpreted completely differently by each of the characters within the novel.

The 4 women who are central to the book all have their own personal histories and tragedies. One was bullied as a child, one has a debilitating arthritic disease, one was taken hostage in Africa while working for an aid organization and the last one had serious relationship issues. These personal histories all play a large part in how they react to the death threats and how they start to become suspicious of each other and end up forming factions within their own organization.

What is so ironic about their deteriorating relationship is that these are women that study the psychology of genocide and what causes rational people to commit murder and atrocious crimes; yet, they end up demonstrating many of the same behaviors which they study. They use their subject knowledge to further their own suspicions rather than taking a step back and becoming aware that their actions mirror many of the abhorrent behaviors during genocide.

The unraveling of who sent the death threats takes many twists and turns and the author leaves you in suspense until the very end and even then does not positively solve the mystery for you.

I also admired the way that Jungersen used his setting to educate the reader about genocide. I learned so much about the various genocides that have occurred during the 20th century as well as the psychological studies about group think and behaviors in these situations. There were a few studies described that I already knew about such as the Stanford Prison Experiment in which college students volunteered for a study and 1/2 are prisoners and 1/2 are guards.  Within days the prisoners became passive, depressed, and despairing while the guards became agressive, callous and hostile. There were no significant personality differences between the 2 groups at the beginning of the experiment but it demonstrated that people act according to the roles given to them by external forces.  There were many other experiments and studies that Jungersen described that I found fascinating.

The Exception was educational, thought provoking, entertaining, and a real page-turner. And it accomplishes all this even though it is set in Denmark and translated into English. Kudos to Jungersen - not an easy feat.

I backed up the small town criminal losers in Arkansas with Anthony Neil Smith’s Yellow Medicine - a novel that treads similar territory.  Yellow Medicine is a much bleaker read though.   The book’s cover accurately sends the message that within the cover desolation, loneliness, and despair will reign.  Think maybe Fargo without Frances McDormand.

Billy Lafitte is a cop exiled from the Gulf Coast of Mississippi to the tundra of rural Minnesota for a second (and last) chance. Lafitte was asked to leave the Gulfport PD for making up his own brand of justice following Katrina.

I messed with the wrong people…In the wake of the storm surge, plenty of officers were glad to rat me out…I was strung up as an example of the “good” police filtering their own ranks to protect and serve…A scapegoat, a whipping boy, a martyr.

The Great White North leaves little to occupy a  wayward cop, other than heavy drinking, bouts of depression, the occasional shakedown of small-time hoods, and, of course, psychobilly music.  Like the novel Arkansas, boredom, lack of opportunity, and desperation lead to low-level crime for some.  The driving force of Yellow Medicine though is the havoc visited upon the bucolic Yellow Medicine County by outside forces.  In this case, a foreign crime syndicate with an eye towards terrorism comes to town.  Things get ugly fast.

Yellow Medicine is a good read for those that like their cops hard-boiled, their action bloody, their environments grim and unforgiving, and their justice merciless, if ambiguous.  Or something like that. If this describes you, leave me a note in the comments, and I’ll send you a promo copy of the book.  First come, first served.

It dawned on me recently that I might be the only person in America over the age of fifteen who hasn’t read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.   Sure, I know the names Scout, and Atticus Finch, and even Boo Radley (who lent his name to a great British band of the 1990’s).  But I hadn’t read the book, and I hadn’t seen the movie.  But we had a copy on our bookshelf, and my wife recently re-read it and seemed to enjoy it.  So I decided to give it a shot.

It is absolutely a coincidence that I had just finished Toney Earley’s Jim the Boy, also a book that centered on a young southerner during the Great Depression.  If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect that’s my new favorite sub-genre.  But it really was a coincidence.  Not to say, though, that as I read To Kill a Mockingbird, Jim the Boy wasn’t clearly in the front of my mind, and that I couldn’t help but look for similarities and differences between the two.  And overall, while both are great books, I can’t say that there’s a whole lot of similarity between them; Lee’s and Earley’s writing styles are very different, the books were written forty-some years apart, and the stories they tell are drastically different.  Certain themes are definitely present in both: racism, rural poverty, and other blights that haunted this country at that time.  And both mention “haints”, a word that I had never seen or heard before and had to look up (it basically means a ghost).

But while Jim the Boy is simply a captivating and engaging tale of one year in one boy’s life, To Kill a Mockingbird is really a deeper story about how these negative elements manifested themselves in the South at that time.  I have to admit that I almost gave up on this book because the first half of it was pretty uneventful.  I’m not a particularly patient reader, and Lee certainly takes her sweet time setting the stage for the characters and events that will take place in the second half of the book.  But I persevered, and I’m glad I did.

By the way, going back to my first sentence above, I’m not going to tell you anything about what happens in this book, because I’m assuming you already know.

It seems appropriate that Shaft posted about Tony Earley’s Jim the Boy on Monday.  Tony Earley writes about changing times in the small town South.  Many of us in the South can relate to the characters in Earley’s work based upon our parents’ or grandparents’ experiences and stories.  It’s nostalgic writing about a romanticized, pastoral South.  John Brandon’s Arkansas is the flip side of that coin.

