New Century Reading

Dark Places

I tell you what, Gillian Flynn is not for the faint of heart. And I really love that about her.

Dark Places is the book she wrote before Gone Girl. Having read and loved Gone Girl, I was a bit nervous about going backwards in time--what if earlier books weren't nearly as good? Fortunately for me, I found Dark Places to be awfully close to Gone Girl.

The premise is this: Libby Day was only 7 when her mother and two older sisters were brutally murdered and her brother put in prison for the deed. As you might expect, this had a negative effect on Libby's life going forward. She's pretty much done nothing but live off a fund people donated to right after the tragedy. But 25 years later, the money's running out. When Libby is contacted by a member of the Kill Club--a group of people who obsess over notorious murders--and offered money to talk to them, she has little choice but to say yes. They may be a revolting group of people to her, especially since it was her testimony that put her brother behind bars, and the Kill Club group firmly believes he was wrongly imprisoned.

Still, they continue to offer money if she'll follow up on some of the ideas they have for who might be the actual culprit. So, unwillingly, Libby goes along for the ride.

The book is told in alternating chapters from Libby's point of view and from third person chapters detailing what exactly happened the last day before the murders, so that Libby's investigation slowly merges with the actual murders. It's a gripping approach that Flynn pulls off in the most tension-generating way possible.

I had a few problems with some of the plot points, but you know what? Overall I didn't care. Flynn sails through this story, full of darkness and unlikable people, with great confidence, and I was sold.

Besides that, Flynn is a master of using place in her writing:

"Magda's neighborhood was as cheap as mine, but nicer. Every house had been built shabby, but the owners still found enough pride to slap on a coat of paint now and then, hang a flag, plant some flowers. The houses reminded me of hopeful homely girls on a Friday night, hopping bars in spangly tops, packs of them were you assumed at least one might be pretty, but none were, and never would be. And here was Magda's house, the ugliest girl with the most accessories, frantically piled on. The front yard was spiked with lawn ornaments: gnomes bouncing on wire legs, flamingos on springs, and ducks with plastic wings that circled when the wind blew. A forgotten cardboard Christmas reindeer sat soggy in the front garden, which was mostly mud, baby-fuzz patches of grass poking through intermittently. I turned off the car, and we both stared into the yard, with its jittering denizens."

I guess there's nothing for it but to read Flynn's first book, Sharp Objects, and then have to wait--please, not too long!--for her next book.

The Odds

I love Stewart O'Nan. Why isn't he as well known as, say, Jonathan Franzen? O'Nan deserves it. His latest is no exception. The Odds is the (brief) story of Art and Marian Fowler, married 30 years, and things aren't going well. There have been affairs, both have lost their jobs, they're at risk to lose their home, and in one last, wild attempt to reverse their fortunes and save their marriage, they return to the site of their honeymoon--Niagara Falls. There they hope to use what cash they have left to win big--and Art hopes to win back Marian, who's inclined to let the marriage die.

That's it. A weekend on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. A middle-aged couple, most likely invisible to the people around them, carrying the proverbial baggage. Flawed people, a mix of likable and not (like most real people), struggling to determine what's the right thing to do and the right path to choose.

One of the things O'Nan does so well is to shine a spotlight on a little-explored community or corner of the world, and one of the more mundane. Just like he did in Last Night at the Lobster, a short bittersweet book about the staff at a Red Lobster that's about to close for good, O'Nan brings some humanity into a place many would sneer at, and gives it a more wistful reality, even if it's still kitschy in places and downright trashy in others. (I should confess to having a soft spot in my heart for kitschy, tacky places; I always loved our family trips to the Wisconsin Dells.) In literary terms, not many readers view Niagara Falls (or Red Lobster) as a setting for a serious literary work, but O'Nan proves them wrong. Any setting can be appropriate in the right hands.

I suppose now I'll have to wait several months for the next O'Nan book. I've already read and loved Emily, Alone, Wish You Were Here, The Night Country, Songs for the Missing, and A Prayer for the Dying. Hmmm...but I haven't read The Good Wife...

