captain's log: reading Blood Meridian: Or The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy

I should make it very clear at the outset that this is not a review of this book, nor is it a post where someone looking for any sort of revelations about Judge Holden, the Kid, or what McCarthy's saying here will discover anything at all.

Instead, it's about two and a half moleskine notebooks (large size) being filled  with close-reading notes, with observations, vocabulary, googled references to Shakespeare, the Bible and other sources,  lightbulb moments, a bazillion questions, and pink and blue highlighting over the course of a couple of weeks.  It's about getting stuck in a world that is difficult to leave, even when you've left it. It's about getting one chapter shy of the end and wondering if I can take any more that day because I was just too depressed to move on.

It's just that kind of book.  And I loved it.

As I made my way through it, I started posting status updates about it on Goodreads.  I started it on 11/19 and immediately realized this wasn't going to be something I could just mark with my little sticky tabbies on the page edges and come back to later.  Each and every paragraph had something in it that made reading it pretty much line by line a necessity.  First real entry, 11/28 with

page 44: 13% -- "Loving every slow second of this book."

11/30:
page 84: 24% -- "I don't remember the last time I read something this intense. Going slow to get the most from it."
 -- In truth I was really barely crawling through this book, making very s-l-o-w progress. On the home front, Larry was actually here that day (not traveling), and I told an online friend I planned to read all day if he didn't need me. In my head, it was a pretty safe bet that he wouldn't -- as I said to her, "he's pretty busy with writing a speech for work so hopefully that will corral him for a while."  Not four hours later I wrote her that "he's out of his corral.  There may be "Evening Redness in the East" if I keep having to listen to his speech after every addition."

12/01: -- I noted "Super progress today - this book gets darker and darker, but better and better with every chapter."
-- In the real world, I had read up to page 124.  Then at around 4:00 that day, since I'd just been sitting there reading the entire time, Larry comes downstairs and says, "do you know you're wearing the same clothes you had on yesterday? The pants are inside out."  I was absolutely horrified but then I just started laughing. He looks at the table where I'm sitting and I could almost read his mind. There was the coffee cup I'd used that morning, still half full; my half-eaten lunch quesadilla still on a plate on the placemat to the right, a bunched-up paper napkin with dried-up tangerine peels on top of it just sitting there, and the Neilsen tv diaries (most days marked "no viewing")  I was supposed to have mailed 2 days earlier. Oh well. Nothing I can do about that now.  Actually he made me feel like one of those world of warcraft addicts that sits in front of a computer screen all day, and I didn't blame him at all. I just took a shower and changed my clothes.

12/02: -- Page 152, and "Oops. I got so wrapped up I forgot it was my turn to cook today."

Holy crap. How does someone forget to make dinner? Blame it on the book. I was really wrapped up in the novel that day and did not want to stop. Larry came downstairs took a look at the once-again world-of-warcraft station (the breakfast room table) and says "where are we eating tonight?"  In my house that's a serious question because where we live you have pretty much no choices - eating at a decent place requires a minimum 20-minute drive. I was in no condition to leave the house. I had my hair in a scrunchie on the top of my head with strands leaking out every which way; I was wearing a pair of comfy yoga pants that Larry keeps telling me to throw away because the elastic has been pretty much dead for a year and at that point, the thought of going upstairs to put on any kind of makeup and real clothes was just too much work.   We used to go to the neighborhood Italian for pizza when we were desperate, but they closed because the manager's such a cow and had huge staff turnover. There's another smaller little pizza place that smells like cheese the minute you walk in and they don't deliver so you have to go in and face the cheese smell if you want to eat, so that's out. Then there's one nearby Chinese restaurant where you have to be pretty desperate to eat since they give you yesterday's grey, stringy pork in today's pork fried rice and their eggroll drips with so much grease that you take one look at the paper it's wrapped in and just want to puke -- so that was out too. I'm getting desperate  because he's hungry and I'm feeling guilty, so we call the one place left where you won't die if you eat the food. Next day I had to give up reading to atone and made homemade pasta.

12/04: -- by now I've read to page 232, and my status update said: "109 pages until the end. My brain hurts." Well, evidently my brain wasn't even functioning at that time, because there are 351 pages in my book so I was off by like 10 pages. I wasn't joking though. My brain really did hurt.  By now I also started feeling like the South Park kids in that episode where they're all playing world of warcraft and can't leave their computers so they get really fat (of course, while I'm reading this intently, my regular exercise has become a freakin' chore I just don't want to do).  I'm also neglecting things again.  Larry came down at one point during the day and asked me when the dogs had gone out last and I swear I couldn't remember.

 I'd looked in on the group at the end of the day to see how everyone was progressing, and the discussion about what the letters branded on one of the character's face meant had come to a close. My friend in the group says something along the lines of "well, we can all sleep soundly knowing that we've answered a few questions today," and I figured that she's so right -- not because I was thinking about questions answered, but because I was just exhausted from spending my days so focused on reading this novel. I mean, this is NOT the easiest book to read because it's pretty philosophical and you absolutely must pay attention to language use in this novel, and on top of that, it's emotionally draining to get through scenes of scalping, wanton violence and murder, etc.

12/05 -- no updates, but  as it happened, I reported back to the group that morning in response to the "sleep soundly" post,  that

"I'm giving the book a pass today. I didn't sleep soundly -- I was dreaming of being in Texas in the desert and seeing St. Elmo's fire, so I think I need to walk away for a day."

It was true. Instead of a horse, though, I was in a car and on the side of the car was a huge red white and blue logo in the shape of the state of Texas and as I was being driven through, all kinds of horrible stuff was going on all around.

I also noted that

"I can't remember a book that has so gotten under my skin that it reproduces itself in nightmares. And it wasn't even the violence -- I've been thinking about it all morning and it was more my ongoing idea as I've been reading that the landscape in this book reminds me of hell. I'm not religious at all, but dreaming of being in hell is never a good thing. "

Let's just say that I've read books that were so creepy that I couldn't get to sleep -- but this nightmare thing was new.

The weekend comes along now, and so I actually need to spend time with my spousal unit who has to leave Monday for a week, so I read a little but not until Sunday. That night I had to go to a neighborhood Christmas party and that day I realized just how far I'd let myself go being stuck in this book for so long -- I went to the grocery store and bought Nestle's pre-made refrigerator cookies, stuck them all on 2 baking sheets and threw them in the oven. That was my contribution. I love to cook, but I had absolutely zero energy ... I just wanted to read.  I went for an hour or so -- thankfully they put desserts in the back room so I didn't have to claim ownership. The store-bought cookies remained anonymous.  So - at the same party, someone asked me what I was reading and I opened my mouth to say Blood Meridian but I was afraid she would ask me what it was about and I didn't want to go there.

12/08 --
My coffee pot died this morning.  My faithful workhorse grind-and-brew Capresso coffee maker just quit working after seven years, so now I'm down to the pod machine. That is not real coffee by any stretch of the imagination.  The day started out poorly. I made a note about it on Facebook because my friends and family know that coffee for me is the elixir of life. Yes. A first-world problem, but still.  I need coffee when I read.

I shouldn't have spent the entire day reading with no one here to give me a reality check. Larry left in the morning, but not before telling me that a guy from A-1 leak detection is coming on Thursday to take a look at our pool to see if he can find and fix the leak, and that I needed to fill it on Wednesday.  I knew deep down that I would totally forget and the guy would show up so I actually had to write down on the calendar for Wednesday that I needed to fill the pool and at what time.  Otherwise, and I swear this is true -- he would have shown up Thursday probably to a completely empty swimming pool.  Also, to prove that I could actually get away from the book and do what needed doing around here, I threw a load of laundry in the washing machine. It was still there when I went to bed that night. Ah, but that was the day when I started the dreaded chapter 22, which was so disheartening I had trouble sleeping that night. Laundry getting moldy in my washing machine was nothing in comparison. I forgot to eat today.

12/9 -- Today's evening update entry reads

"Today chapter XXII damn near did me in. I have to say, this book is so incredibly outstanding - but probably the most emotionally pulverizing."