The characters in Arkansas are from small towns and they are going nowhere.  They have no opportunities, they have poor educations, they are broke, but mostly they are just bored.  Boredom, poverty, and a lack of opportunity are often recipes for crime and drugs. Arkansas tells the story of two likeable-ish losers who stumble into a life of lower-tier criminality because they don’t have anything better to do.  Things go well for the pair, they are set up with a good situation with with cover as employees at an Arkansas State Park, with free accomodations. One even lands a girlfriend.  Of course, crime doesn’t pay, and a freak incident leads to the wheels coming off their simple life of hopes and dreams.

Brandon lays out the construction of a mid-level crime syndicate in such detail that I feel, should my current employment situation not pan out, that I have sufficient information to start my own.  How the author came to acquire this kind of knowledge, I can’t say.  It’s the question that I’d ask were I to see him read anytime soon.  The author is from the Florida Panhandle, so his descriptions of small town boredom and desperation are pretty spot on.

I came to read Arkansas after seeing Brandon read 1 1/2 times locally.  The 1/2 occured when Brandon was part of a McSweeney’s event at Criminal Records/Aurora Coffee.  Unfortunately, I had to bail just as Brandon began his reading.  A few months later, Brandon was back in town at Wordsmiths, and I was able to stick around.  I am fairly confident that I would not have read Arkansas had I not seen the author read.  Attention publishers:  the system works - send us your authors!

I ought to just bite the bullet and sign up for McSweeney’s Book Release Club - 10 hard cover books/$100.  It’s not like they put out crappy books.

After reading Dr. J’s review of Tony Earley’s The Blue Star, I decided to investigate Mr. Earley’s work.  My inquiry revealed that Jim the Boy came before The Blue Star, so I thought I’d start with it.  Quasi-spoiler alert:  You can bet the farm I’ll be checking out The Blue Star forthwith.

The book tells the story of Jim Glass, a ten year-old boy living during the Great Depression in rural Aliceville, North Carolina.  The story spans about a year in his life and tells of his fears, desires, curiousities, motivations, and other feelings as he begins a new school year with children from the mysterious Lynn’s Mountain (sort of the other side of the tracks), lives life with his mother and three uncles (his father passed away a week before Jim was born), and explores some people and places that are completely new to him.  Earley’s ability to write with simplicity but with such depth, particularly as he goes inside the mind of a ten year-old boy and tells the story in the third-person, is flat-out remarkable.  Sample quotes from the book, to give you a feel for his writing style:

He leaned over so that the warm wind whistling in through the open window blew directly into his face.  When he closed one eye, the black line along the edge of the state highway disappeared into the front fender of the truck, as if the tire inside were coiling it up like a rope.  When he stuck his head out of the window and looked back, he saw the line unrolling neatly behind them, marking the way they had come.  They would be able to find their way home.

and

The oak tree he stood beneath seemed to mark the exact center of the empty fields; the blue bowl of the sky balanced directly above it, which made the place seem important, even though nothing in the landscape, save the tree itself, suggested import.

and

[Jim] had heard every story his mother and uncles had to tell about his father so many times that over the years his father had become less vivid.  It was as if each story was a favorite shirt that had been worn and washed and hung in the sun so often that its fabric, while soft and smooth and comfortable, was faded to where its color was only a shadow of what it had once been.

and

He tugged at his beard as if pulling on it opened a door that let his thoughts out.

I could go on and on, but I won’t — I’ll let you see for yourself by reading the book.  I loved this book.  And I’ll confess that this book doesn’t have a clear defined ending.  But unlike some other books which frustrate me because they don’t have a true denouement, where everything gets wrapped up in a neat little package at the end except for the questions that are supposed to remain open, this book doesn’t fall short in any way, either.  Jim turns eleven, and it is clear that many more thoughts and adventures will occupy him in the future, and I absolutely want to be there for them.

(You can read Tim’s review of Jim the Boy and The Blue Star here: ed.)

With the idea of reading more short stories in mind as a goal for 2008, I was happy to see Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan come through the mail slot.  Once I read the author’s bio, the book jumped to the top of my reading list.  Akpan was born in Nigeria, studied in the US, became a Jesuit priest, and then got an MFA from the University of Michigan.  He works as a Parish priest in Africa.  (I attended a Jesuit school is the attraction.)

The stories contained in Say You’re One of Them are not the predictable morality tales that you might expect from an author whose day job is being a priest.  These are dark tales of people on the edge of existence living in extreme conditions.  Adding to the desperation, the stories are all told from the point of view of children.  Many of the stories center around religious or tribal conflicts that have long ago abandoned rationale behavior.  This story collection will keep you up nights.

The book opens with the story An Ex-Mas Feast, a harrowing tale of a family living in extreme poverty.   The style of the story and the hard realities of the son reminded me of the excellent novel African Psycho by Alain Mabankou. (You can read An Ex-Mas Feast at The New Yorker.)

The stories in this collection are gripping and imediate.  Even a usually ill-advised second person narrative completely sucks the reader in within pages.  Two of the stories are novella length and are almost cruel in taking so long to reach their resolution.  The stories take place throughout Africa, highlighting that the horrors portrayed are more widespread than we’d care to think.  For those of from the US, there is even a handy map on the inside cover so that we can locate where the stories are taking place.

I highly recommend this amazing collection of stories.

