Baby Got Books

Joe Meno’s new novel, The Great Perhaps, is a revelation.  It is capital “L” literature that arrived fully formed, seemingly (to me) from nowhere.  But, of course, that’s not the case.  Meno’s first book Hairstyles of the Damned was a “pitch perfect…coming of age story about finding your own identity that has the ring of truth and awkwardness.” (My mini-review of hairstyles is here.)

In retrospect, I should have been put on notice to find the rest of Meno’s books with a quickness.  The author next appeared on my radar when The New York Times’ Paper Cuts blog cheekily asked “Joe who?” in a post about last year’s Story Prize finalists: Jhumpa Lahari, Tobias Wolff, and Joe Meno.  Joe was nominated for his short story collection Demons in the Spring.  After reading the article, I believe that I actually said aloud – “Damn, I’ve got to check that out.”  But didn’t.  When I saw that Mr. Meno had a new novel out, the stars finally aligned, and The Great Perhaps made it atop my to be read pile.

The Great Perhaps is the story of a modern Chicago family, each struggling with their own demons.  Clouds, literal and figurative, dark and light, hang over the characters lives.   The use of clouds in the novel reminded me of the looming chemical cloud of Don Delillo’s “airborne toxic event” in White Noise – a symbol of mortality and the threat of modern life that lurked constantly on the horizon.  This connection had me keeping my eye out for other literary antecedents in the book.

Jonathan Casper, the center of the novel, is a modern-day Ahab (and family man).  He is a paleontologist obsessed with finding  evidence of a long-believed-to-be -extinct giant squid.  His obsession with his work is also his refuge – from his teaching duties, from his elderly father’s illness and erratic behavior, from the needs of his immediate family, and, ultimately, from the world at large.  Where Ahab was a man of action chasing his obsession, Jonathan stalks his leviathan from a fortress that he withdraws to constructed of blankets in the family’s living room.

Amelia, Jonathan’s oldest daughter, seems a less sure version of the Swede’s daughter Merry from Philip Roth’s American Pastoral.  Angry at the world, Amelia begins researching pipe bomb manufacture on the internet when not actively ignoring her sister of firing off angry editorials in the school paper.  She fancies herself an anti-capitalist revolutionary, but she has a difficult time getting anyone to care.

Thesbe, the youngest daughter, is named after Ovid’s star crossed-lover.   Like her namesake, the modern Thesbe experiences a budding romance that is “forbidden”.  Thesbe’s rebellion takes the form imagining herself a deeply religious person in a deeply secular home.  Her attempts to pray for herself and her family (having never been shown how) are heartbreaking.

The mother,  Madeline Casper, is an experimental psychologist (no literary precursor comes immediately to mind).  Her work involves social experiments conducted on pigeons.  As her world and reality slowly come unglued, it appears that Madeline’s pigeons hold some of the secrets of human nature.  The expression “her head was in the clouds” takes on a nearly literal

Henry, Jonathan’s father, lives a life of decreasing consequence at a nearby nursing home.  He has decided to remove his connections to this world by giving away all of his possessions and reducing the number of words he will say each day over time.  In the meantime, he is determined to flee the nursing home and catch a plane to Tokyo from O’Hare.  His reasons for wanting to visit Tokyo are slowly revealed.  (I can’t come up with an antecedent for Grandpa Henry either.)

And, of course, the surname name “Casper” brings to mind the friendly ghost of the comics.  These are not bad people.  They want to find the solutions to their problems.  They are each damaged in some way and are in full retreat from the challenges of daily life.   They lack the courage or moral fiber to engage the world and its inherent dangers.  Madeline’s studies suggest that this helplessness may be learned and may be even inherited. Which brings us back to Grandpa Henry’s story and its effects on his family that has come to live a ghost existence.

The Great Perhaps is a terrific novel. It is not as bleak as it may sound from my literary name dropping.  It’s a novel of warmth and humor. It’s also a novel of substance.  I expect to find this novel on many year-end “best of” lists, and it seems inevitable that the days of people asking “Joe who?” may well be over for the author.

We are such big fans of the novel and the author here at BGB, that Russ Marshalek, our man in New York, set out to interview Joe Meno about his work.   Be sure to come back tomorrow for that.

More:

Throughout the book, Amelia shows her disdain for American life by listening solely to French music.  One song mentioned by name is Marie Laforêt’s Marie Douceur Marie Colère. In Largehearted Boy’s Book Notes, Joe Meno says that the song is “a French cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black” and it is one of the most terrifying songs you’ll ever hear.” I had to hunt it down:

Marie Laforêt – Marie Douceur Marie Colère

Aleksandar Hemon’s novel The Lazarus Project ensured that I would be a fan of the author for life (my review). Needless to say, when  Hemon came to town a few weeks ago to read from his new collection of short stories, Love and Obstacles, I had to be there.

It was evident upon arrival that many (most?) in attendance at the Decatur library were former Yugoslavs/Sarajevans.  Hemon is formerly from Sarajevo and found himself in Chicago when the Balkan War broke out, and he became a man without a country.  Although he has gone on to win a McArthur “genius grant” and has written several critically acclaimed books in English, he also continues to write regularly in Serbian for a Sarajevo-based publication.

Hemon read from the story The Conductor about a young writer’s rocky relationship with an elder literary statesman of Sarajevo.   The story seemed to be autobiographical enough that the author was asked questions about the protagonist’s views as though they were his own.  Hemon had to remind the audience that it was a story and not his life. Which is maybe another way of saying that the story dripped with authenticity.  (On the basis of that story I bought the book in the lobby as soon as the reading was over.)

During the Q&A, almost everyone who asked a question began, “Mr. Hemon, I am also from the former Yugoslavia…”  Or sometimes they would say Sarajevo.  No one spoke in terms of the current political boundaries.   The author used some of the questions to riff on the tyranny of language and identity.  Hemon explained that the Serbo-Croatian language that he learned in school was an artificial construct.  The idea was that a common language would foster a common identity (and thus, peace).  When Yugoslavia crumbled, the language disappeared over night and the old identities re-emerged.  Hemon spoke of the freedom that he felt when he was able to escape the bonds of the old languages by thinking and writing in English.  He also related an anecdote (by request) that in the last three or four generations of his family, no one has died in the country in which they were born.  Although some of the previous generations had moved, the fact of the matter was that the countries where they were born no longer existed at the time of their deaths.   It was fascinating stuff.

