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(Review: October 2007)
You hadn’t have read Richard Ford’s The
Sportswriter or Independence Day to get through Lay
of the Land, but the background would undoubtedly raise your
experience and appreciation. Ford,
who won the Pulitzer for Sportswriter, is a master of detail and well
crafted prose. He’s capable of describing a setting in overwhelming detail
or can segue off into political or ideological banter without losing the
momentum of the current action. It’s a rare gift that Ford engages without
effort or show.
Lay of the Land is
the third book in Ford’s Frank Bascombe series. Bascombe is essentially Ford’s alter ego. Ford was a
short story writer, then became a sportswriter and then went back to
fiction. Bascombe’s life has followed a similar
arc. By the time we catch up with Frank in Lay of the Land, he’s now a
realtor in New
Jersey
and suffering from prostate cancer. He has an ex-wife, his current wife
think she’s still in love with her ex-husband and his mercurial son is
coming into town for Thanksgiving. If that sounds like some mundane drama,
rest assured that Ford puts enough of a spin on it all,
The current wife falls for her ex, when he comes and stay’s with Bascombe and his wife. His son’s girlfriend is missing
a hand from handling a grenade in the military and Frank’s business partner
is a Nepalese transplant who chasses after the American dream with Buddhist
ideals. Add to that the haunting ghost of Frank’s other, dead son, the
pressure of the
holidays and some ballistic events and you have a rich portrait of suburban
America turned upside down. A read that is as gripping
in narrative as it is impressive in it’s style and
construct. Ford is truly a modern master.
(Review: July 2007)
The Wisdom branch of Paulo Coelho’s so called tree
of enlightenment (a collection of life lessoning novellas) may posture
itself as enlightening and soul moving but in execution it’s little more
than a haughty hodgepodge of Gospel verse, Aesop fable and One
Thousand and One Arabian Nights. The simplistic, religiously
infused moral tells of a young nameless boy who gives up his material
wealth to find his “Personal Legend.” The concept of PL, is that one does
not subscribe social constraints and makes their own way in the world by
working hard and pursuing their dreams (as if you never hear that one
before). The boy labors as a sheepherder until an old woman tells him of a
great treasure at the foot of Pyramids. Along the way, the boy meets a king
dislocated from his homeland and the mighty incarnation of title, each
espousing such inane, pseudo Zen philosophies as “then Soul of the Land”
and “the Master Work.” And it’s here
amongst all the proverb rich riddles that Coelho stoops to insipid Yoda
babble. Oddly enough there’s little conflict to test the boy. He’s hardly
ever challenged (he can deduce that two hawks fighting might mean a war—how
astute!), nor does he undergo any change, all he
does is ask questions of others to get closer to the mother lode. In short we have an undeserving hero on a
quest fueled by greed.
Of course there’s a
love interest, and here too, the story doesn’t hold up. Initially, it’s a
merchant’s daughter who holds the boy’s eye. He thinks of her nonstop for
one year, until he learns of the great treasure. Then, out in the desert,
he falls for an Islamic woman. Coelho constantly affirms the boy’s ardor,
but when the two are together on page, there’s no spark.
The most intriguing
aspect of The Alchemist is its interspersing of differing
philosophies and theologies. The boy begins his odyssey in Christian Spain,
and journeys into the predominately Islamic territories of Northern Africa and the Middle East. And while Coelho wrote the story long before
9/11 (it was initially published in the 80s in Brazil and subsequently dropped by the publisher,
because of lack of sales, but a subsequent resurrection turned it into an
international bestseller), the contrast of such belief systems and their
tenets proves provocative, relevant and insightful. Coelho however points
to a higher human level (there’s a dash of Nietzsche’s ubermensch
thrown in) and man’s spiritual link with nature. Just what the exact
rendering is, never makes it onto the page. For all its impressive sales
and battery of believers, The Alchemist never finds its
Personal Legend.