You & Me

If you want a book with a compelling, forward-driving plot, this isn't it. But if you'd like to spend some time with a couple of cranky but clearly intelligent old geezers while they shoot the shit, well, this is your book.

I mean that in the best possible way.

You & Me is a book made out of dialogue. Only dialogue. No plot, and we don't even know the names of the two geezers. There's no topic they consider off limits. Sometimes they agree, sometimes they don't. The book's intro is succinct and very accurate:

"Somewhere between Bakersfield, California, and Jacksonville, Florida--we think spiritually nearer the former and geographically nearer the latter--two weirdly agreeable dudes are on a porch in a not upscale neighborhood, apparently within walking distance of a liquor store, talking a lot. It's all they have. Things disturb them. Some things do not."

It's hard to explain (at least for me) why this book was so entertaining. Although only 194 pages and in very short sections, it took me a while to read. Probably because, as much as I enjoyed it, I only wanted to spend a certain amount of time with these dudes at any one time.

But when I did drop back into their world, I always enjoyed it. Sometimes it was irreverent and apparently meaningless:

"I'd like to see some flying dogs

Are there flying dogs?

Not that I know of. Seeing some would improve my mood tremendously, though.

I suspect it would. Mine too.

Cheer us right up, flying dogs.

Raining cats and dogs.

Like to see cats bouncing off cars.

Why'd they call combat air battle "dogfights"?

They wanted to see flying dogs too."

They talk about Jayne Mansfield and about language (sometimes making up their own words) and why people behave the way they do, including themselves, in all their faults. Sometimes they're melancholy, although never sentimental:

"Are we going to have fun today?

No.

Are we going to live today as if it is the last day of our lives?

No.

But we know from the testimonials of Close Callers that we should.

Yes.

But we don't do it.

No.

Why not?

We can't conceive of how you actually do it.

We can't?

No. Go ahead. Propose that we live right now as if this is our last day. What do we do? Where do we go?

I want to sit right here and think about The End.

See? Why don't you ACTUALIZE yourself? Have you been to Tahiti? No? Then you must go. Now. Be gone.

Jesus.

See? You see?

God wasted two whole spaces on us as human integers. We're nils in terms of becoming all that we can become."

Sometimes funny, sometimes dark, often thought-provoking, and all without plot. Quite an accomplishment.

The Angry Buddhist

I would like to tell you I loved this book. It's full of dark humor, political parodies, crazy characters, infidelities, and the title character, a guy with anger management problems. It's an entertaining romp.

But.

I had some problems that ended up distracting me from my enjoyment of the book. See if you can spot the common issue here:

"She says yeah, oh, yeah, but what she's thinks is if you want to make me happy"

"They eat salad, and chicken, and after: a desert of apple pie"

"Sees Nadine running...tennis trained legs carrying her swiftly toward the store, it's yellowish lights, it's perceived safety"

"He takes a last look at the Salton Sea, it's splendid isolation, its fragile beauty"

"probably can't fill out a Soduku puzzle"

"It occurs to him that this is could be the weapon used"

These are just a few examples of the errors that are throughout the text. I'd say the publisher (Europa Editions) only ran spell-check on this, except for the repeated references to the local lawman as "Sherriff".

I kept track of the "its/it's" errors until I hit 7, and then I gave up.

My temptation, after returning this book to the library, was to buy a copy, copyedit it, and send it to the publisher with an invoice.

So--if you can overlook rampant errors, you might enjoy this book. But to me, the annoyance was just too much.

Triburbia

I had a few different reactions to this book of connected-short-stories-as-novel. One is that it's not nearly as well done as Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists or Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad. I think that's due in part to the fact that rarely does the same character return as the story's focus, so there's a whole lot of people we have to keep track of. And in the end, many of them sound the same.