 I wake up and remember after wondering where the hell's my coffee maker that it no longer exists. I walk to the pod machine (it's in this little niche where there used to be a wonderful huge pantry, but no, the former owners of this house decided to make it a stupid and useless butler's pantry) and open the coffee pod drawer and it's filled with Larry's latte pods, some decaf espresso and then paydirt -- "real" espresso so I fix that. Gross. I can't take the coffee situation any longer so I decide to do something about it. . Like getting takeout, that's easier said than done where I live.  The only place to buy a coffee maker without driving 20 minutes is the local grocery store. Have you ever seen the selection of coffee makers at your local grocery store? I hadn't either.  My choice was Mr. Coffee 4-cup brew or the 12-cup model.  So I decide on the 12-cup and put it in the basket. Taking it out of the cart to put it up onto the checkout counter thingie I twisted my back somehow and it was all I could do to get home and throw on a heat wrap so I can make it through the day. I was supposed to go to lunch with my friends but now I'm sort of stuck at home.  So instead of feeling really awful about missing lunch, I think "oh cool. I can finish the book today!"  which is terrible, because the purpose of the lunch was to help cheer up a woman whose  very young son had just passed away.

That final chapter was just so draining and downright depressing that at some point during the day, I posted to the group

"Can we read like "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm" or its equal next?"

 By the end of the day I only have 4 pages to go ... but I can't take any more so I have to stop reading.

12/10: "marked as read."

Up at 4:30 a.m. and enjoying my coffee, although I must say that Starbucks Rwanda Rift Valley is less than perfect  through a Mr. Coffee machine. I look over at the table (which once again, now that Larry's not here. looks like the good old world of warcraft station) and the book is beckoning.  I can't do it. I haven't had enough coffee yet to get through the horrors of those last four pages.  Later I go out and turn on the hose to fill the pool, setting the timer on the microwave so that I won't forget to turn off the water in my reading haze because I would have.  I finally have enough guts to get started on the book and I finish the last chapter. Then I puzzle through the epilogue, filling more pages in my notebook, and  adding even more questions I want to bring to the group.  I must say, I would have done a happy dance after having finished it but a) it's not that kind of book and b) if you've read it, the words "happy" and "dance" just don't sit well together, especially in the last chapter.

I'm glad it's over, but now I'm sort of feeling like I'm suffering from book-related PTSD. I can't explain it any better than that. The killer part is that reading it was the easy part -- now I have to go through and put things together in my head and relive it all over again.  But it's well worth it. It turned out to be the epitome of book excellence.

This Dark Road to Mercy, by Wiley Cash

9780062088260
Wm Morrow, 2014
242 pp

paperback

my copy from the publisher, thanks!

The premise of this novel  is a really good one. Two little girls, Easter, twelve and Ruby, six, are taken into foster care at a place described as a facility for youth at risk when their mother dies. Their dad, ex-minor league baseball player Wade, is long out of the picture, having earlier signed away his parental rights. Now he's back again and he wants his children back. He tries to do things above board, but of course, that doesn't work, so he feels his only recourse is to take them.  But he's got a huge problem: while he's on the run with the girls, trying to keep them together as a family and to be a dad,  someone with a financial motive who also wants revenge is hot on Wade's trail, and so is the girls' guardian-ad-litem, an ex-cop whose past continues to haunt him. Yet, even with such a good premise behind this story, there was so much potential for depth here that just wasn't brought out in the telling.

My main issue with this novel is that  I think the author did his readers a disservice by shifting points of view among three different characters. The most poignant voice of the three is Easter, coming across realistically as a twelve year-old girl trying to make sense out of a world that's been upended for her and her little sister more than once. It is really her story -- left without a mom, she's now in the hands of a dad she really doesn't know, and on top of that, she's got her little sister to think of.  Through her voice it becomes obvious that Wade has no clue about how to raise children -- that he wants them because they're his and in his mind, family should be together.  The author's really done a good job with her -- so why move from viewpoint to viewpoint? The story would have been much more powerful, and the theme of the "emotional pull of family" as described on the back cover would have come across so much more powerfully if we saw this story through Easter's eyes.  Brady, the guardian-ad-litem, has his own past issues, and despite his breakup with his wife who got custody of their daughter, he's a good, attentive dad with a kid who has had a happy childhood. The third perspective, that of Pruitt who's after Wade for a combination of personal and monetary reasons, just takes the reader through a long and violent journey that keeps Wade and the girls on the run.  I get that the reader needs the backstory, but still ... I was so taken with Easter that I couldn't wait to get back to her chapters.

I went into this book without any expectations, but in my opinion, there's a lot missing here. As just one example, the reader is introduced to the girls' mom Corinne pretty much just as she's dying from an apparent drug overdose.  We learn later that she met Wade in Alaska, they fell for each other, and ended up in Gastonia, North Carolina, where Wade played minor-league baseball. There's no mention of how she got to such a low point that Easter is reluctant to even call 911:

"I knew how people would think of us when they came inside in a few hours to get Mom and take us away to wherever we'd be going. they'd see that we didn't have any furniture except for a plastic deck chair and two folding chairs that you might take to the beach. And they'd see that me and Ruby didn't have beds but just slept on mattresses on the floor that had mismatched sheets on them. They'd know that I' called them from the corner store because we didn't have a phone, and they'd see that even if we'd had food we didn't have no clean plates to eat from."

Basically, we have no idea what's happened -- and it might have made a difference in whether or not I would have  rooted  for Wade to succeed. Was she a bad mom? Would the girls have been better off with their father?  We don't know.  For that matter, we know very little about Wade,  except that he grew up in North Charleston, played baseball for a while, then got involved in some shady doings.  We know that he's back for another chance at being a dad. That's pretty much it.

Finally, although Wade ultimately steps up to the plate (pardon the pun) and shows how much he cares for his girls, there just isn't enough emotional tug that develops from him  to have made me cheer or clap or say "hey, way to go - now there's a great dad."  Frankly, I had zero sympathy for him at all -- I wasn't, to use the stock phrase, all that much invested in his character.

However, let me say that while this book just wasn't a good fit for this reader, it's getting screaming good reviews everywhere -- people are loving it. There I go swimming upstream again --  I just wanted more depth where I felt there wasn't very much.  I will say, however, that his A Land More Kind Than Home looks really intriguing, so I am definitely planning on picking up a copy.

**********

I read this book for the lovely people at tlc book tours, and I seem to be the last stop on this tour. However, if you want to check out what other people said about this book, you can click here. 

A Replacement Life, by Boris Fishman: I liked this one!

9780062287878
Harper, 2014
336 p.

ARC from the publisher, thank you!

So, I went to get publisher info (ISBN, # of pages, etc) from Amazon and I must say that I was floored by the negative reviews of this book.  In my opinion, they are largely uncalled for, but hey - chacun à son goût, as they say.  Personally, I had a great time with this novel and have already recommended it to a number of people; I've also put it on the list for  my book group to read in September when we return from our summer hiatus.  Obviously, I liked it.

Slava Gelman comes from a family of Russian immigrants who had settled  in Brooklyn.  He'd made a conscious decision to "become an American," to leave his grandfather Yevgeny's  "neighborhood of Russians, Belarussians, Ukrainians, Moldovans, Georgians and Uzbeks"  and set his sights on working for  Century, a longstanding and prestigious magazine, "older than The New Yorker and, despite a recent decline, forever a paragon."   Staying in the neighborhood would keep him among the ranks of those who   ". . . don't go to America," except for the DMV and Brodvei," or who "shop at marts that sold birch-leafed switches"  to "whip yourself in the steam bath and rare Turkish shampoos that reversed baldness . . ."  but this is not what Slava wants. He had to leave, in order to

"strip from his writing the pollution that repossessed it every time he returned to the swamp broth of Soviet Brooklyn."

