Book Reviews

To cut to the chase, you should buy and read this book. There was so much to like about it. I came out of Act 1 of Murder Bimbo thinking that, if the rest of the book was as good, it could become the definitive novel of the MAGA era. It was that good.

While the rest of the book was “merely” quite good — packed with great sentences, great observations about its characters and their relationships, razor-sharp social commentary — it did not, in my opinion, fully exploit the superb opening act.

The book’s premise — a sex worker assassinates a rising nazi politician — is brilliant; almost strong enough on its own to justify snapping up a copy. The fascism is viewed through a rigorous but breezy feminist lens, which makes the novel’s politics feel more grounded. Making the protagonist a sex worker adds a bit of titillation to the story, but also brings readers into a fascinating subculture they may not know much about.

Murder Bimbo is more than just topical, it taps into dark impulses that are probably being entertained by many Americans who dislike Nazis, swastikas, rapists, pedophiles, war crimes, concentrations camps, psychopaths, etc.

The book’s complications and ambiguities transform it from a satisfying, two-dimensional pot-boiler into something larger and more profound.

Regarding the merely good 2nd and 3rd acts, there are certain issues that I won’t tackle because I don’t want to spoil the book. The pacing in Act 1 places it solidly in “kick-ass literary page-turner” territory. The remainder of the book advances our understanding of the characters. The plot, as we understand it after Act 1, recedes somewhat. In Act 2 the writing about an important relationship bogs down, slightly and briefly.

It’s a first-person narrator, and there are epistolary elements to the story, and I think those factors wound up slightly flattening that relationship.

Much of the novel’s strength lies in the way it uses narrative structure to reveal its protagonist’s motivations. There are trade-offs that come with that decision as well, however. We wind up going through certain elements of the story twice, from different perspectives, in a way that is (intentionally) disorienting. So there is a minor redundancy that arises, and the second act somewhat diminishes the impact of the first. But only because the first was so propulsive and flawless.

Those problems aside, I liked it enough that I could see myself re-reading it down the road, and I will not be surprised if it winds up winning a slew of awards.

Disclaimer: I participated in Hartnett’s fiction-writing workshop, but that has not influenced my review.

The Road to Tender Hearts has generated enthusiastic responses from readers and critics. It was named a book of the year by Lithub and NPR, and the New York Times selected it for a “great road trip novels” list.

It’s a funny family road trip novel with what Lit Hub called a high body count; lots of people die in accidents: cars, gas explosions, drownings, murders. Hartnett has a confident grasp of plot, character development, and jokes. It was fun to read.

Tender Hearts pulls off the trick of being a light-hearted comedy, but also a white-knuckle ride. I found myself frequently worried about the characters, who are all vulnerable and have been through terrible things. There were many passages in the book where I was anxious about their fates.

I had two minor quibbles with the book. First, the many fatalities slightly strained credibility and pulled me out of the story a bit. The plot, character development, and writing in general were solid enough that it did not need all of the casualties.

There is one exception to my “maybe too many people died” position. Maybe the funniest scene in the book involves an alligator. I won’t spoil it by revealing the details, but it might have been even funnier if the gator had eaten someone. Regardless, it was very funny as-is, and I will continue to chuckle about it for years to come. I don’t know that I would say the alligator alone justifies reading the book, but maybe it justifies the whole book. Or maybe I’m just too into alligators.

(Tangentially, this is the only book that might also be worth buying just for the prologue, in which Hartnett describes a series of wild shit that befell or nearly befell her family after they moved into a new house. Gah!!)

The other quibble — again, a minor — is the book’s dabbling with magical realism, specifically moments where inanimate objects talk. A cat, which is not inanimate, also is endowed with language skills. I wouldn’t say these elements harmed the story, but I’m not sure they added much or needed to be there. I felt like if inanimate objects were going to talk, that needed to tie into the story more, somehow.

Buy the book here.

And you can check out Annie’s workshop (which I found to be helpful) here.

How did I come across this book? I don’t remember. I read … ah yes, I watched a documentary about the 19th century American whaling industry on either Amazon or Netflix, and portions of it were about the whaling ship that was destroyed by a sperm whale, which inspired a non-fiction account which inspired Moby Dick. The documentary said that the novel was based on Melville’s experiences in Tahiti after he jumped ship, and may have mentioned an insurrection. It sounded exciting, and I was curious. Moby Dick is one of my favorite books.

I thought it was mostly a good read. It was held together as a story by the tension that ran throughout concerning what the indigenous people were going to do with Melville’s character. They are alleged to be cannibals.

On top of this is another mystery: the fate of the character, Toby, who jumped the whaling ship to live on the island.

Because I knew it was autobiographical to an extent, I wondered throughout which elements were true and which were embellished. My impression based on the background reading I’ve done (not much / wikipedia and a couple other items) is that it is mostly a true account.

It’s pretty shocking that it was published when he was 26, and it made him an overnight success.

The main criticism I have is that the book is arguably more of an ethnography than a novel, and as an ethnography it’s constrained by the language barrier between Melville and the locals.

Also left hanging is the question of why the tribe he tucks in with wanted to keep him as a prisoner. They treat him well, but they prevent him from leaving them. Why? Maybe there was no way for Melville to know.

Some of the passages and details were a bit slow-going, but I’m pretty quick to put a book down if I get bored, and I was able to stick with Typee without much of a problem.

I put this down after about 10 pages because of a lengthy passage of dull landscape writing. Because it has now been a long-ish time since I’ve read a novel that I loved, I’m being more ruthless.

I put this book down at page 43 because it seems to be more of a collection of (fictional) ethnographies of alien cultures that were not interesting enough to read on their own, or to read a dozen of them if that’s all the book has to offer. There was no plot and no character development that I was able to detect. Presumably some of that happens as the book progresses but the twee thumbnail sketches of the Hvenkis and the Veksis and the Annous didn’t do it for me.

Fish Tales draws from an interesting or even spicy millieu, and the author’s own life, but for the most part does not work as a novel. It is clogged with various sex acts, drug use, and conversations that do not come together into a plot or a story. There is also very little in the way of character development. There is a kind of descent the protagonist experiences, but it feels like this happens at a great distance, despite the first-person narration.

It’s an autobiographical novel, and Jones deserves credit for writing it, but I wonder if it would not have worked better as a memoir. The epilogue Jones appended to the FSG re-issue, in which she recounts her years as a struggling author, professor, and woman, was much more interesting than the novel.

I found this book to be readable and occasionally amusing. I also am not quite sure what to make of it. It was a significant commercial success when it was published, and it was praised by greater writers of the era, which is puzzling to me. The writers and readers who liked it must have connected with the author’s wit and eye for social satire, but to the extent that that’s the case, the book has maybe not aged that well. The critical reviews were mixed.

There is not much going on in terms of plot or character development or language or descriptions of place. There is only a vista into the lives of the Roaring 20s’ financial and creative elite, and the machinations of the gold-digging protagonist.

Some of this was attributable to the circumstances of its writing, it was serialized in Harper’s Bazaar, so Loos would write a chapter, send it off, and then start plotting out the next chapter, with no eye to an overarching story. It’s episodic and picaresque. Which is not to say it’s dull, particularly if you are curious about that decade.

Its fans call it a send-up or a lampooning of society’s pillars, and maybe that’s fair. The introduction to my edition says that it fell out of favor in the 70s, and most of the friends I’ve mentioned it to did not know that the film was based on a novel. (Now I want to see the film.) The introduction also calls it “an examplar of literary modernism and a withering attack modernism itself.” Not sure I see that.

Loos made it pretty clear that she had contempt for her protagonist who, in the novel, is a gold-digging rube and a crook. The intentional misspellings wore a bit thin after a while. In short, the novel violates many modern tenets of modern fiction writing.

Loos claims that the inspiration for the book was a train trip with some film honchos from New York to L.A. There was a blonde actress in their party who apparently got a lot of attention from the dudes. So, in the book, blondes are stupid and treacherous, and so are the men who like them. It’s pretty bleak.

The pacing was a bit too slow on this one for me. Parts of it were interesting, but not enough to stick it out. One of the problems may have been too much exposition.

Beasts of No Nation is a first-person narrator novel about a child soldier named Agu in an unnamed African country.

It’s depiction of Agu’s subjective experiences as he is torn from his family and forced to fight and to commit a long list of atrocities and warcrimes is effective and compelling. The use of the first-person narrator makes a lot of sense in that regard.

Overall, however, while the book was engaging generally, it felt slight in some ways, and not just because it’s only 142 pages. Maybe, I’m just riffing, the issue was the lack of narrative tension. For the overwhelming majority of the book, bad things happen to Agu, who is passively victimized. He wants, presumably, to be reunited with his family, and to be freed from the trials of his life as a child soldier, but that is not much of an element in the story.

Most of the book is concerned with Agu’s reactions to and thoughts about his various ordeals, at the expense of a broader/larger plot, although there was enough of a plot to keep me reading.

And while Beasts does the thing that it does well, what it does not do is develop Agu fully as a person. We get only a narrow slice of his subjectivity, although that slice is vivid and moving. Agu has no distinguishing characteristics.

I’m also not certain that there was as much of an arc as there should have been for his character. He is worn down physically, emotionally, and spiritually by what he’s subjected to, but I did not get the sense from the book after one read that much thought was given to how this slide into hell was manifested. Typically something like this is demonstrated by establishing a routine for the character, and then showing how the external circumstances impact that routine.

I suspect it was intentional, but maybe one problem I had with the story was the lack of specific details. The entirety of the narrative takes place in this kind of ethereal, abstract interiority. It could have felt more anchored to the times and places it described.

Little effort was put into describing his life pre-abduction, the book kicks off as he is being inducted into the guerilla army. Later there is a flashback or flashbacks detailing his life in his village, although these are cursory. Part of me wondered if the narrative would have been more effective if it had been more linear. Like his losses would have been more powerfully felt if we knew what the losses were.

Quibbles aside, I’m glad I read it, and if it is not an epic, searing representation of the tragic consequences of child warriors, it is at a minimum an affecting one.

Made it 20 pages into this book and put it down. I’ve learned that overly-long descriptions of landscapes, of bathroom wallpaper, or in this case backyard gardens bore the shit out of me and feel like torture to read.

It was also very heavy on exposition, and seemed to brim with details that were not interesting and did not seem to advance the characters, themes or plot. It read like details for the sake of details.

There’s some very good writing in this novel, and it’s a well-paced if very conventional story. It’s set in the late 60s, in a hotel with a number of senior citizens who live there permanently. It’s frequently amusing, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. It feels like an extremely English novel, pre-globalized England, which reflects the era in which it was written. In that sense reading it felt a bit like an escape, there was something exotic about it.

It’s also a challenging book to read in some respects, in that it’s about the indignities of aging. It is frequently bleak and frosty. Rife with rude, bitchy turns from friends and family alike. It will not make you feel great about growing old.

I’m glad I read it though, I enjoyed it and would recommend it if you’re in the mood for something English, funny, and somewhat sad.

My brain is shattered by the election, my attention span is greatly diminished. Partly for this reason, I grabbed Dept. of Speculation to read on a trip to LA. It’s 177 pages, and there’s a good amount of white space on the pages.

It was in fact a fast and breezy read, finished it in 2 sittings. Fortunately, it was also a fun book to read, it was soothing too in these dark times.

It’s not a very visual book, there are not brilliantly observed details (although there are some nice ones), there are no sweeping landscapes, but the protagonist’s voice and worldview made the book worth it.

It’s not particularly transgressive in its themes, story, or formal approach to story-telling, but its sparkling wit more than compensate for any lack of technical or artistic risk-taking.

I don’t really have much in the way of criticism, I just kind of got swept into the tale and enjoyed it; I had no complaints along the way, and wasn’t reading it through an analytical framework.

One observation, and I don’t know how helpful of meaningful it is, is that the story could have been longer and bigger. It’s crazy for me to pick up a book because I wanted a quick read, and to then turn around and say that it was too quick of a read.

Offil intersperses throughout the books a number of quotes from various luminaries; sometimes these spoke more directly to what was happening in the protagonist’s life, other times it seemed to me that they quotes or paraphrasings were somewhat random, but if they were random they didn’t really detract from the story. Sometimes the curating was quite adept and funny.

I walked away from the book feeling like it was an easy one to write, but more likely is that it somehow looked like its effects were easy to achieve but actually were not easy to achieve; that the book masks the skill it took to write.

I think at some point I might come back to it and read it again. It’s an odd compliment to pay to a novel, but there was something soothing about it, maybe due to the fact that it was published in 2014, before our fascist political moment.

The Last of Mr. Norris is the first of two novels that comprise The Berlin Stories. I vaguely remember reading Down There on a Visit and really liking it, so I gave this one a go. It’s set in a rich milieu, Berlin in the run-up to the Nazis seizing power, and it more than does the period justice.

It’s an interesting, well-structured plot, the characters are complex, colorful, funny, pathetic, and I found myself getting attached to them over the course of the book.

The approach to the era’s politics was pitch-perfect and even-keeled; it’s not really a political thriller; the strife and the terror play out on the margins for much of the story, although it doesn’t shy away from the period’s particulars.

Anyway, it’s a great book, I recommend it highly.

I made it 95 pages into this short novel but am putting it down, despite the fact that it’s packed with astonishing language.

The reason I’m putting it down is — I can’t emphasize how subjective this is — I feel it gets bogged down in descriptions of interiors at the expense of plot. I struggled for similar reasons with Possession.

Related, but maybe separate, is that, while some of the writing was among the best I’ve read in a novel, it could also at times be quite dense, which is probably an effect Robinson was striving for. So, maybe I just don’t have the attention span for this book, and if you have more of an attention span than I do (you probably do), you should ignore my gripes about it.

Despite the fact that I’m putting it down, I am really glad that I gave it a whirl, no regrets, because I feel like some of those sentences are going to stay with me for the rest of my life.

My response to this book was a bit less enthusiastic than most of the reviews I’ve read. My main complaint is that I bought it and read it because everyone raved about how funny it was. I laughed once. This is very subjective, of course, enough people who have read more than I have and are probably smarter in general have described it as funny that I must be in a minority.

I almost put it down around page 200, during a Hollywood celebrity party scene that I thought was pretty flat. I think that would be a hard scene to write well, a party populated with actual celebrities, and Plunket did not write it particularly well.

The novel, which was based on Henry James’s “The Alpern Papers,” for me, may have had some pacing problems. The protagonist’s mission, the central plot line, is to acquire the correspondence between Warren G. Harding and his lover, who is an old lady living in LA. I wondered if maybe too much of the plot centered on a cast of characters, and their dramas, that did not figure into the effort to snatch the Harding papers.

More likely, the issue was not that the novel was overly digressive (which a number of reviewers liked about the book) but that the digressions were not particularly entertaining. There were a few plot cul-de-sacs that detracted from the narrative momentum. A few scenes and characters that dangled and did not fit into the story in a meaningful way.

Rebekah Kinney, the mistress, is an afterthought in the story, it might have helped to develop her more, and work her into the story more than Plunket did. There are a few tossed-off flash-back scenes about her time with Harding, but they come early in the book and are fairly brief.

It is not a novel of vivid details or beautiful sentences.

What keeps the novel going is the narrator’s sensibility (“arch”). His withering commentary is the book’s main course, but there were points where the insults, the cruel judgements, the stereotypes stopped being funny, or interesting. The novel is comprised almost exclusively of a deeply unhappy closeted man punching down. I don’t mean to imply that protagonists need to be likable, or that it’s not OK to write racist, homophobic protagonists … I don’t know, maybe it’s a challenge to make that type of person the protagonist in a first-person novel.

It may also have been the case that the characters were somewhat flat because we were seeing them only or primarily through the (flawed) narrator’s eyes.

It’s one of those books where the story behind the book — how it went out of print and then was rediscovered, the author’s biography, how it remained influential among a small but famous crowd — is more interesting than the book itself.

