A year or two ago, I saw a tweet from a music and film publication I follow that held up the fact that disgraced comedian Louis C.K. is still able to A year or two ago, I saw a tweet from a music and film publication I follow that held up the fact that disgraced comedian Louis C.K. is still able to earn a living after his sexual misconduct scandal by distributing standup comedy videos on his own website as proof that "cancel culture does not exist". Below, someone commented with that Obi-Won Kenobi Jedi mind trick gif and the words "cancel culture does not exist". The implication was clear, and while I'm hardly a culture warrior or a political partisan in any way, I don't think much of illiberal movements to stifle free expression--firing people who commit unwanted sex acts is, of course, a very different story--and even less the insistence that a thing that is obviously occurring throughout society for all sorts of legitimate and dubious reasons is not real.
That's not why I read this necessarily. Instead, I read it because I'd read and enjoyed Greg Lukianoff's previous books Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure and am a big fan of the work Lukianoff and others do in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). This book is an offshoot of that organization's work focused on the illiberal stifling of free speech on college campuses and in society at large, the chilling effect of this stifling on open inquiry and academic discourse, and what can be done to create a culture of free speech. Lukianoff and co-author Rikki Schlott rightly differentiate the First Amendment itself and its protections from the concept of free speech as an ideal to aspire to in a healthy society, and they make their cases well, indicting both the political left in the form of campus shutdowns and melodramatic Twitter pile-ons and the political right in the form of draconian legislation and book bans.
If I have a bone to pick with the authors and the book it's in their attitude toward society's most perpetually under-attack profession: K-12 teachers. Not in their late chapter about reforming K-12 education, which is fairly balanced, or even in their odd dismissal of academic freedom in K-12 schools, which is apparently not a thing at all (and evidently isn't important even in the aspirational free speech culture we're striving for), but in a tangent in an early chapter about stifling debate about Covid and school closings where the authors discuss the issue and how students are highly unlikely to die from Covid while making no mention of the other category of human beings who inhabit schools, namely adult faculty and staff, who most certainly are. It's an oversight and a sizable logical hole, but it's not enough to detract from what is otherwise an important book everyone should read to understand what's really happening with public debate and why it's important to stand together against authoritarianism on the left and the right.
Merged review:
A year or two ago, I saw a tweet from a music and film publication I follow that held up the fact that disgraced comedian Louis C.K. is still able to earn a living after his sexual misconduct scandal by distributing standup comedy videos on his own website as proof that "cancel culture does not exist". Below, someone commented with that Obi-Won Kenobi Jedi mind trick gif and the words "cancel culture does not exist". The implication was clear, and while I'm hardly a culture warrior or a political partisan in any way, I don't think much of illiberal movements to stifle free expression--firing people who commit unwanted sex acts is, of course, a very different story--and even less the insistence that a thing that is obviously occurring throughout society for all sorts of legitimate and dubious reasons is not real.
That's not why I read this necessarily. Instead, I read it because I'd read and enjoyed Greg Lukianoff's previous books Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure and am a big fan of the work Lukianoff and others do in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). This book is an offshoot of that organization's work focused on the illiberal stifling of free speech on college campuses and in society at large, the chilling effect of this stifling on open inquiry and academic discourse, and what can be done to create a culture of free speech. Lukianoff and co-author Rikki Schlott rightly differentiate the First Amendment itself and its protections from the concept of free speech as an ideal to aspire to in a healthy society, and they make their cases well, indicting both the political left in the form of campus shutdowns and melodramatic Twitter pile-ons and the political right in the form of draconian legislation and book bans.