(Review: June 2007)
Raymond Carver is one of the most talented,
simplistic writers period. Often you see his name with the tag
“contemporary” affixed to it, but put him right there in the pantheon with Chekhov,
Hemmingway and Cheever. From Where I’m Calling is
a posthumous collection of Carver’s shorts (he died in 1988) arranged in
chronological order, including three new stories—the last of which, Errand, is Carver’s remaining of
Chekhov’s final days. What’s interesting about the collection is that you
can see Carver’s personal evolution from drunk,
day laborer to reclusive reformed alcoholic. Most of the stories take place
in the Pacific Northwest, where there is wide open space, yet the action
is always small and confined with something larger to be said about life in
general. The first—and obviously very autobiographical—person narrator is
most always a man in or just out of a broken relationship (Carver was
married three times).
If you’ve seen, Short Cuts, Robert
Altman’s 1992 masterful cinematic rendering of Carver’s works, then your
familiar with many of the yarns in Where I’m Calling From. You can
easily spot A Small Good Thing is
the devilish weave with Lyle Lovett as a bothersome baker and So Much Water So Close to Home has
Fred Ward, Huey Lewis and Buck Henry as outdoorsmen who discover a dead
body on a fishing trip and just keep on fishing. The latter was also
recently recast and set in the Australian Outback as Jindabyne,
losing none of Carver’s laconic malaise in the locale change.
Of course, Carver’s
most famed short, Cathedral,
which depicts a jealous husband’s time spent with his wife’s former
employer, who happens to be blind, is in the collection, as is the titled
short, about a dry out ranch, which is one of my personal favorites and
part of the One Hundred Best Short Stories of the Century collection. Nobody Said Anything depicts two
boys in an uneasy alliance to capture a large mutated fish and Little Things details the literal,
and grim, tug of war between husband and wife over their infant.
The stories haunt, not
so much in the darkness of the events, but in the earnestness of Carver’s
narrators and the simplicity of his prose. There’s an accessibility in his
stories that goes beyond craft and having been there. There’s a window to
be there and look inward. How Carver finessed this technique is a mystery,
but his power to evoke remains on the page.
Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and
Stephen J. Dubner
(Review: May 2007)
The subtitle, A Rogue Economist Explores
the Hidden Side of Everything, says it all. The byline list two
names, not one, as A implies.
Sure, if you look at the bios, you see that Levitt’s
the economist and Dubner the journalist, but
still, the slight obstruction is typical of what Freakonomics is, a
couple of guys having fun turning certain statistical commonalities upside
down in a slack matter. It’s great food for thought, but the duo’s droll,
condescending, know-it-all tone becomes grating after a while and the job
they do supporting their arguments with underlying data, is scant at best.
They assert more than they prove.
Take for example the
claim that the drop in crime in the 90s was tied to Roe vs
Wade. Less unloved (i.e. aborted) children would mean less crime 20 years
later on. It’s a solid, though pretty obvious, observation that’s promoted
as the factor while the graying
of America and tougher penalties and gun control are
slackly dismissed. Like the rest if the book, the economic stone turning
reveals more commonsense reasoning than labored analysis or theory and to
provide a value added interpretation, they swim against the current, but
leave themselves plenty of wiggle room so they can backtrack if need be. So
goes the book. And issues of black and white get oddly over played. Take
the East Indian researcher lost in a Chicago slum, the authors infer that the blacks had no
idea what to make of someone who was not white and not black. How they
reach this conclusion (did they interview the principals?) is never fully
explained. They just slap on a weak subjective (“very, very scared”) and
plow onward, never proving their point, but scratching the surface of an
issue that might make for good cocktail fodder if all other forms of small
talk have been exhausted.
The book jacket says,
“Prepared to be amazed.” It should read, “Reapplying common sense to old
conclusions.”
