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America America is a quietly stunning book about politics, wealth, family,
love and loyalty. It bears comparison with The Great Gatsby and An American
Tragedy, but it is its own book and I would not be surprised to see it
enter the canon as a modern American classic.
It is narrated by Corey Sifter, an upstate New York newspaper publisher
looking back at his past association with the wealthy Metarey family. The
teenage son of a plumber, Corey is hired by the Metareys as a
groundskeeper/handyman, and becomes a sort of protege to patriarch Liam
Metarey. Through them he becomes involved with the presidential campaign of
Henry Bonwiller, a liberal antiwar senator whose campaign is derailed by
accusations of the coverup of a fatal accident.
Corey is a hard working, studious, almost unbearably decent boy who is
often mystified by the scenes of political and emotional drama unfolding
before him. As he begins a flirtation with one of the Metarey daughters,
and accepts Mr. Metarey's offer to pay tuition to a prestigious prep
school, he feels conflicting loyalties between his family and class origins
and the heady new world of power and wealth of which he is mostly a passive
and naive observer.
There is drama, suspense and tragedy in this book, and it is a page-turner,
if you can imagine a wistful, sad, elegiac page-turner. It is a book that
longs for decency and for the old-fashioned "American" virtues of hard
work, common sense, practical knowledge and unselfish love. It is a book that fights like hell against cynicism, and in the face of the political treachery portrayed, it seems a quixotic fight indeed.
In The Missing, an industrial accident unleashes a virus that creates zombie-like flesh eaters, feasting on an affluent town in Maine.
I picked this up as my annual Halloween read, but it didn't do much for me. The story and characters were interesting enough, in a soap-opera kind of way, but there was way too much grade-school gore, and not nearly enough terror. I like my horror novels to be truly frightening, to follow me around for days (I'm thinking of The Haunting of Hill House, or early Stephen King). This one was just not scary.
I can't write a fair review of an "inspirational" book, because I'm not a fan of the genre. I suppose theses tales are supposed to be filled with cardboard characters that represent Ideas.
To the extent that I pondered the ideas herein, I didn't agree with them. I detest the notion that all people are in complete control of their own destiny, as if any failure is their personal responsibility. And I'm infuriated by the notion that only men need to purse their Personal Legend; that woman's role is to love, and wait for, their men.
In Blindness, Portuguese Nobelist José Saramago's dystopian fable, unnamed people in an unnamed country are suddenly stricken blind. Due to fear of contagion, the early victims are herded into asylums, offered no medical help, given meager rations, and left to themselves to organize a civilized community - or not, as it turns out.
This book cries out for discussion, but I would not recommend it to any book that prefers uplifting, ladylike books. It is harrowing and graphic. I had tears in my eyes at one point, not from sadness exactly but from...horror, I guess. As for the writing style, Saramago employs run-on sentences in long paragraphs, with dialog set off only by quotation marks, so it is sometimes hard to puzzle out who is speaking. I've mentioned before that I find the lack of quotation marks a distancing device, but that was not the case here. The writing creates the kind of disorientation that the newly blind might be experiencing.
My brief and untutored review can't do justice to a book that demands more analysis. I'm still thinking about it.
Hurray for Obama and hurray for us and hurray for the world! It can be argued that Obama's peace prize is premature, but on the other hand, no one in the history of the prize has actually achieved world peace. The prize is always for potential. It's a little sad that the simple act of looking outward, and being willing to talk with other nations, is so exceptional in an American that is deemed worthy of a prize. It's a lot sad that so many Republicans cannot be happy for their president and their country for one day, or even one minute. They remind me of Charlie Brown, "who can take a wonderful season like Christmas and turn it into a problem." Whiners.
Truly Plaice, a woman afflicted with an undisclosed growth disorder, grows up in rural New York, scorned by her neighbors, teachers and family. When her beautiful sister Serena Jane runs away from her husband and son, Truly moves in to care for them, despite the husband's continual cruelty and exploitative medical examinations. She eventually finds her strength and her wisdom in an unexpected way.