• The book/author’s official web site

One of the items on my 2008 reading agenda was to read more short story collections.  Jim Shepard’s collection, the National Book Award-winning Like You’d Understand, Anyway seemed like a good bet.

Like You’d Understand, Anyway is a stunning achievement and is unlike any short story collection that I have ever read.  Each of the stories is set in a very specific time and place, like Colonial Australia, a Soyuz space capsule, an Ancient Greek battle, Revolutionary Paris, a high school football field, Chernobyl, etc.   The stories’ settings are incredibly well detailed.  The amount of research that must have gone into this collection is staggering.

The grapplers on the cover are a metaphor for Shepard’s stories that feature men (with the exception of a female Cosmonaut) wrestling with themselves, responsibility, history, and the expectations of others.  The stories also tend to be action driven with little of the navel gazing that derails some short stories.  This is an excellent collection for people that don’t like to read short stories - and, of course, for those that do.

I have bought three copies of this book to date.  The first two were bought as gifts for other people, and the third, finally, was for me.  It’s entirely possible that I’ll buy another copy of the book for future gifts.  Pick up a copy of two for yourself.

So, you’re looking for something different to read this summer.  Have I got the book for you.  Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow is simply the best epic poem about lycanthropes that you’ll read this year.

Come back! What?  You’re not a fan of werewolf stories or long poems?  Generally, neither am I.  On the poetry front, Barlow’s verse is not rhymed or metered.  It’s not Beowulf.  It certainly doesn’t have the formal constraints that Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions rigidly imposed on its self.  Instead the free verse feels stripped away of everything that’s not central to advancing the story in a timely manner.  The brakes have been removed from the narrative.

The story revolves around Anthony, a down on his luck schlub who gets a job in L.A. as a county dog catcher.  We are introduced to rival packs of werewolves around the L.A. area.  Some gangs are criminals; some gangs are white collar businessman led by a lawyer.  I suspect that Barlow is trying to tell us something. The fighting within gangs and between the rival gangs can be fairly graphic and bloody.

Sharp Teeth is not simply a horror novel/poem.   It’s also a book about modern relationships, urban life, the single-mindedness of enterprises both legal and illegal, and survival in the modern age.  At its heart, Sharp Teeth also tells the love story of Anthony and the woman/werewolf sent to keep an eye on him.

Anthony in love is unlikely

in its grace,

like a drunk with a magic trick.

There’s no reason it should work

but it does.

Like Anthony in love, Sharp Teeth just works.

An aside: While reading the novel, I went to see the L.A. punk band X at the Variety Playhouse (30th Anniversary tour?! Yikes!).  One of the songs that they played was their classic The Hungry Wolf.  The very next day, I began a chapter that had a line from the lyrics as an introduction.  I love when things like that happen.  I’m just telling you this story so I have an excuse to add the song to this post.  Check it out.  The vibe in the song is similar to the mood of the novel.  Says me.

The Hungry Wolf - X

Links of distinction:

• The author reads an excerpt with cool animation and spooky music
• Barlow is interviewed at The Onion A/V Club
• The author talks music in Largehearted Boy’s Book Notes
• The San Francisco Chronicle reviews Sharp Teeth
• as does the Washington Post
• Omnivoracious interview the author in verse

A friend recommended Consequences by Penelope Lively with such enthusiasm when she was about ten pages into it that I had to pick it up immediately. I read The Photograph last year and thoroughly enjoyed it.

The theme of the novel is formulaic: fate and consequences control our destinies. However, the formula is deftly handled by Lively.

The novel focuses on the lives of three women: Lorna, her daughter Molly, and Molly’s daughter Ruth. The book opens with Lorna sitting on a park bench crying after an argument with her mother. She catches the eye of a young artist named Matt who is at the park sketching ducks for a wood engraving he has been commissioned to produce. They end up blissfully married and forever thankful for the commission, the argument, and the park bench. Lorna is a young bride with a small daughter living with her husband in a cottage nestled in the English countryside when World War II breaks out.

Not much more can be said about the plot without spoilers. As with most books focused on fate every event leads to a chain reaction of other events right up through the last page.

I’ve read some reviews of the book since finishing it and have been very surprised to find some rather harsh criticism of the pace of the story (too fast), the development of the characters (or lack thereof), and the stilted dialogue. I feel as if I read a different book. Granted, packing 3 generations of women and their families into 258 pages makes for a pace that never lets up. Herman Wouk she is not. On the other hand, though, do we need every detail of what was eaten and worn and thought to grasp the story and the feeling of the time? Either the answer is no or I am far more intuitive than I imagined.

As for character development, I finished the book over a week ago as of this writing and still miss the characters. They are well-drawn, warm, easy-to-relate-to characters.

The dialogue may not be as natural as one might like, but it makes a point and pulls pieces of the story together to highlight the events that move the characters through the story. I had no issue with the dialogue at all.

Maybe I missed something, but I thoroughly enjoyed the book and look forward to reading more by Penelope Lively.

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet rounds out my impromptu Women and Science Trilogy. (The other two books were Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances and Samantha Hunt’s The Invention of Everything Else.) Someone somewhere has to get these three women on a panel discussion about science and literature.  I’d go.

