I'm not surprised to discover the connection between Nell Zink and Jonathan Franzen or that Franzen advocated for Zink's work with publishers. If I'd I'm not surprised to discover the connection between Nell Zink and Jonathan Franzen or that Franzen advocated for Zink's work with publishers. If I'd read this book without a cover page, I would have assumed it was Franzen. There's a similar focus on pop culture and contemporary discourse, a similar cynical humor, even a similar use of a real-life rock icon (Ian McKaye here vs. Connor Oberst in Franzen's Freedom) as a foil for a fictional musician character. It's all very Franzenian, which means its strengths and weaknesses are similar to Franzen's. To Zink's credit, she's a better writer of dialogue than Franzen--the witty banter between central characters Pam and Daniel are by far the highlight of the book--and, while her characters are jaded and cynical, they're not as nihilistic as Franzen's. Maybe Zink's characters are just more likable, with the exception of Flora who's beyond insufferable. Ultimately, it's a good book and, while I regret writing so much about Franzen in this review of Zink's novel, it's hard for me to react to the novel in any other way. Maybe she'll grow a body of work ubiquitous enough for me to one day describe a Franzen work as Zinkian. Better yet, maybe she'll write a book that doesn't so closely remind me of a better-known author.
Merged review:
I'm not surprised to discover the connection between Nell Zink and Jonathan Franzen or that Franzen advocated for Zink's work with publishers. If I'd read this book without a cover page, I would have assumed it was Franzen. There's a similar focus on pop culture and contemporary discourse, a similar cynical humor, even a similar use of a real-life rock icon (Ian McKaye here vs. Connor Oberst in Franzen's Freedom) as a foil for a fictional musician character. It's all very Franzenian, which means its strengths and weaknesses are similar to Franzen's. To Zink's credit, she's a better writer of dialogue than Franzen--the witty banter between central characters Pam and Daniel are by far the highlight of the book--and, while her characters are jaded and cynical, they're not as nihilistic as Franzen's. Maybe Zink's characters are just more likable, with the exception of Flora who's beyond insufferable. Ultimately, it's a good book and, while I regret writing so much about Franzen in this review of Zink's novel, it's hard for me to react to the novel in any other way. Maybe she'll grow a body of work ubiquitous enough for me to one day describe a Franzen work as Zinkian. Better yet, maybe she'll write a book that doesn't so closely remind me of a better-known author....more
Claire Jiménez's Pen/Faulkner award-winning novel What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez is only nominally a work of mystery-crime. The book deals with the diClaire Jiménez's Pen/Faulkner award-winning novel What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez is only nominally a work of mystery-crime. The book deals with the disappearance of a young Puerto Rican girl from Staten Island and her sisters' attempt to find her after seeing a lookalike on a trashy reality TV show. More than that, though, the book is a look at the family dynamics of a very loud, brash, surprisingly crass, but ultimately endearing group of characters who've overcome extreme hardship. I can't believe family members talk to each other like this, but the writing is funny and alive in a way that leaves an impression, even if I wasn't entirely sold on the plot or the execution and even if all the characters told their stories in their associated chapters in basically the same voice. I liked the book well enough, yet I can't imagine what differentiated it enough from anything else published in 2023 to warrant a very prestigious literary award. I mean, this is far from the first time I've asked myself that question, and I've done so over far worse books than this. Ultimately, Ruthy Ramirez is a fast read with genuinely entertaining moments and occasional glimpses of pathos to boot....more
On the one hand, Jenny Erpenbeck's Booker International Prize-winning novel Kairos is a work of romance that prods into the May-December relationship On the one hand, Jenny Erpenbeck's Booker International Prize-winning novel Kairos is a work of romance that prods into the May-December relationship between East Germans Katharina and Hans in the waning years of the Cold War. In this aspect, the book is often intriguing, frustratingly overlong, and increasingly disturbing as the young Katharina comes to be abused physically and mentally by her 50-something lover Hans. Think Fifty Shades of Grey but with really smart writing. Hans is irredeemably awful, and it's tough not to lose some sympathy for Katharina as she so fully surrenders herself (and her youth) to him. It also seems plausible that the relationship at the center of this book is meant to serve as a microcosm of the relationship between the individual and the Communist system on the verge of oblivion that provides the novel's setting because, on the other hand, Kairos is a work of political fiction recalling the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the entire East German way of life in the early 1990s. It's in this second aspect that the novel works best as the story of Katharina, her friends and family, and even Hans, horrible as he is, is fascinating as they struggle to adapt to a complete paradigm shift and a new way of life. I might not have loved Kairos, finding it way too long and repetitive in structure, but I can see why it won such a major literary award and can appreciate both its ambition and Erpenbeck's talent as a prose stylist....more
Beijing Payback is a lot of fun: heavy on action yet balanced in its blood and violence by witty dialogue and banter among its likable central charactBeijing Payback is a lot of fun: heavy on action yet balanced in its blood and violence by witty dialogue and banter among its likable central characters. It's a decent boilerplate crime novel elevated into something more sophisticated by its transnational setting. I can't help but think, though, that it would work better as a screenplay than a novel, so thoroughly influenced as it is in its predictable twists and turns by the medium of film. Calling a book cinematic might be seen as a dismissal, implying that the book explores only the exterior world of its characters or exclusively shows rather than tells, as opposed to the interior concerns of literary fiction. I guess that's the case here. Between that, chapters ending in cliffhangers and the book's overall episodic nature, Beijing Payback seems ready for the big (or small) screen. Maybe it could be a limited series on Netflix or, given that the book ends by implying sequels, a full-fledged network tv show. Not that any of this is a bad thing.
