Category Archives: Books

Becky mentioned a while back that she enjoyed Molly Fox’s Birthday by Dierdre Madden, so I picked it up from the library and gave it a try myself and found that I enjoyed it very much too. The novel has a structure that I like: it takes place over the course of one day, with frequent jumps back in time to describe scenes from the past. The title character, Molly Fox, doesn’t appear at all, except in a phone conversation. Instead, the novel is narrated by her friend, an unnamed woman who is a playwright. Molly is an actress, and the two met while preparing to stage a production of the narrator’s first play with Molly in the starring role. It’s a play that will make both their reputations and send them off into successful careers.

But all that happens far back in the novel’s past; in the present tense, the two women are a older (it’s Molly’s 40th birthday, or at least we presume so; she is secretive about her age, as she believes actresses need to be). The narrator is living temporarily in Molly’s house in Dublin while Molly is traveling, and she is trying to write her next play. Over the course of the day, she struggles with her writing, takes a walk into town, and unexpectedly meets an old friend for dinner. It seems like a quiet day on the outside, but all the drama is of the interior sort: the narrator spends her day thinking about her art and her friendships and also about how she and others have been shaped by their pasts.

The third main character is Andrew, the unexpected dinner guest, and a man the narrator has known since their university days when they used to take study breaks together. Andrew and Molly both have difficult relationships with their families. Andrew is passionately devoted to the arts but comes from a family indifferent to them, and his brother died a violent death at a young age. Molly’s mother abandoned her while Molly was still a child, and her brother has struggled with severe depression his entire life.

As the narrator tells these stories and thinks about her two friends, she wonders just how well she really knows them. Both of them can be secretive and reserved, but this doesn’t diminish her love or her sense of closeness to them. The book is very much about the mystery of friendship, how experience can bring people together in deeply loyal relationships, even when there is much about each other they don’t know, and also how friendships can arise unexpectedly. When Molly develops a close friendship with the narrator’s brother, Tom, the narrator has to reevaluate her understanding of both of them, as well as deal with feelings of jealousy.

The novel is also about art, its mystery and its transformative capability. The narrator spends a lot of time thinking about Molly’s acting; she is shy in regular life, but on stage, she becomes a different person entirely. There is something about the artificial quality of the theater that allows her to capture the feeling of reality, and something about the fleetingness of a play that makes seeing her act a particularly intense experience. And then there’s Andrew, whose entire life is shaped by art; he is an art historian who has begun to host successful television programs where he explains the meaning of art to his audience. There is something about his personality that works well in this medium; he is able to communicate a genuine passion for his subject. To the narrator, Andrew is all about artifice — he doesn’t seem to care about nature at all, and would prefer to look at paintings of a landscape than the landscape itself. But the “artificial” world of art is his world, and he lives comfortably in it. It’s sometimes unclear, the book argues, what is artifice and what’s real, but somehow they are inextricably combined.

This is, obviously, a thoughtful book, slow-paced but absorbing. If you like thinking about relationships and about the meaning of art, and if you like following the train of someone else’s thoughts as they try to sum up a life, then I think you will enjoy this book.

It’s been a while since I finished Bohumil Hrabal’s novel Too Loud a Solitude, but I want to write something about it because it was such an odd, wonderful little book (98 pages). It took me a while to warm up to it, actually; I wasn’t in the mood for something as spare and quirky as this book is, but it ended up winning me over.

It’s about a man, Hanta, who lives in Prague and works as a trash compactor, specifically a wastepaper compactor, and he rescues books from the trash to take home and read. He has towering stacks of books at home, and he sleeps in fear that they will fall and crush him. His education has been reading these books, and what an education it’s been: he finds all kinds of wonderful things, books by Seneca, Kant, Erasmus, Goethe, and Nietzsche, reproductions of Van Gogh and Gauguin paintings, and lots of other treasures.

Hanta is a quiet and isolated man; most of his time is spent at work, and he works overtime in order to make up for his slowness: he doesn’t hurry through his job, but instead takes his time to appreciate the books that come his way. He’s so absorbed in his work, in fact, that he dreams about retiring only to buy a paper crusher so he can do his work at home. He occasionally wanders the streets of Prague and he sometimes gets visitors, most often his boss who is forever furious at him for not working fast enough, but most of his time he spends in the dim, enclosed setting cooped up with his machine. Early on in his career, he would get upset when people threw away good books and was particularly furious over the destruction of the Royal Prussian Library after World War II, but as time goes on, he becomes resigned, or perhaps numb, to the destruction, and just does what he can to save as many books as possible.