In short, to focus on his writing for Century, he had to get away, to "Dialyze himself, like Grandmother's kidneys."  So it's off to Manhattan and a sparsely-furnished, affordable studio apartment.  As he's about to find out, getting away is not so easy.

from NY Daily News

As the novel opens, it's July, 2006, and just after 5 am, Slava  is surprised by the ringing of the telephone.  It's not  because it's so early, but rather because no one ever calls him, not even his family, since he'd "forbidden" them to call. He doesn't answer it, but the second time it rings, it's his mother telling him that his "grandmother isn't."   She'd died alone in the care facility.  He hadn't seen Grandmother Sofia for about a month, and now she's gone, and as his mother puts it, it's the family's "first American death."  After the funeral, Yevgeny asks him to write a narrative that would allow him to collect reparations as a victim of the Holocaust. He hands Slava an envelope, addressed to Sofia who was registered at  Yad Vashem  in Jerusalem. When Slava notes that this was for his grandmother, not his grandfather, his grandfather tells him to make it up.  As he states,

"Maybe I didn't suffer in the exact way I need to have suffered ... but they made sure to kill all the people who did. "

Eventually giving in, Slava starts thinking about all of the things that his grandparents  never told him, and how he really knew nothing about his grandmother's life and all she'd gone through.  What little he does know goes into Yevgeny's narrative, and the rest he invents but makes fit the story.  His work is so good that word spreads, and Yevgeny pimps him out to write other narratives for friends.   Each one builds a little more on the made-up, missing details of Sofia's life, and Slava begins to find it easier to lie, to fabricate, to make stuff up.  He gets so good at it that he even starts doing it at his job at Century  -- and it also spills over into other parts of his life as well.  However, writing these narratives produces more than just a few unintended results for Slava that he never could have predicted.

A Replacement Life is a book that shows, in part,  that life can't  always be measured in terms of absolute principles of black and white, true or false, good or bad. It's also a story about family relationships and cultural ties, history, and the Holocaust. To his credit, while the Holocaust is a very large part of this story and while Slava writes of terrible things that happened then in his reparations narratives, for the most part Mr. Fishman keeps the terrors in check so that they don't take over the modern-day story.  There are also a number of comical set pieces in A Replacement Life that made me laugh out loud,  especially when it came to the older folk in this book and the insider look at the Russian-Jewish  immigrant culture. As far as the reparations fraud angle, Mr. Fishman knows of which he speaks: I looked this up and discovered that last year, judgments had come down in a real fraud case that netted the perpetrators around 57 million dollars.

One of the most common themes in the less than complimentary reviews is Mr. Fishman's writing style. I don't understand why -- even in my own casual reader sort of way, I found it very easy to read in terms of writing and style, and I easily picked up on a number of literary references here.   Mr. Fishman obviously enjoys playing with language and playing with other writers' words and ideas and in doing so, has created something very different.   Considering that this is his first novel, I think he's done a fantastic job. This is a book I can definitely recommend.

My thanks once again to the publishers, and to TLC book tours for including me!

A very brief and intentionally vague look at Andrew's Brain, by E.L. Doctorow

9781400068814
Random House, 2014
224 pp

arc from the publisher -- thank you!

"Pretending is the brain’s work. It’s what it does. The brain can even pretend not to be itself."

Let me just say at the beginning here that I loved this book, but I didn't realize how much I liked it until it was over.  Add this one to your list of most-unreliable-narrator novels, or just to your list of books you should definitely read.  It is a novel filled with surprises, the entire book  a conversation between Andrew, a cognitive scientist whose life up to this point has been one of inadvertent disaster, and a psychotherapist/psychologist/shrink to whom he tells his "not pretty" story.  Or maybe not, depending on how you choose to read it.  So -- this post won't be a standard book discussion, but more my reaction to the novel, since it is really one of those books where the reader makes up his/her own mind about what's actually going on. Or not. Plus, it would sort of be unfair to spill its contents -- doing so might throw prospective readers into major spoiler alert territory.  I'll say this: Andrew's Brain is something very different than anything I've seen before. Forget the usual linear narrative format, and forget any kind of basic quasi-understanding normally provided by the author that all will be explained.  The book focuses on how we view brain and mind, memories, free will and fate, truth and deception, and overall how we see ourselves. At the same time,  Andrew muses about  the mind as a "kind of jail" for the brain, which according to him, can often pretend to be one's soul, posing the question of one's ability to actually know and understand one's self.

Reading this novel took me on an interesting ride. The narrative started feeling way too random and repetitive at times, and while my normal thing to do when I read a novel with an unreliable narrator is to try and figure out what's really going on,  this time I started getting frustrated and felt like giving up.  But then I thought, this is E.L. Doctorow, an author I've been reading for years, so there's got to be something here I'm missing.  So midway through, I started completely over, relaxed, and changed my own way of thinking about the whole thing.  Suddenly the randomness and the flashes of repetition  made sense, as I  came to realize  that this book is offering  an opportunity to look through a window at  how this person's traumatized brain works, making for a much better reading experience and allowing me to become more comfortable with what was going on here. 

Andrew's Brain is definitely a novel where a)   the reader is left to judge for himself/herself just what might be  going on during these conversations, and b) you have to think outside of the box, freeing yourself from whatever expectations you might have as soon as you open the book. With apologies for being so vague here, I don't want my take on it to ruin anyone else's appreciation.  This novel is getting very mixed reviews, but I found it intriguing and I had a lot of fun trying to figure things out after I'd finished it,  coming up with several different interpretations of what I'd just read, all of which made perfectly good sense to me. It's often funny and is populated by some very interesting characters here and there; at the same time, it can be downright heartbreaking.

You can find professional reviews that will tell you more,  but I'd strongly suggest not reading them. If you must, however, I  like the approach taken by the writer at The Daily Beast so I'd recommend that one. My thanks to the people at Random House -- I've given my ARC to another reader and bought a real copy of this novel to revisit later.  The challenge of going  through it again is just irresistible.

another oldie: *The Origin of the Brunists, by Robert Coover

0802137431
Grove Press, 2000
originally published 1966
441 pp

paperback

"...there is a logic to everything ...even the irrational..."

 I loved this book.  I'm going to read the sequel, The Brunists' Day of Wrath, when it comes out in 2014 from Dzanc books -- I don't want to wait until March, so close on the heels of finishing the original novel, but well, I suppose I don't have much of a choice in the matter. As the book blurb on the back cover notes, The Origin of the Brunists won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for Best First Novel, but imho, it certainly doesn't read like a first novel.

At its heart, the book is an account of the rise of a religious cult and the resulting religious fervor coming on the heels of  a terrible mine disaster, but really, that statement is way too simplistic.  It begins with a prologue as the people in the cult, known as the Brunists, have gathered the day before the second coming on a hill they've named the Mount of Redemption.  A terrible event occurs, one that goes on to find its way into the very legends, myths and art of the religion.  This part is related by a new convert, who seems slightly confused.  The rest of the novel reveals what happened leading up to that event and beyond, beginning with the disaster at the mine, an event which will ultimately leave an entire town and several lives in chaos. 

The Brunists take their name from a coal miner named Giovanni Bruno, who just prior to the disaster has been getting a lot of crap from fellow workers to the point of making him cry.  Another victim of hazing is a new guy who is saved by a miner named Oxford Clemens (his friends call him Ferd), and off the two of them go to have a quiet smoke.  Lighting up sets off an explosion; in the confusion down below, a group of miners got lost and then  barricaded themselves to wait for help. Bruno is with them, but off on his own; the others die, and Bruno is saved, although pretty damaged by the carbon monoxide.  Another miner, the Reverend Ely Collins of the Church of the Nazarene, is also killed, but had written a note to his wife Clara and daughter Elaine that Clara takes as a message that reveals the day of the second coming. She also hears that Ely reportedly saw a white bird, "like a dove,"  in the mine just before the explosion.  Bruno is in a coma, but when he wakes up (still damaged), he mutters some strange words about a white bird and a visitation from the Virgin Mary in the mine.  While Clara is convinced that Ely was sending her some kind of message about "God's final judgment," another person is concerned that she never received advanced warning about the disaster from her guide Domiron, who allowed her to communicate with "higher forces." This is Elaine Norton, a substitute teacher who has been kicked out of a few towns after townspeople started noticing her strange preoccupation with teenaged boys. Elaine has notebooks dating back years filled with Domiron's communications; now she believes that they were forced to leave their last town for a specific purpose. She becomes involved with Clara, Bruno and Bruno's sister Marcella, as do a few other of Clara's friends and a lawyer who's into numerology named Ralph Himebaugh -- who become the founding members of this new religion. Chronicling it all is Justin Miller, a former hometown athlete who'd been brought back to the town to run the newspaper.  Justin tends to see everything as "a game," and while researching the Brunist story that he knows is going to make him a lot of money, he falls for Marcella and comes up with a plan to "rescue" her.  The new Nazarene reverend Abner Baxter is suspicious of the Brunists and gets things stirred up; the town banker enlists the help of some of the disaster survivors to form a Common Sense Committee in the wake of rumors of the mine closing to try to keep a lid on things so that the Brunists don't drive away potential interest or business for West Condon's future.  All of these people and their stories (including Baxter's kids who form their own group called The Black Hand) come together at the Mount of Redemption, coming full circle back to the beginning of the novel, and then a little beyond.