Second, this group of people who live in the Tribeca neighborhood in New York are almost all very wealthy, very concerned with real estate, and live lives of sad wealthy desperation. Not to say that wealthy people can't have screwed-up lives or be depressed. It's just a little harder to feel sorry for them. When you're on an enormous yacht in the Mediterranean and feel down, please tell me you have a very good reason why I should feel bad for you.

Not to mention the story where the father learns about mean girls in the elementary school. His shock and dismay is out of proportion--it's like he had absolutely no idea. C'mon--mean girls are nothing new. The Brontes and Jane Austen covered them, and let's not forget Nellie "Little Bitch on the Prairie" Oleson.

On the other hand, I'm a suburbanite who gets very tired of people assuming I'm a certain way just because I live in the 'burbs. Obviously all of us 'burb-dwellers are shallow, haughty, appearance-driven, competitive with our kids, and only want to eat at Applebee's, right? I'm here to tell you it ain't so. My suburb has those kind of people, yes, but there are a great many who are the exact opposite, people who are highly literate and intelligent, kind, concerned about the greater good, and can even poke fun of themselves for living here. If you're in Minnesota, you'll understand when I say: there are a whole lot of Vote No signs in this suburb. So reading about urban dwellers who act exactly as I'm told is how all suburbanites act, I got a bit of a chuckle out of the idea that--hey! those people live in the big gritty city too!

Overall? I'm kind of meh on this one. The publisher sent me a review copy, which I hadn't solicited, and I thought it looked interesting. But I'm only lukewarm.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette

I stopped at my local library this weekend to pick up a book I had on reserve (because in addition to having too many books to read at home, I also keep a lively library book request queue) (but supporting the library is like a civic duty, right?) and saw this book on the Bestseller Express checkout shelf. I don't know if all libraries do this; ours takes popular, high-demand books and has a number of copies that can be checked out for a fee ($4) and can only be kept 10 days instead of the usual 21. I've never used it before, but as I saw it on the shelf and reflected on the fact that I was #311 on the non-express waitlist the last time I checked, I picked it up, paid the fee, and drove home, hoping I'd have time to squeeze it in during the 10 days.

That was Saturday morning. Sunday before dinner, I finished it.

Best $4 I ever spent.

How could I possibly resist a book about family dysfunction, a mother (Bernadette) who disappears right before the family is supposed to head out on a trip to Antarctica as a reward for the middle-school kid getting perfect grades, the same mother whose intense dislike of the Seattle community and specifically the other parents at her daughter's school has caused her to retreat into her house and hire a virtual assistant from India to do things like schedule dentist appointments, another mother who's a brilliant parody (or perhaps not quite parody, even scarier) of parents who don't believe their little darlings can do anything wrong, and architecture, and Microsoft, and a mudslide, and what happens when creative genius is stifled?

Bonus: lots of humor, but lots of touching moments that don't tip over into gooey sentimentality.

Right off the bat, we learn a great deal about the middle school in question:

"Galer Street School is a place where compassion, academics, and global connectitude join together to create civic-minded citizens of a sustainable and diverse planet.

Student: Bee Branch
Grade: Eight
Teacher: Levy

KEY
S  Surpasses Excellence
A  Achieves Excellence
W  Working towards Excellence"

Global connectitude? A grade system that only recognizes levels of excellence? Author Maria Semple had me on that first page and held onto me through the wild ride that follows.

The narrative is a crazy quilt of emails, faxes, police records, and Bee's (the middle school daughter of Bernadette) narration as she tries to make sense of her mother's abrupt disappearance. Along the way, as the puzzle pieces come together, Bee learns--as does the reader--a whole lot about who Bernadette really is and why she behaves the way she does.

The humor that balances out the sadder parts of the book is much needed, and it should come as no surprise that the author has also written for Mad About You, Ellen, and Arrested Development.

I guess this was my little weekend gift to myself. Loved it.

Home

I read Toni Morrison's Beloved for the first time this fall. I'd (shamefully) never read Morrison before. And I mostly loved it, except the end felt rushed to me.