It seems a little lame that I spent most of this review talking about the reading that I went to that one time.  I felt that I should mention all of that back story though because Hemon’s take on language, identity, belonging, etc. are central to all of the stories in this excellent collection. In a BGB interview, author Richard Lange said the following about short stories:

What I’m looking for is electrifying flesh-and-blood stuff that makes me sit up and go, “Holy shit! Here’s someone who’s ready to throw down.”

Love and Obstacles meets Mr. Lange’s criteria.  Check it out.

Post script: I found myself returning to the U2 (ft. Pavorotti) song Miss Sarajevo while reading the book.  It seemed to nicely sum up the mood of the book.

Denis Johnson won the National Book Award for his doorstop/novel Tree of Smoke.  I meant to get around to reading ToS, I really did, but it never happened.  Then along came Johnson’s new novel Nobody Move, and it seemed as good a place as any to check out the author’s work.

As you might gather from the cover, Nobody Move is a by-the-numbers crime noir.  And I don’t mean that in a bad way.  Johnson is known for weighty “important” novels, but here he appears to be having fun and experimenting with genre.

The novel begins with this passage:

Jimmy Luntz has never been to war, but this was the sensation, he was sure of that–eighteen guys shoulder to shoulder, moving out on the orders of their leader to do what they’ve been training day and night to do.

Jimmy is thinking, of course, about a regional men’s chorus competition.  He is met after the performance by a goon intent on taking him “for a ride”  due to gambling debts owed to the wrong person.

Meanwhile, the femme fatale of our story is Anita Desilverio, a politician’s wife and alcoholic.  Anita has been framed for embezzling cash from the State and is not happy about it.

The two hapless losers join forces as the world around them grows steadily more grim.  There are surprise plot twists, double-crosses, a shot-up Caddy, gay bikers – but at least they have a plan:

I said we had ten percent of a plan.  It’s more like two percent. I gotta get some smokes.

Or not.  You can be certain that the story is headed towards a showdown of epic proportions.

I read Nobody Move on the heels of finishing Elmore Leonard’s Road Dogs (review). Leonard is undeniably a master of the gritty-noir-crime-drama form, but Johnson more than holds his own in a back-to-back comparison. Road Dogs has more comic relief, and Nobody Move is a little darker/edgier. Both are action-packed and loaded with charm and grit.   The two novels together pack an excellent beach side one-two punch.

Holy cow — I thought I had read George Orwell’s 1984 way back in high school, but I just read it and there is no way I could have read it before and forgotten.

A couple of years ago I took some quiz on the Internet that purported to determine which book would most resonate with me, and the answer was 1984.  I started reading it then but for some now inexplicable reason gave up a short while into it.  I don’t know why I bailed on it then — I subsequently read Animal Farm and loved it, so I don’t think it’s Orwell’s writing style.  Well, I decided to give it another shot and am now breaking my own arm patting myself on the back for my achievement (such achievement also known as “reading yet another book that everyone in the world already read” and/or “reading yet another book that’s the source of ideas and theories that I use in everyday conversation despite not having read the actual book”).

1984, written in 1948, is Orwell’s ominous tale of a future state in which the government has taken a far greater role in the lives of citizens, from their thinking to their daily activities.  It focuses on Winston Smith, who lives in London, which is part of Oceania, which is one of three global empires in Orwell’s fictional modern world.  Oceania is under the control of the Party, which is led by Big Brother, and which exercises close watch and control over the population of Oceania.   Smith himself is a member of the Outer Party who works at the Party’s Ministry of Truth, rewriting passages in archived media to alter historical records to better fit with the Party’s then-current agenda and proclamations.

Smith’s story and the way it demonstrates the workings of the Party, together with the writings of Emmanuel Goldstein (the so-called “Enemy of the People”) as relayed in “The Book” that Winston reads, present an unbelievably compelling insight into the manner in which power can be obtained and maintained.  While many books have been written during the time between Machiavelli’s The Prince and Orwell’s 1984, the vast majority of which I’ll admit that I may not have read, I doubt any other author has been able to present such an innovative or downright scary case as either of those two.  Believe it or not, I had peeked a while back to see what the last four words to this book were, because they were the answer to a trivia question, and knowing those powerful words in advance not only didn’t spoil anything about this book for me, they gave me goosebumps while reading everything leading up to them.

If there are any of you out there who haven’t read this one, you need to get on it.  Or the Thought Police will get you.

(Check out this guy’s comic book adaptation of 1984)

Being a fan of pop culture, I really like Chuck Klosterman — Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs had me snorting with laughter at times — and so I jumped at the chance to read his first foray into fiction, Downtown Owl.

Klosterman grew up somewhere in the Dakotas, and he sets this novel in the fictional town of Owl, North Dakota; I get the feeling (despite the disclaimer at the beginning) that many of the characters and events in this book were drawn from Klosterman’s childhood and adolescent memories.  And like many other books that I’ve read and enjoyed that took place during my formative years (the early-to-mid-eighties), the storylines and characters in this book bore no resemblance to where and how I grew up.  But I know enough about the stereotypes of the era from watching t.v. to appreciate the humor in Klosterman’s story.

The structure of this story is a bit odd and took a little while to engage me, but it nonethless worked.  Each chapter in the book is labeled with the name of one of three main characters:  Mitch (a high school student), Julia (a new teacher just transplanted from Wisconsin), and Horace (an elderly regular in the town).  There are other regular characters as well, including the hotshot football coach/teacher Mr. Laidlaw (who had impregnated at least one high schooler).

Each chapter covers the events of a day or so in the life of one of the main characters, and while they all take place in Owl and involve the same cast of supporting characters (most of whom have nicknames that make them sound like hoboes, e.g., “Bull Calf”, “Buck Buck”, “Busload”, “Brother Killer”), they don’t have a whole lot of direct connection throughout most of the book.  And so I wondered how it might all tie together at the end.  And when I got to the end, I realized that they sort of did and they sort of didn’t, but I wasn’t asking the question any longer — I was just sitting there with my jaw hanging open.

If you’re a fan of the era, I think you’ll dig this book.  But beware that if you have (a) a wife who adores Def Leppard, and/or (b) a 10-year old son that loves Star Wars and still believes in Santa Claus (by the way, I happen to have both), one single paragraph in one of the chapters under Mitch’s name will belittle you and your loved ones mercilessly.  You’ll know it when you see it.