With lots of humor interspersed throughout the book, this is one of the craziest novels I've ever read. Aside from the new religion, which imho isn't the real focus of this book but rather the centerpiece around which the characters react, the author really gets into small-town life and minds, the workings of power and politics, and how seemingly "normal" people can get caught up in their own various forms of madness and mania.  I'd say it's  a novel about the people of West Condon much more than anything else.  The author is a genius when it comes to the characters -- and it's really incredibly tough to believe that this was Mr. Coover's first novel.  It does take some time and attention to get through, not because it's difficult to read, but because the author so carefully and slowly develops the  frenzy that occurs not just among the Brunists, but the craziness occurring  throughout the entire town. It also shows that no matter what sort of community these people find themselves in, even in "A community of good will,"  everything eventually comes down to matters of self interest -- a very non-idealistic view that makes this book well worth reading.  Definitely recommended.

*Messiah, by Gore Vidal; *Survivor, by Chuck Palahniuk

We're finally moved in upstairs again since the remodel (yay!), so  I can find everything once more and now I actually have time to get back to the books about fictional cults I've set aside to read this month. I think I'll be carrying the list into December, because there are quite a few more I want to get to.  For now, here are two incredible novels that I most highly recommend.

Up first: Gore Vidal's Messiah.


9780141180397
Penguin, 1998
originally published 1954
256 pp

paperback

"If this thing spreads it will become organized. If it becomes organized, secondary considerations will obscure the point."

 If ever there was a reason to take a break  from reading what's on the New York Times bestseller list or  from current fiction, this book is it.  Going onto the favorites list for 2013, this novel is simply amazing.  Considering it was first published in 1954, it's surprisingly current and definitely way ahead of its time.  In this book, a new religion is born, and a simple message offered by a charismatic young man becomes organized, publicized, bureaucratized and ultimately bastardized before it encompasses the entire non-Islamic world.  It's highly satirical, funny in a dark humor sort of way, and makes you appreciate how perceptive this author must have been, considering all of the events coming out of  messianic cults over the last few decades.

Eugene Luther (which is actually Gore Vidal's real name) has been living in Egypt for the last fifty years under an assumed name.  He is working on an account of "that original crisis" that sent him there, which began when he was introduced to a former embalmer by the name of John Cave ("a pair of initials calculated to amaze the innocent").   Luther meets him through Iris Mortimer, a woman to whom he was introduced by another character, Clarissa.  On a visit to California,  he first hears Cave speak at a small gathering, and somewhat "against his will" Luther realizes that he was totally absorbed.  As Iris notes, "There's something in oneself which stirs and comes alive at his touch, through his agency."   Cave's message is relatively simple: "it is good to die."  This was the sole vision of John Cave, at first anyway; everything changes when Cave is put in the hands of  publicist Paul Himmell and his erstwhile partner, Jungian analyst Dr. Stokharin, and Cavite Inc. is born. It's Iris who notes that

"a society which knows what we know, which believes in Cave and what he says, will be a pleasanter place in which to live, less anxious, more tolerant." 

Himmell puts Cave on television and his popularity soars -- but to Himmell and his investors, Cave has become a product. While Luther has misgivings about the whole religion phenomena, telling the Cavite Board of Directors that they will

 "... do more harm than good by attempting to supplant old dogmas and customs with new dogmas. It will be the same in the end, except that the old is less  militant, less dangerous than a new order imposed by enthusiasts,"  

he readily accepts being drafted to supply background on Cave, to give him a "respectful ancestry," and soon he is also drafting dialogues, supposedly containing doctrine that becomes the basis of "Cavesword," the new religion. Millions of people are enticed by Cave's TV presence, and Cavesword spreads like wildfire, despite threats posed by leaders of Christianity, and despite Luther's growing misgivings.

But Cave sells -- and  becomes even more popular when Cave, a natural recluse,  is kept away from crowds allowing a mystique and mythology to grow.  It isn't long before Cavesword spawns centers in all major cities run by Residents and Communicators; nonconformists are "swayed" toward Cavesword in these places; eventually they become centers where practitioners can commit suicide.  As the story gets closer to why Luther is living in Egypt under an assumed name, it also starts taking on even more frightening tones.

This is, of course, a barebones outline of plot; this is another one you really can't get a feel for without reading it, but Messiah is simply put, an outstanding novel.  It seems to parallels the rise of Christianity, including the dissenters, the overlaying of old traditions to make new ones, the schisms, and mythologies that grew out of historical reality.  It examines the relationship between postwar American anxieties and the need for some kind of larger-than-life solution to offer people beyond the old, superstition-based religions.  It also looks at television's ability as the ultimate medium of persuasion -- considering that this book was written in 1954, that's an incredibly farsighted vision on Vidal's part.  But really, the best thing about this book is the realization that comes to Luther as he comes to understand his real role vis-a-vis  John Cave; sadly it's at the end so I can't really spill it.  It is however, a revelation that had me thinking about this novel long after I'd finished it -- in fact, the same is true of the entire book.  There is so much more to discuss, but if I wrote all I really wanted to, it would be more like a paper rather than a review.  Messiah is also first book I've ever read by Gore Vidal, and I absolutely love the way he wrote -- so much so that I've already picked up two more of his books.  It's as good or better than much of the fiction coming out currently, so if you're into great writing, excellent plotting and a story that causes you to sit and mull over what you've just read, you really can't make a much better choice than this one.  It shouldn't be pooh-poohed just because it's nearly 60 years old ... you'd think after reading it that the author somehow had access to news of the future.  Superlative. That's my final word.


Next:  Survivor, by Chuck Palahniuk

 9780385498722
Anchor Books, 2000
(originally published 1999)
289 pp

paperback

"You're going up and up and up and not getting anywhere. It's the illusion of progress. What you want to think about is your salvation." 

Going from Vidal's sublime Messiah to Palahniuk's ridiculously sublime Survivor isn't such a great leap, really.  There are a few shared ideas between the two books, for example, the importance of television as a medium for publicity and maximum exposure, the "messiah" as commodity in the hands of publicists and agents, and the reimagining of historical fact into a mythology designed for public consumption.  At the same time, only Chuck Palahniuk can write like Chuck Palahniuk, throwing in some very pointed barbs at American lifestyles.  As I noted somewhere, this book has some very disturbing scenes, but god help me, I couldn't help but laugh.

If you haven't yet read this novel, you might get a little confused like I did when I opened the first page. I thought my book had been screwed up in the binding process -- it starts on page 289, with chapter 47.  It's gimmicky, but it really does work.  Survivor is the story of Tender Branson, who, when we first meet him, is on an airplane minus passengers and pilot, the former having been deplaned shortly after takeoff and the latter having parachuted after giving tips to Branson about how to keep the plane in the air after the pilot jumps, the amount of time before all four engines flame out, etc.  Branson is the sole occupant of the plane, and is now telling his true life story to the airplane's black box which will survive the inevitable plane crash.  He wants to get it clear right away that he is no murderer; getting from the beginning to the end when he finally reveals the reasons behind clearing his name is the journey the reader makes through the novel.