The book did have things going for it, or I wouldn’t have finished it. I don’t know that I would call it funny, but it was witty, and the concept is a good one, the premise. A gay Harding scholar mucking around in 1980s Hollywood.

At the end of the day, I’m glad it’s out there, and that it brought the writer a measure of fame and success, and I’m glad I read it.

This one-sentence novella was, in my opinion, complete garbage. There’s a 30-page introduction which I’m guessing explains its merits, which were utterly lost on me, but I did not have the patience to read the introduction after finishing the book.

There’s no arc, no development of story or character, it is just a rambling, stream of consciousness recounting of moments in the narrator’s life. The writing was OK, maybe a bit better than OK, but generally the sentences did not have any kind of a wow factor.

Do not recommend.

I really liked this book. Its primary strength lay in its evocation of the damaged psyches of the narrator’s parents. The things Riley writes about why the parents say the things they say, and act the way they act, and do the things they do, were remarkable. It read like the narrator had been through extensive therapy, and spent a lot of time reflecting on her parents, and as a result made observations about their agendas and motivations that went well beyond insights that would be derived from just casual, every-day observation.

I would say that the book is a worthy read solely for that reason. However, while the writing is mostly somewhere between competent and good, there were a few sentences, more toward the front of the book, that were pretty mind-blowing, “I could never hope to write sentences like that” good writing. So, that’s an added bonus.

The plot is unremarkable, but it’s not a plot-driven book, and the plot does what it needs to do.

It was interesting that Riley doesn’t say much about the protagonist, Bridget. Bridget serves mostly as the first-person camera, observing the parents’ peccadillos. However, we get glimpses of Bridget, mostly via the way she interacts with her mother. The daughter is not a particularly sympathetic character, and exhibits some of the mother’s toxic vibes, the point being perhaps that Bridet’s childhood experiences have damaged her and made her the somewhat broken person that she is.

Anyway, a great read, I recommend it.

This was not much of a book and felt pretty dialed-in. It’s short, under 100 pages, but it was either too short, or too long. The language is very repetitive, as our the thoughts of the protagonist. An observation is made, and then challenged, and then re-made, and then re-challenged, in the same repeating pattern, ad nauseum.

It had the beginning of an interesting premise: man gets stuck in woods and decides to just wander into the woods, and weird shit happens, but the book did not bring this premise to life. The language is very plain … yeah, that’s kind of the jist of it. Do not bother reading this book.

Had not ever read this novel, and The Odeon is one of my favorite restaurants in New York, so I felt that it was time to give it a go. I went into it with somewhat low expectations, but it’s a very good book. At a number of points I came across passages where I felt the caliber of the writing was beyond what I’m capable of, which is simultaneously exhilerating and depressing. What comes through again and again is McInerney’s plain, raw talent as a writer, the bastard.

The plot moved along quickly, it was a breezy read, and it was full of funny and keen observations about life in the city, and about the people around him, and about the magazine he worked at as a fact checker.

I had only two criticisms, and they were pretty minor. The first is that it felt like the story would have benefited from being a bit longer; a couple of the relationships in the book felt like they needed or could have benefited from having more meat on the bone.

I also found the writing about his relationship slash former relationship with his ex-wife to have been merely acceptable rather than great.

As usual I went into the novel cold, I prefer to read them that way, because that’s the way they are meant to be read. I read after the fact that the 3 major plot points were all taken from his life. It is a very autobiographical book, but that doesn’t detract from it in any way.

I could see myself re-reading it at some point in the future and would definitely recommend it.

In 1997, an 83 year old man who apparently was trying to feed some pigeons outside, fell from the fifth floor of a hospital in Prague and died. The man was Bohumil Hrabal, the Czech novelist and poet. I didn’t learn how he met his end until after I finished reading his novel, I Served the King of England, but when I read that about him on the back of that novel, it made sense that that’s how he would meet his end. The last phase of the novel’s protagonist’s life is spent taking care of four animals.

I believe it is at least as good, and most likely better than its most obvious comparator, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It’s a picaresque novel; frequently funny, but also moving, and is crammed with great writing and imagery. I hate to use the word sparkles, but the book sparkles.

In its opening phases the protagonist — I believe we only get his last name, Ditie, which is German, which is significant in the story — works as a busboy in a series of hotel restaurants. There was one point where for five pages, I wondered if I could get through an entire novel of him being a busboy in different hotel restaurants, but the novel proceeds to take some wild and unexpected turns.

It was painful for me to put this novel down after 180 pages, because Byatt is clearly a genius, but I could not bare a single additional page of the correspondences between the two 19th Century poets who are among the novel’s main characters.

The novel bounces back and forth between contemporary England (and the United States) and the 19th Century, and in this 19th century strand of the narrative, some of it is epistolary, and these epistolary passages were excruciatingly tedious reading. If there were just a few passages of these epistolary exchanges with, say, a maximum length of six or even eight pages, I would have suffered through them, because the rest of the book is so good, but as I waded into an overly-wordy series of letters between the two poets, I got curious and wondered how many pages of the drek I had ahead of me, and flipping through discovered that it was 4o pages of these exchanges, which were as much fun to read as eating chalk.

The language in the letters displays a mastery of that period, but the thing is, that period was perhaps overly verbose. At least her characters were. Not only did it take too long to say things via these pens, but the things that they were talking about were not exciting, and they were not interesting. I couldn’t stand it.

The other quibble I had with Possession, and this was an entirely forgivable and minor quibble, is that Byatt seemed at points to get carried away with descriptions of interiors. Make no mistake, she has a real gift for and command of the lexicon of interior design and furnishings, but it felt at a few points like this description became an end to itself rather than a means.

At some point maybe I will try another novel by her.

There is a reasonable chance that you will be less irritated by the epistolary passages in the novel than I was, my friend who read it years ago said he loved the letters, and if you like or can merely abide the letters, the rest of the book is solid gold, so you shouldn’t necessarily rule this book out based on my experience. If you’re thinking about it, try to find that 40 page section of the book, and start reading through it, and if you’re not bothered by the rhythms of that section, you should buy the book.

Aside from truly top shelf descriptive writing about interiors and flora, I also really did enjoy the way that Byatt developed her characters. I liked the types of things she said about them. These passages were rich and thought-provoking but also fun and breezy.

Surprised by how much I hated this book. I finished it, but only because I forced myself to, not because I wanted to. I had never read a book by Faulkner, and I badly wanted to check that box. That’s the only reason I stuck with it, and I emphatically do not recommend it to anyone.

I knew that The Sound and the Fury was supposed to be tough going, I avoided it for that reason. I went into As I Lay Dying blind, not really knowing what to expect, but thinking and hoping that it would be a good read, even if it contained some modernist trickery.

It was in fact quite challenging to read, particularly the first half of the book. It eased up a bit in the second half. There are no concessions early on to explaining to the reader who the characters are or how they relate to one another. But that is only part of what makes this book such a painful chore to wade through. Even the parts of it where I was able to more or less fathom what was happening still felt like I was reading them through a wet sheet.

In addition to the novel being “difficult,” I just really did not like the writing. Some of the writing was good, for sure, but much of it wasn’t, and it seemed to be “bad writing” or “bad modernist writing” rather than “profound writing that only seems to be bad writing because it is modernist writing.”

For example, there are no typos in this transcription of the passage of the book, this is exactly how it was written:

“The mules dived up again diving their legs stiff their stiff legs rolling slow and then Darl again and I hollering catch her darl catch her head her into the bank darl and Vernon wouldn’t help and then Darl dodged past the mules where he could he had her under the water coming in to the bank coming in slow because in the water she fought to stay under the water but Darl is strong and he was coming in slow and so I knew he had her because he came slow and I ran down into the water to help and I couldn’t stop hollering because Darl was strong and steady holding her under the water even if she did fight he would not let her go he was seeing me and he would hold her and it was all right now it was all right now it was all right”

The novel did remind me in some ways of the opening pages of Beloved, by Toni Morrison, but Morrison’s dense writing in that book felt a bit different than the mush in As I Lay Dying. There was also, based on what I read about Beloved, a better rationale for the disorientation she creates for her readers in that book.

I hated As I Lay Dying not just because it was difficult, but because parts of it were intelligible but were just really fucking tedious regardless. Five pages about the character Clay’s intense relationship with his saw.

Part of Faulkner’s modernist technique is the use of repetition, and I don’t know what the effect he was going for with the repetition, but he did not achieve that effect, or, he did achieve it, but it was a shitty effect to begin with.

Anyway, I’m glad I can now say that I read one of Faulkner’s novels, but I’m bummed out that I hated it as much as I did — “As I Lay Hating,” lol. I would like to read at least one more book of his; I have started Light In August twice, and both times lost my book owing to drinking alcohol in bars. I remember liking it both times, and I think I got a third of the way through it.

Now that I have this bad taste in my mouth though, I don’t know when or if I would dip back into his work. Also, I had read sporadically about Faulkner’s attitudes about race, and my understanding was that there were maybe some problems there, but that he was not just an outright racist guy. I remembered reading that he handled race with a certain insight and sensitivity in his books. I wanted to give some of his work a chance in spite of whatever racial issues his life and work brought up.

After I read the novel, however, I read up a bit on his views on race, mainly in a New Yorker article, and Faulkner was in fact a horrible racist who said he would fight for Mississippi in a hypothetical do-over of the Civil War. He said other horrible shit as well. What was interesting was that the New Yorker article, a review of a new book about Faulkner, also said that his books were much better about race than he was in real life. That he understood the moral stain of slavery, and savaged the South for its inability to move forward.

Anyway, I don’t think I’ll be reading much more Faulkner in the near future.

Believe I snapped this one up after seeing it on a magazine’s “best of the century” list, and it did not disappoint. The writing is frequently funny, West has a witty and quirky sensibility, and the novel’s themes are complex and thought-provoking. The subject matter is also interesting, as was the novel’s treatment of sex, which was not explicit but was the conversations around sex were candid and mildly racy.

I have nothing bad at all to say about the novel, and can see why it made it onto that list. I also had a strong sense as I finished it that there was stuff that I’d missed after only one read, and when I looked at it’s wiki page I saw that there were a couple of interesting patterns that I had not caught the first time through, such as several instances of interrupted sex. I feel like this is a novel that I would happily re-read at some point.

It’s interesting that this came out the same year as Ask The Dust, which is also set in LA, but is not about the film industry. Locust is a much better novel, if you can only read one.

It’s a very dark novel, there are no good-guys to speak of, or good gals, maybe with the exception of Homer Simpson (and that becomes complicated later in the story).

West had a lot to say about the country, Hollywood, and politics, but he said what he needed to with a light hand. The stakes often felt sort of low, the action buffoonish, until they didn’t and it wasn’t.

I recommend it highly.

Overall this book felt very polished, well executed, and had no blemishes. The novel evinces a powerful sense of even-keeled control and restraint, mostly to its benefit.

I found the subject matter to be very interesting, and for me it was a novelty. i’ve not read many novels set in Japan. The protagonist is an artist who is renowned throughout his city and even the nation for his pro-military art and propaganda prior to and during World War II. He’s celebrated during the war, but in the years immediately following Japan’s surrender, his hawkish views, his activities, and his propaganda present him and his family with a number of difficulties. The story offers a vivid picture of what life was like for its characters.

In addition to the fascinating historical milieu, I enjoyed the way that Ishiguro wove together the narrative. There was an elegant seamlessness in the way that the story unfolded, from plot point to plot point. The novel, his second, also captured the sadness that can accompany the changes brought about by the passage of time, and this was reflected not only in the characters but also in the way that neighborhoods evolved due to the war and its aftermath.

Maybe the novel owes a significant part of its achievement to Ishiguro’s choices around perspective. The protagonist, Ono, is clearly complicit in fueling the ugly fires of Japanese militarism, but the portrait of him, while not making excuses for or justifying his views, offers a rich portrait of him, and of his attempts to process his decisions after the fact.

Ono, who narrates the book, is unreliable, and the use of the unreliable narrator was shrewd and effective.

As for the book’s shortcomings, there were a few minor ones. The language is not particularly vivid or visual, and I think much of that is by design. The restraint was, I believe, intentional, and it seems to me that Ishiguro did not want the language to call attention to itself. The language was not at all bad, it served its purpose, but it’s not a book full of beautiful sentences, nor of vivid visual details.

I also felt that, for a book that revolves so much around art and artists, that it didn’t really talk about art that much in an interesting or novel way. It felt to me like it was written by a man who didn’t know a great deal about visual art and hadn’t bothered to do the type of research that might have brought those passages to life more. Surprisingly few of the books passages concern the act of painting, considering that painting and paintings anchor the story.

I would also say that the characterization is completely adequate, but somewhat perfunctory. Ono the protagonist is rendered as a fully developed, three-dimensional character, but the book’s other characters are adequately developed, but not much more than adequately. They were generally not very vivid on the page.

Lastly, Ono’s views of his actions before and during the war evolve; that is in fact what the book is primarily about, but at the end of the book I was wondering if the character in fact vacillated in a way that was not satisfying, or in a way that weakened the story somewhat. I guess it’s fair for Ishiguro to have created him in a way that he had conflicting views of his own actions and beliefs. Where Ono actually stands in relation to his past is a bit ambiguous, but maybe that was intentional.

This was also true of a shift with his family that I found to be somewhat confusing, although the confusion too may have been intentional on Ishiguro’s part.

Overall I would definitely recommend it if you have any interest in what life was like after the war in Japan. It was pretty satisfying to work through it.

This was my first novel by a Greek author, and it’s quite good, periodically brilliant. It’s a beautiful premise for a novel, a mostly epistolary first person tale about a 17 year old girl with some masochistic tendencies who marries God, and about how their marriage unfolds, fluctuating between adoration, distrust, and rebellion.

At points the novel, which I would characterize as magical realism, felt like Nobel prize caliber writing, although these moments were fleeting. Through the first two-thirds of the novel I felt like it might rank among my top 10 favorite novels. It cracked the top 20 but not the top 10.

Along the way there are a number of rich insights into Creation, the nature of love and faith, the nature of writing, and what it means to write fiction. The significance and implications of writing, and more specifically what it means for women, is one of the novel’s main themes. One of the accomplishments of God’s Wife is how it manages to explore philosophical ideas and themes without being wooden or bombastic.

It’s almost always the case with any decent novel that a second reading brings you closer to a truer understanding of what the book is about, how it works, what it’s trying to say. That feels like it’s even moreso true with God’s Wife. I read it for a book club, and this novel in particular would be a great one to discuss with other people, owing to certain complexities and ambiguities.

So, why did it not crack the top 10? I would be hard-pressed to identify any legitimate grips I had with the novel, but the closest thing I’d have to a complaint about it is that … to me it felt like it wanted to be more of an epic. It’s a very short novel, 144 pages, and maybe this is a compliment rather than a complaint, but I wanted to scope of the story to be bigger. There are only two characters of any significance in the story, the narrator wife and God.

The book has a plot, but I would not call it a plot driven book. The plot such as it is is somewhat minimal. It’s an effective plot and I’m sure that Michalopoulous structured it carefully, and that it is a shorter novel because she felt that that was the best way to tell the story, but for that reason, to me, the book feels somewhat incomplete. Not fully realized. In particular, the writing around the Creation was interesting, but I felt that she could have leaned much more heavily into this.

The only other minor gripe is that, while ambiguity is a tool that is used intentionally to tell the story, there were a few passages, particularly in the final 20 pages of the book where it felt like “complexity” and “ambiguity” about the relationship degenerated into something of a mish-mash that did not service the telling of the story or the development of the character. There are pages where the wife has opposing or conflicting feelings about God every other paragraph which for me induced a bit of a whiplash sensation.

It is bringing to mind Mariette in Ecstacy by Ron Hanson, which if I recall explores similar themes and subject matter, I will have to take a look at that one too.

All of that said, however, this was a great book, I recommend it.