(Also on BGB: Tim’s review of Downtown Owl)

Elmore Leonard takes a victory lap and crafts the perfect beach book with his latest Road Dogs.  For his 46th novel (my best count), the 83 year-old author picks some of his favorite characters and creates a volatile mix where anything can happen.  Humor and noir mix in equal measure to deliver a crisp crime novel.

The story begins with Jack Foley (played by George Clooney in the movie version of Out of Sight) back in prison in South Florida.  As a celebrity bank robber, Foley maintains a certain level of respect among the inmates.  He is joined in prison by Cundo Rey a connected and wealthy Cuban  criminal (from LaBrava).  Foley and Rey are “road dogs” – inmates that look out for each other on the inside.  Rey “loans” his high-powered attorney to Foley, who has his prison sentence greatly reduced.  Beholden to Rey, Foley heads to Venice, California to wait for Rey’s release and the inevitable pay back.  Enter Dawn Navarro (Riding the Rap), femme fatale and Rey’s common-law wife who has been waiting patiently for her husband’s release.

Once the gang isall together, it’s game on as the trio try to play each other while  keeping an eye out for the angles.  It’s a fairly conventional plot that somehow never quits throwing surprises in front of the reader.  For an 83 year-old, Leonard seems surprisingly fresh and as tuned into the criminal/street underworld as ever.  It doesn’t hurt that the reader can’t help but imagine George Clooney coolly delivering Foley’s lines throughout.  This book is made for summer.

I haven’t read much Elmore Leonard, but I’ve enjoyed the handful of his books that I have read.  My favorite of the Leonard novels that I have read is Cuba Libre, a gripping read from start to finish that reminds the reader why we’re supposed to “remember the Maine”.  Add it to your reading pile this summer, too.

I’m not a huge fan of memoirs, especially after reading some of those agonizing tell-alls that make the reader feel guilty just for complaining about traffic, but I have come across a couple great ones lately.  Love is a Mix Tape by Rob Sheffield and Shut Up, I’m Talking by Gregory Levey come to mind as wonderful examples.  I’ve just finished another one, Lucky Girl by Mei-Ling Hopgood, that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Mei-Ling grew up in the mid-west as the adopted daughter of the Hopgoods, a couple of loving teachers who also adopted two younger sons from Korea.  She knows that she came from Taiwan via a nun at St. Marys Hospital because her birth parents couldn’t care for her, but she’s never been curious to find out more.  When one small inquiry goes amuck, Mei-Ling finds herself being called, emailed, faxed, and begged to return to Taiwan to meet her family.  Eventually she finds herself excited about meeting this giant family and agrees to the trip.  After getting off the plane in Taiwan, she meets both birth parents, her 5 older sisters, one older (actually adopted) brother, and several aunts, uncles, and extended family members.

Having always considered herself a lucky girl, lucky to have been adopted by parents who gave her everything she could ever want, lucky to leave a country where, traditionally, girls were not valued, and lucky to have been given away by poor parents who could not care for her, Mei-Ling soon finds that much of what she had assumed about her Taiwanese family was incorrect.  She and her parents and sisters embrace each other and try to spend time getting to know each other, but secrets begin to leak.

Over the span of a decade, through various trips to several continents, Mei-Ling investigates her Chinese history and culture.  She admits to some and confronts other Chinese stereotypes, eats tons of food, gets completely frustrated at the inability to communicate well with her birth parents, discovers and reunites with another adopted sister in Switzerland, and eventually comes to realize that her birth parents’ reasoning for giving her and her sister away had absolutely nothing to do with sacrificing a child so she may have a better life and everything to do with a father not wanting to waste any more effort on girls when he may one day have to provide for a perfect, healthy son.

The Wangs eventually overcome their poverty and enter the middle class managing to educate their daughters and send most of them to college.  The parents are genuinely overjoyed to find their lost daughters, to the point of making generous contributions for plane fares and gold wedding jewelry.  But these actions cannot cover up what haunts their past and what disturbs their present.  As Mei-Ling comes to the end of her story she is freelance writing in Argentina with a husband and child of her own.  She is happy to have found her sisters and loves them.   She tries to understand the decisions her parents made in the times and culture in which they were made.  She tries not to judge.  She even tries to forgive.

As quoted by Kathleen Flinn on the cover of the book , Lucky Girl is “A compelling, honest, and very human tale about self-identity and the complex concept of family.”  I agree.  This is a well told story you should pick up if you enjoy memoirs that explore a wide range of emotions without being emotionally manipulative.

I thought that I knew what the novel The Resurrectionist by Jack O’Connell was going to be about.  The author humored me for a chapter or two then took a sharp left and kept me off balance for the rest of the book.  I had no idea what was going to happen next or where the author was taking me.  It is one crazy book.  In a good way. 

The Resurrectionist begins with a father, Sweeney, relocating his brain damaged young son to what is reportedly the best facility for drawing patients out of vegetative states.  The father has a huge chip on his shoulder from being condescended to by the medical establishment.  Sweeney is a pharmacist by training and has taken a job at the facility at a pay cut in order to provide the best for his son.  Any parent will instantly empathize with the anguish and desperation that Sweeney carries like a bat to keep the focus on his son: 

Sweeeney nodded back.  He needed the job and he’d burned all of his bridges back in Ohio.  But there was still a limit to the amount of patronizing shit shit he’d endure…”I have one concern and that’s the well-being of my boy.  You tell me what your concerns are and I’ll address them.”

This is the part of the story that I was expecting.  Then the sharp left turns begin…

Each night, Sweeney reads to his son from a collection of his favorite comic series, Limbo.  The comics are presented as chapter length stories that break up the main narrative.  The stories take place in an alternate world and feature a band of circus freaks on the run from a mysterious nemesis who wants them eliminated.  Chick, the leader of the motley group, has visions while in a catatonic state (that he calls “limbo”) that guides the group on their journey. 

Back in the real world, things are not as they seem at the esteemed neurological institute. The staff at the institute and Sweeney himself have back stories that are slowly revealed and add to the complexity and unexpected twists of the story.  Sweeney also finds himself mixed up with a group of dangerous bikers that may not be what they seem.   Then things get really weird.