And what a story it is.  Prior to sitting in the cockpit, Branson's adult life was one as a "full-time drudge," and part-time god."  His day job was slaving away at housecleaning for wealthy employers, guided by a day planner, so that at any given hour of his workday, he and his employers know what he's doing. He's interrupted periodically by calls from his boss, who asks him questions about such topics as how to eat lobster correctly at an upcoming dinner, which forks to use, that sort of thing.  Tender Branson is a whiz at home economics; he spent his life being schooled in running the perfect home.  He is also, as we discover shortly after meeting him, a member of the federal Survivor Retention Program, which affords him a caseworker with whom he meets each week, a tiny apartment with a shared hallway bathroom, free government cheese and a bus pass.  Branson grew up in the Nebraska church district colony of the Creedish; at age 17 he was baptized and sent out as a labor missionary.  This was the common practice of the Creedish; all boys but the first-born sons (all named Adam)  went out into the world to work and shared the name of Tender. The girls who were not chosen as wives for the first-born sons went out to work as well, sharing the name of Biddy.   Back home, the Adams and their wives had children, children and more children, and the children spent their lives learning a particular trade.  There were rules for living on the outside, though -- no dancing, no listening to broadcast media, and the biggest one of all was this one:

 "If the members of the church district colony felt summoned by God, rejoice. When the apocalypse was imminent, celebrate, and all Creedish must deliver themselves unto God, amen."

While Tender Branson is cleaning grout and getting bloodstains out of leather, the word comes that the Creedish in Nebraska have been delivered; he is taken into the Survival Retention program so that he doesn't off himself.  There are rashes of suicides among the survivors, and at some point, Tender becomes the only surviving member of the cult (well, as far as the authorities know), and thanks to a savvy agent whose job it is to make cult suicide look "fresh and exciting every time around,"   is turned into a new messiah for the people.

As Tender's lifestory is recorded for posterity, the author takes potshots at different facets of American culture that blend into Tender's experience.  For example, while being refitted as a "new guru" for people who need to "make sense of their risk-free boredom of a lifestyle,"  he climbs the "stairmaster to heaven," and is wardrobed, told what to say, and pumped full of botox, steroids, drugs etc in order to make him media perfect. As his agent tells him,

"Nobody wants to worship you if you have the same problems, the same bad breath and messy hair and hangnails as a regular person." 

Sitting in the cockpit, Branson reflects that "Reality means you live until you die...The real truth is nobody wants reality."

There are also riffs on diagnosing yourself via the DSM with the disorders of the day, things people pray for here combined into his "Book of Very Common Prayer,"  people being so busy with working and making money that they don't have time to enjoy their gardens, but one of the biggest ideas that comes out of this story is based on how to find salvation in the face of  boredom that comes from sameness  and having no control over your own life.

As I said earlier, it's not all funny, because there are some pretty tragic things described in here, but I defy anyone not to laugh while reading this book.  Fantastic novel -- if you haven't read it, go and get yourself a copy soon.  I love Chuck Palahniuk because he's such a great satirist, expressing questions about life in terms everyone can understand and recognize.  Another one not to be missed. 

book discussion: At Night We Walk in Circles, by Daniel Alarcón

9781594631719
Riverhead, 2013
384 pp


arc - my thanks to the publisher and to LibraryThing's early reviewers program

"...the play is different every time."

Some time ago I read this author's Lost City Radio, and loved it. Absolutely. Now he's back with At Night We Walk in Circles, and I loved this one even more. The blurb describing what's on the inside doesn't even come close to describing what actually happens in this character-based novel, which I would say focuses largely on identity, how past events come to be re-imagined, and the effects of blurring the thin line between reality and artificiality.

Set in a South American country somewhere (likely Peru based on a number of clues in the story),   the novel opens with the story of Diciembre, a theatrical group formed by a group of "radical students" at the city's Conservatory during the war. Their slogan was "Theater for the People," and they often went out into the "conflict zone," where'd they perform plays.  It was risky, but then again, being in the city also had its hazards: Henry Nuñez, the lead actor and author of the play The Idiot President, was arrested and sent to prison. His crime was one of "incitement," and he remained there from April through November, 1986, incarcerated as a terrorist.  From his prison cell, he made a radio broadcast, a "jailhouse interview" heard by many people, but by one person in particular who at 8 years old, was so impressed that Henry became his hero.  This is Nelson, who became intrigued about the occupation of "playwright," and who already had been making up his own dialogues about a girl with whom he was secretly in love, sometimes acting them out for his brother.  His brother explains that a playwright is someone who makes up conversations and calls them scripts, much like what Nelson had already been doing. It was then that Nelson decided that he wanted to do that as well -- it became his dream to become a playwright.

As the wartime curfews continued, Diciembre staged all-night shows such featuring such entertainments as "pop reworkings of Garcia Lorca," "stentorian readings of Brazilian soap opera scripts," and "anything that kept audiences awake and laughing through what might have otherwise been the long, lonely hours of curfew." As the 80s closed, and into the 90s, the troupe was a shadow of what it used to be. Things were changing in the country as well -- the capital had been "reimagined" in such a way that made it seem that no "unpleasant history" had ever happened there.   In  2000, the anniversary of Diciembre's founding prompted some of its "veterans" to mark the event somehow, and they decided it might be fitting to take The Idiot President on tour out in the countryside.  Henry was brought in from his now-quieter life to participate, "but only if a new actor could be found to join." His friend Patalarga is on board, and enter Nelson, now a theater student at the Conservatory, who ultimately gets the third part.  The timing is perfect and Nelson needs an escape, especially since  the woman he loves has set up house with someone else, and since the death of his father, he can't leave mother for his long-awaited trip to the US.  As the men wait at the bus station before they are taken away, Henry tells Nelson that they're "entering the world of the play now...its constructed  universe," and that he should "give in to it." As the narrator tells us, the beginning of the tour is  "when the trouble began." 

We learn all of this background and more  from a first-person narrator, who has only appeared some 13 pages into the book (well, in my ARC copy anyway).  His very presence signifies that something is not right -- that something has gone wrong with Nelson. Later, we also discover that he is trying to "decipher the mystery" around a "brief encounter" between himself and Nelson, by interviewing

 "his confidantes, his lovers, his classmates, people who'd seen fit to trust me, as if by sharing their various recollections, we could together accomplish something on his behalf. Re-create him. Reanimate him. Bring him back into the world." 

Using these interviews and words from Nelson's journals, he tries to piece together the chain of events that started with Nelson going on a tour for a play with two other actors, because he feels some kind of bond with Nelson.   The thing is though, that each person he interviews knows Nelson from a different vantage point, from  different situations in which Nelson has played different parts, so that eventually we find that there are  a number of different Nelsons.  How then is it possible to know the true Nelson? Is it possible at all?  Even he is aware of himself as an actor -- at the last drink he had with his brother he came to the realization that everyone, including himself, is always acting. When all is said and done, and as you come to the end of the story, you start to wonder if even Nelson really knows who he is any longer.   What I find striking about this book is that it is built around actors, their roles, performances, scripts and improvisations -- all tools used to create  illusion.

Re the title:  As Henry asks earlier, when he talks to the narrator about walking in circles while in prison,  "how do you set a play in a world that denies your characters any agency?"  I'm not exactly sure, but I think this statement may provide some clue.

 At Night We Walk in Circles is definitely not easygoing as far as the reading.  This book could be the easily be included in  a literary  or  history course, one that spends most of the semester analyzing it. All the same, I love this writer's work and this one I can only describe as hypnotic and haunting, mixed with a touch of very dark humor at times.  Highly recommended -- take it very slow, though.  It's not a book you want to rush through.

The Circle, by Dave Eggers

9780385351393
Knopf/McSweeney's Books, 2013
491 pp

hardcover

"...any information that eludes us, anything that's not accessible, prevents us from being perfect."
                                                  -- 287

Let me start here with how I felt about this book when I turned the last page and closed the cover. The words "holy sh*t" came out of my mouth, and I was tempted to go disconnect myself from every social media site I'm on. As far as the book itself, I didn't think it was perfect; in fact, it is a bit contrived, but still a very timely read, one that gave me a case of the willies.