Merged review:
Beijing Payback is a lot of fun: heavy on action yet balanced in its blood and violence by witty dialogue and banter among its likable central characters. It's a decent boilerplate crime novel elevated into something more sophisticated by its transnational setting. I can't help but think, though, that it would work better as a screenplay than a novel, so thoroughly influenced as it is in its predictable twists and turns by the medium of film. Calling a book cinematic might be seen as a dismissal, implying that the book explores only the exterior world of its characters or exclusively shows rather than tells, as opposed to the interior concerns of literary fiction. I guess that's the case here. Between that, chapters ending in cliffhangers and the book's overall episodic nature, Beijing Payback seems ready for the big (or small) screen. Maybe it could be a limited series on Netflix or, given that the book ends by implying sequels, a full-fledged network tv show. Not that any of this is a bad thing....more
Rebecca Makkai's I Have Some Questions for You (awful title) is a decent murder mystery that effectively builds a lot of suspense throughout its 400-sRebecca Makkai's I Have Some Questions for You (awful title) is a decent murder mystery that effectively builds a lot of suspense throughout its 400-some pages before sort of petering out anticlimactically in its final pages. The plot is fairly clichéd--a woman returns to her exclusive prep school where a classmate was murdered decades earlier and ends up rocking the boat in her quest to right past wrongs and arrive at the truth--but it's a compelling narrative and works well here. Makkai is a talented writer who brings some new life to this familiar plot by injecting in a whole lot of #metoo and tying the mystery at the center of the novel to current discourse about male violence and power. It works and makes sense even if a cancel culture subplot involving a very dubious accusation muddies the waters and calls into question what exactly Makkai was going for. To her credit, the actual #metoo movement was sometimes complicated by these sorts of issues (remember Aziz Ansari), so maybe Makkai is being honest here instead of haphazard. Again, it's an intriguing mystery, and Makkai does a great job of making the reader feel invested enough to read ahead quickly to the resolution. While that resolution itself feels very unsatisfying and full of loose ends, it's also honest. So maybe I Have Some Questions for You is an honest if not exactly cathartic work of mystery fiction. There are worse things for a book to be....more
Even by today's standards, Dashiell Hammett's 1929 Red Harvest is shocking in its violence and depravity. That's not to say the book is graphic in anyEven by today's standards, Dashiell Hammett's 1929 Red Harvest is shocking in its violence and depravity. That's not to say the book is graphic in any way, but between the high body count, the casualness in how characters react to murders happening right in front of them, and the overall feeling of nihilism, Red Harvest is about as noir as it gets. An unnamed narrator and operative from the Continental Detective Agency in San Francisco is dispatched to the town of Personville (cleverly nicknamed Poisonville by the locals) by a journalist who is promptly murdered leading said operative into the middle of a gang war of bootleggers, a corrupt police force, a requisite femme fatale, and the enigmatic old man who built the town. From there, it's a lot of heavy drinking, fighting, killing, and trading witty wisecracks with a variety of lowlifes. It's this last respect that makes Hammett always worth reading with more great bits of dialogue than even Hammett's contemporary Raymond Chandler would have come up with. Red Harvest is essential reading for fans of 20th-century noir fiction and easily one of the grittiest books of its era and a lot of fun to boot....more
Although Sea Monsters is often meandering and mostly plotless, it works as well as it does because of the quality of Chloe Aridjis's prose and the booAlthough Sea Monsters is often meandering and mostly plotless, it works as well as it does because of the quality of Chloe Aridjis's prose and the book's wonderful narrator and central character, Luisa. Luisa is a 17-year-old in the 1980s from Mexico City who runs away from home with the boy she's been fascinated with and spends the summer in Oaxaca at the famous clothing-optional Playa Zipolite. Luisa is a dreamer, imaging a romantic getaway with Tomás but soon finding him unappealing, initiating a tryst with a mysterious man she calls "The Merman" who turns out to be more mundane than she'd hoped, searching Oaxaca in vain for a troupe of Ukrainian dwarf circus performers who have defected from the Soviet Union, and filtering her adventures through her interests in historical shipwrecks, French literature, and the UK post-punk of bands like Joy Division, Depeche Mode, Siouxsie & the Banshees, and others. Even if Sea Monsters lacks a strict dramatic structure and the payoff of a clear resolution, I still found a lot to enjoy in its prose, its narrator, and its concise 200 pages. It's not hard to see why it won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2020. ...more