I gave this novella 35 pages, which is a third of the book, and I decided to put it down because it was dull and flat. There is some good writing in it, Ferlinghetti is a significant poet, but what killed it for me was the male protagonist droning on and on about his childhood and his political beliefs. He did better work with the female protagonist. But the dude’s rambling monologs I could not abide.

I think maybe even a bit more so than usual I was impatient with this book. Maybe in a few months I’ll pick it up again and start reading where I left off, see if it goes anywhere.

Ask the Dust is an uneven novel, with a healthy dose of nice writerly flourishes that are bogged down by patches of melodramatic and cartoonish plot and character development. I’m glad I read it, in part because of where it sits in the body of American literature, in part because I’m interested in the history of Los Angeles, and in part because Fante did have talent as a writer and story teller. I’d recommend the novel to anyone who is interested in the history of Los Angeles, not sure I would recommend it to a general reader.

I went into the novel cold, which is how I prefer reading a novel for the first time. I knew only that he lived in and wrote about Los Angeles.

One of the interesting aspects of the novel for me was considering its influences, as well as how it related to the work of other novelists who followed. It reminded me a bit of Notes from Underground in that it is a novel that’s very focused on the psychological issues of its protagonist; the protagonist’s conflicting and sometimes self-defeating impulses, as well as his self-loathing.

There were a number of uses of the word “clean” as an adjective that seemed to reflect a strong influence of Hemingway. “Strong,” too. Like The Sun Also Rises, Ask the Dust is about a love triangle comprised of damaged people, and explored the themes of frustrated sexual desire. And, as with The Sun Also Rises, the protagonist to a certain extent gets caught up in the whims of the woman he desires. In both novels the woman wears the pants in some ways relative to the male protagonist.

Fante was a significant influence on Charles Bukowski, who mined a similar milieu for his work, the down and out in Los Angeles. It was also interesting to think about whether or not Ask the Dust qualifies for the Noir label, in that the protagonist is deeply flawed and is also alienated within the society he inhabits.

Fante’s work additionally made me think of On the Road, although I don’t know if there was any cross-over. If there is an essay or two out there about Fante as a precursor to the Beats, I’d like to read that essay.

And then of course there is The Long Take, with which Ask the Dust shares the most DNA in terms of subject matter and setting.

One of the challenges with reading the book for me was trying to figure out what to make of the characters’ racism. The protagonist, Arturo Bandini, his Mexican-American love interest Camilla Lopez, and Camilla’s love interest are all racist, as is the woman who runs the flop-house who won’t rent rooms out to Jews.

As a reader I’m still trying to work out exactly how or when a novel crosses over from being about racism to being racist. Ask the Dust occupies a strange grey area between those two poles. There are different ways that an author can signal that s/he and/or are writing about racism to criticize and condemn it. Racist characters can be presented as unlikable villains; victims of racism can be presented as complex but broadly sympathetic. But people are complex, and so are issues of race, so nuanced approaches to the issues of race are appropriate.

Fante in his novel telegraphs that he as a writer recognizes the harms of racism. Bandini at one point attempts to explain his racist verbal outbursts toward Camilla by claiming that he himself, as an Italian American, was the victim of racist abuse in Colorado, where he was from. So the protagonist is troubled by his racism. However, his apparent rejection of racism is fleeting, as he continues to hurl racist abuse at Camilla after his exposure to racism is detailed in the story.

The arc of Camilla also seems to support the idea that Ask the Dust is an anti-racist work, as the story demonstrates the toll the racist and sexist abuse takes on her.

But this all gets fairly complicated, as Camilla is … there are sort of two strands to that drive the story forward: Bandini’s attempts to become a successful writer, and his infatuation with Camilla. Over the course of the story, Camilla, in the final third of the book, transitions from being merely a passive love interest of Banidini’s into more of a dynamic and active character in her own right. However, the camera in the story remains fixed on Bandini at all points, so her experiences are filtered through Bandini, and they are secondary to his development as a writer. Racism then does not receive serious exploration as part of the protagonist’s development.

Additionally, there is weird race- and gender-related stuff between Bandini and Camilla that Bandini fails to recognize as troubling. In the midst of a sexual liason with a Jewish woman whom he uses as a stand-in for Camilla, he fantasizes about Camilla as a Mayan princess, but he is Cortez the conqueror. The goal for Arturo seems to be domination rather than something like love.

It is a convoluted stew. At the end of the day I think the best I can say about Ask the Dust on the issues of race and gender is that it’s a mixed bag.

Based on having read and really dug The Quiet American (though a long time ago), I suspected that I was going to like Our Man in Havana, and it generally did not disappoint. The writing throughout is vivid and deft, with inspired gems of sentences on many pages. It was quite funny at moments as well.

Greene apparently considered this book to be among his “entertainments” rather than one of his Signfiicant Pieces of Literature, and maybe you could say that the whimsical tone qualifies it for the judgement, but given the caliber of the writing, it’s hard for me to think of it as anything other than a very good book.

I had the sense while reading it that there were cards he had up his sleeve that I would only see if I went back and re-read the story, which I may do at some point.

Interior Chinatown is an example of how a smart premise can almost by itself carry a novel. The premise in question is that the protagonist, Willis, is so invested in his dream of becoming Kung Fu Man in a TV series that is filmed in Chinatown, Black and White, which by extension entails embracing Hollywood’s de-humanizing stereotypes of Asians, that the line for him between the show and his life collapse.

Yu’s prose is not particularly visual, but the book’s tone and wit more than compensate for mostly unremarkable language.

It did feel like the book was missing something. Weight, perhaps. It’s a very breezy book, which is not to say that it’s all fun and games until someone gets kicked in the face, but at times the book had a dashed-off or even quasi-cartoonish quality to it. It was almost like the book wanted you to read it quickly.

Toward the end there is a trial, as with The Sellout, but I think the trial worked better for The Sellout, which was, like Interior Chinatown, set in Los Angeles.

This was not a major issue for me, but I wasn’t sure that positioning Asian-Americans a step below “Black and White” Americans made that much sense. One of the show’s two main characters is a white woman, and the other, her detective partner, is a black man. The book posits a kind of parity between white and black people (actors, in this case) that most certainly does not reflect reality.

It’s a criticism that Yu anticipates and writes into the story at various points, but it’s not clear to me that the way he anticipates or responds to that critique resolves it in a meaningful way.

Minor gripes aside, I did enjoy reading it and would recommend it.

We moved at the end of February, and the disruption wreaked havoc with my reading habit. I stopped reading books, for the most part, although I seem to have gotten back into it again.

I picked up 3 Hardy Boys books maybe a year and a half ago in Cold Spring, because I devoured every book in the series when I was young, and I was very curious about what, exactly, I had read.

I have to say I enjoyed reading The Tower Treasure more than I expected to. Reading it as an adult, its flaws were obviously more apparent: a total lack of character development, chiefly. But I also appreciated things about the book that I would not have as a 10-year-old. It was interesting just to read a young adult book written in the 1950s. They say “swell” unironically.

I noted that the lack of character development did not prevent me from being pulled along through the story in a way that was somewhat entertaining.

There were no passages in the book that I remembered reading as a kid, which is not surprising because I probably read that book 40 years ago, or more.

The book reminded me a bit of two other franchises: Leave It to Beaver, and Scooby Doo. Scooby Doo in particular owes basically everything except its outfits to The Hardy Boys, it seems to me.

I had read somewhere that the Hardy Boys series doesn’t do race very well, also unsurprising. The first book in the series fared better in this regard than I anticipated, however. There are no people of color in the story, but there is an Italian immigrant, a shopkeeper in Bayport. One character in the story, Oscar Smuff, expresses anti-immigrant views, and Smuff is a bad guy. So, Dixon seems to be pro-immigration, or at least pro Italian immigration.

Where the book did run into some problems was with class. I was surprised by the extent to which the book focused on the socio-economic damage to Mr. Robinson and his family caused by his being wrongly blamed for the book’s central crime, a burglary.

It makes sense from a narrative perspective to wade into the harm brought onto the family due to the false accusation, but their descent from barely middle class into prospective (and presumably temporary) poverty is treated as a major catastrophe.

Characters are shocked and horrified that the Robinsons have to live in (gasp) the poor part of town. Tellingly, people are not freaked out by this part of town because of violent crime — there is no mention of crime in this part of town — it is the poverty itself that is horrifying and to be avoided at all costs.

The book embraces a fear of and a subtle contempt for economically disadvantaged communities that seemed toxic. The Robinsons, in the book, differentiate themselves from their neighbors in the story by trying to keep their place tidy and presentable. Maybe this is a back door espousal of racist attitudes, although the racial backgrounds of the poor folks are never mentioned.

The day that I bought the first installment, I picked up two other titles in the series. I’m glad I re-read The Two Towers and have no regrets, but I don’t think I will bother with the other two titles.

Made it 160 pages into Normal People and put it down due to dull lifeless prose and sub-par character and plot development.

At the 160 page mark it did seem like one of the novel’s strands, the female protagonist’s relationship with her shitty abusive family, might gather some steam, and that may have salvaged the project, to an extent, but after 160 pages of bad sentences I’d lost my patience.

I’ve decided to include in every review where I shout “bad setences!” some of the bad sentences, so that you, the reader, can gauge for yourself if my idea of a bad sentence matches your idea of a bad sentence. You might think that sentences that I think are bad are totally fine.

That said, here are some of the sentences that caused me difficulties:

Page 7: “For a few seconds he says nothing, and the intensity of the privacy between them is very severe, pressing in on him with an almost physical pressure on his face and body.”

Why would you modify “intensity” with “severe”?

A couple more examples.

Page 22: “In total he had only had sex a small number of times, and always with girls who went on to tell the whole school about it afterwards.”

WTF is a “small number of times”? Why lead into that inelegant formulation with “In total,” which suggests that you are going to cite an actual number?

Page 26: “I like you so much, Marianne said. Connell felt a pleasurable sorrow come over him, which brought him close to tears. Moments of emotional pain arrived like this, meaningless or at least indecipherable. Marianne lived a drastically free life, he could see that. He was trapped by various considerations. He cared what people thought of him.”

This novel, I’ve also just now decided, has changed my approach to reading novels. Some novels I’ve stuck with out of a sense of guilt or obligation, over the 100-page mark, like this one. From now on, I’ve decided, I need to be much more brutal with the novels I read. If I make it 30 or 40 pages into a novel, and it’s replete with bad sentences, I just need to hit the kill switch. The final 120 pages of this novel that I read were a bad use of time. I could have been reading a better novel!

Thank you for your time and attention.

I dug and would cautiously recommend this debut novel, the premise of which is succinctly stated in the title.

The sisters in question live in Lagos, Nigeria. The murders detailed in the book are, it suggests, the byproduct of domestic abuse the women experienced at the hands of their father. They are also victims of a patriarchal culture that objectifies women.

I’ve read through the reviews, and they seem to be in agreement, and largely correct, about the book’s strengths and shortcomings.

The book’s strength is its plot, which is brisk, or even “taut.” I found it to be entertaining, and I don’t feel guilty about being entertained, and it’s ok both to be entertaining and to be entertained. Nyyyyyyaaaaaaah!!!I kept reading the book because I wanted to find out what would happen! It has a page-turner quality to it.

It offers interesting insights into life in Lagos, it would have been great if “My Sister” offered more of this.

The prose is not ornamental, nor flowery, nor does it really draw attention to itself, but it is, at worst, competent. It was also was tailored, I believe intentionally(?), to the protagonist, a nurse, who is also the narrator.

The book’s shortcomings are that it was perhaps too short, too limited in its scope. It did not venture far from the immediate plot twists, nor did it attempt to make the setting, Lagos, much of a factor in terms of its descriptions. The characterization was flimsy, except for Korede, the protagonist and sister of Ayoola, the murderer.

I will be curious to see what Braithwaite produces next.

I highly recommend The Long Take, a Man Booker finalist, if, like me, gorgeous, dazzling sentences are basically enough to get you through a novel. I can assert, or maybe even attest, that the author, Robin Robertson, a Scottish poet, is a master of gorgeous sentences. There are too many to even provide examples. I would just reiterate that there was a “wow” moment on almost every page. Really inspiring, beautiful writing.

I hate synopses, but I’ll just say a couple of things about the concept and story. It’s billed on the cover as a “noir narrative,” which is accurate. It’s a novella, a nice short book, perfect for your Covid-shattered attention span. It’s set mostly in LA right after WWII. The protagonist, Walker, is a vet who gets a job as a reporter for a paper in LA. The tale is concerned largely with the changes to downtown L.A., the destruction of a community. The book also winds its way through the making of a number of noir films from that era.

Robertson is more than just a gorgeous-sentence-generating one-trick pony. The way he traces the city’s evolution is compelling. He also exhibits a real talent for mini-vignettes. Chunks of text, a dollop of sentences, that he somehow packs with enough weight to almost qualify as accomplished flash fiction. This one I am going to track down an example of, because I liked it so much. Hold on please.

[Fetches the book.]

There it is, page 122. The only context you need is that Walker is in San Francisco for work, and is just walking around, seeing the sights. I’ll maintain the line breaks as they appear:

He got to work. From the heights to the depths: Howard Street,
south of Market, between 3rd and 4th,
a few blocks away from the Chronicle.
He found a Salvation Army troupe with tambourines
singing in a semi-circle round a bunch of bums: men oblivious
to everything but their jugs of wine.
There’s deep discussion, laughing, hugging,
then a shower of loose punches, and the Army scattering,
some solemn gulps of wine
then more laughs, back-slapping, fumbled rolling of cigarettes.

The Long Take also has what might be the funniest threat I’ve ever read in a novel. I’m not going to write it here, you should just buy and read this book. The threat is on page 136 of the hardcover edition, if you want to cheat, but seriously, just buy and read this book, despite its flaws, which are forgivable, and which I will address in the very next paragraph.

My main complaint with the novella is the way that the plot is concluded, which is a bit of an odd thing to say, because the writing was so good that the story didn’t really need a plot. But, it tried to have one, and the plot that it tried to have held together pretty well for the first 4/5’s of the story (it was pretty minimal and mostly just stayed out of the way of the writing), but then Robertson in a way tried to swing for the fences, in terms of the drama. It’s not correct to say that he failed, it’s just that the final act in the book was a minor let-down relative to the great work that preceded it.

The Long Take to me at times seemed to channel Steinbeck and Hemingway. There’s maybe a bit of Cannery Row in The Long Take, but just a bit; the millieu, mostly. I was not a big fan of the nods to Hemingway (he was fond of “hard” and “clean” as adjectives, like Hemingway ), but these were minimal.

Overall, The Long Take was a pure pleasure, glad to have it on my shelf.

I gave Homegoing 122 pages, because the subject matter — the African slave trade as it plays out across generations of African slaves and African slavers, moving from West Africa to the U.S. — was interesting. In the end I put it down because the language, the characterization, the sense of place, were all thoroughly mediocre. It’s just plain bad writing. The characters do not surprise, nor do they come to life. There is a truly unfortunate lack of specific detail which would have made the story more vivid. No visual surprises.

Examples:

“Before long the men came in. Abeeku looked as a chief should look, Effia thought, strong and powerful, like he could lift ten women above his head and toward the sun.”

“Baaba had said that Effia’s curse was one of a failed womanhood, but it was Cobbe who had prophesied about a sullied lineage. Effia couldn’t help but think that she was fighting against her own womb, fighting against the fire children.”

“The need to call this thing ‘good’ and this thing ‘bad', this thing ‘white’ and this thing ‘black,’ was an impulse that Effia did not understand. In her village, everything was everything. Everything bore the weight of everything else.”

The one thing Homegoing did have going for it was the rudiments of a decent plot. And the plot was interesting enough that I almost stuck with the book — and for some readers it might be worth sticking with it — but the lifeless prose just wore me down.