The story focuses on Mae Holland, who when we meet her, is working in a dead-end job until recruited by her best friend Annie, who works at a tech company called The Circle, and is in the upper echelons known as the Gang of 40, "privy to its most secret plans and data." One of the founders designed the Circle's "Unified Operating System," which

"combined everything online that had heretofore been separate and sloppy -- users' social media profiles, their payment systems, their various passwords, their email accounts, user names, preferences, every last tool and manifestation of their interests."

He also invented TruYou, "one account, one identity, one password, one payment system, per person," where you had to use your real name, which "tied to your credit cards, your bank," and your personal identity, basically did away with online anonymity. TruYou is presented as a system beneficial to the customer, since he/she wouldn't have to remember multiple user names, multiple passwords, etc. In fact, everything that the company does is "beneficial" in some way, for example, microchips embedded in bone to prevent kidnappings or to easily locate missing children, other measures designed to prevent crimes, and technologies to make everyone and everything accountable via transparency provided by built-in cameras. And all the while, The Circle monitors everything that's going on, boosting the slogan "All that happens must be known." Its point of view is that privacy begets secrets, secrets beget lies, lies beget impropriety, and that the only answer is to be completely open about everything. In short, "If you aren't transparent, what are you hiding?"

As Mae gets into her job, and gets sucked into the community aspect of the company, she not only gets swept up in all of The Circle's potential, but also develops her own unflinching desire for success, doing all that she can to make herself well known. Soon enough she quickly becomes a rising star with designs on getting into the top ranks.  Now, if this book were only about Mae and her ambition, well, that story's been done already, but The Circle offers a look at how promises of utopia can easily turn into a nightmare. The company has designs on making things so that eventually "all government and all life" would be "channeled through one network," with no escape from being "tracked, cradle to grave." In the world of The Circle, there will be no protection -- the by-then transparent politicians who "owe their reputations" to this company could be easily ruined by getting involved against it.

While I don't think this book is so great on character development or prose, it made me stop several times while reading to think about what I'd just read. I spent a lot more time thinking about it when I was finished, mainly about what the repercussions could be if technology induces us to give over all of our private information to one single entity that controls and monitors all information flow and all of our personal activities, vs the benefits that the technologies might offer. Yes, this book is didactic, and yes, there's zero subtlety here in terms of the message that is meant to come across, but it is definitely a thought provoker.

This book has gotten incredibly mixed reviews, so it is one that should be judged not by other-reader opinion, but by your own reading of it. I've seen everything from "this book is utter crap" to someone calling it essential reading, so the range of reader response is huge. In my opinion, it's a very timely book to be reading right now, and if it gives you a case of the willies, it's because the future described in here should scare the crap out of you.

ps/ after reading this book, I bought a brand-new copy of Orwell's 1984. 

The Abominable, by Dan Simmons -- an old-fashioned, rollicking good yarn

9780316198837
Little, Brown and Company, 2013
663 pp

ARC - thanks!

The Abominable ends my month of spooky Halloween reads, but this one fooled me.  I'm not quite sure where I got the idea that  The Abominable was going to be a horror novel, because as it turns out, it's much more of an old-fashioned adventure tale. The basic story is pretty good when all is said and done in that escape-fiction sort of way, complete with a group of climbers who find their way to Mt. Everest, a missing man last seen on the mountain, a beautiful young heroine, and a secret that someone is willing to kill to keep buried.  My only real issue with this book is that there is so much detail here that I felt like I had to put on my slogging boots to wade through it,  but more on this a little later.

The Abominable begins as Dan Simmons, in a nice metafictional twist,  finds himself in 1991 having to come up with a "new package" of novels for his publisher.  He really wants to do something on Antarctica, and as it happens, a friend of his wife's knows someone who went there with Byrd in the 1930s.  Simmons journeys to an assisted-living home to talk to the man, Jacob Perry, who is dying of cancer.  While he interviews him, Perry tells Simmons that there's a story he's always wanted to write -- not necessarily for publication -- just so someone will read it.  Leaving Perry with a Moleskin notebook, in 1992, Simmons gets word that 90 year-old Perry is dead, and is surprised to hear that Perry left nothing for him.  Flash forward to 2011, and Simmons receives a box of notebooks in the mail;  after having gone through them, he decides to publish Perry's manuscript, a "strange and oddly beautiful testament."

The story moves from 1924, where we meet the three main male characters on top of the Matterhorn, through 1925 where our erstwhile heroes find themselves climbing Mount Everest. It is while they are atop the Matterhorn in 1924 when the three, Jacob (Jake) Perry, Richard Deacon and Jean-Claude Clairoux, learn about Mallory's death on Everest.  As they are making their descent, Deacon asks them if they would like to accompany him on a "fully-funded expedition" to climb Everest in 1925, an expedition consisting of only the three of them.  They agree to go, then realize that the funding will be coming from Lady Elizabeth Marion Bromley, whose sons, Charles and Lord Percival (Percy) were once playmates of Deacon's when they were children.  It seems that Lord Percival had himself disappeared on Everest in 1924, although he was not a member of the Mallory expedition, and he had made no attempt to climb or camp with them.    A witness had reported that Bromley and an Austrian man, Karl Meyer,  were swept up in an avalanche, but Lady Bromley is just not certain that Percy is really dead.  Although she knows that it's highly unlikely he's still alive, she will  give them the funds and logistical help they need to find out why he was in Tibet to begin with, why he was on Everest, and why was he with Meyer when he died.  There's only one condition: she wants a family member, Cousin Reggie, to go along, and to keep track of all of the money.   If Percy's dead, she wants proof; if he's alive she wants him home.   Perry, Deacon and Clairoux eventually find themselves in Darjeeling, home of Cousin Reggie, where they begin what will be the climb of their lives.  But needless to say, there are a few twists along the way that none of them had bargained on.

While I was reading this book, I kept thinking what a cool movie this book would be based totally on plot and characters.  It's very much reminiscent of old-fashioned adventure stories á la Indiana Jones (not the same plotlines but in that same vein), the kind where you just have to let that suspension of belief slip into play.  The characters may come off a bit stereotypical and even larger than life, but you know, this book is just a lot of fun, and should really be read not in comparison to the author's other works, but as a stand alone kind of rollicking good yarn.  Truth be told, I had trouble putting it down when I had to, that's how much I enjoyed it. But sometimes my fun was interrupted by the constant descriptions of ice climbing, mountain climbing, and the equipment necessary for both, as well as the numerous and lengthy passages describing the ice-covered cwms in Wales, the Tibetan landscape and pretty much each camp-to-camp ascent on Mt. Everest itself.  I think it could have benefited from some more judicious editing, but if I stack the sheer reading fun against the bog and slog, the fun comes out on top, even though I kind of figured out part of the plot way ahead of time.  I do think the Amazon reviewers who gave this book one star because it wasn't at all like  Mr. Simmons' past works aren't being quite fair, and while everyone's entitled to his/her opinion, they're being extremely harsh in this case.

If you're ever in the mood for an old-fashioned adventure yarn, you'll definitely find it here.  I try really hard not to judge one work of an author's on the rest, and to take each one individually on its own merits, and in this case, I found myself really liking the core story in  this one despite its flaws.  It's not a great work of literature, just fun, a story for a rainy day or two.   It won't be for everyone, but then again, which book is?

a special thanks to Em.

*Dissident Gardens, by Jonathan Lethem

9780385534932
Doubleday, 2013
384 pp

hardcover
 
"To be, unlike Rose, married to her last instant to the first and only man who'd had her.  Yet at the same time to discover, as did Rose, but to bear the knowledge more capably, that every cell is infiltrated in the end." 

Dissident Gardens has definitely earned a place on this year's list of my favorite books.  Not that I got every single subtlety or nuance in this novel -- I'm sure I missed a lot -- but I do love irony, and this book is filled with it.  I spent a long time on this novel, reading incredibly slowly to get the most out of it that my casual reader self is capable of,  and I was hooked from page one.  I'll say this up front:  it's not a novel complete with traditional plot or a story that moves cleanly through linear time/space, so if the lack of the normal doesn't do it for you, you'll probably want to pass. For me, it's all about the characters, the ideas, and the writing.  And I absolutely loved it.