If I have a bone to pick with the authors and the book it's in their attitude toward society's most perpetually under-attack profession: K-12 teachers. Not in their late chapter about reforming K-12 education, which is fairly balanced, or even in their odd dismissal of academic freedom in K-12 schools, which is apparently not a thing at all (and evidently isn't important even in the aspirational free speech culture we're striving for), but in a tangent in an early chapter about stifling debate about Covid and school closings where the authors discuss the issue and how students are highly unlikely to die from Covid while making no mention of the other category of human beings who inhabit schools, namely adult faculty and staff, who most certainly are. It's an oversight and a sizable logical hole, but it's not enough to detract from what is otherwise an important book everyone should read to understand what's really happening with public debate and why it's important to stand together against authoritarianism on the left and the right....more
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
Although I haven't really kept up with horror movies in the past 30 years beyond catching some of the more critically acclaimed releases and catching Although I haven't really kept up with horror movies in the past 30 years beyond catching some of the more critically acclaimed releases and catching the occasional guilty pleasure on some streaming service or another (who knows which one? seriously, cable was better than our current TV situation), as a child in the 1980s, I was really into horror movies. My mother used to drive my friends and me to rent them regularly from the local Video Time store down the street, and I saw some of the most dark and depraved films of the 70s and 80s before I was even in high school. That's how things were back then. Call it the typical negligence of Boomer parents leaving their Gen-X kids to their own devices. I call it an incredibly fun childhood that I still feel tons of nostalgia for. Which, I suppose, is why I decided to read Shock Value, a look at the careers of horror filmmaking royalty like John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, Brian DePalma, Dan O'Bannon, and Roman Polanski. Personally, I'm partial to Carpenter, who directed quite a few of my favorite movies of all time, but I was familiar with every director and film referenced in this book. I do think the chronology and organization might have made more sense and that the few years covered in the book excludes many of the great films that would come just two or three years later, but it's hard to fault what's here. I enjoyed this as a walk down memory lane. A memory lane drenched in blood and gore, of course....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
I don't always enjoy these sorts of books that retell an existing story from a new perspective. Sometimes they just feel like pointless fan fiction, bI don't always enjoy these sorts of books that retell an existing story from a new perspective. Sometimes they just feel like pointless fan fiction, but most of the time, they demonstrate a sort of disdain for the source text, which is then redeemed through a heavy-handed critical (likely post-colonial) lens, especially in this day and age when ideology seems to supersede narrative and aesthetics in our literature. To be clear, there's a bit of this in Percival Everett's celebrated 2024 novel James, which retells the story of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the slave with whom Huck goes on the run. In Everett's version, Jim/James displays a decidedly modern cynicism about race (incongruent with ideas of the period by people Like Frederick Douglass) while Everett removes the rescue of Jim by Huck and Tom Sawyer, downplays the centrality of slavery as a cause of the Civil War, and most tellingly (view spoiler)[makes Huck Jim's biracial son rather than a well-intentioned white person who rejects the tenets of slavery (hide spoiler)].
While all of these changes feel political and nothing here improves on Twain's classic, the book is better than a heavy-handed identity lecture masquerading as a novel for one clear reason: the affection Everett obviously has for the original story, which he demonstrates through his book's humor, episodic structure, and tone that feel very much in communication with the source text rather than an indictment against it. I'm not surprised James has received so much praise. Even if I didn't exactly love it, I enjoyed reading it and revisiting the world of Huckleberry Finn from a fresh point of view. James's is an interesting perspective that's worth experiencing even if its worldview feels a lot closer to the 2020s than to 1860s....more
I know that Rachel Kushner isn't a spy fiction genre writer. I know this because Creation Lake is the third of Kushner's books I've read and enjoyed. I know that Rachel Kushner isn't a spy fiction genre writer. I know this because Creation Lake is the third of Kushner's books I've read and enjoyed. Even so, if Kushner were to decide to become less high-minded and literary, I think she might be onto something by writing a long series of episodic adventures of Sadie Smith, Agent Provocateur, the amoral protagonist of her latest novel. Smith is contracted by an unknown employer to infiltrate a group of French climate activists and in the process becomes interested in the teachings of one of the group's advisors, an enigmatic man who has left behind modern civilization, lives in a cave on land how inhabited by his daughter, and blames homo sapiens for supplanting their superior predecessor, Neanderthal. Smtih's adventures with the Moulinards as she nudges them towards a violent confrontation with a local politician are interrupted by long epistolary emails musing about early protohumans and the perils of modernization. It sounds completely bizarre, and it is, but it works incredibly well in the hands of a writer as talented as Kushner. While Creation Lake isn't the masterpiece it's clear Kushner keeps getting closer to writing, it's my favorite of her books so far and one of the better works of literary fiction I've read this year....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