It was mandatory that I pick up Oh Pure and Radiant Heart immediately upon finishing Millet’s excellent How the Dead Dream.  (With apologies to George W. Bush: I’ve read two Millets!)  The cover blurb on the cover of my edition says, ” a brilliant, madcap, poetic, fact-spiked, and penetrating novel (think Twain, Vonnegut, Murakami, and DeLillo).”  That’s pretty accurate.  I’d also add Thomas Pynchon to the mix.

Oh Pure and radiant Heart begins with a great premise.  Following the detonation of the first nuclear bomb in the desert of New Mexico, three of the leading physicists involved in the Manhattan Project (Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard) find themselves in modern Sante Fe befriended by a local librarian named Ann. Millet doesn’t explain how the men came to be there - they just are.  Ann quickly comes to believe that the men are who they say they are.  Her husband thinks that they are convincing but are either deeply deluded or are con men.  Throughout the novel, people must choose whether to accept the scientists’ claim (or not) as an article of faith.  The scientists themselves are not interested in sci-fi time-machine theories for their sudden appearance .  As Szilard notes:

I like H.G. Wells as much as the next guy, but please.  We are men of science.

Ann helps the scientists in their quest to discover the purpose for their appearance int he 21st century.  The search leads the group to visit the Los Alamos and Nevada Test Site nuclear facilities, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and ultimately to Washington, D.C.  The journey becomes increasingly as the novel progresses.

One of the things that Millet does exceedingly well in this novel is breathe life into the physicists by equipping them fully developed unique personalities.  These are no mere cardboard cut-outs for the author to drape her themes from.   Szilard is a self-important know it all who quickly adapts to our time, taking instantly to a laptops and cell phones.  He even quotes rapper Ice Cube at one point.  Enrico Fermi, on the other hand, is a bit of an Eeyore.  He is hopelessly lost in our world, and guilt-ridden about his involvement in the Manhattan Project.  Metaphysically adrift, Fermi laments:

I have lost confidence in the validity of my judgment.  With science, he said, — one can explain everything except oneself.

It is Oppenheimer who steals the show.  He is a dashing figure in European suits, French cigarettes, and a porkpie hat.  And he is a genius.  After watching the detonation of the bomb, Oppenheimer quotes from the Bhagavad Gita:

If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one. Now I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

I may be wrong, but I don’t know that scientists talk that way much anymore.  For that matter, it would be interesting to find any government spokesperson quoting from an Eastern religious text. The novel notes that Oppenheimer also liked to give his projects lofty names.  For example, he called the first atomic bomb test site “Trinity”.

Wait a minute, “Trinity”?  And there are three scientists.  Surely she doesn’t go there?  Oh, yes she does.  Religion and science are clearly central themes in the novel, but not necessarily in the way that one might think.  It is science, after all, that is responsible for enabling men to become “destroyer of worlds”. Religion doesn’t get a pass either though.  Eventually the scientists are joined by armed religious zealots that want to co-opt the time travelers’ message of peace for their own ends.  The tension between science and religion is palpable in the book, and both have some answering to do.

Early in the novel, the scientists read their own (and each other’s) biographies, world history of the intervening years, and the latest in scientific developments.  Coming to grips with their role in world history fuels their journey and drives them toward what they feel that they must do to make amends.  However, the trio were under no disillusionment in the 1940’s that the bomb, if developed, would not be used.

Oppenheimer says: That a man, a group, or institution should want to employ a nuclear weapon, should desire its employement is difficult for a thoughtful person to credit, thought Oppenheimer. And yet weapons are full of desire, shaking with it, They are instruments for the expression of longing.

and

Millet tells us: One day, when Oppenheimer was on a boat full of world-renowned physicists, he was what would happen if the boat were to sink. “It wouldn’t do any permanent good,” he said.

Yet they persevered, if for no other reason than to beat the Nazis.  Throughout the book, Millet also interjects snippets of the history of atomic weapon development.  Clearly she did a remarkable amount of homework to write the book.  If you’re not careful, as they used to say on Fat Albert, you might learn something before its done.

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart is not a perfect novel, but I loved it anyway.  Millet’s prose often made me stop cold in admiration.  More than once an incredible sentence would redeem pages that seemed to be going nowhere.  The first draft of this post contained about 10 more quotations from the book and was twice as long.  Let’s just say that I am very enthusiastic about the book.  Some may be put off by the length, and there are sections that drag here and there.  If you don’t find the subject matter of interest, it may be a slog.  That said, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart is a novel that was almost tailor made for my enjoyment.  I could go on and on.  Pick it up if you are a like-minded reader.

Interesting Side Note: When I began writing this review, the NYT ran an interesting story about the phyicists in the current U.S. Congress.  There are three of them.  Freak-y.

Additional reading: If the subject of nuclear weapons is of interest to you, I highly recommend Richard Rhodes’ Pulitzer-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb.  After reading Millet’s novel, I feel the need to pick up the Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, which also won the Pulitzer.

One more quote from the book: “Love of knowledge can draw on its credit indefinitely…In love and knowledge there are two ostensibly virtuous quantities, so love of knowledge is ironclad.”

I was tipped off to Joe Meno’s Hairstyles of the Damned by Tim when my “to-read” pile was down to the felt and I needed something to take with me on a trip. Knowing that I’m some kind of punk at heart, the cover certainly made it look like a match. And judging by the general description of the book, which in my mind likened it to King Dork and others of its ilk, I was willing to invest myself in this guy — all 270 pages of it.