Just very briefly, because this book is so difficult to summarize and because it's a book a person should really read for themselves, the novel examines three generations of the family and the legacy of Rose Angrush Zimmer,  Jewish, single mom, community-minded activist and ardent Communist, the consummate “Party-made New Woman, unforgiving in her nature and intoxicating in her demands, her abrupt swerves and violent exclusions.” It spans several decades, moving through the history of various radical movements and changing faces of ideologies, all the while building on each generation, their worldviews and their reactions to what's happening in their world. It's also a novel examining relationships, especially, but definitely not limited to,  the one  between Rose and her daughter Miriam.   There are three generations at the heart of this book, but it is also peopled with a variety of other colorful characters.

Rose Zimmer, who at the beginning of the novel is being tossed out of the Communist Party for having slept with a black detective who lives in her neighborhood of Sunnyside Gardens,  is the mother of Miriam, who quits college and Rose after discovering the Greenwich Village scene at seventeen.  She's also an activist in her own right, tries hard "not-to-be-Rose," but

 "mothered in disappointment, in embittered moderation, in the stifling of unreasonable expectations, in second-generation cynicism towards collapsed gleaming visions of the future, the morose detachment of the suburbs, Miriam was in fact a Bolshevik of the five senses.  Her whole body demanded revolution and gleaming cities in which revolution could be played out, her whole character screamed to see high towers raised up and destroyed." 

While Miriam tries to do her own thing, she's still deep down very much Rose's daughter; she also loves her. It's an odd relationship -- she hates Rose, yet she loves her, for example, in

  “the ceaseless arrangement of mother and daughter coiled in fury at each other yet still bulwarked together inside this apartment against the prospect of anything and anyone else outside.”

Miriam marries Tommy Gogan, a staunch pacifist and Irish folk singer who with his brothers plays the club scene; she changes his life when she convinces him that he needs to go solo and write more political songs, starting with catching the life stories of the downtrodden in his music.  Together they live in a commune housed in a brownstone, participate all the sit-ins, boycotts and protests of their era, and have a son, Sergius, who they send to a Quaker school in Pennsylvania where he lives a more quiet life and learns the guitar.  His birthright, as the author notes, is "full hippie and half secular Jew." When Sergius is older, he looks to Cicero Lookins, a protégé of Rose, a "child-prisoner of her stewardship,"  who is trying to exorcise her from his mind as well, a college professor and son of the black policeman Rose had slept with in the 1950s. Sergius wants to connect with his now-dead mother, whom he last saw as a little boy,  by trying to find out about her from people who knew her.  Woven in and out of their stories are the stories of others in their respective orbits, as well as a look at a New York City over the decades.

Dissident Gardens is a story of  ideologies, revolutionaries and radicals and the disappointments they often bring, held fast by some while often collapsing in the bigger scheme into dreaded anachronism as the world moves on,  and it's a story about a family matriarch and how a piece of herself and her legacy, even if unwanted,  continues through each succeeding generation and in the lives of others she's touched.  I absolutely loved this book, and from a casual reader's perspective, the only negative thing I really have to say about it is that while I enjoyed how the author just lets loose sometimes and allows his characters their respective spaces to muse and ponder, sometimes these parts get boggy and detract from the topic at hand.  Otherwise, this is truly one of the best novels I've read this year.  I loved the characters, the ideological backdrop, the mother-daughter struggles, but most especially I loved watching the movement of history and change.  There's so much in this book that as I noted, it's difficult to summarize or to even provide a feel for what you might expect here - so it's a book best experienced rather than read about.  It's also a novel that is getting mixed reviews -- but a review, no matter who writes it, is a matter of opinion, and mine is that it is most incredible. Highly recommended.

Letters from Skye, by Jessica Brockmole

 9780345542601
Ballantine, 2013
304 pp

ARC from publisher -- thank you!

If you've ever been involved in a long-distance relationship, kept up mainly via correspondence with the occasional visit, then this book just might appeal.  As it happens, I met my spouse via the internet about sixteen years ago.   We stayed exclusively on line -- no telephone calls or visits -- for months.  Neither of us was really looking for anything except sharing online great conversation and a sarcastic  sense of humor that showcased our mutual propensities for geekdom and snark.  Once we met, we felt like we knew everything there was to know about each other -- and a year and many plane rides later, the fat lady sang on the long-distance aspect and here we are today.  In Letters From Skye, it's roughly the same sort of scenario, done through letters and the occasional telegram.  There are two different time periods at work in this novel: first, from 1912 to shortly after WWI; second, 1940.  The time periods are interwoven -- the earliest letters and correspondence are between the two main characters David and Elspeth; the later ones are between Elspeth's daughter Margaret and others.  In terms of how to describe it, I'd say that the book is probably most suited to romance readers, although the marketing blurb on the back of my book says it was being promoted to historical fiction readers as well.  Not that I'm sexist or anything, but imho, Letters From Sky  falls easily within the category of women's fiction, and  while I'm not a fan of either romance or women's fiction, it's a light and easy summer read which I'm sure will sell very well to those who like that genre.

The story begins in 1912, when David, a young college student in Illinois, writes a letter to poet Elspeth Dunn to express his admiration for her recently-published book of poems. Elspeth writes back to thank him, and those two letters begin a correspondence that lasts for years, David telling her about his life in college, his girlfriend and then engagement, his problems with his father, and finally, his decision, after the beginning of WWI, to become an ambulance driver overseas to do something for the war effort.  Her correspondence is largely about her life on the Isle of Sky, a place she's never been away from.  As  you might guess, eventually the letters turn into something more, and with David in Europe, eventually plans to meet up are in the works. In 1940, Margaret, who works to help evacuate wartime children to safety, keeps a running correspondence with her boyfriend Paul and with her mother, who cautions her against getting too close to Paul during the war. The two threads merge when  Margaret finds one of her mother's old letters, addressed to someone named "Sue;"  shortly afterwards, Elspeth disappears without a word.  Her absence prompts  Margaret begins another correspondence to find out about her mother's early life, thinking that perhaps it holds a clue as to how to find her.

The idea behind the novel is a really good one and I could relate to the problems and frustrations of maintaining a long-distance relationship mainly by correspondence.  At the same time, I was a little disappointed because once things that I can't reveal cropped up, I figured out how things were going to go and it was just a matter of time just waiting out the obvious.  A few other things niggled:  first,  while David, Elspeth and Margaret take center stage, there were other characters whose contributions to the story  seemed just as important, but they have only more or less walk-on parts here which I thought was a real shame.   Second, thinking of the time period in which the letters between Elspeth and David is set, I had a very hard time imagining some of these conversations  taking place in 1912 -- like for example, Elspeth's response to an early letter of David's going off about women and motherhood.  And speaking of that, it seems like Elspeth's character started out strong, someone feisty and sure of herself, but as time went on, she became more overwrought and simpering, which just plain drove me crazy.  Sadly, while the author takes the time to talk about things like the blowing winds on the Isle of Sky and the beautiful artwork Elspeth's brother created in her mantel piece that incorporated local legends, I really never got that sense of place that transported me there.  And as much as I love historical fiction, this one leaned heavier on the romance and while there are a few decent descriptions of David's time as an ambulance driver during the war, there just isn't that much history incorporated into the story. 



To be very fair, this book is getting really high ratings and rave reader reviews, but as I noted, I'm not the best audience for this one.  However, this is the author's first novel, and I can appreciate all of the research and effort that went into its creation.  I'll recommend it as an easy summer read, and my guess is that it will do very well. 

*You Are One of Them, by Elliott Holt

9781594205286
Penguin, 2013
289 pp

hardcover

"I was partial to unhappy endings." 

Another debut novel bought for my summer readfest of peachy beachies, You Are One of Them is definitely something new and different. Ultimately I see it as a coming-of-age/self-realization story, containing an ongoing examination of friendship and loss,  loyalty and betrayal, set largely in the Cold War years but jumping on into the later 1990s. In this novel, defection is a key term, used in a political sense as well as an emotional one.  The story is told via first-person narrative from the viewpoint of  Sarah Zuckerman, presently in Moscow as a journalist.  While it's  not my favorite novel this year, it's definitely a good read and absolutely perfect for summer.