The novel (or novella, really) is written in first person, and the voice is memorable. It’s simple and poetic; at times the voice makes you think Hanta is foolish and naive, and at other times, he surprises you with something beautiful and profound. He keeps repeating himself, almost in a sing-song way; many chapters open with the same words:

For thirty-five years now I’ve been in wastepaper, and it’s my love story. For thirty-five years I’ve been compacting wastepaper and books, smearing myself with letters until I’ve come to look like my encyclopedias — and a good three tons of them I’ve compacted over the years. I am a jug filled with water both magic and plain; I have only to learn over and a stream of beautiful thoughts flows out of me.

Hanta’s absolute devotion to his work makes his visit to a new Socialist-run wastepaper compacting business utterly shocking. Here, instead of lovingly observing every book that comes through the machine and rescuing them when possible, the workers are perfectly efficient; not a movement or thought is wasted, and it doesn’t occur to any of the workers to care about a book. The workers there are turned into machines themselves, no more than extensions of the hydraulic press they operate. Hanta knows that his days are numbered; his method of working carefully, lovingly, and, yes, slowly, has never pleased his boss or made him a success, but now it might disappear entirely.

By the end of the novel, Hrabal made me care very much about this strange man so devoted to his work, but even more so to books and the pleasure and wisdom they bring.

I think Scarlett Thomas’s novel PopCo is deeply flawed, but I enjoyed it greatly nonetheless. I think it’s perfectly possible for that to be the case; while I occasionally shook my head at the book’s awkwardness, I stayed interested and engaged the whole time and found the ideas it takes up fascinating. Hobgoblin has told me many times how much he liked Thomas’s most recent novel Our Tragic Universe, and I’m looking forward to reading that one too.

Some of the awkwardness of PopCo is the kind of awkwardness that appeals to me: it spends too much time explaining too many things, it’s obsessed with ideas and technical details at the expense of narrative momentum, and it takes its sweet time getting the plot going. It lurches back and forth between background information and mini-lectures on the one hand and present action on the other.

But, fortunately for me, I found the background information and the mini-lectures interesting. They are about a lot of things, but chiefly about math, codes, and code-breaking. The main character is a youngish woman, Alice, who works for the company PopCo, which makes games and toys for children and teenagers. Alice’s job is to make kits for children on spying, detective work, and code-breaking. She has learned all about codes from her cryptanalyst grandfather, and she has a good grasp of math, gained from her mathematician grandmother. Codes aren’t purely cerebral puzzles for Alice, though; her grandfather gave her a necklace when she was young that contains a code her grandparents expect that will she one day crack.

The novel takes place during a company retreat, one of those team-building affairs intended to energize and inspire workers, although surely they more often do the opposite. Alice enjoys her job, but she doesn’t enjoy the intensity of being in such close contact with her colleagues; she has work friends and makes new ones during the course of the novel, but she’s always been a bit of an outsider. This outsider stance comes partly from her uncertainty about the purpose and value of the company; their marketing practices, in particular, seem suspicious to her. She wonders whether they are doing anything that has any value, and whether she is using her knowledge and creativity for a positive purpose. It’s not just her company she’s uncertain about; she wonders about a society that seems to care only for making money at the expense of honesty and integrity. She’s particularly disturbed by PopCo’s practice of making toys that they sell under a fake brand name, not connected with PopCo at all, to appeal to people wanting to be a little different and to buy from small companies, instead of supporting the big corporations all the time. People have no way of knowing the small company they think they are supporting is really just PopCo under another name.

The book takes us through the work retreat; things happen, but they happen slowly, and the narrative frequently jumps back in time to describe Alice’s childhood. It also stops to explain in depth about mathematical concepts, particularly prime numbers, and to describe various types of codes and how to crack them. I found all this interesting, being a bit of a math person myself, but if you’re not, this might be slow going. It’s the kind of book where characters explain things to each other in long stretches of completely unrealistic dialogue; as far as I know, people don’t really talk to each other that way. I have to say I found the ending pretty unrealistic and awkward as well.