Through the two story lines, O’Connell explores the boundaries of consciousness and “being” in unexpected and compelling ways.  Grief, sanity, compassion, forgiveness, and the depths of fatherly love are all carefully explored over the course of the novel.  Many of O’Connell’s themes are reminiscent of Paul Auster’s novels and  BGB favorite Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts – but are presented here in a wholly original way.  

It would have been interesting to see the comic book story presented in “graphic novel” form, but that may have come off as “gimmicky” or “non-literary”.  In any case, The Resuurectionist is a powerful noir-thriller-fantasy-Literary-experimental-post modern novel.   I highly recommend it for readers that like their novels to take them to unexpected places and leave them digesting what exactly happened to them when it is all over.

After watching me struggle through half a dozen normal adult novels, only to see me complete 2 (maybe 3), Tim finally got me the perfect book.  And yes, it’s another irresistible teenage vampire story.   I was so excited I actually raced through a book, whose title I can’t even remember,  about a 75 year old woman who tragically loses the love of her life and has to deal with the memories of their life together and her future without him.  AAGH!

The Reformed Vampire Support Group is the first Catherine Jenks book that I’ve gotten my hands on, but she’s pretty well known in the youngster crowd for her previous titles Evil Genius and Genius Squad.   I kind of wish I started with the other books so I wouldn’t appear obsessed with vampires, but, well, this is the one that showed up…

After renaming herself and all members of The Reformed Vampire Support Group in order to protect their identities, 15 year old Nina, who hasn’t aged since 1973, decides to write her memoir.   For the past 30 years she’s been writing a fantasy series about the glamorous life of a crime stopping vampire named Zadia Bloodstone.  She admits she’s no Stephanie Meyer and that her books don’t make much money, but after the murder of a real vampire and the subsequent events, Nina figures it’s time to come clean.

In real life, vampires are pretty pathetic, especially the reformed ones.  They live off of guinea pigs, are extremely weak, are sick and in pain all the time, and can do nothing but watch tv and play on their computers.  Other than Nina’s mom and the sympathetic Catholic priest who leads their weekly support group, there is no contact with “other” humans.  So when a few of them try to track down this vampire slayer, they are all surprised to find the amount of  courage, the sense of duty and moral obligation, the willingness to get involved, and the actual energy and excitement to do something that they possess after all.  What follows is a late night mad cap adventure from Sydney to the country and back again that traces Nina’s journey from an angry, useless, sick, self loathing adolescent (hmmm) to a confident, self actualized adult, who just happens to have a disease.  And she can live with that.

If you’re looking for a fun, well written, sort of unpredictable break from all the grown up books you think you’re supposed to read, pick this one up.  I don’t think you’ll regret it.

If you missed Part 1 yesterday, I reviewed the Scottish author Martin Millar’s book Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation.  Today I’m set to tackle Millar’s Lux the Poet.  The novel was Millar’s second and was originally published in 1989.  I read the two books back-to-back in an extended reading jag.  I noted yesterday that the two books are similar in many respects, but they are certainly different enough to stand on their own.  So now…

Lux the Poet

“At seventeen, Lux the poet is a natural optimist, undeterred by life’s misfortunes.”  Lux is a deadbeat living in squats and the couches of friends that he has yet to piss off.  He would certainly get beat up more regularly if he were not so handsome, in a Lana Turner kind of way.  He would also be the most successful poet in Britain if he could only find someone that would listen to his poems.  He is also an inveterate liar and a thief.

The Brixton neighborhood around Lux is in flames due to a riot of the downtrodden against the police.  Petrol bombs ignite cars and buildings. Rocks are shattering windows and heads.  And Lux is largely oblivious.

Lux is back in the riot.  He has no idea why it is going on.

“Why is there a riot going on?” he asks a stranger, an elderly man who is standing beside him watching some people across the street throwing stones.

“We are suffering more than usual,” says the man.

“Oh. Who is?”

“Us.  Black people.  No jobs, no money, policemen stopping the youth in the street all day.”

Lux is concerned to hear this…

Still, he doesn’t quite understand why anyone would riot if they couldn’t get a job.  Lux would be more inclined to riot if he had to get one.

Amid the riot, Lux is struggling to find Pearl, a girl that he is currently in love with.  Pearl has escaped from her burning house with her girlfriend Nicky. Nicky has escaped from her employer, Happy Science PLC, which was attempting to use her in some experiments involving sperm from genius donors. Nicky is also grieving for the PC that she has murdered.  The Jane Austen Mercenaries, a thrash metal band and Lux’s downstairs neighbors, are after Lux for ingesting all of their cocaine and destroying their demo tapes.  Oh, and a goddess evicted from heaven and doomed to walk the earth doing good works stumbles across the ensemble.  In short, chaos reigns.   

In Lux, Millar continues to cast stones at the establishment.  The police are racists, corporate culture is an oxymoron, and even the literary world is a sham.  All hide behind facades.  The police are behind their riot shields.  A hilarious side plot involves an accounting executive at Happy Science who calls headhunting firms to inquire about himself in the hopes of creating the illusion of a bidding war for himself among foreign multinational corporations.  Britain’s biggest taste maker in the world of books confesses that he is able to write so many excellent reviews each week by not using up precious time reading books.  Ouch.

Lux is an unforgettable literary character.  As much as you might want to strangle him, you’d be sad to see him gone.  And then he’d something from you and you’d want to strangle him again.  If you’re up for it, I wholly recommend reading both Alby Starvation and Lux, preferably when you have time to crank through them together.  They are fun, and they are smart. Read them at the beach while listening to The Clash’s Guns of Brixton.

The Clash – Guns of Brixton

 

Supplement:

Lux and Alby appear to have been such popular characters that they eventually joined forces in a 1999 UK graphic novel titled Lux and Alby Sign On and Save the Universe (a new copy will set you back $325 on Amazon).

And as far as I can tell, Lux the poet is not in any way a swipe at the poet Thomas Lux, who currently holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech.

The Scottish author Martin Millar has been writing and publishing books in the UK for over two decades.  As far as I can tell, his work wasn’t published in the US until only few years ago when the indie publisher Soft Skull began to roll out Millar’s novels.  I enjoyed his excellent Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me (my review), which was infinitely better than I would have thought.  Since Suzy, Zep & Me, I’ve been clamoring for more Millar. I recently picked up two more of his books and read them both back-to-back in an almost uninterrupted reading jag.  The two books are: Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation and Lux the Poet.