The onset of the pandemic and the lock-down have shattered my attention span, so I’m trying to read shorter books as a work-around. The Hawkline Monster is a quick and a fun read, I might call it whimsical. There are in its pages some food for thought though, and some very good writing. It bills itself as a “gothic western,” which is a fair assessment. It is a fairly bizarre and surreal take on the Western genre.

There is not much happening in terms of character development, but Brautigan has a good eye for weird details and a knack for layering complex ideas or themes into what is on the surface a sort of farcical tale of twin sisters who live in a haunted house.

Mild Spoilers Ahead

The book opens with the 2 main characters, Greer and Cameron, assassin-cowboy types from Oregon, laying low in a pineapple field in Hawaii, waiting to pop caps into the dome and/or ass of someone they’ve been paid to snuff out. But their intended target is teaching his son to ride a horse, and the assassins find themselves unable to kill a man while he is teaching his son how to ride. So, they don’t kill him.

Putting the cowboys in Hawaii created a pleasing dissonance, and as I came to the end of the story, I wondered about how that first scene fit into the story. It didn’t feel like Brautigan just randomly created that scene and then just left it there, but without re-reading the book I can’t really say what the scene meant.

There are other elements of the story that seemed to support or invite a second reading of the book. There are several pairings, duos, in the story that seem to be pointing to some larger idea.

In summary, it’s a quick and fun read, but not lacking in substance.

Might have to read Trout Fishing in America at some point, although it’s not high on my list.

This was Ishmael Reed’s first novel, and based on the limited reading I’ve done about him and his work, the consensus seems to be that this was not nearly his best.

I got to page 50 and had to put it down. It was amusing at points, but also induced a weird kind of vertigo, left me feeling like I was stuck in the mind of a crazy person who was just free-associating, and that very well could have been Reed’s desired intent. However, there was not enough happening in terms of plot or character development or things of that nature to keep me hooked, and it really felt like homework.

This review will be a bit less detailed than I’d hoped. My phone died, and I lost many of my notes, including the note I had going for this novel. (Do not use Apple’s Notes app, ever. Since the app deleted a bunch of notes, I’ve seen other people report similar issues online.)

I picked Unbearable Lightness up on a lark, maybe it was a bit of a nostalgia play. I hadn’t thought about it much at all since probably the early 90s, the last time I read it. The copy on my bookshelf was in pretty bad shape. The pages were stiff as corpses and nearly the color of coffee. About two-thirds of the way through, my copy split into two halves. I’ve never had that happen while reading a novel before, maybe the spine of my copy was a stand-in for Communism!

First, the short-comings, most of which were forgivable. I did finish and mostly enjoy the book, but it started off inauspiciously.

The first red flag popped up on page 1, which alarmed me. I remembered vaguely that the novel started with a discussion of Nietzsche’s theory of Eternal Return, and toward the bottom of the page, citing an example of what would be a completely meaningless historical event, Kundera works into his discussion of the theory a hypothetical war in Africa.

I’ll just include the paragraph:

“Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow … whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, it’s horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing. We need take no more note of it than of a war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century …”

I read that and thought, “Don’t do this Milan,” but it got even cringier:

“…a war that altered nothing in the destiny of the world, even if a hundred thousand blacks perished in excruciating torment.”

The casual racism, a term that may not have been widely used in 1984, surprised me, and it took some time to process it. I don’t think that Milan Kundera is actively racist (I have not researched his views on race), and Unbearable Lightness is not even remotely a book about race, which made the drive-by “fuck you” to Africa all the more vexing.

And this is in a celebrated novel about life under tyrannical regimes, published by a left-leaning public intellectual. Encountering this right after reading the novel I Pass Like Night, which was a bit heavier on the casual racism, changed my perception of where the country was at on race in the 1980s and 90s. I think I was ignorant and complacent about race, as was the country in general. Our “good guys,” writers whom we esteemed and thought of as artists and standard-bearers, were unwittingly (I hope unwittingly) adding their own small bricks to the edifice of white supremacy.

The passage cast a pall over my reading of the book, the first third of it, or maybe the first half. This wariness was reinforced by the womanizing protagonist, Tomas, who makes sex with many women but who expects his lover, Teresa, to be faithful. He views her as child-like and submissive and this is part of her appeal for him. He’s kind of a pig with maladaptive attitudes about women and sex, but he’s a complicated, considerate, brain-surgeon pig with a big heart!

The narrator addresses some of the gender politics at play, so Kundera does not applaud Tomas’s womanizing, necessarily; however, some of the writing did just sort of leave a bad taste in the mouth. This issue became less prominent as the novel progressed.

A few more quibbles.

The novel regularly evinced a certain pedantic tone, and you got the sense reading it that Kundera had a very high opinion of his opinions. He seems to enjoy explaining and extrapolating on common words, such as “horror,” and of course novels are supposed to interrogate language, but he did this in a kind of clumsy and patronizing tone of voice, as if he imagined himself explaining these terms to children rather than to Stephen Kosloff!

Unbearable Lightness is not particularly noteworthy in terms of its language or imagery, we have to assume the former is better in Czech. I would not say Kundera has a great eye for detail in his writing. I wouldn’t call it a marked deficit, but his talent as a novelist does not lie in these domains.

Generally speaking, the portion of the story that takes place up to and shortly after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 — which is largely concerned with the relationships and sex lives of three of the main characters — is the weaker part of the book. The first half of the novel, while mostly readable, felt something like a slightly wooden European soap opera with a pretentious Nietzsche reference for a welcome mat.

The novel comes into its own, however, once the consequences of the invasion begin to play out more in the characters’ personal lives. The story-telling, and the examination of what the communist system did to its subjects, was adroit. Kundera handled it with panache and feeling. He had the benefit of working with dramatic and evocative subject matter, of course.

There were passages in the book where he was playing with the form in a way that I could not necessarily ferret out on the first read. I did have the sense that Unbearable Lightness would stand up to re-reading.

I have spent a fair amount of time discussing the book’s problems, and it does have problems, but overall I did enjoy reading it, and might even recommend it.

I started having bad thoughts about this novel about 40 pages into it, and my contempt only increased as I moved forward, until I decided I’d had enough at page 97 and put it down for good. I was a bit distraught at the prospect of not liking a book that so many friends and critics love, so I asked around, among my novel-reading friends. One of them called it his favorite novel, said he’d read it 3 or 4 times. Another friend lamented that he’d tried and failed to get into it 3 times.

My problems with the book were (a) too many characters, (b) scanty plot development, (c) very little in the way of meaningful character development (see [a]), (d) jokes, or, more accurately an absurdist posture that felt forced after page 30, and (e) not great language, no eye for interesting detail or vivid imagery.

It’s very dialog-heavy, and the dialog was probably interesting or distinctive when it came out in 1961, but, maybe today it’s something of a victim of its own success. Not that the dialog is stale, but it’s not strong enough to carry the first 11 chapters. As I read it, it seemed like it worked better as a script for a sit-com.

According to the wiki page for the novel, those first 11 chapters form sort of a loose first section of the book, and then chapters 12 through 20 or so detail an attack on Bologna, so they’re presumably a bit more plot-driven. For all I know, they might be pretty great, but unfortunately I am not willing to give the book any more of my time. I don’t have the magnanimity required to give someone a pass after 11 bad chapters.

I was intrigued by the idea of someone attempting to do a re-mix of Catch-22 that cut out the bits that should have been cut out before it was published.

I mostly enjoyed Jonathan Ames’s first novel, I Pass Like Night, which he published in 1989 around the age of 25. It’s the first and only book of his that I’ve read. I’ve heard from a writer whose opinion I trust that Wake Up Sir is very good, and I’m guessing better than I Pass, which is set in 1983 and concerns itself with the sexual exploits of Alexander Vine, a casually racist door man at the Four Seasons who lives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and is bi-sexual.

(Don’t know that a disclosure is necessary, but I fraternized on a few occasions with Ames socially while helping to coordinate a performance art event — sheesh, I guess in the early 2000’s.)

I came out of the book thinking that it’s solid work, especially for someone that young. Ames exhibits a confidence and aptitude with his material. The writing occasionally sparkled, and it seemed to point to bigger and brighter work ahead, which is what happened.

I Pass is at its best when it describes the relationship between Alexander and his childhood pal, Ethan. The climax of that relationship, which plays out across two pages, was superb, and those two pages alone arguably justify reading the book. It was poignant, surprising, and it felt true.

The novel is also consistently amusing and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. I particularly liked the use of “fuck-fingers.”

If Ames’s debut was fun and periodically inspired, it was also underdeveloped. I Pass is short, 167 pages (which in fact is one of the reasons I read it, the lock-down has wrecked my attention span). I am a fan of brevity, but I think in this case the book suffered for it.

There’s nothing wrong with a loosey-goosey, picaresque novel, of course, but even picaresque novels need to congeal in a way that I Pass does not. Some of the characters and encounters felt extraneous or unmoored.

Starting with Alexander’s girlfriend/fuck-buddy, a bartender named Joy. She appears maybe five times in the book, always very fleetingly, and the pattern is that Alexander is emotionally and verbally abusive to her. There’s no arc, or there’s a very clumsy and off-putting arc: he’s a total dick to her.

Which brings us to the second set of problems with the book: its problematic identity politics. To caveat, Ames wrote it when he was 25, in the late 80s. If I had written a novel at that age at that time I would not have handled race or gender the way I’d handle it today. I’m not saying we have to whip out the Cancel Gun.

The cruelty Alexander displays toward Joy, a victim of toxic shock syndrome linked to her use of an IUD, is hard to understand. He makes awful, misogynistic comments about his previous girlfriends too. I’m not sure what the point was, or how the book is better for Alexander’s sexism.

Alexander is cruel to the other person he’s friendly with in the story, a guy he cruises for prostitutes with, so the cruelty is not completely gendered. If the point was to illustrate how the various psychic wounds Alexander sustained affected him, these episodes seemed ad hoc rather than organic.

I Pass was also a bit cringe-inducing in its treatment of race. Aside from a one-sentence mention of black mothers toward the end of the book, all of the black characters in it are either crooks or prostitutes, “whores,” actually. Alexander likens black prostitutes in the beginning of the book to animals in a jungle …

“the great jungle cats of the Tarzan books I had read when I was young. These cats, Numa the lion and Sheeta the leopard knew every creature that passed through the forest and knew what it would do.”

There was another tone-deaf passage later in the book:

“There are more homeless than ever, but the Bowery bum, the white, blue-collar alcoholic, who served in WWII or Korea, is going extinct. The ones that are left, the Jimmy Warren’s, the J. B. Britten’s, have little orange hospital tags on their wrists; they are like marked precious birds in a sanctuary.”

The implication in the passage is that those bums matter more because they are white.

A gay Latino man is portrayed as a predator who promises to use a condom while having sex with Alexander but then goes bareback.

Writers, irrespective of their race, need the artistic freedom to create racist characters and to be able to explore racism in their work. What’s not appropriate is to toss some racist characters into a story, ask your reader to identify with them on some level, and to then say nothing substantive about race. The black characters in I Pass conform to negative stereotypes, and the author’s perspective seemingly aligns with the racist character’s.

There might be a fig-leaf here, in that one of Vine’s older relatives refers to “schwarzes,” a racist yiddish term for black people. So, Ames’s idea is maybe to highlight the social origins of racist attitudes.

But my sense is that this is just casual racism.

Pedophilia and incest are also themes in the book; Vine’s father walks up to or else crosses the sexual assault line with his son, and Alexander is preyed on by an adult camp counselor as well. These themes also felt like they needed to be developed more. I suppose Ames (maybe?) suggests that some of Alexander’s struggles as an adult are tied to these assaults, but the book’s treatment of them is casual and off-handed, and I don’t think that was to the story’s benefit.

Most of the reading of books I’ve done was on the subway to and from work. When commuting to work stopped due to the COVID outbreak, on March 13, I stopped reading books, which was distressing, although not as distressing as the widespread suffering caused by COVID.

After a few months of not reading books and hating myself for not reading books, I realized I needed to pick something up that would be fun, and that I knew I’d like. Enter The Hobbit, which I last read in 2006. The prospect of some escapism was appealing, in light of the varied catastrophes the country and my timelines have been clogged with.

It’s a bit odd, the idea of rating and ranking The Hobbit, because I’m measuring it against adult fiction. I’ve seen it referred to as children’s literature as well, but that seems misguided. It’s a 272 page book with beheadings. It also seems weird to pigeon-hole it as YA fiction and/or as fantasy, as it has transcended those categories.

The weirdness of the exercise aside, I had a few thoughts and observations. I admire several of Tolkien’s choices in writing The Hobbit, which made the book richer and more complex. For example, having an off-brand hero (a short, physically timid and vulnerable, risk-averse hobbit) and also having the completion of the hero’s journey result not in a cliched happy ending, but in the hero’s diminishment in and estrangement from his community. There’s a lot to chew on in The Hobbit in terms of what it says about social hierarchies and heroism.

The Hobbit did have two mostly forgivable problems: Thorin’s development and motivations, and Tolkien’s handling of the logistical considerations around the gold. And these two problems are somewhat connected.

Let’s tackle the character motivation issue first.

At some point, maybe a third of the way into the book, I became confused about why the dwarves wanted to travel to the mountain. I didn’t remember if it was (a) just to snatch the treasure, or (b) to snatch the treasure and to kill the dragon and/or to regain the throne under the mountain.

The primary goal, it seems, was to snatch the treasure. In the song the dwarves sing they profess their desire to “seek”, “claim” and “win” the gold. No mention is made of regaining political power. Another passage suggests that they do not intend to rekindle the dynasty.

On page 16, Thorin says:

We shall soon … start on our long journey, a journey from which some of us, or perhaps all of us … may never return.

The plan is to return, not to rule, although I suppose “some of us” not returning might refer to Thorin hanging out in the mountain to rule, rather than not returning due to being dead.

There may also be some ambiguity around killing Smaug. “Win” in the song lyric leaves open the possibility somehow defeating Smaug rather than merely fleeing with the treasure. And on page 23, Thorin says the dwarves want to “bring our curses home to Smaug, if we can.” This phrasing suggests that mixing it up with Smaug is on the table, but it’s not a mandatory.

It’s hard to imagine Thorin being interested in the gold, but not in regaining his ancestral home and power. Thorin’s apparent ambivalence about ruling could have worked if this question had been addressed, even obliquely, and some reason given for this ambivalence, but it’s not addressed.

The degree to which the dwarves blithely cede control of the agenda to Gandalf is also odd, strains credibility, and pulled me out of the story.

In chapter 1 we learn that the dwarves had previously approached Gandalf to seek his help finding another member of their mountain party, for the sole reason that they numbered 13, an unlucky number. We learn in an off-handed comment from Gandalf that he has made a crucial call as to what will happen once they show up at the mountain. On page 14 — and this passage should have been struck, because I think it undermines the entire story — Gandalf, after one of the dwarves has suggested going through the front door into the mountain, says:

“That would be no good, not without a mighty Warrior, even a hero. I tried to find one; but warriors are busy fighting one another in distant lands.”

“I tried to find one” indicates that Gandalf — contrary to the dwarves — initially viewed killing the dragon as being integral to the mission, but settled on burglary (and Bilbo) as a plan B due to a shortage of warriors. You can kind of imagine the dwarves, based on their nature, and maybe Bilbo, due to his inexperience, adopting a “let’s just get there and see what happens” approach to the adventure, but this sentence suggests Gandalf too is not thinking clearly or carefully about the means or the ends, in matters of life and death, and that is not consistent with his character as a wise wizard.

This is also a very puzzling statement in light of Thorin mentioning on page 22 that dragons may have a “loose scale on their armor.” No one in the room suggested trying to find someone to put an arrow through a loose scale?

I suppose, by making the acquisition of wealth Thorin’s only goal, it sets up an opportunity to develop his character, and provides an opportunity for him to achieve an individual moral and political awakening, which is what happens with Thorin, but not in a good way.

The second problem, a minor one, is Tolkien’s treatment of the post-dragon treasure logistics.

