The Oncoming Hope

In this edition of Law & Order: Private Detective, TotallyNotRowling rips a story straight from the headlines. Row-Braith takes the sordid tale of Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty and wraps it all in a entertaining-if-predictable bow.

After a string of improbabilities and coincidences, Detective Cormoran Strike is called in to investigate the death of Not!Winehouse, which had been written off as suicide by the tabloids and the police.

Following another string of improbabilities and coincidences, he's granted an assistant from on high. He doesn't want this assistant, oh no, but then she wows him with her ability to make tea and not ask any questions about, well, anything.

One would think the latter characteristic would immediately disqualify anyone from working in a private investigator's office, but mmm, biscuits. I would like to think that Mr. Strike had other reasons for keeping her on, but Robin*'s character is basically defined by three things:

• a) Aforementioned ability to produce steaming cups of tea at opportune moments.
• b) Recent engagement to a banker wanker named Matthew, who strongly disapproves of her line of work.
• c) Being rather pleasant, occasionally.

In case you hadn't noticed, I'm more than a little bothered by the regressiveness of the females on display in this novel: one's a secretary (and aspires to be nothing more, apparently), and one's a dead object. Rowling's portrait of the dead girl tells us little about who she is, leaving us to trust the smarmy words of her brother, her fashion guru, her leechy best friends, and her boyfriend (Not!Doherty).

Now, I didn't set out to write such a negative review. While reading Cuckoo's Calling, I was generally enjoying the (very long) ride. But the facts remain: it doesn't really succeed as a detective novel (unless your idea of a good detective novel involves one man talking to millions of characters in sequence), and it doesn't really succeed as a cautionary tale on the perils of fame.

Where it does succeed is in providing a detailed portrait of the less glamorous parts of London (and the parts of London I spent considerable time in when I lived there). She has a strong sense of place and atmosphere, but couldn't quite bring that power to her character work.

*And isn't it adorable that they both are named after birds? Someone really needs to hit J.K. Rowling over the head with the terribly cutesy names she's saddled us with (Cormorant-Robin, to be fair, isn't as bad as Albus Severus Remus Dumbledore Potter).

In brief: I have one thing to say: Mockingbird is one of the best novels I've ever read. I never thought I'd be moved to say such a thing at my age, but there you go. The rest of this review goes into why, but the point is simple: read it, then talk to me about it. It also corrected my belief that no one could read anything original about New York City anymore.

Walter Tevis also wrote The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to Earth, and despised both adaptations.

The Full Review

When you know that humanity's coming to an end, what would you want your legacy to be? These are the thoughts that drive us; we pretend to be concerned with a bigger picture, but that view tends to sit just out of reach, something we strive for but never achieve, trapped as we are in our own petty quests.

What if your single driving goal in life is to die? That you want this one thing so badly that every decision you make services that desire, with no regard for consequences to others? That's the question that Walter Tevis' Mockingbird asks. What depravity would that desire drive us to, and how will we mutate if we can't succeed?

Walter Tevis' Mockingbird overflows with character. Dystopian fiction, especially the kind designed to stimulate "big ideas about the dangerous direction society is headed", doesn't tend to concern itself too much with people ("big thoughts" being the operative concept).

Think of 1984 or Brave New World or even Yevgeny Zamyatin's We: there's a male lead who's notable for his very inhumanity, and some female who spurs thoughts of "zomg my desire to act on my desires for love and sex will set me free even if they kill me for it!"

If I'm being reductive, it's with reason. These women are objects; the science fiction equivalent of the manic pixie dream girl saves our hero from a life of total conformity.

But in Mockingbird, there are no heroes, just people striving to be human, which is a heroic enough feat. Because no one's elevated to being more than they are, the characters are actually allowed to breathe: we know Mary Lou, and we understand why she doesn't wait for Bentley (which is a thing every other woman in every other fucking dystopian novel would have done, or felt tortured for not doing).

Not just people; robots too. Spofforth the philosophical android is unique enough: you never forget that he's a product of cold human design, yet he still evolves into a peculiar personhood of his own. Did I mention he's black? A black fucking android roaming the streets of New York City, distracting the world with his perfect physical form while trapped in the darkness of his own driving ambition.

He makes so many bad decisions, like any good human. And yet his value his clear. You see what happens to the world when he stops paying attention. The real answer? It doesn't fall apart, but he feels it does. That's not a human feeling at all.

Mockingbird's world came to be not because of outside concepts like technology and politics, but from human mistakes (if you think that's a weird statement to make about a robot, you haven't yet met Spofforth). The tension between a desire for privacy and a desire to be part of something bigger than oneself drives much of the narrative.

But I've just spent a lot of words to say one simple thing: read this novel. You will love it. The end.

Have you ever consumed an Eton mess? A popular English dessert, it earned its name from looking like what remains after a bunch of teenage boys beat each others' brains out and then have a drunken orgy with a dingo.

But it's delicious, and you can't stop eating it, even though the Oreos and the strawberries battle each other with textures that feel similar but don't fit together in any way shape or form.

Ahem. I'm hungry now. Anyway...

If you take two steps away from Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son, it looks like a fucking mess; it moves from cold gritty realism to picaresque fantasy to delusional fiction (which, ironically, is a dangerous quality in a work of fiction) without bothering to clue in the reader.

When it succeeds, it ruins you so bad that you feel cowardly for even wanting to look away. 90% of the novel falls into that camp. But Johnson disrupts the flow too often with cheap (and insensible) tricks that leave you questioning any truth in the world he fashions.