But, I’m still fond of the book. Alice is a great character, and I liked the fact that she knows tons of cool stuff, not just about math and codes, but about a whole range of other things. She’s confident in her knowledge in a way that’s appealing. The book’s discussion of consumerism, marketing, and also the pervasiveness of technology, is interesting as well. At 500 pages, the book is too long for the story it has to tell, but still, they were a fun 500 pages.

I listened to Jennifer Egan’s novel The Keep a couple years ago, and didn’t like it much; I didn’t believe in the characters or the plot, and therefore the whole thing got irritating. I’m glad I gave Jennifer Egan another chance, though, because I loved A Visit from the Goon Squad. This time, I believed in both the characters and plot, and I loved the book’s structure and its narrative energy. It’s one of those books that both tells a good story and leaves you feeling like you understand the world just a bit better.

The story is fairly complicated, not because it has a complex plot, but because it tells the stories of a lot of different people. We start with one of the main characters, Sasha, in a therapy session where she discusses her habit of stealing things, and then the next chapter introduces us to Bennie, a music industry executive who is visiting a band to see if his company should still represent them. Sasha is Bennie’s assistant and has been for many years. At one point, Bennie makes a pass at Sasha, but she wisely turns him down, and their relationship stays close in the way you can be close to someone you work with without really knowing much about that person at all.

From there, the chapters skip around in time and shift focus on to the people important in Sasha’s and Bennie’s lives. The two main characters never disappear, but they are sometimes on the sidelines as we learn about, say, the people Bennie went to high school with, Bennie’s wife and her life story, the story of the woman Bennie’s wife worked for, the story of the man Bennie’s high school friend ran away with, the story of a man Sasha had a brief fling with, and others. The point of view shifts from chapter to chapter, sometimes in third person, sometimes in first, and once in second. One chapter consists of a article draft written by one of the characters, and one long chapter consists of a journal created by one of the characters using PowerPoint.

If you had asked me before reading this book what I thought about the fictional possibilities of PowerPoint, I would have laughed in your face (politely, of course!). But Egan pulls it off, and this is one of the book’s most moving sections. There’s something about the small number of words on each page and the way those words are strategically arranged that makes some of the pages feel poetic and causes the emotions expressed to come through powerfully.

What it all adds up to is a picture of interlocking worlds, that of the music business in New York City, teenage life in California, suburban enclaves in Westchester, a safari in Africa, teenage prostitutes in Naples, Italy, all connected by people who know each other or have affected each other’s lives in some way. There is a lot going on in the book, but Egan keeps control of the material, partly through the connections amongst all the characters, but also through the energy and insight of the book as a whole. The moods of the different sections vary — there is humor, absurdity, darkness, hope, sadness — but there is a compassion for the characters and an excitement about life that runs through the whole. Egan manages to strike the right notes right up until the end.

I’m not sure what I think about the book’s title, though. We find out in the book that “the goon squad” refers to time, as in “time’s a goon,” which makes sense and fits the book exactly right. But I didn’t know what “goon squad” meant until I read the book, and up until that point I thought it was pretty silly. I hope the title doesn’t push anybody away from reading what really is a great book.

A while ago I read and enjoyed a collection of essays on fiction by Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House, so when the publisher offered me a copy of his latest collection of short stories, Gryphon, I was happy to say yes. I don’t remember a whole lot about the essay collection, except that Baxter argued against the kind of short story that ends in an epiphany where the main character learns a lesson or changes dramatically. He wanted stories that were more true to life and to the way things actually happen to real people. The stories in Gryphon are good examples of what Baxter was calling for; they are quiet stories about people you or I might know who are in familiar situations and go through recognizable experiences. The characters experience change, and perhaps they learn something, if only because something new has happened to them, but the changes are small. The stories capture a quiet kind of reality, which is matched by Baxter’s calmly straightforward, carefully detailed writing.

The stories cover a lot of emotional territory, describing, for example, a woman visiting her husband in a nursing home on their fifty-second anniversary, a man driving drunk through a snow storm to rescue his estranged fiancée when her car breaks down, a Swedish man visiting Detroit and learning the hard way what to expect from dangerous American cities. Other stories tell about a substitute teacher surprising her class with her very strange lesson plans (the title story), a man finding a drawing of a building with the caption “The next building I plan to bomb,” and a boy who follows his brother and his brother’s girlfriend out onto a frozen lake to see the car in the water under the clear ice.