The novels have their similarities that are readily apparent when read together.  Both are set in Brixton among poor young people on the dole awaiting their “giro.”   Seedy characters navigate a world of drugs and desperation that is hilarious and a little sad.  Both jump from character to character in quick “edits”  between frantic story lines that will ultimately intersect.  Both seem related to the caper films of Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch).  In fact, I’d be shocked – shocked! – to learn that Ritchie is not a huge long-time fan of Millar.  The books also provide clandestine and wry social commentary.

For all their similarities, the novels are, in fact, very different.  I’ll tackle Millar’s first novel today and continue with Lux the Poet tomorrow.

 Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation

Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation was originally published in 1987.  The novel neatly captures the paranoia and desperation of the Reagan/Thatcher era.  Alby is a small-time drug dealer (sulphate is apparently a kind of amphetamine) and comic book collector squatting in various Brixton hovels. He feels generally unwell and looks much older than he is.  And he is completely paranoid.  

Alby concocts a purification program of fasting and abstaining from milk products and suddenly feels much better than he has in years (but he is still very paranoid).  He writes about his program in an alternative paper under the name Alby Starvation and the regimen sweeps Britain.  This does not go over well with the Milk Marketing Board.

The cast of characters that get swept up in Alby’s include: a beautiful assassin hired by the Milk Marketing Board to kill Alby, a Chinese mob kingpin, a hapless grocer, a zen master video game champion, a professor after an ancient relic that may have magical powers, a local nurse, and Alby’s lowlife friends and associates.  Whew.  There’s a lot going on, and Millar’s constant shift in story lines propels the novel effortlessly along.  

Alby, of course, is largely oblivious to what is transpiring around him:

I don’t understand this development in the proceedings.  Why is this person pointing a gun at me? Did I do something wrong in bed? Surely it couldn’t have been that unpleasant for her. Perhaps she wants her army trousers back, well she only has to ask.

As the story lines inevitably converge on Alby, it seems that he was right to be paranoid all along.

Millar takes gleeful potshots at government bureaucracy and corporate culture along the way.  The conspiracies of the police and medical establishments and their relationship to the lowlifes of Brixton are hilarious because they have at their hearts the ring of truth.  In the light of recent corporate greed and wrong-doing, Millar’s imagined machinations of the business elite are so crazy that they may not be too far from the mark.  There is some excellent satire in Alby’s crazed story.

Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation is good fun and a great read.  I’m thrilled that his subversive stories are finally making their way to the US.  Check back tomorrow for Part 2, a review of Millar’s Lux the Poet.

Following my recent first-time forays into Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Updike, why not check out some Steinbeck?  Particularly what I believe to be the shortest of his novels, Of Mice and Men.

I’ve read reviews of Steinbeck’s work, and I never doubted his ability to write, particularly about the struggles of early twentieth-century migrant workers in the western United States.  But with my short attention span, I didn’t think I could make my way through any of his longer works, and having never read Of Mice and Men or seen any theatrical or film adaptations of it, when I realized it was only 107 (small) pages, I thought I’d give it a shot.  One of the best investments of my reading energy ever.

Steinbeck truly knows how to tell a story.  And this story, of the diminutive George Milton and his oversized-but-slow partner Lennie Small, was so moving and heartbreaking that I couldn’t believe it was told in so few words.

I actually thought I knew what this story was about, but once I was a little ways in, I realized that my only points of reference were Lennie from L.A. Law and the sideways references from Bugs Bunny cartoons (all the references to bunny rabbits and George).  And so I learned that I didn’t really know anything.

Steinbeck’s ability to relay the tale of this unlikely pair’s time together, and to make you believe that they both needed one another despite their obvious differences, was effortless.  And his ability to develop characters in so few words was astounding.  Curley (and his wife), Carlson, Slim, Candy, and Whit (not to mention George and Lennie), and even the metaphorical story of Candy’s dog were described with such precision that I felt like I was there.

If you haven’t read this one, you really need to.  Heartbreaking, but not worthlessly so.

Tim loaned me Beat the Reaper, the debut novel by Josh Bazell, a guy with an English Literature degree who went to med school and is now doing his residency.  When you add those two up, you would assume the guy knows how to write, and that he knows a little about medicine.  And I think you’d be right on both counts.

This isn’t a world-changing book, but it was an easy, entertaining read.  It tells the story of a guy named Pietro Brnwa, a/k/a Peter Brown, who became an enforcer in the mob through a series of calculated moves following the murder of his grandparents, mainly to track down his grandparents’ killers (who he suspected were in the mob).  The book flashes back from and forth between his past and his present, where he’s in the witness protection program and working as a doctor at a hospital in Manhattan, but does so in a way that doesn’t throw the reader too far off the trail.

Side note:  Bazell throws out a lot of medical tidbits as footnotes, and I’ve been able to act like a smart guy by tossing them out at random while conversing with doctor friends.

Peter befriends the son of a mob lawyer, nicknamed Skinflick, while attending private school, and this friendship leads to all sorts of crazy nonsense.  The dynamic tension between Peter, who is only doing these mob-related things in pursuit of what he believes to be a noble purpose, and Skinflick, who is incompetent but wants to be a mobster, is hilarious.

Anyway, fast forward to the end.  I used to think McGiver knew how to make something out of nothing.  And I still think Jack Bauer is the toughest guy there is.  But when you’re knocked out cold and locked in a blood freezer at the hospital to await the arrival of someone who wants to kill you and who’s been training in knife fighting in South America for years in preparation for this moment, I don’t know that you would think to do what Peter does to prepare for this throwdown.  I’ll leave it at that.

(Read Tim’s review here.)

Sean Dixon’s The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal takes its seat at the banquet table in the middle of the venerable great hall of books that exist, primarily, to celebrate a love of reading. Tristram Shandy, Special Topics In Calamity Physics (yes I did just group those two together), The Book Thief, that Allegra Goodman book that I should probably read one day but at this point never will – all of these, in some form or fashion (and my list is sadly lacking, I know, I’m sure I’ll think of a bunch more to add to this list as soon as I walk way from it), elevate the act of reading, and the love of loving literature, to a high art form in and of itself. Even the forthcoming How I Became A Famous Novelist, which will assuredly make waves in the book world for the number of recognizable characters, has, at its snarky core, a love for the printed page. Canadian writer Dixon has that same bookish heartbeat pulsing through The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal.