Now I've read her latest novel, Home, and this slim (150 pages) little book covers a lot of territory in a very short space: we have a black Korean War vet returning to the States to face racism and difficult personal history; we have the woman he meets and falls in love with; we have some family history, especially about his nasty grandmother Lenore; and we have his hapless sister, Cee, who falls into the clutches of a white doctor who's studying eugenics.

That's a whole lot of stuff going on in 150 pages.

I suspect there's a lot of symbolism going on, and maybe the creation of a parable. The soldier, Frank Money (yes!), and his sister hate the town where they grew up, and they go out into the bigger world where they experience a lot of hurt. It's only when they return home that they can confront the pain the bigger world has caused them--and they've caused others--and begin to heal.

For me, whereas I thought most of Beloved was paced just right except for the rushed ending, this whole book felt rushed. It has none of the depth and exploration of Beloved. We're just handed these characters and situations and whoosh, we're at the end. These are significant events with significant consequences--I think I would have happily read the same story at four times the current length. But the shortness of it kept me at arm's reach; just when I was getting interested and concerned for one character, we zipped off to read another's story, and the main plot points occur so quickly and then are past, I barely had time to consider them and feel an emotional response.

But I hear I should read Sula and Song of Solomon. Thoughts from more experienced Toni Morrison readers?

This Is How You Lose Her

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz is a follow-up, of sorts, to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The primary narrator of the latter book was Yunior, and he's the star of most of the short stories that make up This Is How You Lose Her. 

These are stories about family, and love, and obsession with love. It's not going to be everyone's cup of tea--over on Amazon, I got a chuckle out of one reviewer's counting up all the times the F-bomb is dropped. And like Oscar Wao, there's a fair amount of foreign language dropped in. But I learned my lesson from Oscar and didn't bother looking any of it up--there's enough that it would have been disruptive to the reading, and I could pretty well guess from the context anyway.

The stories roam back and forth across different points of Yunior's life, from when his father brought Yunior, his older brother Rafa, and their mother to the US in the middle of winter, lodged them in an apartment not far from a landfill, and refused to let them go out and play or go to school. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out how that would affect two energetic little boys, or their poor trapped mother. Add to that the father's less than loving parenting and marital style, and it explains a lot about what happens to Yunior and Rafa as they grow up.

Rafa is his mother's favorite, and that doesn't bode well for a boy smart enough to take advantage of it. But in early adulthood, he's diagnosed with cancer, and many of the stories (this isn't really a spoiler, I should add) look at how Yunior copes with his brother's dying.

Yunior himself has some serious issues. When he cheats on his long-time girlfriend (multiple times), is it because, as she thinks, that's just what Dominican men do? Or is he damaged in some unique way? And when she leaves him for the infidelity, why can't he move beyond it, even though his life goes on in every other way?

All these characters are immensely flawed, yet Diaz shows us how they got that way, and we can empathize even when we cringe as they wander down a path we know is going to be oh-so-wrong. And we know why:

"For a few weeks people knock on the door, asking if the house is still for sale. Some of them are couples as hopeful as we must have looked. Ramon slams the door on them, as if afraid that they might haul him back to where they are. But when it's me I let them down softly. It's not, I say. Good luck with your search.

"This is what I know: people's hopes go on forever."

My only nitpick in this book is, unfortunately, one of my biggest pet peeves: no quotation marks with the dialogue. I usually find that distracting, and that was sometimes the case here. Still, the strength of the stories and the characters mostly overcame that.

My thanks to Riverhead Books for sending me a review copy.

Broken Harbo(u)r

Before I get into my thoughts about the book itself, let me just rant for a moment about American publishers who feel the need to drop the "u" from "harbour" in a book written by an Irish author, because apparently they think American readers are too stupid to understand that other countries may have different spellings. Tana French wrote it as Harbour. LEAVE IT AS HARBOUR. Yes, I'm shouting. I hate being treated like I need dumbing-down. Don't even get me started on the American versions of the Harry Potter books.