The characters, situations, and experiences are varied, but in each case, Baxter captures the thoughts and feelings of the characters perfectly. His portraits of his characters are so accurate and convincing that he creates the sense of a world much larger than the one contained in the story. It’s like he describes one small slice of his fictional world so well that we can strongly sense the presence of the rest. The narrative voice is consistently understanding and compassionate throughout; there is no sense of anyone judging the characters who are frequently, although not always, troubled, uncertain, and confused. Baxter seems to want to help us understand these characters in order to understand humanity a little better.

These are “new and selected stories,” which means they date from the publication of Baxter’s first story collection in 1984 up to the present. Remarkably, the narrative voice remains much the same over that span of time, and that is the book’s major weakness: the collection contains 23 stories, and by the time I finished all of them, I was longing for something a little different. I would have welcomed a little more drama or a punchier narrative voice. The final story starts to head into different territory; here, a man travels to the wilds of northern Minnesota to interview a wealthy businessman and, feeling alienated and angry in the vast mansion, acts out in interesting ways. But this story comes a little too late to vary the mood of the book much.

Still, the stories need not be read all at once, and, taken in isolation, each one is a pleasure to read.

One more review before I write some wrap-up posts about the year. I’ve owned a copy of Josephine Tey’s book Miss Pym Disposes for quite a while and finally got around to pulling it off the shelves. I very much enjoyed the book, but I spent much of my time reading it wondering why it’s called a mystery novel. By the end, it began to make a little more sense, but it’s best to think of this book as a regular old novel with some crime in it. Those of you who have read other Josephine Tey novels, is she always like this?

But that’s not to say I didn’t like it. The setting is very interesting, first of all: it takes place in a women’s physical training college. The young women learn dance, gymnastics, and various types of sports, as well as anatomy and the basics of medical training. They keep to a very rigorous schedule of physical and mental training, of the sort that, athletic as I can be, would wear me out in no time. They will leave the school ready to teach physical education and to work in medical clinics. It’s a close-knit school, where the smallness and the rigors of the training bring the students and teachers close together.

Miss Pym is friends with the school’s headmistress, and she has been invited to give a lecture on psychology. Lucy Pym became an expert in psychology largely by having enough leisure to read everything published on the subject (Tey’s novel was published in 1946, so perhaps the field hadn’t grown that much by then?), to have an idea of her own, and to turn that idea into a best-selling book. The best-seller part was a complete surprise to her; she had merely wanted to express her opinions. But now she is an expert, and in demand for lectures, and so she finds herself at the college, rudely awakened by the 5:30 wake-up bell.

She is so horrified by that 5:30 bell that all she want to do is to get home immediately, but the students beg her to stay, and when she does, she finds herself more and more caught up in the life of the school. She’s fascinated by the question of what type of young woman would thrive in such a school and how each one keeps up the energy and spirits to make it through the program.

The early parts of the book explore college life and Lucy’s increasing attachment to it, and they do so at a leisurely pace, although never one that is dull. The excitement begins to build, however, when Lucy observes one student attempt to cheat during an exam she is proctoring. Around the same time, everyone learns that a post will be available at the prestigious school of Arlinghurst, the girls’ equivalent of Eton. These events quickly destroy the school’s peace, and Lucy finds herself in the middle of it all.

Lucy’s status as an expert in psychology becomes a way for Tey to explore the value of the discipline; in this close-knit community where the tensions are rising, Lucy is perfectly situated to observe the mental and emotional turmoil around her. And yet, as it turns out, people are much more mysterious and unknowable than the discipline allows for. And here is where the real mystery of the book lies: not so much in the question of who committed the crime — although that is a very interesting question — but in the question of how much it’s possible to know about another person.

I recently finished David Mamet’s novel The Old Religion, published in 1997. As you might expect if you know Mamet’s films, the novel is dark. It is a reimagining of the true story of Leo Frank, a factory owner who lived in Georgia in the early twentieth century and who was falsely accused of rape and murder. He was sentenced to life in prison, but during a hospital stay was abducted by a mob and lynched. He was a victim of an anti-semitic culture looking for an outlet for its rage.