Twilight for the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg
(Review: May 2007)
Besides the titled piece, Deborah Eisenberg’s
collection of shorts has no continuity or bind, or more to the point,
they’re just not that gripping. Well written yes, but compelling no. Part
of that lies in Eisenberg’s use of overly rich writing, and injecting
affected character after affected character into a story that this for the
most part, banal. The effect is something like sidling up at truffle bar
for three hours…you’ll be gone in 30 minutes if that.
The titular short, does
have teeth however. It tells of a klatch of slackers who have, through
connections, landed a chic penthouse overlooking the Manhattan skyline. The owner is a Japanese business man
back in the homeland. The people living in his apartment amass into a
community. They’ve had the place unchecked for almost two years when the
owner’s return, and their eviction, is imminent. The slackers grapple with
what to do now their coddled existence is at an end. The self exploration
is telling and evocative. Then 9/11 happens, and Eisenberg gets it right.
It’s gem in the book that sets all the other tales up for failure.
The Road by Cormac
McCarthy
(Review: February 2007)
Cormac McCarthy’s last book, No
Country for Old Men, was crafted with spare but rich prose that unfortunately
got lost in a fast paced crime thriller that lacked in character
development and seemed penned with the big screen in mind. McCarthy’s new
novel, The Road, too feels as if it has cinematic aspirations, but
the father looking after his young son in a post-apocalyptic world hits on
a very real and visceral level. It asks hard, inward looking questions; how
far would you go to protect your own and yourself, and how does one
maintain hope in a hopeless world? McCarthy doesn’t detail the cataclysmic
event that has led to the near recent apocalypse and rendered the world
barren. You can guess it’s a nuclear war or global warming, though in
McCarthy’s bigger context, it doesn’t matter. There’s no greenery, no fish
in the waters and no food except limited canned goods lingering in the
remains of burnt out cities. There are other humans however, but not many.
And some go to inhuman extremes to survive. To mask the truth from his son,
the man (as with the ominous and undefined cause for the apocalypse, McCarthy
never gives the father and son names, they are just the man and the boy)
labels the marauding cannibals as bad
guys and all others as good guys.
As policy, the two shun contact with others, but the horrors they do
encounter will haunt you.
The Road is profound in its ability to provoke and conjure. Much of that’s
because McCarthy adeptly puts just enough on the page to force the reader
to look at themselves to complete the picture. Contemporary fears and
ethics are challenged as the man and the boy travel the titled pathway
combing for civilization and hope. And as glum a future world as The Road
is, McCarthy imbues the man with an unshakable paternal instinct and just
enough humanity to affect. His dilemma in a world of terrors is palpable in
the everyday today. McCarthy has crafted a gripping page turner that’s far
too close for comfort.
On Beauty by Zadie
Smith
(Review: February 2007)
Zadie Smith, the wunderkind who at age 24 penned the generational and
cultural traversing weave, White Teeth, returns to her
seminal form in On Beauty. Both are skilled achievements in narrative
craft, but like Teeth, and even more so, Beauty lacks in
consistency and depth. Worse, there are several gapping holes in character
development—jumps ostensibly made to spur the plot that are not earned.
Overall though, Beauty compels. Smith has proven adept at leveraging
extremes in race, ethics and class to provide the friction that gives her
novels heat. In Beauty that is skin tones, black, white and a few shades of
grey in between.
Beauty follows the twisting interconnections between the Belsey and Kipps families.
The two maybe separated by an ocean, but the patriarchs know each other
well as they are intellectual rivals who don’t much care for each other.
And then there’s the issue of color; the Kipps
are black; while the Belseys are an interracial
couple, though their offspring pass as black. While studying in England
Jerome Belsey falls for the fair Victoria Kipps. It doesn’t work out and the tenuous bond between
the two families is tested when Monty Kipps gets
a teaching assignment at Wellington College, just
outside Boston (think Brandies, Tufts or even Amherst) where Howard Belsey is a longtime professor. Infidelity, pride and cultural identity
add to the fire.