This book is getting mostly excellent reviews, but its charms eluded me. The characters were undeveloped at best and ridiculous stereotypes at worst, and the plot was painfully contrived. Truly is born in 1953, making her basically my age, but the story makes it seem as if this all took place in the deep South in the 19th century. Why is Truly so imprisoned by her condition and by her small-minded environs? She attends high school; she watches television; she has to know there is a bigger world out there. For one thing, as Truly is coming of age, second-wave feminism is flourishing all over the world, but you would never know it from this novel's (and Truly's) pinched view of women's lives.
If the book is intended to be read as fable, it is not fabulous enough. If it intended to be read as "women's fiction," whatever that is, it is not credible.
Leaving aside the plot for the writing, my big gripe was that the narration was handled all wrong. Truly Plaice is a first-person narrator, but she is unaccountably omniscient. She recounts things that happened to her boyfriend in Vietnam as if she were there. She describes in detail her nephew waking up with an enormous erection - you get the idea. Again, if the intent was to make Truly seem magical and all-knowing, the attempt fell flat.
Dan Chaon's new novel uses the suspense genre in the service of literature, but if you like, you can forget about the literature and just enjoy this as a cerebral thriller in the High Paranoid style. The stories (there are three) all revolve around questions of identity and how easily one can lose it, intentionally or not.
The three stories will eventually converge into a coherent whole but they are fascinating on their own. Miles Cheshire has spent ten years obsessively searching for Hayden, his schizophrenic identical twin. Teenage Lucy has left home in the company of one of her high school teachers, in search of adventure, glamor and wealth. Ryan has dropped out of college and taken up with Jay, an unsavory character - and his biological father.
Each of the stories is compelling. Chaon's prose is economical and powerful, and his characters are finely drawn - as they feel their own sense of immutable "real-ness" dissolving, they are vividly real to the reader.
The structure of the novel is a thing of beauty, and contributes to the overall power of the work. It is obvious from the start of the novel that all things are not what they seem, but Chaon is fair to the reader, and by the end of the novel one feels moved, not manipulated.
In this clever page-turner, graduate student Connie Goodwin spends the summer at her late grandmother's decrepit house in Marblehead, Massachusetts and stumbles upon clues to her witch ancestors.
It's a fast, easy, amusing read based on the interesting premise that witches or "cunning women" really did exist in colonial America, and that these homely solo practitioners held the key to wisdom sought by male alchemists. What detracts from the book are its grossly stereotypical characters and the "mystery" that was no puzzle at all. Also, I'm never a fan of popular romances, and when I read of our heroine meeting a handsome guy in jeans and a tool belt, who just happens to have a graduate degree and a successful restoration business, I groaned.
If you want a Salem witchcraft novel with a little more heft, I'd suggest The Heretic's Daughter.
Not as expansive as American Pastoral, but searching, incisive, brilliant, and quite the page-turner. While I found Roth's last, Exit Ghost, to be an anemic excuse for Roth's long literary rants, this one is a living breathing story on its own. Ira Ringold, the Communist in the title, is a tragic figure who uses ideology, and marriage, as a desperate protection against his own dark side. His wife, the aptly-named Eve Frame, betrays Ira to the red-baiting journalists of the time by participating in a libelous book that gives the novel its title. Indeed, betrayal, of self and of others, is one of the larger themes of a book that ruminates on what it means to be human. Can we as humans not betray? This is ultimately a story of human relationships and the mess we make of them, rather than a grand discourse on the politics of the time, and it is all the more interesting for that. (Oh, and the gossip? I don't care about that, and it surprised me how often it turned up in reviews).
My library book discussion group read The Art of Racing in the Rain last night and almost everybody liked it, and some people loved it, and Mr. Stein should know that he got six sales out of me because we buy multiple copies for the sake of the group.
It's time to start voting on our selections for the next six months. My group grumbles that my selections are too dark, but I have to practically bribe them to offer suggestions of their own. I'm trying to offer up some lighter fare, like my favorite neo-Nazi book A Changed Man, and my favorite suicide book A Long Way Down. Sorry, that's about as light as I get.
Next month, we're reading Christopher Hitchen's God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I'm not the one who suggested this book (I'm a Sam Harris girl myself), but I'll be the one to get the grief when people complain to the mayor that the library is promoting blasphemy. I have to admit that I enjoyed hanging the God Is Not Great flyers around the library, and I kind of have my dukes up already, and if nobody objects to the book, I might be a wee bit disappointed.