On page 198 the party is on the side of the mountain, Bilbo has returned from inside the mountain with a cup, and they’re trying to figure out how to handle Smaug. Bilbo, after the dwarves grumble at him, complains that they didn’t give adequate thought to the plan, and that they did not tell him how much treasure there was.

However, Thorin did tell Bilbo early on about the amount of treasure, stating that his “…grandfather’s halls became full of armour and jewels and carvings and cups.”

And we know that Thorin (and Bilbo) know that the vast treasure hasn’t gone anywhere: “Dragons,” Thorin tells Bilbo, “guard their plunder as long as they live … and never enjoy a brass ring of it.”

If that’s not clear enough, he then says to Bilbo on page 23, in reference to the treasure, “Probably, for that is the dragon’s way, he has piled it all up in a great heap far inside, and sleeps on it for a bed.”

Bilbo (and Tolkien) seem to do some second-guessing about the planning for the trip, but it seems odd to have the characters agree to get to the mountain and see what happens, but to then retroactively criticize their previous planning. By common agreement, there was no previous planning. There is a distinction is between forgetting to make a plan versus making a conscious choice not to have a plan, and this distinction gets a bit fuzzy on pages 198 and 201, although this may also be due to the dragon casting a spell on Bilbo. Tangentially, this conversation between Smaug and Bilbo is also a deft piece of writing, with more happening below the surface than is apparent, and is an example of why it’s not crazy to think of The Hobbit as capital L literature.

One of the other odd features of the book is the large number of dwarves. Why did Tolkien write 13 dwarves into the story? It seems like too many dwarves! The dwarves, aside from Thorin, are almost totally undeveloped as characters. And the lack of development goes further than “fully rounding them out.” Maybe half-way through the book it occurred to me that I had no idea who the dwarves were in relation to Thorin. Later we learn that Fili and Kili are his nephews, which is grand, but what about the other 10 dwarves? Tolkien never tells us if they are friends or family. The assumption has to be that they are not family, because Tolkien spells out that two of them are family.

It is either a glaring omission in the story, or it was intentional. Maybe they are not developed as individuals because Tolkien intended that they serve as symbols, and not giving them any biographies is a way of shouting at the reader that they are symbols. That doesn’t really hold much water though, as symbolism and character development don’t need to be mutually exclusive.

Tolkien intended for the dwarves to represent Jews, so maybe the erasure of the dwarves in the story is meant to highlight that. The topic of Tolkien, dwarves, and Jews is a lively one, I’m not going to wade into it, but, leaving aside the question of what Tolkien may or may not have been trying to say about Jews in The Hobbit, it’s hard to see how their presence, combined with their absence, furthers the story.

Speaking of absences, I also realized at the end of the book that, with the exception of a brief early mention of Bilbo’s mother, there is not a single female character. In that regard The Hobbit is very much a document of its time.

The House Gun had some shiny spots in the 100 pages I managed to get through, but not enough to sustain the novel, given a plot that held a good deal of promise, but was stifled by over-generous servings of exposition that was not particularly interesting.

The main characters are the parents of a 27-year-old who may have murdered his house-mate, and it’s set in South Africa. The parents and son are white, the defense lawyer is black.

In addition to a number of passages of exposition that were dull, the novel suffered from melodrama. The mother character in particular was hard to stomach after a while.

One problem with reviewing books is that on very rare occasions I might interact with a writer whose novel I reviewed, and if I trash their book, it’s just very awkward.

So, in some cases, I’m going to post a few thoughts on a novel without revealing the title or author.

I realize this is unorthodox, maybe even irritating. I apologize. The problem is that life is stressful enough without having to worry about showing up at a bar and getting punched in the face by an aggrieved novelist.

So, the novel with the title that starts with F, I made it four pages into it, it was a widely acclaimed novel, but I put it down because the writer’s appallingly flat verbs and their sentence construction more generally. I don’t care if the novel turns into a beautiful swan after page 30, my sense was that the writer did not write terrible verbs knowingly, my impression was that he did not realize he was using terrible verbs, and therefore, I’ll take a hard pass on the book.

Come to think of it, flat verbs were just one of the problems that popped up in the first 3 pages of the book. There was also biographical information about the characters that was extraneous; poorly placed, it just seemed like the character construction was going to be a hot mess.

This was a vexing novel for me. It’s without a doubt one of the foremost examples of the form written in the 20th Century, but for reasons I can’t quite articulate, I appreciate the scope of the achievement (towering), but in some ways could not connect with the story. That’s not a statement about the caliber of the story-telling, it’s more just an attempt to wrestle with my subjective response to the story.

I think the fact that Beloved is, among other things, a ghost story, kind of threw me. There may also have been a kind of claustrophobia that the book induced in me as well, and that may have been intentional. I don’t think that I struggled with it solely because the subject matter was grim, although the subject matter is of course very disturbing stuff.

I don’t know, I feel like I need to go back and look at my notes, I finished Beloved in November and maybe need to revisit it.

Underground Railroad is a mostly great novel that vividly documents the horrors suffered by millions of slaves over the course of hundreds of years in the United States. It reads not like an account of a “dark time” in our nation’s past, but like an account of a literal Hell on Earth. Which slavery was.

Like most white Americans, I know less about slavery than I should, for various reasons, not the least of which is the very deliberate and pervasive efforts White America makes to erase slavery from our history. That said, I read a lot of news; I saw Twelve Years a Slave (which wrecked me emotionally for hours afterwards), and I’ve ingested other slavery-related texts.

None of them had the impact on my consciousness concerning slavery that Underground Railroad did. It had a galvanizing effect on me.

Although it does take some magical-realist liberties with its subject matter, Underground Railroad is most successful as a documentary text.

The novel’s main problem was a lack of character development. The protagonist is a woman, Cora, and my sense throughout the book was that she was never fully rendered. She reads like a mere vessel for experiences.

This lack of character development in turn may have been why the portions of the book that take place outside of the plantation where Cora was born and raised seem somewhat bolted together.

Let’s start with the now pro-forma caveat that I can be a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to novels, and in addition to being a curmudgeon, I attempted to read On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous after several very stressful weeks of work and of life. So, if you wanted to take my rating of 1.5 with a few grains of salt, I would emphatically not hold it against you. Hell, I might even look up to you for it.

That concludes the friendly and loving portion of this assessment.

Let’s move on to why I picked up the novel in the first place: in the course of reading over a two week period, two writers who seemed pretty fucking smart raved about Vuong in general, and this novel in particular. I don’t remember who the writers were, I just remember they were pretty fucking smart.

Now let’s move on to what are known in some quarters as the key take-aways.

Prior to attempting to read On Earth, I apparently had a hierarchy of literary sins of which I was only partially aware. What I discovered very quickly as I tucked into this novel is that, for me, pretentiousness is at or near the pinnacle of literary abuses.

Pretentiousness is not the only fault I found in On Earth — it also suffered from melodrama issues — but it was the pretentiousness that got me riled up enough to put the book down after 15 pages.

“How pretentious was it? Can you cite any examples?”

Those are great questions. And yes, I can cite examples.

Maybe the first passage had more of a melodrama problem than a pretense problem.

As context, the novel takes the form of a letter a son writes to his physically abusive mother, who is a Vietnamese immigrant suffering from PTSD due to the war in Vietnam.

“The time with the kitchen knife — the one you picked up, then put down, shaking, saying quietly, “Get out. Get out.” And I ran out the door, down the black summer streets. I ran until I forgot I was ten, until my heartbeat was all I could hear of myself.”

That sounds like a parody of a Cure song. And why were the summer streets “black”?

This next passage was the final straw. Again a bit of context: the novel made several references to the migration of monarch butterflies. That’s what the “fly south” bit refers to.

“If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast.”

Considering that passage again, maybe it’s just muddled rather than pretentious. Do butterflies have sinews?

It’s possible that the novel gathers steam as the story unfolds. There was also a nice bit of black comedy, when the mother, a manicurist, empathizes with a customer who is bemoaning the loss of her daughter to cancer, but it turns out the “daughter” was a horse.

These are my thoughts. I have been sharing them, but now am done. Ahead of me I have the oblivion of sleep.

I bid you good night.

It’s so refreshing to read a novel that won a prominent literary award — a National Book Award in this case — that actually deserved to win a prominent literary award.

I recommend The Friend enthusiastically to anyone, but to writers and to dog-lovers in particular. Which is not to say that The Friend is one of these so-called “Dog” books.

Poignant, sharp, moving, warm, funny, profound, wry, generous, smart, poignant, deft — these words all come to mind when I think about The Friend.

Going into detail about the book’s strengths would spoil it for a first-time reader, and I don’t want to do that. I will just reiterate that it’s a great book.

I had a few very minor quibbles with it, most of which I won’t get into here, again because you should read it cold.

Kicking off here with the increasingly common caveat that there is an excellent chance that if you read this book, which I put down after 110 pages because I couldn’t stand it and it made me queasy, you will probably like it more than I did.

The narrative bounces between two very different but subtly linked stories. The second of these, which I did not get to, because the first section wrecked the whole project for me, might be the stronger of the two sections. It’s quite possible that the second section redeems the first section. I’ll never know, nor do I care to find out.

I had concentric circles of gripes with Asymmetry.

I went into it cold, which is how I prefer to read a novel the first time. I read Halliday’s bio early on in the undertaking, and it struck me that she may have published this novel later in her life (for a first novel), which, as an old, gave me some hope, so I googled her.

At which point I learned that the protagonist in the story who fucks a famous older novelist was based on Halliday’s actual experience of fucking a famous older novelist; Phillip Roth, if memory serves.

In the novel the older writer pays off the younger writer’s college loan. She went to Harvard. Which left me wondering, did Roth pay off Halliday’s college loans because she was an enjoyable sex partner? Did she go to Harvard? I was curious, but not curious enough to google it!

If I had done sex to a much older famous writer, you know what I would not do? Write an imperceptibly veiled first novel about it!

It’s true that Asymmetry is more than that, but it is also that. Which is kind of gross. But, worse than gross, it felt cheap and demonstrates a lack of imagination as well as taste.

My second issue with the novel is the mere ok-ness of the language. Halliday is not a particularly visual writer, nor does she have much of an eye for detail. These shortcomings weren’t in and of themselves deal-breakers; she’s certainly not a *bad* wordsmith, but the language on the page was average.

What killed the book for me, the radioactive core, was the crap story telling.

Two examples in particular come to mind:

— A strand in the story involving the protagonist’s neighbor, which felt like dead weight. It was dull and seemed to not do much for the story.

— A passage in the book with page after page of accounts of baseball games. I think, I hope, that these pages, which by this point in the story were torture for me, were meant to suggest that the flame had been extinguished in the romance. Which is fine. But if you’re going to communicate that through extensive play-by-plays of baseball games, I’m going to stop reading your book.

To my shame and discredit, I believe Things Fall Apart is the first novel I’ve read by an African novelist. I picked it up largely to address this gap and because I have not read nearly enough writers of color in general.

It is the most widely read novel in Africa, and it was among the first to find a wide audience outside of Africa. It was also Achebe’s first novel. It’s objectively a stunning accomplishment.

It became clear early on that, at its worst, Things Fall Apart was going to succeed based solely on its merits as a piece of ethnography. The story takes place in the late 19th Century, and Achebe is a member of the Igbo tribe, who are the novel’s subjects.

But the book succeeds on a number of levels beyond mere ethnography. It takes a bracingly subtle and nuanced perspective on the theme of colonialism.

The other aspect of the book that was surprising was its unabashed embrace of feminism. It seems in this regard it was not merely a first African novel, but that its take on gender was decades ahead of its time, irrespective of geographical considerations. It’s difficult to imagine the impact a book like that must have had.

I thoroughly enjoyed the novel and would recommend it highly; we are lucky to have it.

I suppose my strongest criticism of Census is that there isn’t more of it. It’s a pretty slender little story, 240 or so pages, with many blank pages and many pages with one letter of the alphabet that takes up the entire page.

It’s a father-son road-trip meets Kafka kind of novella, the father is a widower who is near death, the son has Down’s syndrome. The father, for various reasons, has volunteered to be a census taker and is bringing his son with him, but the Census in the novel is not quite like the US Census.

I’ll start with the criticisms of the book, but it is mostly a good book; I’d recommend it cautiously, but not enthusiastically, for reasons I’ll explain below.

The novella has an interesting foreword, in which Ball explains that he wrote it in honor of his brother, who has Down’s syndrome, and in which he explained that the father-son framework seemed to be the best way to tell his story.

Given the centrality of Ball’s brother, and the son in the novella, one of my main problems with the book was the extent to which this key character played second-fiddle.

The entire story is told from the father’s first-person perspective, and, while much of the book concerns itself with the father’s impressions of the son, the son is a bit of a cypher. There is no character development to speak of. Which is kind of baffling, to me.

There is a formality to the book’s tone that I’m not sure always works in its favor. A stiffness. It reads at times like it’s standing at attention.

I personally would have liked to have seen Ball run a bit farther with the threads he was playing with; he was onto some good stuff, and I wanted him to keep digging. The book’s brevity, which I’m sure was a conscious decision, is a liability.

I didn’t find it to be a particularly visual novel. There were a few passages where a lack of descriptive detail gave me the sense that there was something dialed in about it.

All of the griping aside, there is a lot of good writing on the pages, and some good thinking. More than anything the book makes me curious about what he could do in a longer and more sustained novel.

Biswas. What can I say. It … it just really started to bore me around the 200-page mark. I gave it an additional 110 pages after that.

You could see from the writing why he won a Nobel prize; his powers of observation are formidable. He’s a gifted story-teller. Early on in the novel there were events that seemed to be packed with 10 levels of meaning.

But then the novel seriously bogged down; page after page after page of not particularly interesting mini-dramas between Biswas and his varied families.

I made it to Part II, where Biswas moves to the capital of Trinidad and Tobago and starts working for a newspaper, and I thought, “Aha, now this will start to pick up,” but, wrong. It then immediately picked up with the family melodramas.

I leave open the possibility that this was part of Naipaul’s plan: a 400-page set-up for 100 pages of world-class literary pyrotechnics, but, I could not hang with this book.

I wouldn’t un-recommend it though, it is highly likely that my boredom indicates a low IQ or lack of character.

2004: I started trying to write a mostly autobiographical novel, generated a rambling, unsuccessful 80 page manuscript, and stopped.

AUG 2017: After the death of my magazine, feeling demoralized and creatively adrift, I resolved to have another stab at it, so I went to Vermont for a week and locked myself up with a typewriter, in a cabin on a lake, drank way too much liquor, and came back with ... not much.

JAN 2018: Rooting around through Google Drive, I re-discovered the first manuscript, decided to try to bang that into shape, and realize that much of the material had already been picked over in another novel, and lost interest in that, but continued to wrestle with ideas.

JUNE 2018: I had an idea for a story and write 3268 words.

DECEMBER 2018: I stop writing because I need to do some outlining.

JUNE 7, 2019: After six months of outlining, with 56 pages of notes, I started to write again.

JUNE 24, 2019: Dismayed by slow progress, it occurred to me that I could try to write on the subway to and from work. Over the past five days I wrote 1500 words, which is completely not shabby.

KEY TAKE-AWAY: I'm optimistic that I will complete a manuscript of the novel; I've stuck with it despite a lot of turmoil in my life (moving, new jobs, etc), and there have been a few points where I put it down for a few months but I've always come back to it. I have a list of scenes; there's a beginning, a middle, and an end.

I just have to keep writing. Six thousand words down, about 74,000 to go.

A short review of this one. The first 40 or so pages of this book, the opening act, were completely mesmerizing, to the extent that I thought it might break into my top 10 over at the old Rankings page. However, after the first act, the tale sort of bleeds out, loses its shape and pacing. It peaks too early, and Act 1 positions the remainder of the book, which is really not bad, as the ugly step-child.