The book is told in the first person by Brian Oswald, and tells of the stretch between Halloween of his Junior year in high school (in 1990) and Halloween of his Senior year (in, uhm, 1991). Brian lived on the south side of Chicago, in a predominantly Irish Catholic area, and was by all accounts (including this one) your stereotypical dork. He was somewhat of an outcast, although it was never altogether clear to me whether that was voluntary or was the lot that life threw him without any say in the matter. Regardless, he recounts the events of the year in question by talking about his weird friends, his weird family, and the strange characters who populated his high school and his neigborhood. Lots of talk of cars and girls and bullies and cool kids and music.

The book is divided into three sections, each of which starts with a new Chapter One, and each of which is primarily focused on the goings-on with the newest “best” friend that Brian had latched onto at that point. The first section was focused on Gretchen, the heavy punk rock girl that he considered his best friend, spent all of his time with, and secretly lusted after. The second section was about Mike, Brian’s stoner history class project partner, and Dorie, Mike’s neighbor. The third part was Nick, the skate punk whose attitude, and whose acceptance of Brian, finally gave our protagonist a sense of self-esteem.

Unlike King Dork, in which the high school lives of our main characters are interwoven with a deeper murder mystery storyline, there really wasn’t much of a “plot” in this book. It was linear (always a plus for simple-minded folks like me), but the “story” was really not about what happened, but rather about Brian Oswald’s journey of self-discovery — his varying attempts at different lifestyles and attitudes that would make him comfortable with himself.

Not a bad book, and a pretty easy read. But this one also didn’t resonate too deeply with me, either. Not because I was never a dork, but more because my high school, and my neighborhood, and my friends, and my enemies, were just so different than those described in this book; sort of like a John Hughes film — I get it, and I laughed some, but I didn’t relate because it didn’t remind me of any of my own experiences.

(Read Tim’s review of Hairstyles.)

The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt was the second book in what became an unplanned trilogy written by female authors that featured both Science and men of Questionable Psychological Soundness as focal points that I read in sequence. (The first was Rivka Galchen’s excellent Atmospheric Disturbances. For ten points and a possible bonus, can you guess the third?)

The Invention of Everything Else is a charming novel that imagines the last days of Nikola Tesla. Thomas Edison is remembered in this country as the father of electricity, but Hunt reminds us that Tesla developed the inventions that made modern electricity possible. He was also the inventor of the radio, but got screwed over by that Marconi guy.

Tesla arrived in this country when New York was lit by gas lamps, there were no cars, and two world wars had yet to take place. Needless to say, he was a witness to some fairly dramatic changes in NYC. The novel takes place in 1943 when Tesla is an old man living in a world that has been utterly transformed by his inventions. Rather than living in comfort from the proceeds of his inventions, Tesla lives alone and virtually penniless as a charity case at The New Yorker Hotel - then the tallest building in New York City. The scientist laments:

Some days I forget how completely I have been forgotten.

At The New Yorker, Tesla becomes friendly with Louisa, a maid at the hotel, whose own story is told alongside that of Tesla’s. As the reader begins to realize that Tesla may not be entirely in his right mind, it also becomes apparent that other men in Louisa’s life are battling their own demons. Through their shared stories, Samantha Hunt examines the big themes of loss, grief, transcendence, reality, the creative impulse, and the power of human connections. The Invention of Everything Else is an inventive novel that I cheerfully recommend.

The great tragedy of Tesla’s life is that he didn’t have (or want) the PR know-how or the business acumen sufficient to propel him to the fame and fortune that he justly deserved. On the plus side for Tesla, he is experiencing something of a belated comeback. David Bowie did a great job portraying Tesla in the movie The Prestige. There is also an electric car company, Tesla Motors, that may bring him some belated recognition.

Read an excerpt of the novel.

I don’t know how I missed out on the novels of Philip Roth for so long. Though I’d heard references to his work, read the occasional review, listened to the Fresh Air interviews, and thought, “Hey, this guy sounds interesting. I should read some of his books,” I never got around to reading any until Shortbus loaned me her copy of The Plot Against America soon after it came out. It mesmerized me.

I didn’t go back for seconds until last month, when I picked up American Pastoral for a beach trip. I wasn’t the least bit disappointed. In the course of this deceptively complex novel (while I was reading it all seemed so matter-of fact, but I still can’t quite explain its structure and how Roth’s alter ego, the novelist Nathan Zuckerman, fits into the plot), Roth creates one of the most generous, humanistic, three-dimensional characters I can remember coming across, in Seymour “Swede” Levov.

The Swede is an all-American boy and great athlete who also happens to be a third-generation immigrant, inheritor of an industrial age family business (just as the US economy enters the post-industrial age), and father of a mass-murdering political radical. He carries way too much symbolism for one man to bear, but somehow he pulls it off. That’s The Swede for you.

I can’t get over Roth’s prodigious output over the span of forty years. So as I read this novel I couldn’t stop thinking about what Roth did to produce it. To crank these things out he must have to hole himself up for months at a time and get lost in his own fictional worlds, right? But to fill them with so much insight about the human condition and particularly American dilemmas, he has to be of the world and out in it–striking up conversations with strangers at supermarkets, mentally recording snippets of conversations from cocktail parties, devouring news–doesn’t he? How does he do it?.