I imagine any discussion of North Korea has that problem: all we know about that country is how much we don't know. But think about constructing an entire nation from the views of the ones who choose to defect. If the United States were suddenly closed for business, how might Texan secessionists describe the country?

This is what The Orphan Master's Son struggles with. As Barbara Demick said in her own review of the novel:

"People are inclined to believe whatever outrage they read about North Korea, but bad as it is, I've not heard of political prisoners being lobotomised with nails inserted over the eyeball or with electrical charge."

And this is where it hurts to be such a structural mess. If the narrative kept focus, you can overlook the muddy details and choose to follow the highly compelling story of one Jun Do (whose homophonic resemblance to John Doe is no accident).

I love science fiction, so I'd never belittle a setting for being imaginary. But the fact remains, this is not science fiction. North Korea is a real place, with real people. Crafting a dystopian view of a mysterious place seems like an impossible talk; for a dystopian novel to work, you need to understand the society it critiques.

Choosing to set this work of fiction in a place you know nothing about (and don't pretend taking one trip for a couple of days in a highly controlled environment tells you anything about a society) smacks of orientalism of the worst kind. All our knowledge is based on what we imagine their lives are like, which erases any space for true humanity.

Imagine someone writing the novel described in Borges' Garden of Forking Paths. You lead a hundred different lives in parallel.

You're born, and then you die. You're born again, and then you die again, after ticking off a few more minutes of your lifeline. By the time you've met your hundredth death, you're old enough to understand what's about to happen. You may not always interpret the signs correctly this time, but you'll learn. Sometimes you learn when the wrong person dies. But at least you get another chance.

Our heroine, Ursula Todd, is duly plagued, which results in her taking on multiple fates, each of them tiny microcosms of the human experience: so much horror, so many delights. It's not so simple as Sliding Doors, we follow her through two wars, and many traps lie afoot. Some of her worst experiences have nothing to do with the war. Humanity's usually its own worst enemy, whether you're in bucolic England or in mid-war Germany.

These are difficult themes to maintain, and I'm still impressed at what control Atkinson held. Astonishingly, even through reset after reset, there are character through-lines that remain both consistent and heart-breaking. The lines around Ursula's life are so beautifully colored in that the reader can dive easily into each new storyline, at least once you get used to the conceit.

"Darkness falls, and so on."

But what will probably stay in my mind, once all the timey-wimey trickery fades into the distance, are visions of a ravaged London, a London so thoroughly decimated that the descriptions read like science fiction or dystopia.

She was cold. The water she was lying in was making her even colder. She needed to move. Could she move? Apparently not. How long had she been lying here? Ten minutes? Ten years? Time had ceased. Everything seemed to have ceased. Only the awful concoction of smells remained. She was in the cellar. She knew that because she could see Bubbles, still miraculously taped to a sandbag near her head. Was she going to die looking at this banality? Then banality seemed suddenly welcome as a ghastly vision appeared at her side. A terribly ghost, black eyes in a grey face and wild hair, was clawing at her. 'Have you seen my baby?' the ghost said It took Ursula a few moments to realize that this was no ghost. It was Mrs. Appleyard, her face covered in dirt and bomb dust and streaked with blood and tears. 'Have you seen my baby?' she said again.

This London remains stuck in history. The art of the time had strict rules, propagandic overtures that wouldn't bear any mention of the idea that the British were so badly beaten down during the war.

You find this struggle most baldly acknowledged in the stranges of places: Gracie Fields comedies and in Powell and Pressburger's delicious allegories, especially in Black Narcissus. Just as Deborah Kerr's nun struggles against poverty, illness, crumbling infrastructure and burning desire in the remote Himalayas, millions of Brits struggled with the same at home. But one could never admit that; the Dunkirk spirit held its sway. Only in photography could you find the reality; was photography even considered an art then, or just documentation?

Poetry and the visual arts gave way to the abstract; the human eye and the human heart were incapable, then, of processing the horror of being in constant danger of annihilation. Atkinson's choice, then, to draw out this most troubled time, to realize it in words, strikes you in the heart.

A woman wearing a mink coat had come out of the entrance to the Savoy, on the arm of a rather elegant man. The woman was laughing in a carefree way at something the man had just said but then she broke away from his arm to search in her handbag for her purse in order to drop a handful of coins into the bowl of an ex-soldier who was sitting on the pavement. The man had no legs and was perched on some kind of makeshift wooden trolley. Ursula had seen another limbless man on a similar contraption outside Marylebone station. Indeed, the more she had looked on the London streets, the more amputees she had seen.

A doorman from the hotel darted out of Savoy Court and advanced on the legless man, who quickly scooted away using his hands as oars on the pavement.

And so I found, not an answer, but at least an understanding of something that plagued me when I lived in London, wandering the streets and pondering the crazy mess of buildings that huddle up into some kind of city. When so much of the city is destroyed, why wouldn't you build it to plan for the future? Even after WWII, urbanization became apparent. Someone made the choice to rebuild so many devastated buildings as exact replicas of what they used to be, instead of acknowledging survival and moving on into the (somewhat)  brighter future.

A partial explanation ties directly into the novel; you can't see into the future, and no matter what you do, you're always trapped by your past. If only we all had the opportunity to direct our own garden of forking paths.

When I recovered from the relentless terror of Shirley Jackson's House on Haunted Hill, I searched for another novel that flies out of the gate like a rocket-powered robin, whispering horrors in my ear with the loveliest of voices.