Depending on your moods and your star-sign, the opening volley in Warlight might be worth the price of the ticket.

Less is a great book if you love mysteries: the mystery with Less is how something so mediocre and safe won a Pulitzer.

It’s not a terrible book; I was able to finish it, but there was an element self-loathing involved in seeing Less through to the end. Somewhere around page 100 I started to have nagging doubts about it, and I really should have put it down, but it’s a very easy read.

Easy to digest is in fact its primary attribute. It’s very occasionally amusing. There are occasional nice bits of writing. The narrative mechanism, the protagonist’s trip around the world to avoid his ex’s wedding, keeps things from getting dull. Kind of. And that’s basically all that the novel has going for it.

Which is not enough. Less needed more.

Which is why I’ve ranked it below a few novels that were bad enough that I put them down. Those novels at least tried to ... take some sort of stand, to say something weird. They were in their own ways ambitious.

Less, on the other hand, is egregiously beige. Perhaps its main problem (among several) is that it is rooted almost entirely in the life and experiences of its protagonist, and the protagonist is dull. Despite being a globe-trotting novelist.

There is no character development and there’s not much of a plot. The novel’s disregard for telling or significant details condemns it to superficiality. There are no stakes to speak of; not much in the way of conflict, ideas, or insights. It flirts with comedy but is not funny.

Anyway, I could whine some more about it, but I think I’ll just crack open a new book instead.

I whipped through The Hunters in two days, which is maybe fitting for a novel about jet fighters. The jets in question are flown by pilots in the Korean War. Salter was himself a fighter pilot. I mention the speed that I read the book with because it may partially account for the sense of whiplash I experienced coming out of it. I’m inclined to say that the ending, in some important respects, didn’t work; at least as it relates to the main character’s narrative arc.

The Hunters is an entertaining novel, particularly if you’re interested in the subject matter, less so if you aren’t. It holds up ok after 60 years. There are some affecting passages and poignant reflections on the experiences of the pilots fighting their communist counterparts, mostly in the vicinity of the Yalu River.

The combat, however, is somewhat secondary to the story. More than being a story about fighting communists in the sky, The Hunters concerns itself with the hierarchies and their effects on the American pilots back at their base.

Salter was not much of a success either commercially or critically, but he has his fans among his fellow writers. If you poke around a bit you see respectable writers calling The Hunters one of the best books about flying ever written.

Geoff Dyer wrote an appraisal of the novel a few years ago when Salter died for The Paris Review, and praised this passage:

“Suddenly Pell called out something at three o’clock. Cleve looked. He could not tell what it was at first. Far out, a strange, dreamy rain was falling, silver and wavering. It was a group of drop tanks, tumbling down from above, the fuel and vapor streaming from them. Cleve counted them at a glance. There were a dozen or more, going down like thin cries fading in silence. That many tanks meant MiGs. He searched the sky above, but saw nothing.”

I like “strange, dreamy rain” and “silver and wavering”, and the fuel and the vapor streaming from them are also nice. “Going down like thin cries fading in silence” is pretty effective, although the shift to an audio simile comes out of left field and is perhaps a bit clumsy, if one were inclined to quibble. It’s a visually arresting detail for sure, but I think the description of the moment is merely OK. A better writer might have plopped the tanks into more of a visual backdrop.

Perhaps more representative is this passage, in which the narrator is describing how the group of fighter pilots that the protagonist, Cleve, is going to begin overseeing has not wracked up any downed MiGs:

“That the flight had no claims, though, they were all conscious of. Robey’s, in the room adjoining, was heavy with victories, eight altogether, Robey’s five and three others. On the other side was Nolan’s flight with four. Nolan had two of them. The contrast was marked for a flight between them with none. It was understood that Cleve had been installed to change this.

He finished putting his things away as well as he could and sat down on his cot. He was satisfied. He had a feeling of liking them all and of being liked. It was a rich infusion.”

“It was a rich infusion” sounds like a McCarthy-era TV commercial for instant coffee that for some reason was written as a flashback. Weird syntax, flat verbs, this is sad writing.

Fairly frequently the writing in The Hunters feels leaden or muddled. Salter is at his worst when he is trying hard to be a good writer.

Salter’s life was much more remarkable than his literary output. This New Yorker profile is a great read irrespective of your feelings about or knowledge of Salter.

While I seem to have focused mainly on the novel’s shortcomings, I did enjoy it and would recommend it if you’re in the market for a quick, entertaining, and occasionally inspired tale of long-forgotten aerial gunfights. It works pretty well as a document of its time and place.

I seem to be in a small minority of reviewers who had a viscerally negative response to Sam Lipsyte’s third novel, The Ask. I put it down after 130 pages.

Given that other negative reviews of The Ask seem to be rare, maybe take mine with a grain of salt if you’re curious about the novel. Maybe the novel comes alive at page 150. I don’t know, I just couldn’t bare any more of it.

I loathed it because the writing is lazy, and because the characters are flat and undifferentiated. A snide, jaded rant from a character named Horace could just as easily have been mouthed by the double amputee Iraq vet named Don 20 pages earlier.

It grated also because it markets itself as funny, but I didn’t laugh once, even though I went into it favorably inclined, based on high praise from a writer I respect.

There are lengthy stretches of dead exposition that don’t serve to develop the story or the characters. There are flashes of life in the writing, but there are also passages that read like the first draft of a talentless 20 year old in his first creative writing class.

All of the characters have a chip on their shoulders, and it’s the same chip. Lipsyte, in lieu of creating viable characters, attempts to build an entire novel around an attitude, or more precisely a facial expression — the sneer — and it makes for tedious reading.

There’s nothing wrong with a novel full of repulsive characters, but they have to be at least be foul in interesting ways. It also helps if there is some kind of authorial or anthropological remove from the characters’ pathologies.

The Ask has none of those things going for it. It’s a third- or fourth-tier novel crouching defensively behind the label of satire.

And then there are the gender issues. The Ask was published in 2010, seemingly a dozen centuries before #MeToo. So, maybe Lipsyte would have approached his female characters differently had he sat down to write it last week.

That said, the fact that every female character in the novel is run through a slimy meat-grinder version of the male gaze is, candidly speaking, creepy. It’s not just that the characters are being gross, it’s the novel’s perspective that’s gross.

A co-worker of the protagonist is named Vargina (HAHAHA THATS A REALLY FUNNY JOKE! GET IT?! “VAGINA”??!!) and, yep, Vargina is a “crack baby.” I don’t recall if the novel states explicitly that Vargina is African-American; regardless, I think this is what the New York Times might call “racially insensitive” writing. This illustrates how the novel itself is boorish and slimy, not just its characters. Lipsyte is right in the trough with his characters.

The representation of women in The Ask is toxic even by the standards of 2010.

In short: steer clear.

I’d recommend All For Nothing without much in the way of reservations, but it’s best read cold. Do not read the introduction or any reviews prior to reading the book itself. I think I came across AFN in the New Yorker, an rave by James Wood, which prompted me to buy the book. Wood has some smart things to say about All For Nothing (link to his piece below) but again I’m puzzled by certain critics’ fondness for plot summary when it serves no real purpose, and when it sort of wrecks the experience of reading the book.

Anyway.

The story is about an aristocratic German family, the Von Globigs, living on an estate in East Prussia just before the area gets steam-rolled by the Red Army in the final phase of World War II.

I don’t have many negative things to say about the book. It may have benefited (maybe) from a tighter edit; maybe it would have been best at 325 pages, but, who knows. He is Kempowski, while I am merely Kosloff. (I don’t even have any regalia.) I did get a bit impatient in the middle section with the pacing, but the plot’s somewhat bucolic velocities are intentional, and ultimately the pacing is used to devastating effect.

It’s largely not a novel of gorgeous sentences, although they do pop up with some regularity. Nor is it an ostentatiously visual novel, although again, Kempowski is no slouch in this regard.

Like many great novels, Kempowski’s story comes to life in its details. The world Kempowski creates is not just plausible, it shimmers, breathes, and surprises in ways that are a testament to his talents. It is, as the critics like to say, keenly observed.

All For Nothing is worth reading for its detached tone, the beguiling affection for but distance from his characters. Writing a book about characters who had drawings of Adolf Hitler in their bedroom, without whitewashing them or making them seem like two-dimensional villains is not an easy task. The full scope of the Nazi barbarities are located mostly on the periphery. The novel’s depiction off-handed and misdemeanor-level local cruelties are suggestive of the crimes that made the Nazis famous.

It’s a novel that gives you the sense that it would stand up to repeat readings, and, who knows, maybe one day I’ll revisit it.

A final point before signing off: Kempowski published this book when he was about 76 years old. Maybe it’s wrong to be amazed that someone at that age can produce fiction of this caliber, but I’m kind of amazed. His biography is just as interesting, if not more so, than the events depicted in the story, elements of which are drawn from his own life.

I’m slotting it in one position below Austerlitz (another WWII novel!) and above The Sun Also Rises.

Here is Woods’ take in the New Yorker.

Before I weigh in with my (brief) thoughts on this novel I should caveat them by saying that the period in which I read and then stopped reading it coincided with a move to a new neighborhood, as well as other assorted life dramas. It’s been a stressful couple of months for me, it may have skewed my feelings about the book in a negative direction.

On the other hand, it might just be a mediocre novel.

I made it to the 155 page mark before I decided to stop.

The novel, a finalist for the Man Booker award, has interesting elements, including its message-in-a-bottle premise, and I put it down with a whisper of anxiety that it really takes off at the 200 page mark, or the 300 page mark. All of my reserves of patience, however, have been exhausted.

Ozeki’s language is very prosaic; occasionally bordering on stilted. This makes the book’s pacing, which I found to be somewhat glacial, harder to bear.

The story is told from the perspective of two characters: Nao, a Japanese teenager, and Ruth, an Asian-American writer. Neither of them were particularly interesting. They did not say or feel or think things that surprised or delighted or intrigued me. Rather, they felt typical or obvious in a way that was enervating. Beyond the two protagonists, characterization in general was a shortcoming in this novel.

In short: avoid.

Came across this title on a year-end “These were great books I read in 2018” list published by the New Statesman. I’d not heard of Fontane, nor of this book.

I picked it up, and was struck by the novel’s opening paragraph:

“At the point where the Kurfurstendamm intersects the Kurfurstenstrasse, diagonally across from the Zoological Gardens, there was still, in the mid eighteen-seventies, a large market garden running back to the open fields behind; and in it stood a small, three-windowed house with its own little front garden, set back about a hundred paces from the road that went by and clearly visible from there despite being so small and secluded. However, the other building in the market garden, indeed without doubt its main feature, was concealed by this little house as if by the wings of a stage set, and only a red- and green­painted wooden turret with the remains of a clock face (no trace of an actual clock) under its pointed roof suggested that there was something hidden in the wings, a suggestion confirmed by a flock of pigeons fluttering up round the turret from time to time and, even more, by the occasional barking of a dog. The whereabouts of this dog eluded the viewer, although the front door on the far left stood open all day long, affording a glimpse of the yard. There was in general no apparent intention to hide anything, and yet anyone who passed that way at the time our story begins had to be content not to see beyond the little three-windowed house and a few fruit trees standing in the front garden.”

The imagery is very dense, and it seems to be a significant passage thematically. While Fontane writes in a realist/natural mode, this paragraph, with its distorted space (small buildings obscuring larger buildings) and mutated clocks has a surrealist feel to it. The contents of the garden are emphatically visible and concealed at the same time. Oddly enough, there’s not really another paragraph like it in the story, which is too bad.

I’ll start with some of the book’s shortcomings before moving on to its … [looks furtively over shoulder, turns back to camera] charms.

My primary gripe with Paths is that the story, the tale of a somewhat down-on-his-pfennings baron who falls for a working girl and is forced to choose between her and a wealthy woman who will keep him ensconced in the aristocracy, feels conventional to a modern reader. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it formulaic, as Fontane’s handling of the story is nuanced, but for the most part it unfolds in ways that do not surprise.

On a sentence-to-sentence level, the writing (as translated) is apt, but it’s generally not much beyond apt. You wouldn’t read this novel for the language.

Finally, the characters are not particularly complex and almost read like types, rather than as individuals.

Those considerations aside, while I would only recommend reading the novel with a few caveats, I did enjoy it, and for reasons that I didn’t anticipate.

While the plot was not a barn-burner, I found early on in the book that the details about life in Berlin and its environs at that time were very interesting, and you get a sense of this from the first paragraph. The book is peppered throughout with references to historical people, places, and events, and it draws from a rich milieu. With On Tangled Paths, the context in some ways outshines the story. This makes sense, in that Fontane had a long career as a journalist, and in fact did not start publishing fiction until is late 50s.

There is one section of the story set in a village called Hanckel’s Stowage which almost managed to carry the entire book. The description of the setting (which itself is not particularly remarkable) and, moreso, the comings and goings of the inhabitants and German tourists, was inspired and masterful.

I was curious enough about the documentary-like details in the story that I resolved early on to root around for more dirt on Fontane and the novel’s backstory. Fortunately the Penguin Classic version includes a top-shelf afterword written by the translator, with many great morsels about the book and its author.

In fact, this was a rare instance where I almost wish I’d read the afterword prior to reading the novel, as I think I would have appreciated the story more. Although I don’t believe he’s particularly well-known in the States, Fontane is generally regarded (according to the translator, anyway) as the foremost German novelist to ply his trade between Goethe and Mann.

Also, while the plot is pretty tame by today’s standards, and doesn’t seem particularly scandalous, it caused a shit-storm when it first appeared, serialized in a Berlin paper. While affairs between horny Prussian aristocrats and mop-toting peasant girls were common at the time, it was not something that was openly discussed. The story’s serialization led to a deluge of cancelled subscriptions.

So, the final verdict: On Tangled Paths, while I’d never put it on a “best book I’ve read this year” list, is a pretty groovy way to while away a few hours, especially if you’re interested in German or European history, or curious about life in Berlin at the end of the 19th Century. It almost feels like a guilty pleasure, but a guilty pleasure packed with … nutrients.

Tally ho!

I hadn’t read any of Calvino’s work (I know, sad), and The Baron in the Trees’ premise intrigued me. Overall I found it to be something of a disappointment, but it’s a pretty accomplished and intermittently great disappointment. Baron would be a good read if you’re up for something that feels light but also, at its best, brims with ideas and masterful story-telling.

The first half of the book featured some truly top-shelf writing. Calvino has a capacity to consistently wrong-foot the reader’s expectations, and to do so in a way that lends weight and depth to the characters and themes.

The Baron’s life among the trees conjures many referents; the story frames the Baron at points as a Christ figure. He is simultaneously of the world and rejects it. At one point he is pinned to a tree trunk. Calvino packs many ideas into a somewhat goofy premise. The Baron’s arboreal meanderings are at once Edenic, a childish act of rebellion, psychically regressive, and a pre-cursor to political movements that took root a decade later. In terms of its associations, the story brought Tarzan to mind, and The Tin Drum as well, with its diminutive, tantrum-prone protagonist and his idiosyncratic brand of sonic destruction. Last, and probably least, the Baron flitting through the region entirely in the canopy reminded of a spider in a web.

What’s even more remarkable about the novel’s thematic multiplicity is that it largely reads like a children’s fairy-tale.

The final third of the book, or maybe the second half, sees the writing fall off of a cliff, or out of a tree heh heh heh.

Early on, the Baron’s relationship with his mother is beautifully rendered. Aside from the mother, however, Calvino struggles with female characters. The Baron’s relationship with Viola, his main love interest, veers from flat, to irritating, to contrived; and this is in some ways the most important relationship in the story.

Baron has picaresque elements; some of the characters are developed throughout the novel, while others pop up and then are ejected from orbit. Elements of the plot feel tangential, which dampens the drama, although I suspect that was by design. You have the sense at points that some of the characters don’t mean much to Calvino, and his treatment of them is flippant.

