Book reviews, July to December 2018

In the end, I didn't quite make my book a week goal. Or my four books a month goal. Or my "sleep like a normal human being goal", which is directly related to the two prior goals. I did, however, make it through a decent heap of books (42). If you only give one book from this list a shot, it should be either The Underground Railroad or The God of Small Things. Or, if you're a masochist with excellent taste, The Unconsoled.

The Ancestry of John Whitney – Henry Melville

So you know how every family tree has a few nefarious characters whose lives make tremendously entertaining reading? John Whitney was not one of them. It was interesting to find out that the Whitneys in my line are THE Whitneys, descended from John, the ur-Whitney of American Whitneys. But like the early bits of the bible, there was a lot of begatting and lineage, and not a lot of story. It would probably have been more entertaining if Herman, rather than Henry, Melville wrote it. 

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

I'd never read anything by Mitchell, so this story of interconnected lives across expanses of time (from a 18th century whaler to a post-apocalyptic tribesman) was a pleasant surprise. The writing is literary without being too dense for the genre, and the book's forwards and backwards structure, in which the first half of each epoch's story is told, and then the second halves, working backwards through time, doesn't feel as gimmicky as it might in less well-structured works. 

The Master Butcher's Singing Club - Louise Erdrich

Most of what I've read by Erdrich has been her more recent, more accomplished works (The Round House, A Plague of Doves, LaRose). While they differ in tone and structure, they all weave around realities of contemporary Native American communities, with a touch of Gabriel Garcia Marquez-esque magical realism. This departure of a novel of immigrant life in the plains in WWI era North Dakota seems to be most commonly described by critics as "ambitious". Unlike some of the more tight, almost claustrophobic spaces of her other works, this mixtures of characters and stories spanning decades sometimes loses the ability to spend adequate time fleshing out each character's experience. Annie Proulx might have been able to ram robust life experiences into this many characters and events, but for Erdrich it seems like a stretch. It sometimes feels a bit archaic in style, while still enjoying Erdrich's beautiful prose. Not in league with her other recent works, but still a great book in its own right.

Dragon's Teeth - Michael Crichton

The more I read of Crichton, the less I like him. The premise of the semi-historical fiction follows a young student in the employ of competing paleontologists in the frontier of the American West. The real life exploits of Cope and Marsh, and others, in the early boom of paleontology seem like great fodder, but Chrichton doesn't really add much by making this a fictional account. The only interesting bits are the hints at the actual conflict between the two bone collectors, with the tacked on fictional elements feel hacky and rushed (and pretty similar in parts to the superior, but also so-so The Revenant). I'd skip it and get a non-fiction work on the same topic. 

The Wizard and Glass - Steven King

The fourth in the Dark Tower series (think, cowboy D&D), Wizard gets back to a little of the expansive world-building King engaged in in Gunslinger. Much of the novel is backstory for the main protagonist, and is honestly much better storytelling than the primary story. The excellent graphic novel adaption by Jae Lee and others tackles this material first, making for a much better progression. I'm still along for the ride, for now. 

The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

Things has been on my bookshelf a good long time. I don't know why I never got around to reading it. This novel of twins growing up in India is fantastically dense and, if a word could even describe a book...fragrant. It's rich in language and story, like a sumptuous meal. Even though I know I must be missing a lot of cultural context, the universality of the emotion and story here are more than enough to float me along. It's a challenging read in places, as the time frame skips around in less than linear fashion, but it really is, to rack up as many cliches as I can in one review, like a beautiful tapestry arising from disparate threads.    

The Unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro

Did you ever have one of those dreams/nightmares where you have to be somewhere or do something, but you keep getting hung up on little minor inconveniences, one after another, or can't find your way, or otherwise keep getting diverted from where you need to be, or you need to go but all your belongings are all over the floor, and no matter how hard you try you can't get them all picked up? I have that sort of dream a lot. It's not a scary dream like being chased by something monstrous, it's just the creeping horror of everyday inconveniences and minor failures and annoyances. The Unconsoled is essentially an incredibly huge novel that encapsulates that dream experience with such skill that it feels physically uncomfortable to read. Ishiguro is my favorite author whose name isn't Cormac McCarthy, and maybe even just favorite author, period. His deftness and subtlety and endless ability to lay open the delusion and fallibility of our perceptions is unmatched in contemporary fiction. Novels like Remains of the Day and A Pale View of Hills are master classes in writing. Maybe that's why The Unconsoled vexes me to no end. It's at the same time a work of skill that rivals Remains and most other modern fiction,and also an incredibly painful and horrible book to read. The novel nominally follows a famous musician's visit to a European town to perform in a music festival. But the narrative follows dream logic, he never quite gets where he needs to go, there's always some distraction, places aren't where they should be, characters are inconsistent, timelines are unreliable. A door in one place opens into somewhere else removed which makes perfect sense in a dream but not in reality. However, the story is never so nonlinear that we get to lay down that horrible tension of reality, nor is it ever consistent enough to give us an anchoring point. It's scary the degree to which Ishiguro subtly and slowly pulls the narrator through this (in typical Ishiguro fashion) delusional world of unreliable narration and mounting frustration. I won't give away the ending other to say that there is no release from the tension. It was incredibly frustrating and unenjoyable to read while at the same time being the only book I read these 6 months that really rose to the level of the very best of writing. I love/hate Ishiguro for this powerful, awful book. 