A re-release of Charlotte Armstrong's Case of the Weird Sisters fell into my lap, and more than made the grade. Armstrong maintains a a fierce commitment to suspense and character, even as certain aspects of the narrative fall flat.

Alice Brennan trips lightly through a poorly thought-out engagement into the house of the titular weird sisters, each nursing a debilitating handicap and a desperation for cash.

As I read it, 3 other series came to mind: Hercule Poirot, contemporary Doctor Who and a whole body of self-referential film noir.

These may sound unrelated. They're not.

Each case relies upon an interloper who not only happens upon the mystery, but also ingratiates him (let's face it, usually him) self with the primary players in the case.

I love The Case of the Weird Sisters unabashedly, even though it lays bare some of the most problematic aspects of the type of storytelling I describe. Doctor Who, despite being a science-fiction yarn, may represent this storytelling best: it relies upon the viewer relating to the earthbound narrator, who controls the story until the Doc appears. At which point, the Doctor takes over all agency, and our earthbound audience stand-in becomes nothing more than an observer.

::experiences sudden worry that the Charlotte Armstrong reading audience MAY NOT crossover to the Doctor Who audience, but c'est la vie::

Armstrong belies this; Alice is the lead, through and through. In fact, you can practically sense editorial medding; the tale's too feminine somehow, starting and ending with her love life, so we have to introduce MacDougal Duff as the lead, even though he leaves five pages in, only to reappear at the 27% mark.

That's a sizable chunk of the novel, ample time to forget that Duff even exists. And when he commandeers the narrative, our emotional hook becomes less strong. He enters the scene without any real connection to the characters (his knowing Alice is a silly coincidence at best) and absolutely no stake in how events turn out - he can always just leave.

This sort of thing can be written off as a necessary evil in a weekly tv show, but in a self-contained novel, it's a curious choice, and one that robs the narrative of urgency. We want this to be about Alice. The eerieness of the House of the Weird Sisters perfectly reflects the cobwebs in her own mind. As she works to sweep them away, we want to be with her, not with the interloper.

All this notwithstanding, the novel was a great read, and I'd recommend it to anyone. Despite the weirdness of Duff's interruption, he's as entertaining as any of the other characters, and that's what saves the novel. Armstrong's greatest strength is crafting the atmosphere, and I have to say, I was sorry to leave.

Having purchased it years ago, I'm embarrassed to admit that I've only just got to Tana French's wonderful Faithful Place, a magnificently propulsive murder mystery set in the forgotten spaces of a swiftly gentrifying Dublin.

In Nick Hornby's slightly hysterical call for a quota on "literature about literature" in The Polyphonic Spree, he elucidates why novels like Faithful Place are so impressive:

"Writing exclusively about highly articulate people...Well, isn't it cheating a little? McEwan's hero, Henry Perowne, the father and son-in-law of the poets, is a neurosurgeon, and his wife is a corporate lawyer; like many highly educated middle-class people, they have access to and a facility with language, a facility that enables them to speak very directly and lucidly about their lives (Perowne is "an habitual observer of his own moods"), and there's a sense in which McEwan is wasted on them. They don't need his help. What I've always loved about fiction is its ability to be smart about people who aren't themselves smart, or at least don't necessarily have the resources to describe their own emotional states....It seems to me to be a more remarkable gift than the ability to let extremely literate people say extremely literate things."

So here we find ourselves, with Frank Mackey, back in Faithful Place, where working class" still counts as mere aspiration. Faithful Place has a very particular geography, all secret paths and abandoned buildings and dangerous cellars. And like most communities within communities, it has its own set of rules, blunt and simple:

"No matter how skint you are, if you go to the pub then you stand your round; if your mate gets into a fight, you stick around to drag him off as soon as you see blood ... even if you're an anarchist punk rocker this month, you go to Mass on Sunday; and no matter what, you never, ever squeal on anyone."

In a street of bruisers, its all too easy to let the characters go undefined, to have them inhabit archetypes of thugs, thieves and scoundrels that readers are all too familiar with. But that's where French's easy facility with language comes in. She takes us on a tour of Faithful Place and introduces us to Mackey's estranged family members one by one, his abandoned friendships, the very conversations that polluted the air during his ill-fated romance with Rosie Daly.

The mystery of who kills Rosie Daly certainly has its own interest, but the characters really shine here. Faithful Place is also very funny:

"My parents didn't like people with Notions; the Dalys didn't like unemployed alcoholic wasters."

I know I'm late to the party here, but if you somehow missed Faithful Place over the past couple of years, I highly recommend picking it up.

The most enjoyable novels flirt with their weaknesses openly, forcing you to confront their arrhythmias until a) you're Stockholm Syndrome-d into acceptance or b) you cease to notice them, as the mosquito bite turns from a sharp pain to an ongoing itch.

It's been a while since I've read a novel as weirdly imperfect as The Devil in Silver. LaValle's tale of a man stuck in a mental institution (rightly or wrongly, we're never quite sure) pays tribute to its antecedents and builds upon them. He carefully constructs the institution as a real place that we can navigate in our heads, which only adds to our empathetic sense of entrapment.

Unlike one Randle McMurphy, Pepper's not the King of this castle; he's a prisoner in a rundown hospital that feels like a dystopian space station, where visions of sterility become marred by the filthiest barbed wire. It comes as no surprise that here there be monsters.

72 hours more, he repeats, ad infinitum, just 72 hours.

Time passes in strange ways and characters move in and out, though most live on past their brief appearances. Each of Pepper's institution-mates come heartbreakingly to life.they don't exist merely to justify his existence; their hopes and disappointments are real.