When my birthday money came in at the beginning of May it went straight back out to the bookstore. I finally got on the Steven Hall bandwagon and grabbed a copy of The Raw Shark Texts. I was reading something else at the time (review to follow soon) and put my new book aside for a bit. This past week I finally grabbed it and started reading. By the end of the first page I was engaged, and by the end of this weekend I was unable to concentrate on anything else. Like Shaft, I considered just posting a comment about this book but comments won’t suffice for a book like this. I want to talk about it endlessly and force a copy into the hand of everyone I know who hasn’t already read it.

I may be late to the party but I’m having a great time.

If you haven’t read this book yet please call in sick for the rest of the week so you can.

Tim: Can you arrange for Hall to be back in the US for my birthday next year?

Rivka Galchen’s novel Atmospheric Disturbances is an amazing debut. Though it clearly stands on its own merit, Galchen also brings a fascinating back story to the novel. The author majored in English at Princeton where she had Joyce Carol Oates as a thesis adviser. From Princeton, Galchen attended Mount Sinai where she received an MD, specializing in psychiatry. She then went to Columbia to get an MFA in creative writing. Somewhere in there, Galchen won a grant that allowed her the wherewithal to write this novel. (I feel like such a slacker.) What emerged may be the best possible synthesis of those experiences. Atmospheric Disturbances is a gem.

The novel is told from the perspective of Dr. Leo Liebenstein, a psychiatrist, who makes a sudden and unexpected discovery: “Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife.” Dr. Leo, is unsettled by the appearance of his wife Rema’s doppelganger in his home. Dr. Leo begins to believe that a patient, Harvey, may hold the answer.

Harvey appears to be symptom-free to Dr. Leo, except for his belief that he works for a secret organization, The Royal Academy of Meteorology, which works in opposition to a rival underground agency, the 49 Quantum Fathers, to control the weather. Harvey’s alleged contact is a famed meteorologist, Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen. Dr. Leo begins to study the work of Dr. Gal-Chen while searching fro the “real” Rema and finds oddly relevant passages in the scientific journal articles.

Being a man of science, Dr. Leo is able to recognize the oddity of his beliefs, but he is also expertly equipped to rationalize it. For example, Dr. Leo is unwilling to accept that the simulacrum in his home is actually Rema purely on the basis of that having previously been the case:

I knew that my reasoning was post hoc, and another voice came in, mocking me, reminding me that post hoc reasoning is the consolation of the psychotic - all evidence interpreted under the shadow of the belief that one is Jesus Christ, or the King of Sweden, or made entirely of glass.

Dr. Leo’s search for answers leads him to Buenos Aries and Patagonia, believing himself to be “on assignment” for the Royal Society. Depending upon whether you believe Dr. Leo, he may or may not be breaking from what he calls the “consensus view” of reality. Is his head really in the clouds? (The author, mercifully, steers clear of this horrible pun.)

The novel uses several devices that some may call “post-modern” - all to good affect. For example, the use of what can be dense scientific language is no literary parlor trick. The articles that Dr. Leo excerpts about meteorological research problems highlight the issues that he is grappling with in subtle and unexpected ways. Also: The Royal Academy actually exists. The name of the rival top-secret weather controlling organization, 49 Quantum Fathers, appears to be a nod to Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, which also featured a mysterious controlling organization. Galchen also judiciously employs a few photographs and isopleth figures from scientific journal articles. There’s a lot going on in this novel.

And of course, Rivka Galchen herself studied psychiatry, so on some level Dr. Leo may be a stand in for the author. Only after reading the novel did I learn that the mysterious meteorologist Dr. Gal-Chen is not an interesting literary device that plays on the author’s name. Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen is the name of Rivka Galchen’s father, who was an actual published meteorologist. Viewed in this light, the novel takes on a whole new perspective. I went back and re-read several sections of the novel that were now open to brand new interpretations. I think that the book, at its heart, is a love letter to the author’s father, Tzvi.

What may seem on the surface to be a simple story about a man who may or may not have an interesting psychosis is a beautiful examination of our ability to truly know ourselves and those close to us. Atmospheric Disturbances made me think. It’s the kind of book that you want to talk to other people about as soon as you’ve finished. In a stroke of outrageous fortune, I was able to conduct a brief interview with Rivka Galchen. Part 1 of the interview will be posted tomorrow. I advise using the time between now and then to run out, pick up the novel, and get started reading. If you can’t wait, start with Chapter 1 and then read another selection. See you tomorrow.

I’ve written glowingly about James Meek’s The People’s Act of Love, which I called “a masterpiece”. I was prepared, and fully expected, to be blown away by Meek’s new novel, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent. It brings me no joy to report that I will be panning the novel.  I’m expecting that my opinion may be in the minority view on this one.

Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin has called Descent “f-cking fantastic”. The San Francisco Chronicle says, “this somewhat shapeless but nonetheless absorbing novel have a grittiness and authenticity that only firsthand experience could have produced.” I’ll count that as a positive review. The Guardian says, “In this fragmentary or splintered narrative, there is no loss of clarity. The story is always clear.” Another back-handed compliment, but I’m counting that in the “pro” column. I’m solidly in the “con” camp.

While I agree with the negatives that were inserted into some of these critiques, the reviews were still generally positive overall. I don’t get it. I’ll try my best to detail my grievances.