The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal is a giant, sprawling tale condensed to the barest emotional bones of a story about the bonds that books form, and destroy, between people. The Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club is the most elite, exclusive, and eccentric book club ever formed, ever-to the point where their meeting location changes based on what they’re reading, to encourage the members to have fully immersive experiences with their texts. As the book begins, there’s dissent and unrest amongst the group:

“All I know is,I lie in my bed at night, by myself, trying to read some cozy little book, but I can’tread them anymore, because they’re too small, and they don’t matter, and I have to put them down and just get on with it.”

That quote comes from Emmy, one of the initially least interesting members of The Lacuna Cabal who blossoms in unexpected, interesting and truly jaw-droppingly creative ways.

Into this meeting busts Runner Coghill (after a highly-auspicious opening scene involving her crashing through a floor), who proceeds to produce 10 stone tablets as a suggestion for their next reading selection.

From that moment on, The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal is a darkly comedic paen to friendship, love, and, most of all, books. Not to get all Reading Rainbow, but I won’t tell you what the group ends up reading, where they end up or how a little “fitzbot” robot ends up playing a vital part in the story. Linguistically, thematically, emotionally-every facet of The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal sprawls and is loaded with inter-textual references and winking narrative play that’s fun and engrossing.

Sean Dixon maintains a pretty thorough blog about the book over at the Lacuna Cabal-I recommended making your way through the book once, and then checking it out.

Fitting, in a way, that I pick a time around the passing of British novelist JG Ballard to even remotely attempt to tackle Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands. Like Ballard’s Crash (admittedly the only thing of his that I’ve ever read, and, for me, it’s enough), Wetlands uses base humanity (as in lust, desire, bodily functions, bodily fluids) to convey something more, something deeper. Unlike Crash…um, there’s no hot car-crash sex. Ok, so that’s a huge and distinct difference, but give me this one.

Wetlands is an infamous-in-basically-every-country story about a young girl-Helen Memel-who is hospitalized for, erm, an anal lesion. And, given the fact that a one-sentence summary of the plot can’t even come out without the phrase “anal lesion,” you have an idea about exactly how explicit Roche’s novel is.

Much has been made about Wetlands and its explicit, rated triple-x content, consisting entirely of the narrator’s musings on her sex life, her body and its functions. Within the first three pages of the book, there’s the most graphic, skin-greening description of Helen’s hemorrhoids that…well, granted, it’s the only literary description of hemorrhoids I’ve ever had this (mis)fortune of reading, but it, out of the gate, sets a tone of topics and language used to discuss said topics that inevitably will find many a reader who picks up the book out of morbid curiosity closing the cover before they ever see page number 5 (or possibly anything past 2).

And that’s an unfortunate thing.

What Wetlands masks with its immediate gross-out is an absurdly moving and painfully self-aware narrative of mental illness and need for emotional validation that’s as moving as it is grotesque. Helen Memel is an unforgettable, tormented and lost every-youth, and Roche’s done an admirable job wrapping her in filth as a reflection of the deepest, darkest, nastiest desires of humanity. If the act of reading a book that is a completely immersive experience reflects quality of material, Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands, constantly inciting subconscious, guttural and visceral reactions from the reader, is of a high, high nature.

Some may disagree with me on this. Some may find Wetlands entirely too much to take to ever consider it “true literature.” To those naysayers, I simply suggest re-reading their copy of Ulysses and telling me it’s not 100% more disgusting than Wetlands-or, actually, just try some letters from Joyce to Nora on for size.

Those who run for the exits at the first sign of feces in Wetlands ends up missing out on a tender heart bearting what, underneath all the shi…ok, I’m not going to make that joke. But gah, I want to.

Don’t let the Confederate flag on the cover of Dara Horn’s new novel All Other Nights scare you off.   This is not your Uncle Dale’s novel of the Civil War.  In fact, it’s a departure of sorts for Horn as well.  I was a huge fan of her previous novel, The World to Come.   That novel featured an art heist, historical fiction featuring  the artist Marc Chagall, and elements of magic realism (for want of a better descriptor).

All Other Nights, on the other hand, is a full-on literary action/adventure novel, featuring, among other things, Union and Confederate spies, a plot on President Lincoln’s life, a city burning in flaming liquor, a dislocated jaw, a band comprised of members who are missing at least one limb, and a female magician.  I’ve been looking forward to reading this novel since reading an early excerpt in the Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists edition in 2007.

It’s a coincidence that this post was composed during the Jewish holiday Passover, but it is fitting.  The novel takes its name from one of the four questions that the youngest member of a Jewish family asks at the Passover Seder – “How is this night different from all other nights?”  (Please note: I am not Jewish, so I have relied upon the web to fill in my knowledge gaps.  Any gaffes in this post regarding Jewish culture are my own.)

Early in the novel, New Yorker Jacob Rappaport finds himself sharing Passover Seder with family members in New Orleans whose allegiances are with the South in the Civil War.  Horn brilliantly captures the ironic juxtaposition of this celebration of Passover in Confederate New Orleans, a celebration in which the assembled are waited upon by slaves:

Jacob tried to concentrate on the story being told as they chanted the liturgy around the table, describing the anguish of their ancestors, slaves in Egypt, and the vast vindications wrought to liberate them — one of the few moments in Hebrew glory in all of history, perhaps even the only one.  But now he imagined how terrible it must have been to live through: the tortures of slavery, and then the horrifying vindication of the angel of death, slaying the firstborn of Egypt so that the Israelites might be set free.

Jacob’s foreboding vision of Egypt presages the horrors that Jacob (and the country) will face over the course of the Civil War.  How and why Jacob, a Union soldier, finds himself breaking bread in the Confederacy are at the very heart of this novel.  Since this is very much an action/adventure novel, the less given away here the better.

There is no question that All Other Nights is also very much a literary novel. The novel explores the themes of loyalty, family, tradition, duty, honor, and the cost of slavery in America.  Jacob’s experiences in the novel are an examination of how one’s life course can change dramatically – over night.   Horn also looks at the Civil War through a unique lens.