I liked Ling Ma's 2018 novel Severance well enough when I read it about a year after its publication. My only real complaint about it was that the panI liked Ling Ma's 2018 novel Severance well enough when I read it about a year after its publication. My only real complaint about it was that the pandemic narrative didn't fit all that seamlessly alongside the story of a young Chinese American professional woman on a business trip to the place of her birth. The genre conventions of the former against the realism of the latter made for a book that felt disjointed or lacking in unity. I guess this is just to say that I'm not surprised to find that Ling Ma's 2022 short story collection Bliss Montage is an improvement over that earlier novel given that there's no expectation of unity in a collection of stories.
Like any short story collection, the individual pieces in Bliss Montage vary in quality, but they're all pretty good and provide an interesting mix of the fantastical and the realistic. "G" about a designer drug that causes temporary invisibility (incorporeality?) is a fantastic story, for example, and the best in the collection while "Los Angeles", which opens the book and deals with a privileged housewife sharing her house with the ghosts of dead boyfriends, is just okay and probably the worst. Wait. No, the worst is "Yeti Lovemaking", which is overly cute filler. The rest of the stories fall somewhere in between although I also really liked "Returning" and "Office Hours". I probably wouldn't have picked up Bliss Montage if it hadn't won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2022, especially after my lukewarm response to Severance, but I'm glad I read this and am much more likely to stick around for whatever Ling Ma publishes next....more
Get Carter (aka Jack's Return Home) is a great bit of British crime noir from the early 70s. It's best known for its 1971 adaptation starring Michael Get Carter (aka Jack's Return Home) is a great bit of British crime noir from the early 70s. It's best known for its 1971 adaptation starring Michael Caine. While that film is well worth watching--skip the bland American remake from 2000 with Sylvester Stallone--the book is even better: gritty, grimy, amoral, and full of brutal nonstop action. Jack Carter is a hitman for an organized crime syndicate, who returns to his hometown for his older brother Frank's funeral and quickly sets about investigating and avenging Frank's death. From there, Carter spends most of the book drinking, smacking people around, crawling into bed with assorted women, and getting closer to a conspiracy involving casinos and pornographic films. The book isn't perfect--the ending feels a little pat and an entire separate love triangle exists offscreen that lacks development--but Get Carter is still a hell of a book that any fan of Chandler, Hammett, Thompson, Cain, or Ellroy will enjoy. There are two prequels I doubt I'll ever read, but I definitely enjoyed this one....more
Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Jayne Anne Phillip's novel Night Watch covers unfamiliar ground for historical fiction: the states of WWinner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Jayne Anne Phillip's novel Night Watch covers unfamiliar ground for historical fiction: the states of West Virginia and Virginia in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and the lunatic asylum industry in the mid-to-late 1800s. West Virginia, for all the flack it gets, was a state created in response to Southern secession, a breakaway from the state of Virginia with loyalties to the Union, which certainly feels like something worth celebrating. In Night Watch a young mother, Eliza, whose husband is presumed lost to the war, and her precocious daughter ConaLee are admitted to a West Virginia asylum under assumed identities in flight from the sinister "Papa", a southern deserter who has usurped Eliza's husband's place at the head of the house. As ConaLee and Eliza acclimate to their hospital surroundings they encounter a cast of characters including a well-meaning doctor with designs on Eliza, a feral child known only as Weed, and the imposing Night Watch, a wounded former soldier who may be more than he seems. Plot twists are fairly easy to figure out--even my description here probably gives the major twist away--but the book is big-hearted and a lot of fun. It's nice to see something so sentimental win such a big award....more
“Somewhere in the Andes, they believe to this very day that the future is behind you. It comes up from behind your back, surprising and unforeseeable,
“Somewhere in the Andes, they believe to this very day that the future is behind you. It comes up from behind your back, surprising and unforeseeable, while the past is always before your eyes, that which has already happened. When they talk about the past, the people of the Aymara tribe point in front of them. You walk forward facing the past and you turn back toward the future.”