And yet. And yet. As I mentioned, LaValle crafts a wire straight to our empathy sensors. But he lacks confidence in his craft. At some point in the novel, he starts to include interludes from news articles on institutional abuses and other horrors. He's unsatisfied with the visceral power of the story, and hits us over the head. Luckily, these interludes are easy to ignore. And even while they leave our heads scratching, they highlight the success of the rest of the novel.

The Devil in Silver's the first novel I've read in some time that makes spending time inside the head of a middle-aged white man seem worth it. It's no coincidence, I'm sure, that Lavalle is only one of those things.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

After the Golden Age probably isn't the first story written about the talentless progeny of celebrity superheroes, but it's certainly the first I've read.

I can see why it's a sub-genre that hasn't taken off; for the protagonist to be relatable, we must encounter the less than heroic side of those superheroes, their lay personalities which are mundane at best, and most likely overblown and arrogant. It's easy to understand why genre fans are reluctant to rip the shiny veneer off of their heroes.

Watchmen shows what happens when the world outgrows their heroes, and After the Golden Age presents a scenario when the heroes outgrow the world and end up dissatisfied at best, and more often a bit warped.

I first encountered the work of Carrie Vaughn in Songs of Love and Death, a surprisingly enjoyable collection of science fiction romance stories curated by Neil Gaiman (my review of that story here: http://theoncominghope.blogspot.com/2011/03/salute-your-shorts-carrie-vaughn.html). One of the things that made that story stick in my mind was its attention to character. Sure, everyone's living in an age of superheroes, but they still feel remarkably human.

Luckily, After the Golden Age lived up to the bar that Vaughn set with "Rooftops". It's not a long novel, which leaves little opportunity for it to go off the rails. This is the story of Celia West, bumbling through a life without superpowers, even as her parents are alternately revered and reviled for their abilities. She's kidnapped over and over again, until she's actually pretty used to it. Sometimes, it seems like she looks forward to it.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot that's hastily papered over or ignored in order to make the plot work. The whole thing hinges on a bad decision Celia made in her youth, but the impetus for that decision definitely feels told rather than shown.

But she's so real as a person. She's confident and decisive, even when racked by insecurity. Her life isn't defined by her relationship with her parents; they just come butting in at inconvenient moments.

If you love traditional superhero stories, After the Golden Age may not be for you. But if you enjoy character-driven stories with fantastical settings, this should fit the bill nicely.

I don't tend to write about endings, at least not at length (not even Sense of an Endings. There's only so many words I can devote to hatred). Endings never satisfy me; denouements are a necessary evil to closing a relationship with a book/show/film that I've loved. It almost seems churlish to complain about an ending; everyone knows the hardest part for a writer is the saggy middle.

I'll make an exception for Popco. The ending, quite frankly, sucked. Scarlett Thomas's sudden wallow in cod freshmanphilosophy might have been less disappointing if the rest of the novel wasn't so damned perfect.

In Popco, Thomas takes disparate topics like advertising, advanced mathematics, cryptography, treasure-hunting, adolescent angst, toy-production and lust and somehow makes it work. The novel's funny, warm and incredibly inventive in its twists and turns. There's a children's adventure novel, a bildungsroman and a lost adult story all in one, and the swerves almost feel natural.

We follow Alice Butler from her creative agency retreat back to her childhood, spent helping her beloved grandparents decipher an encrypted treasure map (Thomas's tale of the fictional pirate took me straight back to the joys of my childhood). Her grandparents, like most of the characters that Alice sides with, are resolutely anti-authoritarian (her grandfather suffered great humiliation at the hands of one Alan Turing).

The anti-authoritarian streak of the novel is subtle and established, and we come to love Alice despite her eccentricities and social ineptitudes, cause goddamnit, she solves puzzles!

So the last 10% (thank you Kindle) of the novel throws out all the subtlety and elegance of what came before, substituting in leftist propaganda so juvenile that even early-90's Ethan Hawke would roll his eyes. There's an amorphous organization devoted to bringing down capitalism from the inside! They'll break down the walls of the corporatocracy with nothing more than plastic sporks! Marketing is evil!

What's even worse is how these platitudes are expressed. The emissary from the shadowy organization Ayn Rands all over the place, with a 20-page monologue about how righteous their cause is. A is A and B is B and this shit be cheesy.

You should still read it though. How many novels promise 90% perfection?

And look at that gorgeous cover:

The premise is simple: Odysseus, wily storyteller, told different versions of events to different audiences, all the better to protect himself and his family from the wrath of gods and enemies. The Odyssey, as written by Homer, is but one version of events. 44 variations have been excavated from an archaeological site, providing the titular Lost Books of the Odyssey.

The scholarly pretense is effective. After all, there's no question that Odysseus is a trickster, a deceiver of men. In 44 vignettes, Zachary Mason offers a series of witty counterfactuals to The Iliad and The Odyssey. Some stories are simple retellings, others add color and fill in the gaps in these stories of gods among men.

As apocrypha should be, Lost Books is both fragmented and non-linear, owing more to the experimental ministrations of Borges or Lord Dunsany than to the narrative excellence of Homer.

Unlike many experimental works, however, Mason's connects with the heart as well as the head, making Dunsany a sort of apt comparison. The beauty of The Odyssey is precisely that its leads are so familiar; we are already aware of two similar yet different "canon" versions in the Roman myth and the Greek myth, so why not 44 other retellings? We have emotional attachments to Homeric concepts of heroism and bravery that Mason neatly turns on their heads. (To be honest, I'm not sure this book would work QUITE as well for people who aren't familiar with the Homeric tales).