It’s been
purported that Smith leveraged EM Forster’s Howard’s End as the
template for Beauty. It’s an intriguing, if not entirely successful
exercise, that occasionally goes over the top. Take several characters
having a protracted discussion about Forster and his body of work, or
Howard Belsey’s transgression with a younger
woman that feels like it’s ripped from Nabokov’s Lolita,
and even makes such a reference. As talented as Smith is, such creative and
amateurish (the conventions are as obvious and creaky as a film school
homage project) lapses really jump off the page and pull the reader out of
the moment. Then there’s Levi Belsey, the young
man inspired by hip-hop, who pretends to be from the rough and tumble
streets of inner city Boston and not the pampered son of a professor. He feels carved from
stereotypes that one might see on MTV, and at times on the page is
indistinguishable from his brother, Jerome.
But as much as
such flaws trip up the reader, Smith has constructed an arc of contrast,
conflict and inner turmoil that is palpable, real and present in most
people’s lives, and for that, Beauty may not be pretty, but it
is hard to put down.
Kafka on the Shore by Hauruki Murakami
(Review: December 2006)
If you’ve read any book by Hauruki
Murakami, then you’re aware of the author’s simple, yet elegant prose and
ability to seamlessly blur the lines between reality and the surreal. Like
Murakami’s masterpiece, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka
on the Shore, begins with a mundane, everyday happening—a 15
year-old boy named Kafka contemplating running away from home—then the
focus pulls back, Kafka’s father has laid out an Oedipal prophecy, Kafka
winds up in the graces of a (for all intents and purposes) eunuch and a
washed out siren who floats around a quirky library. There’s a murder,
depraved sex, a WW II freak occurrence and an idiot savant who can’t read a
lick but can talk to cats. It may sound over the top, but it works
perfectly and credibly. Murakami is unique and a master of stepping outside
the box. The only disappointment, besides the book ending, is that if
you’ve read any other Murakami in the recent past, Kafka, won’t be that
crystal bullet of ingenuity firing in from left field, as your senses have
been tempered with expectation.
Oblivion by David Foster Wallace
(Review: April 2006)
David
Foster Wallace is a man who knows plenty of three syllable words and likes
you to know that he does. He’s also demonstrates great ardor for minutiae,
or so that’s the conclusion one might come away with after wading through Oblivion,
a slow blooming, yet hypnotic collection of shorts about nothing of much
importance, though Wallace would like to convince you otherwise. The
opener, ¡°Mister Squishy,¡± details, in (too) excruciating exposition, the efforts
of corporate wonks trying to position their Twinkie-like product in the
market. At 60 plus pages, you’ll feel like you could claim the Twinkie
Defense for having had read it.
About the most straightforward and accessible is ¡°Philosophy and
the Mirror of Nature,¡± which revolves around the
son of a victim of plastic surgery malpractice who’s a tad off kilter when
it comes to spiders. Then there’s ¡°The Suffering Channel¡± where a
journalist for a celebrity mag pursues a story
about a guy who makes sculpture art from shit—enough said. The title story,
about a man who visits a sleep clinic with his wife, bristles with the most
promise. It unfurls in a bar at a country club (The Nineteenth Hole) as the
man sits having cocktails with his father-in-law while it pours outside.
The bar action titillates with revelation and the frayed ends of tawdry
relations gone sour but the sleep clinic/sleep issues back-story, which
consumes the page by the end, adds little and ironically serves as an
unintended cure for insomnia. There’s no doubt Wallace, who made his mark
with the quirky, groundbreaking (and long), Infinite Jest, is
a talented writer. His recent collection of essays, Consider the
Lobster, is Spartan, to the point and accessible. Here though,
Wallace is smug, self-congratulatory and worst of all, just not that
interesting. To naysayers and Wallace fans that
disagree, please feel free to write me off as oblivious.
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