A hallmark of Horn’s fiction is an exploration of lesser known chapters of Jewish history and culture.  The author weaves these elements into her novels in a way that feels organic to the story being told and doesn’t come off as scholarly showboating, i.e. “let me tell you everything I learned researching this novel.”  Horn’s real-life subjects are universally fascinating and appeal to Jewish and non-Jewish readers.

For example, a central character in this novel is Judah Benjamin, who held the posts, at various times, of Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State for the Confederacy. That’s a lot going on for one guy, and it explains in part why Benjamin has been known as the “brains of the Confederacy.”  A left-handed compliment if there ever was one.  (Benjamin was also a U.S. Senator for Louisiana prior to the succession.)

Horn also includes a chapter that was missing from my U.S. history book: General Grant’s expulsion of Jews from the Department of the Tennessee.  The order is re-produced verbatim in the text, and it is shocking to experience a government-sponsored act of anti-Semitism, even for a time when slavery was the law of the land.

All Other Nights is a terrific read.  I can guarantee that you will see this one on my year end Top 10 list.  Granta selected Horn as one of its Best Young American Novelists, and All Other Nights shows that the editors knew what they were talking about.  Dara Horn was also one of the first authors interviewed here at BGB.  She now bears the dubious distinction of being the only author to be interviewed by us twice.  Tune in tomorrow to read my interview with Dara Horn.

After a morning of Easter Bunny related activities, I suppose it’s fitting that I write about my experience with John Updike’s character Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.  As an initial matter, I’m fairly certain that I messed up here.  Namely, rather than starting with Rabbit, Run, the first of Updike’s four novels about Rabbit, I decided to cheat and start with the first of the two that won the Pulitzer Prize, 1981’s Rabbit is Rich (the third book in the series).  You know, skip to the good parts, right?

Well, I think the tack I took with this character had a great influence on how much I enjoyed this particular book.  After spending way longer on this book than I’d intended or expected, and then finishing with a somewhat ambivalent feeling (although convinced that I wasn’t going to read any of the others in the series), I did a little research with my trusty friend Wikipedia to find out what the big deal was.  And upon reading about Rabbit’s exploits both before and after Rabbit is Rich, I truly feel like I would have loved to read the entire series. 

Unlike the Star Wars series, in which I was perfectly content to jump in with Episode IV and not feel like I missed a beat, starting the Rabbit series with our main character already in his forties, and with so much of what was happening around him and driving his thoughts and actions being connected to his past (which I mistakenly skipped), I just wasn’t that engaged.  (Although for those of you wondering, I still liked this a lot better than Independence Day, the other Pulitzer Prize winner I’ve read about middle-aged American male angst.)

At the start of this book, Rabbit, a former high school basketball star from Eastern Pennsylvania, is in his forties and is working at the Toyota dealership owned by his mother-in-law.  However, how he got to that point, and the dynamics of his marriage to Janice, his relationship with his son Nelson, and the strange dynamics between him and his circle of friends and co-workers would have made far more sense to me if I had known more of their history (which I would have if I’d read the first two books in the series).  And the book is replete with references to past characters like Skeeter and Jill that didn’t mean anything to me, but after reading about the earlier books in the series, I feel like I really missed out.

All in all, I can’t say that I’d go out on a limb and recommend this book.  But on the other hand, I feel like I would recommend reading the entire series.  Sounds strange, but maybe it makes sense if you think about it.  In fact, now that I’m thinking about it, I think I might just go ahead and read Rabbit at Rest (the last of the four in the series); even though I kind of know what happens, I kind of want to read it myself to get some closure.

There are precious few books that beckon for a re-read immediately after the last page is turned. My relationship with Robert Goolrick’s A Reliable Wife (published by the always-reliable Algonquin Books) has seen the book less beckon and more demand, forcefully and insistently, to be read again, a mere month after I initially finished it.

The set-up of this, Goolrick’s first novel (following his highly-acclaimed memoir The End Of The World As We Know It, which I’ve not yet read), is simple enough: Wisconsin businessman Ralph Truitt, seeking what we’ll call here a “new beginning”, places a newspaper ad reading as follows:

Country Businessman Seeks
Reliable Wife.
Compelled By Practical,
Not Romantic Reasons.
Reply By Letter.
Ralph Truitt. Truitt. Wisconsin.
Discreet.

He finds his “practical”, “reliable” wife in one Catherine Land who, hungry for more than the emptiness she currently knows, after a brief correspondence with Truitt leaves her life behind to join him in his.

Simple enough of a plot, indeed. But if plots are owls, in A Reliable Wife the metaphorical owls are not what they seem. In the book’s second chapter, at the first encounter of Land, Goolrick writes

Catherine Land liked the beginnings of things. The pure white possibility of the empty room, the first kiss, the first swipe at larceny. And endings, she likes endings, too. The drama of the smashing glass, the dead bird, the tearful goodbye, the last awful word which could never be unsaid or unremembered.

Instantly, a strange and ominous finality is draped across the image of Land, only further enhanced by the way Goolrick writes her precise activities, both mental and physical, as she, traveling by train from her past life to that of Wisconsin, Truitt, and her future:

She knew all the details of her new life. The details were not a problem. She had rehearsed them for hours and months. The phrases. The false memories. The little piece of music. She had so little life of her own, so little self, that it was easy to take on the mannerisms of another with ease and conviction. Her new self may have been no more inhabited, but it was no less real.

Still, despite the slow and early coloring of Catherine Land as a shade of gray (an interesting juxtaposition of middle-ground given her stated preferences for beginnings and ends, skipping the center entirely), the true threads of tale in A Reliable Wife unwind slowly and surely, as Goolrick, with a master’s pace, allows his story to be told by the characters in it.

And, speaking of characters-with Catherine Land, Goolrick has crafted one of the most compelling female characters in recent literary fiction. Not to give the game away too much, but her fire, passion, drive and sheer force of will reminded me near-immediately of Ron Rash’s Serena, from his powerful 2008 book of the same name.

When I went to see Goolrick read from A Reliable Wife a week ago at Barnes and Noble on…Broadway and something (oh come ON I’m new to New York, these cross-streets and avenues and all that haven’t gelled for me yet. Give me a Peachtree and a Sycamore and I’ll know how to find my way home), he read the second chapter-essentially the brief, compelling introduction to Catherine Land (the tip of the iceberg, really).