I suppose I should mention that not all 44 work (one or two are too fanciful even for this fanciful concept), but none fail to entertain. Personal favorites include an O. Henry-esque tale of Medusa, Odyssey fashioning Achilles as a clay simulacrum, and Odyssey returning home to Ithaca only to find himself already there, seated by his wife. These are some of the less experimental tales in the book. I will not spoil the rest for you here.

Zach Mason deserves credit not only for bravery (messing with Homer? Seriously?) but for creating a wonderfully diverting work. Next, he's moving to Ovid's Metamorphoses. I can't wait.

In Death Comes to Pemberley, P.D. James executes a vicious assault on Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen and all those who love them.

There's a vicious murder on the grounds of Pemberley, and if you manage to care after 250 pages, then more power to you. For the murder occurs, then Colonel Fitzwilliam recounts the incident, then he and Darcy recount the incident at the inquest. And in case you're not thoroughly bored, there's also a trial, wherein we hear the same story yet again.

Meanwhile, lifeless, witless, self-regarded gold-digger Elizabeth Bennet sticks to the shadows, behaving like the dutiful, conservative women she has never been. Why, P.D., why?

The essential transformation of Elizabeth might have been acceptable if James doesn't herself establish that a) the novel only picks up 6 years afterP&P and b) she makes it clear that Lizzie is having the time of her life, completely free of hardship.

But wait! James isn't content with dragging our beloved P&Pers into this disaster! Poor Harriet Smith, Robert Martin, Sir Walter Elliot and the Knightleys all appear in this mess.

Even that isn't enough. She has to throw in irritating meta comments.

If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?

A ha ha ha ha ha...yes.

Now, let me take you on a journey through exposition city:

"Fitzwilliam listened in silence, then said, 'You are mounting quite an impressive expedition to satisfy one hysterical woman I daresay the fools have lost themselves in the woodland, or one of them has tripped over a tree root and sprained an ankle. They are probably even now limping to Pemberly or the King's Arms, but if the coachman also heard shots we had better go armed. I'll get my pistol and join you in the chaise. If the stretcher is needed you could do with an extra man and a horse would be an encumbrance if we hae to go into the depths of the woodland, which seems likely. I will bring my pocket compass. Two grown men getting themselves lost like children is stupid enough, five would be ridiculous."

Did you get that? No? Then repeat after me: SHUT UP, FITZWILLIAM!

And then there's so many lectures on "social justice".

"Ignoring him, Georgina turned to Darcy. 'You need have no anxiety.  Please do not ask me to leave. I only wish to be of use to Elizabeth and I hope I can be. I cannot see that there is any impropriety in that.'

It was then that Alveston intervened.  'Forgive me, sir, but I feel I must speak.  You discuss what Miss Darcy should do as if she were a child. We have entered the nineteenth century; we do not need to be a disciple of Mrs Wollstonecraft to feel that women should not be denied a voice in matters that concern them. It is some centuries since we accepted that woman has a soul. Is it not time that we accepted that she also has a mind?'

Hey guys, remember how Jane Austen was kind of funny? How she'd couch serious social issues in compelling drama and lively wit?

Ok, I will cease the assassination of this novel, out of respect to the reader.

But when Darcy starts lecturing about the morality of the death penalty, I rolled my eyes so high that the heavens could not have missed my irritation. When the servants polish the 8 millionth candlestick, imagine poor me, resisting the urge to throw my Kindle against the wall.

You can file this one under "legally protected terrible ideas."

*I wish I'd come up with that graphic, but full credit goes to The Guardian. If you think I'm being harsh, you should read that review.

The best way to sum up my feelings about The Marriage Plot is: it's complicated. I didn't hate reading it, I didn't feel like I was wasting my time, and yet I found parts of it profoundly insidious. The Marriage Plot feels so contrary to Eugenides' usual thematic conclusions that it made me wonder, then, if I had misread Eugenides all along?

Two books could not be more dissimilar on the surface than The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex. Where one thrives on mystery and makes a feast on brevity, the other paints every detail with maximalist aplomb. But one thing ties them together. At their cores, they tell the stories of people who are sexually repressed due to the most extraordinary of circumstances. Both make a strong case that our families are responsible for who we are, and often in the worst possible ways.

The Marriage Plot, too, centers on the sexually repressed. But in this case, they are separated from their desires by the most ordinary of circumstances. I can't decide whether to be angry with Eugenides for bringing to life many characters I left behind in college, or to be impressed by his singularly detailed account of this set of despicable characters.

The most compelling passages in the novel center around Leonard, a bipolar scientist who cannot seem to come to terms with his disease (in many ways, his love for Maddy seems to directly prevent him from taking reasonable action against it).

Leonard, it should be noted, is not David Foster Wallace, he is many people, the algamation of all whom I studiously avoided (avoiding people is easy when you're doing a double major, you're always dancing between two disconnected social groups). But unlike many tales of self-destruction, Leonard's is riveting. Whenever he's experiencing a manic episode, Eugenides' writing also takes on a new urgency. We are voyeurs of a train wreck, and we can't look away.

As for Mitchell, can a character be more revolting? He's introduced to us as a lovelorn wimp, and afterwards, we see him wimp his way through sexism, racism, Orientalism and general douchebaggery. There is an untold physics property that assholes attract assholes, and each of his scenes become more tiresome as the assholes become more terrible.