The third short-coming in Baron is that trees themselves are not more of a presence in the narrative. Obviously the entire story takes place in the trees, so they are a presence, but they are not developed as they could have been. There is a feint in this direction early on in the book, but Baron could have been a much more profound novel if Calvino fleshed out this aspect of the book in more detail.

I believe I heard about Speedboat in an article about famous writers’ favorite writers. Top 10 lists, etc. Speedboat made it onto Joan Didion’s list. I saw it on a table in a bookstore in Cold Spring a couple of weeks ago, and, turning to the proprietor, said, “I’ll have Speedboat please!”

I spent the first 60 pages in love with it, but then earlier this week, as I was tooling around in the East Village, attempting a dismounted flight from a malaise, I stumbled into an independent bookstore I’d not heard of before, Codex, on Bleecker Street. I saw Speedboat on display inside.

“I’m reading that!” I announced to the woman behind the counter. She had also read it, and when I asked her what she thought, I saw a hint of a cloud pass over her face.

“It’s a bit...”

In a flash, having thought of myself up to that point as a disciple of the book, I could see she was going to make unkind comments about it, and I attempted to anticipate her beef:

“Snide?”

Kind of, was the employee’s response. She took offense to the way the book trashed hippies.

I don’t recall substantial hippy-trashing in Speedboat, you wouldn’t say it was a counter-hippy platform. However, after I realized and verbalized the idea that there was something bitchy or even a bit cruel in the book’s perspective, I subsequently found it difficult not to see the writing through that lens. Coupled with the fact that Speedboat is not really a novel (it was originally serialized in the New Yorker, and I wonder if it was originally intended to be a novel), I decided to put it down around page 80.

That said!

It’s easy to see how Speedboat came to enjoy the high regard its held in by writers and critics. The book brims with very funny, beautifully structured, and wonderfully nihilistic prose and observations. I flag good writing as I read books, and my copy of Speedboat is festooned with flags. I am very glad that I read the first half, and my gripes with it are subjective, maybe even transitory.

But now for more undermining.

The problem with the book, a sense that Adler spends 80% of it punching down, pointing out other peoples’ stupidity, could have been ameliorated by more insight from the narrator into her own interiority. Jen Fain, at least for the first 80 pages, is mostly a cypher. She spends her time observing and sneering at those in her orbit. At some point I started involuntarily attaching Anna Wintour’s persona to the Fain/Adler, and that may have been the coup de grace.

I mentioned that there’s no plot, right? There’s little to no plot.

Additionally.

There are a couple of tricks that Adler has up her sleeve as a writer, e.g. wildly eclectic biographical details for her characters, but she leans on it too much. Through repetition it began to feel less like a secret power and more like a crutch.

Final thoughts: I’d recommend the book, even though I didn’t finish it. The prose is that good, even if it’s fatally flawed as a novel.

Fin.

The Third Hotel is an ambitious, clever, and energetic novel that achieves critical mass as a story despite some minor issues with characterization, narrative arc, and a scope that favors breadth over depth. I liked it more than Lake Success, Manhattan Beach, and The Sellout, if that helps. (My updated rankings are here.)

I found the first 30 pages of the book to be the strongest, and they were good enough that it carried me through the rest of it, which was merely “good” as opposed to fantastic. The premise and the setting were rich and evocative. The shattered-identity-in-an-exotic-locale motif reminded me of Graham Greene and Paul Bowles.

As the story opens, the protagonist, Clare, who sells elevators in the mid-west (which: LOL), is at a film festival in Havana. Her husband, we learn, is a film critic who was recently killed in an accident. The novel concerns itself with her attempts to process this recent trauma.

Van den Berg’s approach to the Cuba story line, which forms the novel’s dramatic core, brings some innovative twists to conventions you see in stories with similar themes. I won’t go into detail about it because (a) I hate plot summaries, and (b) you will enjoy the book more if you go into it blind.

The Third Hotel had a kind of fleeting, kaleidoscopic story structure. There were many themes, ideas, characters, mini story lines, and riffs in general tucked into a slender book (209 pages). There are repeated references to suicide. We get bits on the history of zombies, critical theory as applied to horror movies, life in surveillance states. Personally I would have liked to have seen some of these notes sustained for longer, although this seemed to be less of an issue for other people I know who read the book. Having read the book once, and quickly, I did not see the relevance of the repeated references to suicide. I may have just missed it. And the cultural theory around horror films was one of the book’s highlights, but van den Berg puts that to bed rather early in the novel.

The profusion of themes coincides with waves of fleeting conversations with inconsequential characters. Reading the novel felt at times like watching a spider weave a web after drinking a pint of espresso. I suspect this was by design, and was also the point of the novel. This rootlessness is part of who Clare is, and it’s exacerbated by her husband’s death. She’s constantly moving because she’s trapped.

The trouble is that Clare’s meanderings wind up feeling a bit anticlimactic. It’s a book of micro-episodes, which is fine, but, in my opinion, they did not always effectively further the plot or our understanding of Clare. The chase that drives the first two-thirds of the story is resolved and then, again, dropped. I can’t help but feel that the book would have had more of an impact if the climax (ha ha) of that story occurred closer to the end of the story.

Clare’s character is also somewhat passive; her goals vaporous. She is, basically, something like a ghost. She spends a lot of time observing from peripheries.

Anyway, these quibbles with the book are by no means fatal. If you’re looking for a fun, thought-provoking story, The Third Hotel is worth a read. Laura van den Berg is a gifted writer, and I look forward to seeing what she comes up with next. My completely scientific and objectively correct opinion is that van den Berg’s best novel is still in front of her.

I picked up Lake Success with modest expectations, based on my recollections of Absurdistan, which I either put down without finishing or finished with ambivalence. I wanted to have a crack at Shteyngart’s latest to see how it fared relative to his earlier work.

Lake Success traces travails of a hedge-fund owner, Barry Cohen, and his family as they struggle with Barry’s legal problems and their son’s medical issues.

TLDR: Better than “OK,” but somewhat short of “good.” Lake Success has an aggressively middle-brow sensibility. it’s not a daring or inventive work. To its credit, it is competent, occasionally moving, and consistently entertaining; a picaresque page-turner guilty pleasure that I inhaled in four days.

Part of the allure stems from the book’s gossipy, voyeuristic qualities. The behind-the-scenes glimpses of high-end lives in New York’s high-end apartments are fluent, credible, and titillating.

LS also should be commended for sifting through the complexities of race and identity without stepping in the proverbial dog crap. The cast of characters reflects the city’s and the country’s diversity, and Shteyngart clearly did the homework writers need to do if they are writing across cultures.

I can also reveal that Success makes very good use of a group of German tourists and has a pretty inspired sex scene.

Success repeatedly points to other novels, particularly Gatsby, On The Road, and The Sun Also Rises. Other than attempting to situate his tale in a broader context, I’m not entirely sure what the objective was, but it felt belabored. LS perhaps makes more subtle references to The Odyssey, via frequent mentions of a one-eyed Mexican passenger on a bus and a well-stocked cave (an ex-employee’s dope crib in Atlanta). Although who knows, maybe sometimes a one-eyed Mexican passenger is just a one-eyed Mexican passenger.

Lake Success suffers from several deficiencies. First, Shteyngart is not a first-rate noticer of details, nor is he a visual writer. Descriptions of places and physical settings are functional, not inspired. The narrative itself, as mentioned above, is very conventional, which is fine if you don’t mind a story that doesn’t take chances with the form. Regarding character development, as with acting, good characters in literature are believable; great characters are both believable and full of surprises. The characters in Success fall into the former category.

There is also a vaguely superficial and disposable quality to the book; the protagonist’s emotional and spatial journeys feel like a bit of a lark. He’s a teflon, Peter Pan-esque figure.

The book was written shortly after a number of the 2016 campaign events it depicts. Success draws liberally on the particulars of the 2016 presidential race: 538.com, Pepe the Frog, Marco Rubio, etc. The political component, however, feels a bit like window-dressing.

The challenge with that kind of proximity to the events at hand is that you write without much perspective on them, and you run the risk of producing a book that feels dated 10 years later. Trump’s victory does play into the story, but maybe it’s nibbling at the edges too much when it should have been more central.

I bought Across on a whim at a groovy little bookstore in the East Village, in part because the cover design is excellent, and it’s a first edition (UK) novel for the reasonalbe price of $25. I guess you could say that I felt, at that moment, like living on the edge.

I also hoped it would be a good novel, of course, but hit the brakes after 25 pages. It’s tedious writing, much of it an artless agglomeration of details about a few villages and landscapes outside of Salzburg, Austria. It is bereft of visual flare, with a leaden, dour tone. There was not a single “aha!” or "wow!" moment, in terms of the language.

Although it’s not explicit, you get the sense that the narrator feels sorry for himself, and he wants you to feel sorry for him too.

Handke is an intelligent personage, and it comes through in the writing, and it’s possible that I’m putting the novel down prematurely, but, basically, I could not hang with this novel.

August 26
I've finished reading The First Bad Man, and it is a remarkable, periodically astonishing first novel. If you haven't read it yet, my advice is to do so, but don't read anything about it before-hand. It's best read cold. This post is spoiler-free.

July manages to pack complex ideas and themes -- as well as brilliant and original plot and character developments -- into a book that masquerades as something more conventional. The story and characters are replete with left turns that are jarring yet completely credible in the context of the narrative; not an easy trick.

There was enough meat floating beneath the surface (ewww) that I had a fleeting urge to immediately go back and re-read it. There were a few points in the novel where I was confronted by questions such as, "how the fuck did she do that," or "where the fuck did that come from?"

The novel is also very funny; not "continuous LOLOL" funny, but on at least one occasion I found myself laughing a bit harder for a bit longer than I wanted to while on a subway.

I don't have much to offer in terms of criticism. I can say that the caliber of the story-telling is generally and consistently high, portions of the book were merely "good," rather than fantastic. There was one brief section, maybe 20 pages, where the writing lost some of its energy, and I was concerned that the remainder of the book was going to sag. Fortunately, it was a brief lull.

I was curious to see what other reviewers had to say about Bad Man, and they were less bullish on it than I am. It's a better novel than reviewers gave it credit for. The main criticism seems to be "nice first innings, but twee" or quirky.

There was one moment in the novel where I wondered if Wes Anderson was a minor influence, but quickly discarded this idea. Bad Man is darker, more sophisticated, and less cartoonish than Wes Anderson's work, which irritates or enrages me. Bad Man is not I repeat not twee or gratuitously quirky.

After finishing it tonight I looked again at where I'd placed it in my goofy little rankings, and I'm now uncertain about spots 4 through 10. I've put Bad Man above Austerlitz. Lot 49, and The Sun Also Rises, and I'm wondering if that makes sense.

Part of the reason I've placed Bad Man so high in the rankings is that I believe it's harder to write a gripping story with relatively low dramatic stakes. It's more of a challenge to make the normal seem, you know, magical.

Rankings aside, buy and read the shit out of The First Bad Man, it's a gem.

Disclaimers: Miranda July went to UC Santa Cruz while I was there; a former friend dated her very briefly. I've never met her, nor did any of this affect my reading of the book.

August 23
I've today assigned The First Bad Man a preliminary ranking and rating (first time I've done that) because I'm very into the book and I needed to take action. I'm about 85 pages into it, and it's amazing writing. I'm withholding final judgement until I finish it; Manhattan Beach was very good, until it sort of fell apart, but my sense as of today is that The First Bad Man will not fall apart because it's not as much of a plot-driven novel as Manhattan Beach was.

I'll have a full review posted soon-ish, watch this space.

I revised my numeric rating system today because the prior 10-point system was not adequate to the task at hand. It's now a 12-point system to allow for more nuance in assessing books' merits.

This effort was driven largely by two novels that did not fit into the old system: Under the Volcano and White Noise. Both of these books have some dazzling writing, but I could not finish Under The Volcano because it started to fucking bore me, despite Lowry's enormous talents, and I finished White Noise, but would not recommend reading it, despite its virtues.

Feel free to take a spin by the revised ratings and rankings, here.

[blank] reads like the raw first draft of a novel that was written by a precocious non-native speaker of English. At page 140, I put it to rest.

For starters, there is the errant use of fairly basic words. On page 49, a character makes "eye contact" with a magazine, but you can't make eye contact with a magazine because magazines have no eyes to make contact with.

Unselfconscious is used and misspelled twice.

"Enlargening," "unself-conscious," and a few subject-verb agreement errors, lead me to believe that no one bothered to run the manuscript through a spelling and grammar check.

In some cases, the quality of the writing may be more of a matter of taste; the abs of the gay patrons of a dance club are referred to as "lurid." While "lurid abs" may be proper English ... it is botched writing. And to tell you the truth, I'm not sure it's the correct use of the word lurid. We can agree to disagree on this.

Here is another gem:

"'I'm going to have to get off in a minute..." [blank] says, a smile creeping into her voice.'"

I don't understand how you write the phrase "...a smile creeping into her voice."

The characters in [blank] range from flat to incoherent. A character is described as being stuck in the Old Testament, and then on the next page we learn that she's regarded as a local fashion icon and has multiple online dating profiles. The character is "progressive," but "has no respect for the poor or uneducated."

Of course good characters contain contradictions, but the sloppy language choices throughout the novel gave me the impression that this character whip-lash is unintentional. Regardless, it was not artful.

The book suffers from larger, more generalized deficiencies. It's described as a satire, but what exactly is being satirized? "Politically correct" attitudes? Or the young characters who dominate the first 140 pages of the book and who struggle to understand identity politics?

Neither of those options -- punching down at wealthy, misguided teen-aged girls or embracing a Fox News critique of PC culture -- strike me as a promising framework for a novel.

At times [blank] seems to dabble in racism or ableism itself. One minor character is described as an "albino minion" of another character. That's all we get about him or her; he or she is defined by their disability, which struck me as gratuitous and shitty.

There are some cringe-inducing passages about Asian students:

"Above these girls sit the brilliant Asians, who are presumed virgins and suffer a constant stream of pens and erasers to their ponytails, especially on test days. [blank] hopes their weekends are rich with friendship and adventure. Then come the cool homework-averse Asians, who hide behind make-up and an air of disaffection. They are both sexy and cute in a perfect ratio that [blank]'s own slight form fails to achieve. She covets their straight noses and smooth hairless arms."

I'm not sure if that technically qualifies as racist, but it strikes me as kind of gross, and 20XX is the wrong year to be publishing novels that might be racist.

(Comments originally posted on FB September 5, 2017)

Just finished re-reading "White Noise" for the first time in 20 years. The ending was a bit disappointing, but it was a fun read. I wanted the cloud to figure more prominently into the plot.

8-10-17 UPDATE: After further contemplation I decided that it wasn't just the ending of the novel that was problematic, it was the last 1/3 of the book. The first 2/3's however were very good

(Comments originally posted on FB June 29, 2018)

I can see why the novel is frequently called one of the best of the 20th Century, the writing is frequently good and less frequently stellar. However, I just couldn’t get through it. It’s a 390 page novel about a man getting drunk and dying over the course of a day. The shards of plot, to the extent that there is a plot, come in paragraph-length bursts every 10 to 15 pages, and in the intervening 15 pages you get mostly the two male characters riffing internally on various topics, or you get descriptions of landscapes. Lowry’s sentences are too frequently run-ons, and they are not pleasing beautiful run-ons, they are convoluted run-ons. At the end of the day, it got to be very tedious reading. If anything it underscores what a superb book Austerlitz is, which has a similar pastoral and contemplative approach to its narrative, but is much more compelling.

Because it’s such a renowned book I’m going to continue to peck at it now and then. If the second half blows my mind I’ll revise and resubmit.

(Originally posted on FB April 8, 2017)

I've been saying for as long as I can remember that The Sun Also Rises is tied for first place on my list of favorite novels (with Moby Dick). Partially because I wanted to enjoy it again, and to a lesser extent to verify that it doesn't suck, since I hadn't read it since I was in my early 20s, I have picked it up again. I'm 30 pages in, and, aside from some flat dialog between Jake and Ashley, it is as good as I remembered it being. I feel like that fucker opened up some kind of hole in the fabric of space-time with that book. Even more of a shock that he wrote it in his mid 20s.