The biggest shortcoming of the novel was a complete lack of focus to the story (which even positive reviews called “shapeless” and “fragmentary”). Here’s The Reader’s Digest version of everything that is shoe horned into the plot:

The novel is about a journalist, Kellas, who finds himself covering the war in Afghanistan for a British newspaper. He has written a critically acclaimed novel that has sold poorly. (Wait, is this Kellas or Meek that we’re talking about?) He (Kellas) decides to boldly sell out and write a military-style thriller. Still in Afghanistan, Kellas meets and falls for an American war correspondent named Astrid, but they are separated (for what will turn out to be an improbable reason) while fleeing the country. Back in England, he tires spectacularly of the chattering class while at a dinner of people he admires but doesn’t appear to like. Wait! His ex is unexpectedly part of the party. Hi-jinks ensue. He leaves the UK, still bleeding, to find Astrid in America. He thinks that she has summoned him through what will turn out to be an improbable plot device. Things don’t go exactly as planned with Astrid, and her Secrets are revealed. The reason behind Astrid’s appearance in Afghanistan is spectacularly improbable and almost offensive to the reader. At least this one. And then the novel closes with an ending that seems only too fitting for the whole maudlin affair.

Well, when I put it that way, it almost seems like a coherent novel. It rarely is. Most of the narrative is told in jerky time shifts that hint at something ominous down the road. The omniscient narrator notes, “He needed to be running two or three lives at once.” Kellas (and the reader) would certainly have been better off it were possible. There are at least two or three excellent novels carefully hidden within this one.

Did you note the frequent use of the word “improbable” in the summary above?

Another sticking point for me is the story line surrounding the book that Kellas writes. Kellas thinks that writing in the Tom Clancy genre will be easy and will make him a household name. The gist of Kellas’ novel: America goes it alone in Iran and ends up at war with the UK and Europe. Unfortunately, Meek decides to share the artless beginning of Kellas’ novel with us at the opening of Descent. The section ends with Iranian school girls mowed down by US military vehicles. Here’s a snippet:

Even when the bullets pierced Sarina’s body, the camera continued to record, writing the billions of digits of information that would be found intact in her cold hand, later that morning, among the heaped bodies of the dead.

Kellas himself describes the novel to a friend:

It would subvert the genre by making America the enemy…American characters would be portrayed as clichéd, humourless, two-dimensional, degenerate, ignorant characters, while their European counterparts…would be wisecracking, genuine, loving, courageous, salt-of-the-earth types.

Even Kellas doesn’t like his own novel. That’s all well and good I suppose. Along the way though, it seems that Meek inserts his own views into the story rather baldly . Our omniscient narrator states:

She would spend most of the night editing and transmitting the pictures to her paper in the US. The Californians had an appetite for looking, over coffee, at the exact monumental broccoli shapes their bombs made in the sky after they were dropped.

Really? Maybe it’s just the Californians that I know, but I doubt if this characterization is even remotely true. A more likely, and damning, critique would have the reporter’s pictures and story bumped off the front page by Spearsian or Hiltonian-level shenanigans. Descent could succeed as a commentary on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (of which I am neither fan nor supporter) if the text wasn’t often so ham fisted.

And it should be repeated: Astrid’s reason for being in Afghanistan in the first place is ridiculous. R-i-d-i-c-u-l-o-u-s.

Bottom line: Read The People’s Act of Love and wait for Meek’s next book. If you’d like to form your own opinion on the matter, you are welcome to my copy of the novel. Leave me a comment if you want it, and it’s yours.

Tony Earley’s “Jim series” (my name for the two books - not the authors) are deceptively simple. The covers suggest that these might be children’s books, and they are written in a bucolic style that masks the quiet complexity of these novels. Tony Earley seems to have effortlessly created a richly detailed world with fully developed and engaging characters.

In the first of the two books, Jim the Boy, we are introduced to Jim as an infant. His father has died unexpectedly in the fields of the family farm at a young age. Jim is raised by his mother and three bachelor uncles in the town of Aliceville in western North Carolina. If you think “Mayberry”, you’re going too cosmopolitan. Jim’s boyhood is a rural existence in the years between the first and second World Wars. As Jim begins to grow up, his world expands beyond the farm as he begins to learn about the world around him and his own family. It sounds so simple but is a surprisingly engaging read.

In the second book, The Blue Star, Jim is a senior in high school on the eve of World War II. World events are beginning to encroach on Aliceville, even as Jim struggles to come to grips with becoming the starting shortstop on his baseball team and the eternal mystery that is high school girls. The ability of Jim’s uncles to protect him from the realities of the adult world begin to wane, and Jim is faced with some tough and very adult choices. There will almost certainly be a third book in the “Jim series” to complete or extend Jim’s story. I’m looking forward to it.

While the two books can easily stand on their own, the reader will be rewarded for reading both books. The second book, The Blue Star, reveals the back story on several situations that were taken for granted in the first book. I read them both within a few weeks of each other, and I recommend that approach.

Earley’s style is warm and generous without being maudlin. Although set in the rural south, Earley avoids the gothic “things go wrong on the farm” narrative. Life isn’t always rosy, but the farm of Jim’s youth is the kind of place that actual Southerners might be able to relate to - even us city slickers.