The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead

I had held on to this novel for a year or so waiting for a good time to read it. I'm glad I waited because it feels especially relevant given the national horror we're slogging through. Railroad is at once a straight ahead, densely literary story of runaway slaves in the American South, and also oddly seamlessly a symbolic metaphor driven condemnation of slavery and its ongoing. The oddness is in what originally struck me as gimmicky; the re-imagining of the underground railroad as a literal series of underground railroad. But Colson builds this indelibly into the udnerlying metaphor and sweep of the story. It's not fantasy, it's not alternative history, it's dense symbolism overlaid on a well-paced story. It reminded me a lot of Faulkner's Absolom, Absolom! in tone, while having its own contemporary voice. The novel pulls no punches in its depiction of the minute and visceral details of the abysmal horror of slavery, but still pulls things into a powerful whole. 

The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss

Here is the geekiest lead-in to why I read a book I have probably ever written: I keyed into Rothfuss because he was a recurring guest participant in an ongoing live D&D game hosted by the creators of webcomic Penny Arcade. Yeah. Not quite like picking up Erdrich because you heard her work reviewed on NPR's All Books Considered. Rothfuss is a boisterous, irrepressible wit in person, and there seemed to be a lot of buzz in the fantasy world about his books, so I thought I'd give it a shot. This first novel in the series (usually a warning bell for me, given the unfortunate preponderance of series based novels these days) is witty and ambitious, if not literary. The ambiguously archaic setting of the novel revolves around a young outsider coming to a school for magic while being bedeviled by a great evil and ...well that sounds pretty damn derivative. But Rothfuss manages to make it fun, new, and engaging without being simplistic. His wit is sly and pokes through rather than dominating the action. The protagoinist is more anti-hero than paragon, and Rothfuss generally avoids the Mary Sue trap, allowing his protragonist to fail, and be imperfect without immediate resolution on occasion. While the archetype might shout POTTER!, it weaves a nimble path that often steers more closely to Tolkein and Piers Anthony. The pacing is spotty in places, but it was entertaining enough that I picked up the second in the series. There's some seriously cool structural elements to his world-building that I can't wait to see fleshed out.    

East of Eden - John Steinbeck

Steinbeck is a guilty pleasure. I know his books are straight ahead stories, and often leave a bit to be desired, even masterworks like Grapes of Wrath. But there's some piece of his writing that is just intractably bound up in the fabric of the country, no matter how much his works are mangled to death in high school English classes and looked down upon for their sometimes simple and moralistic structure by post-modernity. I somehow managed to never read East of Eden, and I regret it. While it suffers from some of the usual Steinbeck glurge in places, it's a lot of his other works (The Long Valley, etc.) seem like practice runs at the much broader, more powerful Eden. This novel of generational families in WWI era California farming communities vacillates back and forth between being an allegorical adaptation of Cain and Abel, and its own unique world. It manages it deftly, and heavily underlies Steinbeck's prescience about social justice issues. Some of the typical complaints about racially problematic bits of the book (the stereotypical "chinaman" Lee) seem misread to me. Steinbeck is not subtle about using these pieces as places on which to drive home a moral point, and in no ambiguity. It's in fashion to dismiss Steinbeck because of his popularity or simple structure, but I think there's a lot of that critique rooted in the fashion of novelty and recentism. Eden has an underlying darkness and moral ambiguity that stands out for Steinbeck. 

City of Mirrors - Justin Cronin

I almost didn't pick this third novel in a somewhat overplayed post-apocalyptic/sparkly vampire genre. The first novel in the series had been fairly well paced and made some brave moves across time periods. The second got bogged down in bad pacing and sterile set piece conflicts. Mirrors was a move back in the right direction. It's not complicated; a straight-ahead fantasy/sci-fi work where, unsurprisingly, it's still humanity vs. sparkly vampires and, of course, itself. But Cronin's ability to make big moves and dramatic reversals is on display, even in its often awkward maneuvering of story lines. The main resolution feels a bit hacky, but it was good to put the series to rest in a fairly satisfying way. 

Meddling Kids - Edgar Contero

I saw this book in line at a book store (the demise of which at the hands of millenials is still, apparently, somewhat exaggerated). I thought it was going to be sort of a fun "After the music" sort of take on Scooby Doo. Something along the lines of The Venture Brothers' absolutely brilliant skewering of Johnny Quest, etc. After finishing it ....I'm still not sure what to make of it? It vacillates back and forth between being a send up of Scooby Doo, trying to be a story in its own right, being an none-too-subtle homage to Lovecraftian Horror, and another fourth of I-don't-even-know-what. There are bits that are enjoyable but it never really gelled as a work. It couldn't decide if it just wanted to be a parody, or to be its own work, and was in the limbo in between. Cantero's prose and clever language play is actually pretty witty, just not sure this was the vehicle for it. 

Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories - H.P. Lovecraft

After slogging through Meddling Kids (above), I thought I'd go back and read some of its source material. I'd only read the titular story in this collection of horror stories of eldritch other-worldly horrors, so I thought I'd re-read it and other works, maybe just to cleanse my palate from Kids. Cthulhu is like the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer...it sets the tone for a cult following and reaches tendrils into a much broader universe (including things like Mike Mignola's classic Hellboy series which spot-on nails the Lovecraftian horror feel), but when you go back and re-experience it after the world has broadened it seems a little...less. I had forgotten that this foundation of countless pop culture references and a whole subgenre of horror is really really short and anticlimactic. The other stories have a similar tone ("creepng dread"), but don't really stand out. It all felt a lot more like pulpy horror comics than literature. Still, sometimes it's good to go back to the source.  

True North - Jim Harrison

Jim Harrison is an author I often enjoy, but also one of the most problematic for me. Works like Legends of the Fall and Brown Dog are excellent examples of his range between austere, sense-of-place epic novel(la)s, and his inherently-faulty-human-nature grittier works. There is a too-prevalent, too-graphic Lolita theme through A LOT of his works that is profoundly uncomfortable (to the extent that I cheered the death of one of his ongoing protagonists just so I would have to wade through the sewer of his particular stories anymore). True North is a generational story of a logging family and a son's obsessive attempt to atone for the crimes of his family against community and specific people. It's a masterful blend of Harrison's two competing genres, and is greater than their sum. A fallible but well-intentioned protagonist and a densely woven background of supporting characters are all firmly enmeshed in the Harrison's beloved-but-oft-abused setting of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. 

Calypso - David Sedaris

No one writes dysfunction and anti-glamour like David Sedaris. While some of his recent works lacked the wit and drive of earlier books, Calypso is mostly back-on point. It's primarily a collection of family bits and pieces, most darkly comical, some a bit heartbreaking, but all Sedaris in good form. The ability to make you wince inwardly at awkwardness of family interactions is part of Sedaris' ability to touch something universal in our experience. 

When the Emperor Was Divine - Julie Otsuka

This novel of a Japanese family's shifting experiences in internment camps in WWII was Otsuka's debut piece (to be followed later by the frenetic energy and sweep of the more successfully executed Buddha in the Attic). While her spare but elegant writing is already on display, it doesn't quite meet the challenge of the structure which has the story handed off at different intervals to be told by another character;s voice. Mother to daughter to son to father. It's still handled well, and is a reminder of the deep betrayal of Japanese internment on a personal level without being a polemic. Otsuka stretches her voice a little in places, but it's still a moving work with her eye for little revelatory details and unfortunate modern relevance. 

Gumption: relighting the Torch of Freedom with America's Gutsiest Troublemakers - Nick Offerman

I admit, I'm generally an Offer-fan, even beyond his turn on Parks and Recreation. I'm even a fan of some of his audiobook work (like his performance on Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo). That being said I've been really disappointed with his own books. I read Paddle Your Own Canoe earlier in the year, and while it had standout moments, really descended into a morass of Hollywood name-dropping and plodding tangents. Gumption fails in its own, uniquely spectacular way. Ostensibly a book about American paragons of values of self-reliance and trouble-making etc, it makes it about 6 (of 21) pieces in before it completely unravels. The first couple chapters are pretty tight, but Offerman makes a massive jump ignoring most of American History since the Revolution other than not-surprising detours to T. Roosevelt, and spend the vast majority of the book on either artisans he knows personally, or Hollywood personalities that are really, really a stretch to include in a book of gumption-enhanced Americans (Yoko Ono? Laurie Anderson? Really?). It really feels like he phoned much of the book rather than finish the book at hand. Don't get me wrong, Offerman is hilarious in the good bits and has an unexpectedly (though sometimes overused) broad vocabulary, but the intent and content of the book seem at odds. Even some of the maxims he lays on us feel a little glurge-y. His overly-personal selection of people to profile is problematic as much for its lack of relevance to most people outside showbiz, as it is in the heavy-hitters it leaves out. If you want gutsy troublemakers, are you really saying Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, and Tom Laughlin did more to relight the torch of freedom than, say, Martin Luther King, Susan B Anthony, Cesar Chavez, Harvey Milk, et al? I like Offerman but his arts and entertainment focus here is really askew from the broader theme of the book. 

Leftovers

In typical style, I started but have not yet finished several works, including a re-read of Anna Karenina, Rothfuss's second novel Wise Man's Fear, Julie of the Wolves (with my daughter Lydia), and Perry's The Essex Serpent.