The point of the novel isn’t what happens, which is a good thing since the book’s publishers tell you everything (as I have done here) on the back cover. The point is to explore what goes on in the mind of the main character, Leo Frank, and to capture from that perspective what it might feel like to be falsely accused. The book is made up of very short chapters that explore scenes of Frank’s life and give you his thoughts on whatever is occurring, serious or mundane. The book begins before the accusation and trial, so we see Frank among his friends, relaxing, talking, pondering philosophical and political questions. He is a very thoughtful, sensitive, analytical person, and when we finally learn about the rape and murder charges and the trial begins, it’s a shock to see him so badly misunderstood and villainized.

This is the point: to show the humanity of a man whom the world had turned into a monster. Mamet makes this point well, and what’s so effective about it is that he stays inside Frank’s mind with very little narration. We learn about what is happening only indirectly, as a result of Frank’s attempts to process it. As Frank’s world is falling apart around him, he remains the same thoughtful, analytical person, but now his analytical bent becomes a way to try to handle the insanity he is experiencing, a way to stay sane himself. As time goes on, he has to try harder and harder to find ways to occupy his mind, until he ends up looking for meaning in the manufacturers’ names stamped on the bars of his prison cell. Right up until the end, his thoughts are calm and rational, in contrast to the virulence of the people who want to see him dead.

The Old Religion is an intensely uncomfortable book: it’s hard to read about Frank’s downfall and the extremity of the hatred he experienced, and it’s also hard to read Mamet’s portrayal of Frank’s accusers, which is ugly. But Mamet’s stream-of-consciousness style works effectively to capture Frank’s experience. It’s a good thing the book is short, and I say that not because I didn’t like it, but because brevity works well both with Mamet’s subject matter and with his style: he can capture so much in so few words, and that kind of intensity needs to be short-lived.

After seeing Stephen King a few weeks ago, Hobgoblin suggested that I read one of his books. This thought hadn’t occurred to me because horror is not my genre at all, but Hobgoblin and other people have assured me that King writes more than just horror and that a lot of his books are more about psychology than anything else. So I picked up his latest book Full Dark, No Stars (although not one of the two copies we got signed!). I ended up liking it quite a bit. The book has three novellas and one short story, and yes, there was violence in each one, but the stories were more about character and psychology, just as people had promised.

The first novella was good — gripping and hard to put down. But it was a complicated reading experience that reminded me of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley in the way both books have psychotic narrators who commit atrocious crimes. In King’s story, it’s a first-person narrator, and in Highsmith’s it’s a third person narrator who stays so close to Tom Ripley’s consciousness that I keep forgetting it’s not actually in first person. In both cases, I got so wrapped up in the stories and identified with the narrators to such an extent that I started feeling obscurely guilty, as though I were the one who had committed the crimes. I had to remind myself that no, there was nothing I needed to worry about, no fear that anyone would come and arrest me for the horrible thing I did.

I started the second novella relieved that the mood was lighter, at least initially. That story is about a semi-famous cozy mystery writer who is asked to do a reading for a literary society when Janet Evanovich cancels on them. But then on her way home she gets attacked and raped, and I began to worry about what I’d gotten myself into by reading this book. The first story was about a man murdering his wife, and then here was another story about violence toward women, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to read about it anymore. But I kept on and realized that King wasn’t simply using violence toward women as a plot device, but was making a point of exploring its cultural meaning. The cozy mystery writer, Tess, spends a long time thinking about how she is going to deal with the attack, and a big part of her worry concerns what the public will make of it, since inevitably the press will seize on the story. She is a bit of a public figure, after all. She imagines someone insinuating that she invited the attack somehow, and she delays calling the police. She is agonizingly alone, a victim another time over, since she knows how hostile the world can be toward rape victims. I won’t give away the rest of the story, but I’ll just say it’s satisfying and Tess ends up with a little bit of the support she deserves.

Next was the short story, which was good but didn’t quite fit with the rest of the book. And finally, the third novella once again takes up violence toward women and once again handles it well. Reading about the violence in all four pieces was uncomfortable at times, but once I figured out that King was exploring violence as an idea, I began to enjoy the reading more. I have to say this is not what I expected, to read Stephen King for the ideas. But I think I’ve been unfair to him. I can’t say I’ll read him again very soon, since even with the psychological focus, violence and horror really aren’t my things. But I’m much more interested in him than I was before, and that’s a good thing.