Eugenides has said that Mitchell's experiences abroad are based on his own, and perhaps that's why he seems so infatuated with Mitchell's journey. But he's such a weak character to start off with, that each of his small epiphanies seem almost petty.

I'd say one of Eugenides' greatest strengths in the past was his ability to allow a bit of grace even to the most horrible characters. But with Mitchell, either he can't be bothered, or doesn't want to allow him that grace. Or these are the perils of "writing what you know," instead of letting imagination guide the work.

But it is with Madeleine that Eugenides really loses the plot (the marriage plot, if you will). We are made to relate to her from page one, and to Eugenides' credit, I did root for her until the end. I wanted nothing more than for her to break the shackles she'd placed herself in, even though she was continually offered outs and refused to take them.

Though she's the strongest character in the novel by any traditional definition, she's seems the most subservient to outside forces. She's suffers no illness preventing her actualization, no crippling indecision, no emotional vacuum, yet she surrenders to events. She makes no proactive decision of any kind, and she seems unable to function without male validation. If her shackles weren't so particulary described, it would be difficult to care about her fate (and that's dangerous, considering she's the main character).

As always, Eugenides writes beautifully, but he's lost his grasp on what once made his work so compelling: the darkness, the atypical discussions of gender, the opposing forces of societal inertia and human agency. But I suppose everyone's allowed an unsuccessful novel. It's just a shame that we'll probably have to wait another decade for his next.

IN A SENTENCE

Great premise, incredibly sloppy writing.

IN MANY SENTENCES

My experience with Night Circus leaves me very hesitant to recommend it. While I ultimately enjoyed the novel, readers with more cutthroat instincts will probably abandon this movie 20 pages in, as I very nearly did.

The first quarter of the book goes on and on with long descriptive passages that barely even serve the purpose of exposition, and certainly don't pay off later in the novel. Had the initial premise not been so compelling, I definitely would not have continued. Morgenstern shifts from perspective to perspective, leaping back and forth in time in a manner that precludes any connection with the characters or with any particular storyline.

I thought then, and I still think now, "Was the editor drunk?"

When the novel finally became engaging (right at the 26% point!), it struck me that the previous 1/4 of the novel could have easily been summed up in a few paragraphs, and those paragraphs could have worked to serve character instead of just sitting there, static on the page.

In case you don't believe me about the dull, flat writing:

"The first to arrive (after the pianist, already playing) is Mme. Ana Padva, a retired Romanian prima ballerina who had been dear friends with Chandresh's mother. He called her Tante Padva as a child, and continues to do so to this day. She is a stately woman, the grace of a dancer still visible through her advanced age, along with her impeccable sense of style. Her sense of style is the primary reason she is invited this evening. She is a fiend for aesthetics with an eye for fashion that is both unique and coveted, and provides her with a sizable income since her retirement from the ballet."

It's not even grammatically correct! Allow me to use Morgenstern's own words against her:

"The goings-on of the circus are dutifully reported, but with such matter-of-fact precision that he cannot picture it in the richness of detail that he desires."

If only.

But then things improve. Once we become more involved in the intricacies of the circus itself, the book transforms into something far more magical. There are plot holes galore and the finale is vaguely disappointing (I say vaguely because what happens isn't precisely clear), but there's much to recommend about it. The characters finally come alive, and the romance in the novel feels real and adult, which is unusual for a young adult novel.

But Morgenstern never overcomes the lack of trust in her writing ability. Typos and occasionally grammatical mistakes are fine, but this novel felt incredibly sloppy in so many ways. It doesn't even feel like a first draft, it feels like the regurgitations a writer makes that is then shaped into a first draft. There are diamonds in the rough, but it's up to you whether you feel like digging through.

You're not going to hear me say this often: I can't wait to see this made into a movie. I guarantee that even the worst screenwriter will cut the fluff and improve the story.

Have you read Night Circus? What did you think?

Stone Arabia's about an eccentric rock musician named Nik Worth who lives by the motto "Self-curate or disappear" (by the way, he's just disappeared). Or it's about the persistence of memory. Or it's about new spaces for communication created by technology. Or it's a story about one women who feels that she's slowly losing everything, including her mind. Or it's a satire of pretentious navel-gazing. Maybe it's all of that. Maybe it's none of that.

In her third novel, Dana Spiotta takes full advantage of the power of perspective. She weaves in a series of fictions and falsifications within the contradictory narratives of siblings Denise and Nik, and leaves her filmmaker daughter Ada to sort it out in her documentary, which is plagued by its own problems of perception.

Everyone worships Nik, perhaps no one more than Nik himself. He persists in intruding in the narrative that others have constructed around him, adding to the general confusion about his history and his music and his general attitude to creativity. He even intrudes on them by using their own voices, crafting fake letters from one character to another.

Spiotta gives us excerpts from Nik's fake biography, Ada's blog, Denise's journal, music press,liner notes and stories told by former band-members.

In this way, Stone Arabia mirrors the way we receive information in real-life; we are left to sort through millions of contradictory signals, guessing at the agendas and biases of the informers, always filtering information through the lens of our own experiences.

But is it good?

Spiotta certainly knows how to craft a sentence; she peppers the novel with tiny observations that may seem irrelevant, but each contribute to a clearer picture of the truth of Denise and Nik.

But I never lost the sense that there was too much going on, that Spiotta's play on the media of our time left the novel a little unfocused, a little too mysterious about the true nature of her characters.