Nitro’s review of Lauren Groff’s The Monster’s of Templeton was so convincing that there was little choice but to by the book at the first opportunity.   I suspect that my appreciation for the novel may be slightly less than Nitro’s but only by the thinnest margin.  Read her review for the gist of the novel, and I’ll just throw in my two cents along with some supplemental material that I’ve come across.

This is a charming book - in the least patronizing sense of that word.  It has a centuries old literary pedigree at its core, but the novel is neither twee nor precious.  The “monster” that occupies the imagination of the  town makes for some great symbolism.  There’s a lot going on in this novel.  Check it out for a nice read.

The Monsters of Templeton made me want to read all of James Fenimore Cooper’s books.  So hat’s off for that feat alone.  I also need to visit Cooperstown, NY - all the more so after Groff recently paired her book with Three Philosopher’s, which is brewed by Coopertown’s Brewery Ommegang.  Between a trip to the brewery and the Baseball Hall of Fame, I’d feel like I was one of the novel’s “Drosophila tourists”.  (Best description of tourists ever.)

I recently came across a weird trailer for the novel. It’s like Masterpiece Theater Presents: The Monsters of Templeton. And why are their accents so strange?  The cover gives the game away. It’s for the UK edition, and the actors in the trailer are apparently trying to sound American. “Marmaduke” gives them all away.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aveOElUyZU[/youtube]

Author James Meek has a new book coming out in May (more on that one in a future post). Everything that I’ve read about the upcoming book mentions that Meek’s first novel, The People’s Act of Love, is a masterpiece. Somehow, I missed it when it first came out. I decided it would be prudent to maybe begin my reading of Meek’s work with the masterpiece.  I’m glad that I did.  I love everything about this book.

The novel takes place in a small Siberian town during the Russian Revolution.  A garrison of Czech soldiers has commandeered enough of the town’s buildings and supplies to remain indefinitely.  When the soldiers left their homes five years earlier, they were part of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire.  Their homes are now in a new country that they’ve never been a part of, and the country that they’ve been fighting in and against is changing political fortunes almost daily.   Isolated as they are, they’re not sure who they’re supposed to be fighting for, which way the Russian political winds are blowing,  and if and when they might be able to return home.  The Czech commander, giving a pep talk tyo his troops, says:

Comrades.  Friends.  We have fought together for five years. We have fought for the Emperor of the Austrians against the Emperor of the Russians.  We have fought for the Emperor of the Russians against the Emperor of the Austrians.  We have fought for the White Terror of the monarchists against the Red Terror of the Bolsheviks.  We have fought with Social Revolutionaries and Cossacks against Cossacks and Social Revolutionaries.  I can say to you, with pride, that not once have we compromised our ideals.

Exactly.

The townspeople coexist with their Czech occupiers in a quiet subservience.  The natives have a deep and dark secret that they are trying to hide from the world at large.  If you tried for a million years, you would never guess their secret.  I promise.  The fascinating part is that the basic scenario - trapped Czech soldiers, town with a crazy secret - are based on actual events.

This is a fantastic novel - and I’m not just saying that because I like virtually all books either written by Russians or set in Russia.  The themes that Meek tackles are certainly relevant to our time: moral ambiguity vs moral certainty, extremism, citizenship vs identity, the fog of war.  James Meek is a journalist for The Guardian.  He was stationed in Russia for several years, which I’d assume is where he found the seeds of this book.  His journalist’s eye for detail and his beautiful writing style are a winning combination.  Do yourself a favor and spend some time in this wonderful book.

Submarine by Joe Dunthorne is not a book that I was likely to find and read on my own. It was pressed into my hands by someone who thought that I might like it. It’s a first novel by a Welsh writer that is geared towards a teen audience. I finished this book a few weeks ago, and I’m still trying to decide what I think of it.

The narrator of the book is Oliver, a 15-year old boy in Swansea, Wales. Oliver initially comes across as a completely unlikable teen. His approach to high school is based on Darwin’s survival of the fittest. He has an I will pick on you because you are weaker than me and I need to maintain my own standing so I suggest you toughen up mindset. At the beginning of the book, Oliver sets out to see a therapist (that turns out to be the wrong kind of therapist) purely to get a reaction from his father.  His relationship with his girlfriend Jordana begins when she blackmails him and seems to be based upon the fact that she would be willing to be in a relationship with him as something to do rather than mutual attraction or affection. It’s tough to care about these kids as a couple.

Eventually, Oliver begins to become a sympathetic character. To be honest, I almost bailed on the book before he became remotely likable.  Oliver has his first encounters with adult situations - e.g., his first sexual experiences, his first brush with the serious illness of someone close to him, his parent’s fracturing marriage, a too close encounter with his mother’s infidelity, etc.  Oliver’s reaction to these real life dramas is usually on the continuum of poor to very poor.

It slowly began to dawn on me that 15 year-olds are unlikable in general. They think that they are adults, but they behave unpredictably on the whims of emotion. Dunthorne’s novel is almost sadistically true to the stereotypical adolescent experience.  There are some passages in this book that make for tough reading.  Since I’m so conflicted about whether I’m glad that I read this book or not, I have a hard time offering it a recommendation to anyone else.  I hope that someone else reads it though so that we can compare notes.

Second Opinion: The LA Times reviews the book today (very positively) as well.