As much as I enjoyed Time Shelter the 2023 Booker International Prize-winning novel by Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov, I'm not sure I feel comfortable recommending it to any friends or Goodreads connections reading this. The book is essentially plotless with almost no forward momentum and none of the catharsis that comes from building and resolving a central conflict. Instead, Time Shelter is an extended mediation on the topics of memory and history explored through a fictional premise. To wit, two men, one who seems to be the literary creation of the other, set up a memory clinic for patients with dementia or Alzheimers to live within a chosen decade in the past: the 50, 60s, 70s, etc. The idea then catches on to the point where people begin choosing en masse to forgo the present and live in happier decades of the past (I mean, I'll take 1994 with angsty Seattle grunge music, edgy independent cinema, and NHL 94 on a Super Nintendo). Eventually, all of Europe begins resetting to eras of past glory. Gospodinov is clearly satirizing the reemergence of nationalism and communism on the continent--do people not have grandparents to tell them how horrible these systems were?--and in this respect, the book is absolutely brilliant.
Brilliant as it is, it's not always easy to follow. Again, there's not much of a plot, and the narrator is prone to long digressions into history, literature, pop culture, and even personal autobiography. More than anything, Gospodinov's writing reminds me of Pynchon or even Joseph Heller, but there's plenty of Borges and Thomas Mann, whose The Magic Mountain is continually referenced and sometimes feels as though it has been remade here, as well. Time Shelter is one of the smartest and most ambitious works I've read in some time, but it's also a dense, literary book that requires a lot of work and focus. I'm glad to have read it and look forward to checking out the author's previous work, but, again, I'm not sure this is one I'd comfortably recommend to most people. Unless, I guess, this review is selling the book for you....more
Joan Silber's book Improvement won both the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2017 and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2018, which is quite an achievemeJoan Silber's book Improvement won both the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2017 and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2018, which is quite an achievement considering how little overlap there generally is with the major literary awards. While the book is categorized and marketed as a novel, it is in fact a series of interconnected short stories featuring a cast of characters who appear in one another's narratives. The central characters are Reyna, a single mother living in New York who backs out of an interstate cigarette-running sales tax scheme to disastrous consequences, and Reyna's aunt Kiki, a free spirit and intellectual who once lived in Istanbul and Cappadocia. The rest of the narratives tell tangential stories related to these two women and their interactions. It's an interesting conceit, and Silber is a highly skilled writer who more or less pulls all of these disparate threads together to weave the literary equivalent of a pricey Turkish carpet. I wasn't always interested in each of these stories, but I mostly enjoyed the experience of reading them. I can see why Improvement was so celebrated given the scope of its ambition and the quality of its writing. Personally, though, I liked but didn't love it....more
Lorrie Moore's I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home (great title!), like many post-Covid novels is explicitly a book about grief. It's about a particuLorrie Moore's I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home (great title!), like many post-Covid novels is explicitly a book about grief. It's about a particular type of grief increasingly common in the wake of Covid: the sadness of having been absent at the moment of a loved one's passing. Although Covid mercifully doesn't appear anywhere in this novel, which is set primarily in 2016--an overlapping epistolary narrative in the form of found letters date from right after the Civil War--the mix of loss and regret that was everywhere in the pandemic years is palpable throughout the novel.