The strongest sections of the novel allowed real-world events to pierce the narcissistic bubbles of our lead characters; even with tragedies like Abu Ghraib, Denise manages to make it about her. These moments are precious and few, the moments that tell us who Denise really is, not how she imagines herself, how she wishes herself or how Nik imagines herself.

If you've read the novel, you may be interested in an extended round-table discussion hosted by Edward Champion, with comments from Spiotta herself. Here's Part 1: http://www.edrants.com/stone-arabia-roundtable-part-one/

I wrote this review a year ago, and for some reason I never posted it, but I thought I ought to. Since then, Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer and the novel is now being transformed into an HBO series.

Do you re-read novels? I mean apart from the beloved novels of your teenage years, the ones that accompanied you through difficult times, the ones that allowed you simply to pass through the bad times unscathed? Let's face it, who ACTUALLY has time to re-read anything apart from scholars and students? Pauline Kael never watched a movie twice, simply because that two hours could be better spent broadening her film education (granted, she was blessed with an incredible memory, so she never forgot what she saw either).

All that said, as soon as I finished Visit from the Goon Squad, I wanted to read the whole thing again. This in itself is not a sign of quality, literary merit, scholarly interest or anything else (though the many, many awards this book has received demonstrates the book has plenty of that). I couldn't believe how deeply I connected with the book, despite the multiple narratives and characters. I am still astonished that Egan managed to maintain a commitment to human character while creating a structurally unique novel. A lot of literary fiction seems designed to keep the reader at arms length, and I found the opposite to be true in Goon Squad.

I love the idea that this book is so universally loved, but everyone has a different idea of what exactly it is. I read it as a novel with a bajillion different perspectives, but others have read it explicitly as a collection of interlinked short stories, and still others refer to it with the dreaded moniker of 'experimental' fiction. Still others don't even try to define it. Certainly I didn't even think of trying to characterize it until I saw so many reviews calling it a short story collection.

I've read Infinite Jest since I've read this one, and though i know a few people are going to whack me on the head, I think Goon Squad achieves what DFW aspired to, a quasi-comic dystopia that illustrates everything that is wrong, and everything that is beautiful about our contemporary malaise. But Egan achieves it with minimal words, while DFW was ultimately so maximal. He shows us everything, trusting us to separate the wheat of life from the chaff. Egan takes us straight there. It's two completely different styles, but in both of them, there's a deep understanding of humanity.

Oncoming Firsts:

First time I've ever read a book BEFORE it won the Pulitzer Prize! Good times.

For those of you who are interested (everyone)

Here's a link to the legendary Powerpoint chapter "Great Rock 'N Roll Pauses", complete with the relevant tunes that she writes of: http://jenniferegan.com/books

It's taken me about a year to finish How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu. For those who know me, this may seem odd, as I usually spend a few days on a novel, max. This is no Infinite Jest, after all. But I found it difficult, mainly because it's wistful tone is intensely depressing.

The lead character, Charles Yu, repairs time machines, and his only constant companion is his operating system, TAMMY. But after nine years, he "goes rogue" to hunt for his father, who invented time travel and promptly disappeared.

The novel speaks of humanity, and of the fact that no matter how much our physical circumstances change, how much even the reality of the universe changes, there are certain central truths about being human. Central truths about the perception of time as it passes you by, that even if you personally are able to put your life on hold for an eternity then others aren't. And then you realize you've lost them forever.

“To live in here is to live at the origin, at zero, neither present nor absent, a denial of self- and creature-hood to an arbitrarily small epsilon-delta limit. Can you live your whole life at zero?  Can you live your entire life in the exact point between comfort and discomfort?  You can in this device.  My father designed it that way.  Don’t ask me why. If I knew the answer to that, I would know a whole lot of other things too.  Things like why he left, where he is, what he’s doing, when he’s coming back, if he’s coming back.”

I do believe you need to be nerd to enjoy this, not necessarily in the science fiction sense, but in the linguistic sense. Dig out your old French lessons, brush up on subjunctive, imperfect, all the tenses that even many professional writers confuse repeatedly.

And then again, maybe you'll enjoy it more if you don't give a damn about tenses and focus on the story, which offers plenty of tension of its own. Characters are frequently retconned out of time and space, and playful paradoxes abound.

But fundamentally, this is the story about a boy who lost his father, and struggles to find him even with the power of time at his fingertips.

Have you read it? Let me know what you think.

Until Jamie Oliver's show last year, I confess that I'd never given much thought to the healthiness of school lunches. Growing up as a vegetarian in Texas, it was always an issue of "stuff I eat" vs. "stuff other people eat." School lunches were never really an option, unless I was desperate enough to pick the pepperoni off of the pizza. But I still found my way to all sorts of junk food.

And that is probably the most valuable contribution Amy Kalafa makes with Lunch Wars: cafeteria lunches are only part of the picture. The really bad foods are often doled out in the classroom as "rewards," in vending machines, from ice cream salesman. I didn't get fat from my mom's healthy lunches. I got fat from Flamin' Hot Cheetos and Everlasting Gobstoppers (sadly, I seem to have as little resistance to these forms of crack today as I did when I was 15. But I digress).

However, while Kalafa's heart is clearly in the right place, I found the book a little too evangelical in nature. She wants you to feel bad about the choices your children make in school, and seems to suggest that protecting schoolchildren means becoming a nutritional Big Brother, keeping eyes on them at all time in case of trans-fats.

That said, this is an extremely serious issue, and I'm glad to learn a little more about it before (God forbid) I bring my own spawn into this universe.

Be sure and check out the great discussions at BlogHer about the issues raised in this book.

