48 posts tagged “fiction”
Collect four adult siblings from an extremely dysfunctional family and force them to sit shiva for seven days for their father. It's an easy premise for funny domestic fiction or an ensemble-cast movie (which is already "in development", according to IMDB). It is narrated by Judd Foxman, who is reeling from the discovery of his wife's infidelity. His sister and his two brothers have their own issues, and the solemnity of the occasion doesn't keep them from going at each other, sometimes physically.
The book is often laugh-out-loud funny; the scene where Judd walks in on his wife having sex with his boss is almost Chaucerian in its bawdy, slapstick hilarity. It's also moving and insightful about sibling and parent-child relationships. My only complaint is the extreme emphasis on sex, which makes sense in the context of the story but got wearying to me as a reader.
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).
How could I not read the novel endorsed by Barack Obama? The narrator of Netherland, Hans van den Broek is a well-to-do financial analyst living in Manhattan in the aftermath of 9/11. When his wife takes his son and flees to London, Hans copes with the loneliness and disorientation by playing cricket and by befriending a Trinidadian "businessman" (read: gangster) named Chuck Ramkisson.
The novel is beautifully written (and the only book I've read in a long time that drove me to the dictionary a few times) but I have to say I admired it more than I enjoyed it. I want to say that the overall effect is more cerebral than emotional, but in fact Hans is a very vulnerable character and there's emotion all over the place. I think I'll need to revisit this later and try to connect with it in a more substantial way.
If I'm in the mood for a frothy and funny summertime read, I wouldn't generally pick up a book about neo-Nazi skinheads. But I stumbled upon A Changed Man, and although I wouldn't call it frothy, it's an easy read and sometimes wickedly funny - a perfect beach read. It's about Vincent, a young skinhead complete with Waffen SS tattoos, who offers his help to a human-rights group headed by a Holocaust survivor. The organization puts Vincent up at the home of the development director, a tightly-wound divorced mom, and starts milking his touching reformation for all its worth in terms of publicity and donations.
This is a book that could easily have devolved into something oh so very arch and mean-spirited, but in the end the flawed characters, with all their human ambiguities, are quite endearing. It made me smile.
Dark Places is a well-crafted mystery with an interesting structure and certainly an apt title, because it's dark as hell. It's about Libby Day, who as a child survived the slaughter of her family in their Kansas farm house. Her brother Ben was convicted of the murders and has been languishing in prison, while outside groups increasingly defend him. One of these groups approaches Libby, and offers to pay her to help prove Ben's innocence. She testified against him at his trial, but she agrees to help because, frankly, she's broke. Also bitter, dishonest, lazy and antisocial.
The narration alternates between Libby's point of view in the present day, her mother's point of view on the day of the murder, and Ben's point of view on the same day.Because of the back-and-forth narration, sometimes the reader knows things that Libby does not know, but that certainly doesn't take away from the suspense.
To say that none of the characters are likable is an understatement. Most are despicable. There's a glimmer of redemption for Libby in the end, but no mawkish change of heart a la Scrooge. I rooted for her anyway, and grew to care about her. Sad to say, I identified with Libby. It's an excellent rendition of someone suffering from long-term depression.
John Hart's new novel was a huge disappointment to me. I loved his last, Down River, because of the beautifully rendered setting and the rich characterization. This one sacrifices setting and character to plot.
It's a dandy plot, admittedly, about a 13 year-old boy desperate to find his missing twin sister, and the police detective obsessed with the case and perhaps with the missing girl's mother, as well. It's a fast-paced affair, with the requisite one-sentence paragraphs to keep things moving, although to be accurate, they are usually not sentences.
Just fragments.
Unfortunately, the book calls upon too many tv-movie cliches: the angst-ridden detective, his politically-minded boss who throws bureaucratic obstacles in his way, the rich, well-connected and evil businessman, the beautiful, weak woman who needs the hero to rescue her.
The pivotal character is the boy, Johnny, who takes it upon himself to find his sister. He has studied up on vision quests and native American lore, and armed himself with eagle feathers, for reasons that remain obscure to me. This character is a major missed opportunity. I would love to have had a better look inside him, but the imperative of the
suspense-novel structure precluded that.
Oh, and I pinpointed the doers pretty early.
In the newest from Sarah Waters, set in postwar Britain, a family living in a dilapidated manor house are befriended by a country doctor whose mother had been a servant there. They have the mundane troubles of the fading gentry: lack of money, the seeming irrelevance of their class in the new England, a house that they can't maintain. With all that difficulty, it seems superfluous when a malevolent poltergeist manifests, apparently intent on tormenting them to the point of madness.
I love this writer. Her sense of place is incredibly vivid and her characters tug at your heart. Like many of her novels, this one starts slow and then grabs you by the throat and won't let go - I was up until 2:00 a.m. finishing it.
I didn't love this latest (and last?) installment of Roth's Nathan Zuckerman novels. Zuckerman, impotent and incontinent following prostate surgery, leaves his Berkshires haven for Manhattan. He connects with the lover of his late literary hero, I. E. Lonoff, an aggressive would-be biographer of Lonoff who claims to know a secret, and a young couple with whom he agrees to swap homes for a year. The story was absorbing, and the writing as good as always, but the tone put me off. Zuckerman seems to equate his sexual impotency with his literary decline, and that's so facile. He also seems to revere the Great Male Writers with their Big Ideas and their Propulsive Energy, and gives me the impression he would disdain women writers. I've been reading a Roth novel a year, and the recent ones I've read didn't have this vaguely anti-feminist tone.
This is the story of Pluto, North Dakota, and how generations of its residents are affected by the brutal murder of a family and the lynching of a group of Indians innocent of the crime.
This is my first Erdrich, believe it or not. The book is billed as a novel, but it reads like a short story collection with a common theme. Multiple points of view and time shifting, that's to be expected today, but what was different was the different emotional peaks - the individual stories had their own crescendos, and the novel as a whole did not, at least not in my reading of it. Still, most of the stories were absorbing, and the characters felt real. I'll read her again.
In Kathleen Kent's debut novel, Sarah Carrier, the daughter of a woman hanged for witchcraft in Massachusetts, recounts the story of the Salem witch hunts.
By telling the Salem story through the eyes of one child, Kent does a good job in making these historical events real and immediate. The characters are complex; only one, the family servant, is presented as thoroughly evil. Sarah's understanding of her family grows as she does. Her mother is presented initially as unloving and unpleasant, and her father as remote, but as we learn about their motives we grow to sympathize with them. Likewise the family of relatives go from angels of mercy to enemies to - in one case, a martyr and savior of sorts.
A page turner with a little meat to it, and characters that breathe. What's not to like?
Side note: one thing I learned while reading the book is that torture is not necessarily an effective way to get at the truth. Imagine that.