I struggled to rate this book, to be honest. Moore is an exceptional prose stylist, and nearly every line is quotable. Much of the book takes the form of conversations between a teacher, Finn, and the ghost (zombie?) of his recently deceased ex-girlfriend Lily on a multistate road trip. The dialogue is witty, sharp, and profound. Another reviewer here on Goodreads wrote, "Manic pixie dead girl." It's completely true, but it's so much fun to read that it doesn't matter. It's like The Corpse Bride meets Before Sunrise or Annie Hall. At the same time, the plot doesn't really go anywhere, and the fact that Finn's brother Max is also in the process of dying during Finn's entire excursion with Lily isn't dealt with in a satisfactory manner. Still, someone who can write as well as Moore is well worth reading, and I can see myself checking out her previous work....more
Danielle Steel's 1990 novel Message from Nam Kristin Hannah's 2024 novel The Women tells the story of Frankie McGrath, an American army nurse in VietnDanielle Steel's 1990 novel Message from Nam Kristin Hannah's 2024 novel The Women tells the story of Frankie McGrath, an American army nurse in Vietnam struggling against the gendered expectations of her parents, falling in love, facing heartbreak, and struggling to stay alive amid constant rocket attacks. It also deals with her return to the U.S. where she faces similar problems but finds strength through love and female friendship. There's nothing inherently wrong with this premise, but the book is ultimately melodramatic, predictable, and incredibly contrived. It brings to mind both Grey's Anatomy and the 1980s TV show China Beach. Frankie is an impossibly self-absorbed character, and the bulk of the book is devoted to her mental illness, which like everything else here is so milked for pathos that the effect is a lack of sympathy. Her friends Barb and Ethel are much more interesting, but they're relegated to benevolent guardian angels, who appear whenever Frankie spirals. Plot twists are fairly predictable and often bring to mind stories from television soap operas. Not one but two characters are presumed dead but later turn out not to be. I'll admit that this isn't the type of book I read. I'll also admit to sounding like a snob (see the above Danielle Steel joke) and having read this along with my fellow English department members mainly for laughs, but I didn't enjoy The Women. I imagine it will be popular at wine-fueled book club meetings and as an airplane or beach read. Not that there's anything wrong with that....more
While I wouldn't say that Hernan Diaz's novel Trust is at the same level as the novel it shared the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with, Barbara KingWhile I wouldn't say that Hernan Diaz's novel Trust is at the same level as the novel it shared the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with, Barbara Kingsolver's masterful Demon Copperhead, it's a very good book in its own right and in disputably the kind of sweeping, ambitious work that generally wins these sorts of awards. What's most notable about Trust is its structure and the intertextual relationship between four separate narratives that illuminate and contradict one another. I would say that I'm thankful these narratives exist in isolated blocks rather than overlapping in alternate chapters, but this is actually one of the few times that this now very clichéd mosaic technique might have improved the book, eliminating the effect of the two narratives that comprise the first half of the book being virtually the same story with names and a few specifics changed. This isn't a dealbreaker necessarily, but making the third narrative, Ida Partenza's "A Memoir, Remember", the book's primary thread with bits of the other three books sprinkled throughout would have made for a more coherent structure with less repetition and a better book overall.
Still, Trust is a good book. It's well-written with sympathetic characters and a smart critique of the machinations of 20th-century finance kingpins. Its politics, overtly feminist and anti-capitalist, are exactly what you'd expect from the New York literati/cosmopolitan academic elite circa 2023. This isn't at all a bad thing, but it does make for a narrative with few surprises in its revelations--men can't tell women's stories effectively, women are the secret brains behind male achievements, etc. The character of Ida Partenza is really the best part of the book, and again I think Trust might have been stronger with her as the central figure and the other narratives filtered through her perspective. On the other hand, Diaz has won universal acclaim and the most prestigious award in American fiction for this exactly how it is, so there's that....more
A young adult novel told as a collection of poems, Jason Reynolds's Long Way Down definitely has its strengths. It has plenty of creativity and intereA young adult novel told as a collection of poems, Jason Reynolds's Long Way Down definitely has its strengths. It has plenty of creativity and interesting wordplay, its plot reminiscent of A Christmas CarolA Christmas CarolA Christmas Carol is intriguing, and it's an effective book to teach to two sections of 9th-grade English students suffering through debilitating cellphone withdrawal related DTs. I do think there might have been a wider array of poetic devices and forms throughout and more creative risks in general, but Reynolds does a nice job of balancing poetry and narrative and telling a compelling story. And the narrative itself works well with some great fantastical elements and a cleverly ambiguous ending. The students responded positively, which given that they're the target audience, speaks to the book's quality overall even if it's not necessarily the kind of book I would personally seek out or read for pleasure. ...more
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