All righty. So I've been complaining lately about books by first-time authors that I don't feel have had the time to properly develop their talents. I have the opposite problem with Tana French. I loved loved loved In the Woods. I didn't think The Likeness was quite as good, but darn close. Faithful Place was a bit of a disappointment, but I still felt that French is such a strong writer that even a weaker book by her is better than a lot of other books out there.

That brings me to book 4. I logged onto Goodreads to rate this and found myself in a rating quandary. Well, more than one--Goodreads' lack of half-stars is frustrating when you don't think a book quite deserves a 4 but is better than a 3. But the main quandary was this: do I rate this book as just any old book, in which case it's a 4, or do I rate it against Tana French's previous books, in which case I'm looking at maybe a 2.5 (if Goodreads gave that option)?

I liked Broken Harbour better than Faithful Place, and if this was a new-to-me author, I'd be happier. But it's by an author who's done better work. The wonderful thing about In the Woods and The Likeness was the close marriage of "psychological" to "thriller". That's here too, but the marriage is dysfunctional. The psychological backdrop the mystery is set against feels forced, as if French now has herself in the position that she must include that backstory to all her books. The sad thing is that the main story, that of long-time detective Mick "Scorcher" Kennedy heading up a murder investigation while training in newbie detective Richie Curran, was perfectly fine without the distracting sidetrips into Scorcher's past and his mentally unstable sister Dina. Every time she showed up, I groaned with impatience--back to the mystery, please! And that's not a reaction I had with French's first two books.

Also, this book is waaaaaaay too long. That said, I blew through its 450 pages in 3 days, so I guess there was enough momentum to keep me going. But really, this would be a much tighter book with about 75-100 pages edited out.

Overall, I thought it was better than Faithful Place. But here's an author whose first two books were amazing, and I don't know if it's the pressure to keep producing that's making her falter a bit, or if the editors now take a "hands off" approach with her since she's a proven quantity.

But still, in a couple of years when I see that Tana French has a new book coming out, I'll hightail it over to my library's website and put my name on the list.

 

The Age of Miracles

Last week I blogged about being happy that a book I read lived up to the hype. Today I'm sad to report that this one did not.

I love the premise: one day, the world wakes up to the scientific announcement that the earth, for unknown reasons, has started spinning more slowly. Days and nights become longer. No one knows why, or how to fix it. The book is narrated by 11-year-old Julia, who watches her life change in so many ways, some expected, some not: there are still bullies at her middle school, there is still a boy she wishes would talk to her, there are tensions between her parents that don't seem to have anything to do with the spinning of the earth; there's the confusion over how to organize a day when the length of the day changes constantly, and there's the division in the community when the government orders everyone to retain a 24-hour clock but some choose to live by "real time".

All great stuff. I loved seeing the dystopia start at the beginning. In other dystopia that I've read, society has completely changed by the time the book opens. It was refreshing to see a different approach.

But I felt the book could have gone a lot deeper. Many of the characters are one-dimensional. At times, the background story of the earth's slowing feels forced into the text to remind the reader that there's a big change going on while Julia wonders why Seth didn't talk to her at the bus stop. There was frequent use of not-at-all subtle foreshadowing that became tedious. The ending just sort of--ended. It needed more, for reasons I can't go into without giving spoilers.

I'm going to go out on a cranky frumpy middle-aged limb here and posit a theory. Over the past year or so, I've read several books that had gotten a fair amount of hype and acclaim that disappointed me (and other readers I've talked to). The disappointment is of the "the writer can write, but this book shouldn't have been the final draft" kind. Interestingly, all the ones that come to mind for me were first books written by attractive young women. It's as if the publisher said, hey, she's good looking, we can market her. In every case, I would definitely consider reading the next book they write in the hopes that their writing has matured. Whatever happened to the idea that the book itself was the thing to be marketed, with the emphasis on making sure it was at its absolute best before it was published? And speaking of a marketing dream--how about an attractive author with a fully developed, beautifully polished book?

Yeah, I know. I'm old and living in the past.