Kafka's Last Trial tells the story of the battle between Germany, Israel, and a single family over a collection of letters and manuscripts written by Kafka's Last Trial tells the story of the battle between Germany, Israel, and a single family over a collection of letters and manuscripts written by Czech writer Franz Kafka. Through this legal case, author Benjamin Balint also retells the history of the European Jewish diaspora in the early 20th-century and the burgeoning Zionist movement that would later lead to the establishment of Israel. The most intriguing parts of this book deal with the fraught relationship between diaspora Jews and Israelis as well as between Jews and the German language, which for obvious reasons holds some horrible associations. The book also tells the story of the friendship between Kafka and author Max Brod, whose estate contained the disputed Kafka papers. It's an interesting story, but I wish there were a bit more of Kafka's biography, a lot of more discussion of his literary work, and a more coherent storyline of the civil case over the fate of Brod's Kafka papers. I haven't read Kafka in decades, but Kafka's Last Trial has put me in mind to do so, which makes the experience of reading this well worth the time, even if I do think it might have been a better book overall....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
Well, that could not have gone worse. In Accountable by Dashka Slater, a California high student's private Instagram account full of horribly racist mWell, that could not have gone worse. In Accountable by Dashka Slater, a California high student's private Instagram account full of horribly racist memes and attacks on fellow students serves as a case study of what not to do for school administrators as the revelation of said account quickly spirals into pandemonium. Reading this, it's hard not to cringe at the decisions made by the adults in the aftermath of this situation (or react in astonishment as one community parent publicly shrugs off a teenager being punched in the face and suffering a broken nose), but with the exception of the handful of kids who posted and commented on racist posts, it does seem like everyone was acting with the best of intentions. But if we've learned anything in the last decade of American politics and culture, it's about the paving of roads to hell. In this way, Albany High School is a microcosm for the country as a whole as our "racial reckoning" of 2020 seems to have led to increased racial resentment, animosity, and division.
Accountable is a decent book to look at this issue in both the Albany and American context, but it's not a perfect one, consisting of short underdeveloped chapters, far too much jumping around in perspective, some melodramatic poetry that unintentionally seems to mock viewpoints, and the contemporary worldview that individuals are best understood as avatars of broad racial categories. It's also worth noting that the Instagram account in question was primarily run by Asian students, yet virtually all analysis of the issue is steeped in discussion of Black/White racial dynamics, which feels a little like forcing a square peg in a round hole. Even so, Slater deserves credit for telling this story so evenhandedly and for gaining access to so many of the involved parties in this unfortunate issue. Best of all, Slater considers the question of whether we should really shame and exile people who have done bad things rather than giving them the opportunity to grow, learn, and adapt. She doesn't have a perfect answer to that question. Neither do I....more
For my money, Nellie Bowles's 2024 book Morning After the Revolution is the definitive book about the excesses of the progressive left in the period bFor my money, Nellie Bowles's 2024 book Morning After the Revolution is the definitive book about the excesses of the progressive left in the period between the 2016 election of Donald Trump and our current moment, in which the pendulum seems to be swinging again towards a more rational and less histrionic kind of discourse, the Israel/Palestine conflict notwithstanding. Like Bowles, I am a political liberal and someone who tends to vote Democrat, but, also like Bowles, I've looked on in bemusement at how crazy the far left has been over the last decade on matters of race, gender, the rule of law, etc. Unlike Bowles, I lived outside of the country through much of the insanity while she was smack in the middle of it working as a reporter for The New York Times. To Bowles's credit, Morning After the Revolution is much less polemical than you might expect, which is what makes it better than the lot of "heterodox" political books that have come out over the past three or four years. Bowles isn't judging progressive politics from the outside. When she writes about gleeful mobs of leftwing journalists engaging in cancel culture on Twitter or downplaying the burning of cities and small businesses in the wake of BLM protests, she does so in first person plural, acknowledging how she herself was once part of this movement.
The book consists of revamped versions of prior pieces Bowles wrote for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other publications, many of which she was warned not to cover for fear of making the political left look bad. She spends time among armed warlords in the Capital Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle, in antiracist struggle sessions that feel a lot like self-help cults, among the crime and drug-addicted homeless on the streets of San Francisco, at extremely volatile trans rights protests outside gyms, and amid the bubble of elite coastal leftwing journalism. If there's one downside, it's that the book was finished before the most unhinged moments in the current Israel/Hamas university protests. Bowles is an engaging writer, funny but also emotionally authentic. I like her TGIF weekly newsletter in The Free Press, a publication she founded with her wife, Bari Weiss, and I thoroughly enjoyed her book, which provides the smartest and least ideological insider look at the last decade of progressive politics I've seen. Easily a contender for best nonfiction of 2024....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
Loading...