During Q&A with an appreciative audience (most of whom had, seemingly, read and loved the book), Goolrick revealed that Catherine’s surname was chosen to be indicative of her true lust: for power. At her base, in many levels, Catherine Land is a hole to feed, a hungry force of nature that is just one of the many facets of what makes A Reliable Wife such an incredible book.

As I said at the outset of this, I’m going to re-read A Reliable Wife very, very soon. And then, undoubtedly, again-it’s like walking head-first into blinding but gorgeous blizzard: ensnaring, harrowing, and an all-encompassing experience. Watch those best of ’09 lists for this one.

After reading the two glowing reviews of Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orelans by Dan Baum in the New York Times (1 and 2), I drove to my nearest bookseller to scoop up a copy before they were all gone.  I knew that I was reading something special when the book’s three page preface gave as compelling a snapshot  of the mysteries of New Orleans as I’ve ever read.  I asked my mother who was visiting at the time to check out the preface, and she ended up mailing the book back to me a week later.  Once the book was back in my hands, it remained in my mitts until I read the last page.  Nine Lives is a gripping account of the City of New Orleans that pulls the reader in and won’t let go.

You should know this going in: “Nine Lives is not a Katrina book,” according to the author.  Baum covered Hurricane Katrina for The New Yorker magazine, including an excellent story on the NOPD’s breakdown after the hurricane.   The author later moved to New Orleans and wrote daily missives for The New Yorker’s post-Katrina blog, New Orleans Journal, which was well received by New Orleanians.  Based on these experiences, the author set out to write Nine Lives, which is so much more than a collection of hurricane-related sob stories.

The book begins in 1965 in the aftermath of Hurricane Betsy.  Over the next 300+ pages, Baum weaves together the stories of nine disparate, but weirdly representative, New Orleanians.  The stories of each of the nine is based upon hours and hours of interviews that Baum conducted with the subjects and their friends, family, and co-workers.  Though written in the third person (with one exception), each account is presented in what is essentially the subject’s own words.  Dan Baum the interviewer is nowhere to be seen on the page.  There are no editorial comments, no expository explanations of geography/language/culture, or other diversions from the narratives of Baum’s chosen nine.  It’s an achievement that Baum was able to contain the book to just over 300 pages.  A writer without Baum’s sense of the essential could easily have made Nine Lives a 1000 page doorstop.

The author is quick to point out in the preface:

These nine people do not all end up sitting on the same flooded rooftop. Nothing in New Orleans is ever that tidy…[but they] share a common problem: how to live in a place that by the rules of modern America has no right to exist.  In the context of the techno-driven, profit-crazy, hyperefficient self-image of the United States, New Orleans is a city-sized act of disobedience.

It’s this essential riddle that Baum sought to solve by undertaking this book: why are New Orleans’ citizens so happy in and devoted to what is by most objective measures one of the worst cities in America.  It has a terrible education system, political corruption, high unemployment, high crime, and on and on.  What Baum reveals through these stories is a people’s connection of place through a wonderfully unique and very strong local culture.

Katrina doesn’t rear her ugly head until the book is into its final hundred pages.   By the time the storm hits, the reader has been presented with as complete a portrait of the city in all of its imperfect glory as one is likely to find.   There is a context for the disaster to crash into, and real lives are impacted – each one in a different way.  Baum doesn’t go in for cheap theatrics or maudlin sentimentality in the aftermath of the storm, real life is dramatic enough.  The book is dedicated to “the people of New Orleans,” but it is not overly deferential nor a book length puff piece on a tragic city.  Baum does not shy away from shining a harsh light on the city’s many failings, but he does it in a way that demonstrates that he understands the complexity of the society that has evolved there and with a great respect for her people.

This is an incredible book, and it deserves a wide audience.  I was so impressed with Nine Lives that I felt compelled to contact the author to see if he would consider being subjected to a BGB interview.  Baum graciously accepted the invitation, and I immediately began trying to pare my questions down to a manageable number.  I could have talked to the author about this book for days on end.  Tune in tomorrow for my interview with Dan Baum.

Bonus points: The cover photo is by photographer Frank Relle who is known for his eerily lit nightscapes of New Orleans.  Read Relle’s interview with Times-Picayune reporter Chris Rose here, and be sure to check out his online gallery.

I’m the sort of person that enjoys doing things that really, really freak me out. Roller coasters. That giant thing at Huntsville Space and Rocket Center that sends you plummeting into nothingness and slingshots you back up. The “Super Mario Brothers” movie.

So when I saw a Largehearted Boy review of Will Elliot’s The Pilo Family Circus that begins with this:

The Pilo Family Circus is horrifyingly surreal, the story of clowns who take an apprentice into their otherworldly circus. Elliott has earned comparisons to Chuck Palahniuk and Stephen King, but his fresh creative (and chilling) approach to fiction stands on its own.

I was almost, but not quite, obligated to hunt this book down. Then I saw the cover.

A clown. An effing clown, glowing eyes, stupid creepy smile-the scariest possible thing in the world.

Game. On.

The back-story to The Pilo Family Circus, Elliot’s first published novel, reads almost like twisted dream itself. After dropping out of law school and being diagnosed as schizophrenic, Australian Will Elliot began experimenting with sleep deprevation and other self-torture methods to produce ideas and concepts from the brink of sheer insanity.

And this book, finally brought to American soil (after a multiple-award-winning Australian tour of duty) thanks to Underland Press, shows it. In a nutshell, The Pilo Family Circus is the story of Jamie, a boy who finds himself trapped amongst the lost and adrift souls in a horrific, hellish circus. After being slowly broken down by his new family, a group of freakish, sadistic clowns, Jamie splinters an alternate personality as JJ, a clown that uses youth and innocence to protect himself. Jamie spends his time attempting to pull at the thread of what the Pilo Circus is really about, with its grotesque freaks, a matter manipulator that can turn flesh into the most disgusting things, and the seemingly mindless mob of sheep that are the circus’s patrons, called “tricks”, but immediately upon applying his clown make-up all semblance of self disappears as JJ takes over-and horrific things begin to happen.

There’s not much, not much at all, that I can say about The Pilo Family Circus without giving away bits of the gorgeously grotesque layers of theme and meaning that Elliot lays, one on top of another, within the book. Addiction, sadomasochism , um…copulation with ferns…it’s all there. And it makes for a terrifying hell-ride of a read.