This review was paid for by BlogHer Book Club but the opinions expressed are entirely my own.

Hello to one and all! I recently had the opportunity to read and review Rules of Civility by Amor Towles for Blogher.com.

It's a great cocktail of a book: one part Fitzgerald, one part Mad Men and one part Richard Yates, and it goes down smooth.

Come on over and read the full review.

It seems appropriate that given the approaching 10 year anniversary of 9/11, Amy Waldman gives us the perfect novel to make sense of it and the world that followed.

In the Age of Hysteria that succeeded 9/11, most Americans have populated their worlds with flat, two-dimensional characters. What do I mean by that? That we are inclined to pre-judge people on single word epithets: Republican, Christian, Liberal, Commie, Feminist, Blogger, Lawyer and so on. Certainly, one can argue that we do this more and more because we are encouraged to by the arbiters of power: by the government, by the media, by community leaders, and so on.

In "The Submission," Waldman aims to challenge this tendency, to show that it's not useful, that it reduces humans to even less than the sum of their parts. Not only that, these oversimplifications warp our very insides until we barely resemble the humans we imagine ourselves to be.

The story is simple: there is an anonymous submission process to build the 9/11 memorial, and at the end of the search, the winner is revealed to be an American-born Muslim by the name of Mohammad Khan.

I don't need to tell you that this is controversial. Waldman, in what must have been a tremendously masochistic act, delves deep into the implications for the widows, for the firefighters, for non-violent Muslims and for the media. All receive the sharp end of her pen, but perhaps no one more than the media establishment, with its NY Post hysteria and Glenn Beck-a-likes.

When the novel introduced its central conceit, I thought I knew what the right answer was. It was very easy for me to say that the identity of the artist is irrelevant, it's the art that matters. But Waldman is not content to let my armchair liberalism lie undisturbed.

Let's return to the core truth of the Age of Hysteria, that it's easy to make decisions about people if you reduce them to single attributes. If you see Mo Khan as a Muslim, and not as a human being with the same hopes, dreams and frustrations as any other American, then it becomes easier to deny your own stated values to make a politically expedient decision.

But Waldman chooses to deepen all of her characters, not just Mo, not just the grieving widow, but even the bureaucratic flaks who usually get blamed for screwing this stuff up. In fact, as Waldman filled in the characters, my frustration with the situation at hand deepened more and more until I faced the same dilemma as all of the characters: what exactly is the right thing to do in this situation? And this in spite of my earlier certainty: that the identity of the artist is irrelevant.

As you work through all the different concerns, represented by different players in the novel, you find yourself judging every aspect of every character, their moral righteousness, their ethics, the legality, how willing they are to undermine "the process," the purest considerations of politics, and then, fundamentally, is each character's stated opinion even true to their own values? It becomes nearly impossible to judge certain characters' actions apart from their motivations, apart from the circumstances that brought them to the decision.

And so, when the jury is steered by pathos to what I would consider the right decision in this instance, I couldn't help but hate them for being so easily manipulated by a sensational act. I may not agree with, and probably despise, the characters who stand on the other side, but at least they've come to their decisions with considerable soul-searching and genuine pain.

This tug-of-war between a character's inner-life and their actions can be complicated for an author to bring to life without turning the character into a bunch of hypocrites. But Waldman largely succeeds in doing so.

She seems to have written the novel the way that David Foster Wallace wrote Infinite Jest, constructing it like a Sierpinski gasket.

The large triangles are the broad stereotypes she uses as her playthings: the ambitious governor, the secular Muslim, the 9/11 widow, the angry firefighter, and so on.

But small details sell the story; they set up the expectations. For instance, intrepid reporter Alyssa Spiers is introduced a sort of real-life Veronica Mars, a Nancy Drew for the post-9/11 age. But little things mar her character: we learn that her ambition lacks grounding in honor or ethics, we learn that she is racist in subtle ways (like when she calls Curry Hill "Curry Hell" because of the resident Indian community).

Even Claire Burwell, the 9/11 widow the story focusses on, eventually succumbs to her prejudices in spite of being introduced as the only character with a conscience. Watching her give up on her ideals is heartbreaking, but Waldman skillfully navigates us through Claire's dis-enlightenment, to the point that you can't help but wonder if you'd fall prey as well.

But no matter what expectations you brought with you into the book, the last 1/4 will bely all of them. That there would be violence is perhaps to be expected, but not like this. That Waldman makes so definitive a statement in the end about who the villain is was also unexpected. But it's certainly possible that it only seems definitive to me.

Part of me believes that this novel ought to be required reading for all Americans, as the ultimate test of how strong their belief in the imagined construction of the United States really is, about how truly they hold the values of the Constitution close, about freedom of speech, about freedom of religion, about the very relevance of values.

But part of me believes that the Age of Hysteria is the wrong time for these values to be tested.

All this is a long-winded way for me to say one basic thing; I believe that Amy Waldman has written one of the Great American Novels. I do not come to praise Waldman, but to bury this era of hate and intolerance that was born of 9/11. I'd like to think that if more people were aware of the contradictions within themselves, of their very complexity, of the very real fears that guide their outward prejudices, then perhaps they can be better people.

Can a novel really cause such intense self-reflection? I can't say for sure, but I think if any novel can, this one will.

P.S. Don't let me put you off the novel by discussing its importance. I have no shame in saying that it made me cry (not just tear up, but full on bawl) on 4 separate occasions. It made me laugh out loud twice as many times.

Let me know what you think of it!