(Originally posted April 19, 2017)

I know, you're *dying* to hear my thoughts on The Sun Also Rises. I think the last time I'd read it I was in my early 20s, loved it, considered it tied for first with Moby Dick for best novel in the English language. I was wondering if it would hold up 20 years later.

I'm about half way into it, and I don't think I'd rank it first or even second or twentieth in the English language. I remember the Spain part of it being the best, and I'm not there yet so maybe it will knock me on my can over the next few days. But, after a very strong start, the second quarter of the book drags a little. There's a lot of dialog that feels inconsequential. There are scenes that feel like asides.

I'm still really digging it, and I'll probably read it periodically for the rest of my life, but it's not the flawless gem that I half-remembered.

(Originally posted April 25, 2017)
Finished The Sun Also Rises last night. It still does pack quite a wallop. The whole time I was reading it I was curious about how it came to be, and what it came to mean in America, so I'm going to have to snap up Everyone Behaves Badly by Lesley M. M. Blume today after work, and read the shit out of that book. This New Yorker piece was a nice snack; I did not know that Fitzgerald had a hand in the revisions, it sounds like his advice made it a better book.

(Comments originally posted on FB October 7, 2017)

I snapped up this book after I saw two very smart people (don’t remember who) rave about it, separately. It also won the Man Booker, and a co-worker who reads fiction constantly told me that she thinks Man Booker nominees are better overall than their National Book Award counterparts, after I told her I quit reading fiction after reading several award winning novels that were dogs.

I enjoyed the book (and finished it!) but was disappointed. The characterization is ... non-existent. The characters aside from the protagonist are not much more than stick figures. The plot is also lack-luster. The writing itself rarely rises above OK. There were periodic run-on sentences that were clunky and didn’t work.

Where the book succeeds is in painting a rich portrait of life as a black man in South Central LA. Beatty has a keen eye for social observation and detail. It’s billed as a comedic novel and I did get some LOLs out of it. Lastly while the plot was not even close to fully realized, The Sellout is an original story. The protagonist is a bookish farmer in South Central who also is into surfing; the story revolves around his efforts to re-segregate his neighborhood.

So, that’s that. I enjoyed it, glad I read it, but not sure I’d recommend it.

(Comments originally posted on FB July 30, 2018)

The Plague is a solid novel. I enjoyed it and would recommend it with some qualifications. At its worst the writing generally was better than competent and periodically it was inspired.

The Plague, however, mostly underscored for me how superb Blindness (another Plague novel) is in comparison, and shed some light on what makes Blindness such a great book.

The Plague had a documentary feel, and it succeeds on that level, but it felt orthodox and conventional. Not what you’d call a triumph of the imagination. It was concerned more with the clinical and the process part of the story where Blindness was more focused on the psychological implications of its plague.

Camus described the impact of the Plague on the town at some length, whereas Blindness stuck more closely to one small group of people in an institution, leaving the effects of that plague on the town outside the gates mostly up to the reader’s imagination.

Blindness did a much better job of depicting the horrors attendant on its plague. Camus’ characters feel like they’re having articulate, earnest conversations about events they’d seen depicted in a PG-rated movie, while Blindness puts you in the room in a way that was totally harrowing. Not in a shock-factor way, but in its merciless assessment of what humans are capable of.

The Plague loosely follows the travails of 5 or 6 characters (all men) as they navigate the pestilence mostly on their own. Their character arcs did not feel rich; the story may have been more successful if their lives and stories were more woven together.

Camus intended the story to work as an allegory. The human condition is the true plague in his novel. There are both oblique and overt political dimensions to the story, including references to trains and crematoriums which presumably were meant to evoke the Holocaust.

Camus gets his point across, and this sets up one of the most moving scenes in the book, but overall this allegorical dimension felt somewhat predictable. Saramago’s efforts in these veins were more subtle much more evocative.

(Comments originally published on FB June 19, 2018)

I really hated this book, and put it down after 85 pages. It is easily the worst of the 20 novels I’ve read since I got back into the novel racket.

There were a few nice sentences, but not nearly enough to put up with the soul-shattering claustrophobia, solipsism, repetitiveness, lack of plot (literally no plot 85 pages in), and absence of character development.

Not a single likable or relatable character.

I could not rule out the possibility that the book would pick up in its final half or quarter, but I’m just not willing to suffer through it to find out. Jelanek is a Nobel laureate; presumably her other novels are better. I have no intention of investigating.

8-10-18: I read that some members of the Nobel prize committee resigned after Jelinek won the award.

(Comments originally posted on FB 8-9-18)

This was a stunning, gorgeously written novel, so glad I read it. I would recommend the shit out of this novel to basically everyone.

I had a couple of very minor quibbles. The explanation of the conditions that led to the crisis was treated a bit too loosely.

And the account of the coup felt glib. Although this criticism is anticipated in the novel. The protagonist is not a journalist.

The flashbacks could perhaps have been handled more effectively. The back story could have been woven into Into the present a bit more organically, although you learn a few things at the end of the book that cast the story into a different kind of light.

The last criticism — and I just need to re-emphasize that the “flaws” are trivial — is that it struck me as odd that she would situate the blame for the nightmarish patriarchy in the lap of one religious sect.

The problem of misogyny is one of the few constants across epochs, geographies, cultures, and religions. I think blaming the WASPs fails to take the deep-rooted complexity of gender issues into account.

Anyway, Atwood is an explosively talented writer; I look forward to reading The Handmaid’s Tale again at some point in the future, as well as more of her other work.

Regarding the rankings below I’m now questioning my rankings of the three novels below HMT. I may need to go back into them to jog my memory. Wondering if I’m giving Lot 49 and Blindness too much credit and Austerlitz not enough.

For the last couple of novels I’ve been taking better notes so it will be easier to go back and review what the writers had up their sleeves.

(Comments originally posted on FB May 5, 2018)

I finished re-reading Gatsby a few days ago. I remembered liking it the first time around, but not being blown away. I think I preferred The Sun Also Rises when I first read those books.

Gatsby this time blew my mind, and it is better than TSAR (although I still love them both; and was struck by some of the similarities). If you haven’t read it since high school or college, do yourself a favor and grab it.

The only downside is that I now feel compelled to watch the Baz Luhrmann adaptation, and it’s going to be a challenge.

8-10-18 update: Did not watch the Baz movie, thank God. Gatsby is one of the best novels of the 20th century, if you haven't read it, or haven't re-read it lately, dive in!

(Comments originally posted on FB November 4, 2017)

I finished The Crying of Lot 49 last night. This is what the Times had to say about it in 1965. It sounds like V is the better of Pynchon’s first two novels. Although it’s a mostly favorable review of TCL 49, the 3-word phrase in it that most effectively and accurately indicts it is “pockets of eccentricity.”

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-lot49.html

8-10-18 update: I'm a bit confused about this book and it's position in the rankings. I did like it more than the post from November suggests. Need to revisit, it may get bumped down.

(Comments originally posted on FB July 4, 2018)
I’d never heard of Herta Muller, and she’s a Nobel Laureate so I wanted to read some of her Work. I liked The Appointment enough to finish it but would not recommend it. It offers interesting glimpses into life in a communist dictatorship but it suffered from a meandering, under-powered plot. Not much in the way of character development. The language (or the translation) was ok.

Looks like I read this in March of 2018 but did not post any comments on GarbageBook.

Parts of the novel were great; particularly the passages about the character's time as a POW. However, off-handedly revealing significant plot developments before they officially occur in the book tended to flatten the story and deflated the dramatic impact. The blending of the Tralfamadore story with the POW story wasn't executed particularly well, and it all wound up feeling kind of facile.

(Comments originally posted on FB February 2018)

Just finished “Round House” by Louise Erdrich, and it was ok enough to finish but I wouldn’t recommend it.

(Comments originally posted on FB March 26, 2018)

Finished re-reading On The Road today. I’m glad I read it, despite its serious shortcomings. I think the context around it’s creation and publication, the back story, may be more interesting than the novel itself. Also would be curious to read some criticism. I am probably not fully attuned to it’s achievement and impact, reading it 60 years after its publication.

8-10-18 update: This was a dull, repetitive, shallow story tucked into what could have been a very promising novel. I'd still like to know a bit more about it though.

(Comments originally posted on FB July 10, 2018)

It’s a great story as far as the story goes. His treatment of Santiago is somewhat puzzling. Not much more insight into Santiago’s mind and interior life than you get about the fish. I suppose that wasn’t the point though.

8-10-18 update: I still don't know what to make of this book. The mastery of the details of a fisherman's life and routine on the water were impressive. Part of me feels like reading the book you step into a chamber of meaning, but that chamber of meaning is itself embedded in a larger and unseen chamber of meaning. Would like to see what other critics have made of it.

(Comments originally posted on FB April 5, 2017)

AGAINST BAD NOVELS

One of my goals for 2017 was to try to start reading novels again. My efforts toward that goal, unfortunately, have reinforced my prior aversion to the form. It's not an aversion to the form; it's an aversion to worthless novels, and way too many of them are worthless.

What could be worse than wasting 2 hours in a worthless movie? Wasting 30 hours on a worthless novel!

The latest offender: Shadowbahn, by Steve Erickson. Great premise, first 20 pages were promising, and then it devolves into complete garbage.

I thought I learned after getting burned by Nabokov's "invitation to a beheading," and an Ali Smith effort the title of which eludes me: with Shadowbahn I read the first 5 pages before buying, and liked them. Compelling premise. I think I also opened up to the back third and read and liked a few pages there. Of course it got great reviews, or at least a great review, in the Washington Post.

But the inescapable problem is that you can't tell if a novel is a dog until it's way way way way way too late. It's like buying an album before they had listening stations or iTunes. You're buying blind. But it's worse! You can tell an albums sucks in as few as 20 minutes!

A co-worker suggested that Man Booker novel nominees are better than their National Book Award and Pulitzer peers, so maybe that will be guide in the future.

Another thing I'll look for when dipping in to scan a few pages in the middle of a novel is evidence of writing where interesting stuff actually happens (a plot!) or interesting observations are made about the people in the story (characters!) as opposed to vague pointless rambling.

For my next 2 novels I'm going with known winners. I'm going to re-read "The Sun Also Rises," which is either my favorite or tied-for-favorite novel of all time, and then "White Noise". It's been years since I've read either of them, curious to see what senior citizen Steve thinks of them vs 20-something Steve.

Thank you!

I seem to have not posted anything about this book on Facebook after reading it. It was only OK. Would not recommend it.

(Comments originally posted on FB May 14, 2018)

I gave it 100 pages, but I've decided to put down "Manhattan Transfer" by Dos Passos. There were the glimmers of a novel in there somewhere, but, I wasn't feeling it. In addition to reading like a pile of unrealized short-story fragments, the dialog was terrible.

(Comments originally posted on FB April 7, 2018)

(Spoilers)

Superb set-up with a somehow flat final 150 pages. The narrative may have lost some of its punch through some plot sequencing choices.

Much of the writing was inspired, but it’s a case of many brilliant sentences that were not harnessed to deliver a good but not a knock-out story.

Dexter the gangster’s trajectory kind of didn’t work.

The father-daughter reunion at the end felt half-baked.

Anyway the book’s merits more than compensate for its shortcomings. It’s a very rich picture of life in NYC during the war. That alone was worth the price of the ticket.

8-10-18 update: worth a read if you're interested in NYC history, or in the impact the war had on the way women fit into society. Otherwise, I'd take a pass.

(Comments originally published on FB June 9, 2018)

Not a novel I would have picked up myself, but because I’m going to hear some interesting people talk about it, I just finished Lord of the Flies. I think I read it in junior high school (?) or part of it. Had no idea that William Golding was a Nobel Laureate. It was also his first novel. Anyway, it’s probably a book that many people read in high school and then never look back on, but it’s a great novel. The use of symbolism is remarkable.

The novel I read prior to it, Blindness ... the structural (or maybe thematic) similarities were surprising, although maybe unintentional.

8-10-18 update: This was kind of a crazy book, I've not read any other novel that was so good while simultaneously being so flawed. The characters are very two-dimensional, is the main problem. At the same time, Golding is clearly a genius.

(Comments originally posted on FB April 13, 2018)

Finished “Junky” yesterday. It’s a pretty solid book. Interesting look at life as a junky in the 1950s, much of it set in NYC. Kerouac I think borrowed heavily from it for On The Road, which is not as good as a novel as Junky.

8-10-18 update: the novel works best as journalism. Little to no story or character arc.

I did not review this one on Garbage Book either after I read it.

Ice is a quasi-sci-fi dystopian novel that came out in 1967.

As I was reading it it felt almost like a novelization of a graphic novel or a cartoon. The story was kind of melodramatic and absurd; the characters were not believable or interesting. However, I found that for unknown reasons, the novel continued to sort of percolate in my cognition zone, and I seem to be aging into a weird kind of grudging respect for it.

Anna Kavan, the author, is a fascinating figure and her life may have been more interesting than her fiction.

(Comments originally posted on FB October 18, 2017)

Finished “Crash” by JGB last night. Jesus. Disturbing fantastic shit.

8-10-18 update: This is the second-best novel I've read. Part of me thinks that I rank it behind Gatsby partially for sentimental reasons. I've not read another novel like Crash, and it is such an outstanding story. Read it immediately.

(Comments originally posted on FB July 9, 2018)

This was an extraordinary novel. The dust jacket described the author, Gerard Murnane, as a perennial Nobel candidate, and I can see why.

It’s not just that it’s a ravishing novel, it’s a novel that manages to be ravishing despite the absence of a plot, conflict, love triangle, character development, or car crashes. It has sort of forced me to rethink what a great novel should look like.

It reminded me a bit of Austerlitz in terms of its tone (old man looking back on his life) bit they are very different novels.

It’s the kind of novel that looks like it would be fairly easy to pull off, but I also had the sense that to really get all that it has to offer you’d have to read it three times.

I recommend it highly, and I can share that I finished reading it standing on the corner of 13th street and broadway avenue while waiting to see a mediocre action movie.

I can also share that Border Lands is only 130 pages, which is nice.

(Originally posted June 7, 2018)

Finished reading Blindness today. It’s a superb novel.

8-10-18 update: I feel like I'm going to need to re-read this one again at some point. Also wrote a bit more about this in the review of The Plague.

(Comments originally posted on FB January 17, 2018)

"Austerlitz" at 50 Pages
-- It reminds me a bit of "The Heart of Darkness"; a narrator riffing on a mysterious character; the tone also, not just the narrative perspective
-- I'm trying to wrap my brain around the use of photographs in the novel; this may be the first novel I've read that has pictures. Off-hand, unless some deeper meaning or rationale for including them emerges, I'm inclined to call them gimmicky and distracting. They don't add much
-- The exposition, I felt, started to bog down a bit for a few pages, but it was a very brief lull, and the last few pages have been masterful. The descriptions of landscapes sort of come out of nowhere and are amazing. What's more disturbing is that it's not totally clear why they are so amazing. Can't wait to see where he takes the story.

8-10-18 update: Did not write a review after I finished this, but it's an incredible novel. I'm now wondering if it shouldn't get bumped up a spot or two in the rankings. The narration feels pretty removed from the story, it felt a bit like you were seeing the events unfold through a very long straw. I think this is one that I would love to go back and re-read at some point, I recommend it highly.

(Originally published March 3, 2018)

I currently own 75 novels and have read 42 of them.

Why am I telling you this?

It’s a great question. Maybe I’m telling myself this, publicly.

Today I’m starting to get them grouped together on the shelves, then I will alphabetize them, then I will catalogue them on google drive, so that I do not buy duplicate copies of books I already own.

Thank you.