I said to myself: three days and you'll be seven years old. I was saying it to stop the sensation of falling off the round, turning world. into cold, blue-black space. But I felt: you are an I, you are an Elizabeth, you are one of them. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15211#sthash.DJKUqVbD.dpuf

Back in 1982 there was a little 10-year old girl named Samantha Smith, who wrote a letter to then General Secretary of the Communist Party in the USSR Yuri Andropov. She wanted to know if he was planning to vote for a nuclear war against the US.   Pravda published her letter, and some time later, she received a letter back from Andropov who invited her to come visit the USSR.  She and her parents went there in the summer of 1983 for two weeks, during which time they visited Moscow and Leningrad. Samantha also stayed at a Young Pioneer camp, where she made a good friend who spoke English very well.

from Wikipedia , Samantha Smith captured on a postage stamp

 After coming home and enjoying a great deal of press coverage as a Goodwill Ambassador, Smith and her father died in a plane crash two years later.  In You Are One of Them, set in the same time period and beyond,   two girls write a letter to Yuri Andropov -- and one goes to Russia.  That trip will have profound implications for the one left behind. 

Sarah Zuckerman has suffered a number of "defections" in her life -- starting with her sister's death.   In 1980, "the summer of the Moscow Olympics," and the subsequent boycott that signaled rising tensions between the two countries, she becomes friends with the little girl who moves in next door in the Washington DC neighborhood where she lives. To Sarah,  Jennifer Jones has a normal family life compared to hers -- Sarah's father had moved out a year earlier (the second defection).  Her mother suffers from all sorts of paralyzing fears, had panic attacks that could be triggered by mundane things, but most  especially by the thought of  nuclear annihilation, leading her to become an wholehearted anti-nuke activist and to convert their basement into a fallout shelter.  Sarah and Jennifer become best friends, doing everything together, and by the time they're in fourth grade two years later, both decide to write to Andropov à la Samantha Smith.  It isn't long before Jennifer is invited to the USSR, leaving Sarah behind.  After Jennifer's return, as the two girls get older, Jennifer becomes the popular girl while Sarah is once again left behind, and one day in 1985, in seventh grade,  Sarah learns that Jennifer and her entire family have been killed in a plane crash.  Fast forward ten years later, and Sarah receives a letter from Russia from a woman who claims to have been good friends with Jennifer during the USSR visit.  The woman invites Sarah to come for a visit to Moscow, and tells her she can organize a "special tour;" later, an email to Sarah in response to her questions asks Sarah how does she know Jennifer is really dead?  After all, in Russia,  "news is not truth."  As Sarah makes her way to and through Moscow,  she reveals the stories of the girls' friendship, her own life growing up, and ultimately what she discovers about herself during her journey.

There are some wonderful moments here, especially in the author's descriptions of Moscow (although I do have to say that if you've ever read Snowdrops by A.D. Miller, he does it much more vividly).  She is also very effective in linking together both personal and political suspicions on both sides during and after the Cold War.   Her best work, however,  is found in terms of Sarah's character. She comes across as a person believably pained, unmoored, filled with loneliness and loss, and exuding a kind of vulnerability that never lifts throughout the novel.  But somehow, I was left a little unsatisfied --  towards the end I felt like the author was rushing to get to the end of the story, and  after the big buildup of the girls' friendships during their childhood years, I'd expected much more in terms of the novel's climax, for reasons that I can't explain without giving away the show.  All in all, though, the book was a good summer read, one I probably wouldn't have picked up had it not been beach read season, but one that I'm glad I did.  Amazingly, it's the author's first novel, and one I can recommend, especially to readers who like keeping it casual. 

*Joyland, by Stephen King

9781781162644
Hard Case Crime, 2013
283 pp

paper

"...  when I'm blue --  when life comes down on me and everything looks tawdry and cheap, the way Joyland Avenue did on a rainy day --  I go back to it, if only to remind myself that life isn't always a butcher's game. Sometimes the prizes are real.  Sometimes they’re precious."

Joyland's Amazon page quotes author Stephen King as saying "I love crime, I love mysteries, and I love ghosts."

So do I, to a point.  Maybe when they're not all mixed together -- a crime in the course of a mysterious ghost story is okay, but a ghost in a crime story has never sat too well with me.  But a) it's summer and, more importantly, b) it's Stephen King -- so before even opening this book I already knew that there would probably be some kind of  supernatural element involved, making it much easier to  push the "suspend disbelief" button in my brain.  I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised -- along with the trademark supernatural elements, many of King's most common themes are here as well,  including small-town life, the loss of youthful innocence, the forces of good in opposition to the forces of evil, and nostalgia.  The novel is also permeated with a deep sense of melancholy and loss, but it does have a light touch of humor here and there as well. It's probably not what I would consider "hardboiled crime," which is Hard Case Crime's milieu, but the crime and the supernatural make a very cool frame for the story at the heart of this novel.


Devin Jones is in his 60s, looking back to 1973, which he calls "Devin Jones's lost year." He'd  lost his mother just four years earlier, and is still grieving.  Thinking about the spring of that year, the one he calls the last year of his childhood, he relates his vision of his future with Wendy Keegan,  "practically the girl next door."  In his mind, 

 "There would be a house on a lake in Maine or New Hampshire (maybe western Massachusetts) filed with the clatter-and-yell of a couple of little Keegan-Joneses, a house where I wrote books that weren't exactly bestsellers but popular enough to keep us comfortably and were -- very important -- well reviewed. Wendy would pursue her dream of opening a small clothing boutique (also well reviewed), and I would teach a few creative writing seminars, the kind gifted students vie to get into."

In short, Wendy is the lynchpin of Devin's imagined future happiness, a life that (sadly) will never be because shortly after that spring, she dumps him.  Plans to work together over the summer have changed so that they each take separate jobs away from each other, Wendy in Boston and Devin in North Carolina. Despite their two years together, Devin is still a virgin and  still very innocent for a guy of 21,  and for him,  it looks like his dream of sharing the view of Heaven's Bay from his window of his room at Mrs. Shoplaw's Beachside Accommodations and the room's big bed  will never materialize.  Wendy is rarely available for Devin's calls, or always too busy for them to get together.  Despite Devin's hard work with the carny folk at an amusement park called Joyland, "an indie, not as big as a Six Flags park, and nowhere near as big as Disney World," he's still mopey and mooning after her, and he's not ready to give up. Looking back on it, he notes that

“As June wore on, I started to understand that my relationship with Wendy was as sick as William Blake’s rose, but I refused to believe it was mortally sick, even when the signs became increasingly clear.” 

His friends Tom and Erin come to the rescue trying to wean Devin away from his broken heart and despair.  On a day off when the friends are acting like tourists at Joyland, Tom becomes convinced he's seen the ghost of Linda Gray, the young girl who was brutally murdered during a ride through the Horror House, leading Devin and Erin, a camera-wielding "Hollywood Girl," to become interested in trying to figure out who killed the dead girl.   As the summer winds on, Devin's life takes a few unexpected turns, putting him in various situations where his selfless, innocent goodness comes shining through; he also finds someone who can help him start to move past his pain.  As summer turns to fall, he's in place for the ultimate challenge, as only Stephen King can write it, between good and evil. 
 
Very cool book, although I have to say that for me the crime and supernatural aspects were secondary to Devin's story and Stephen King's writing.  It's the air of loss and sadness that made me look beyond these elements to the idea that "no summer is endless." This idea is something I can personally relate to -- and I love when a book can take me back into my own past.  In the novel, it's very obvious that as an older man looking back on his 21st year, Devin is still haunted by his feelings toward those he loved and lost during that very short summer at Joyland.  There are other things to like about this book as well  -- the carnies,  a strange group of people with hidden lives whose job it is to "sell fun," not unlike the unseen televangelist in this novel whose job it is to tout and sell religion, and other small-town America character types that somehow seem to make their way from book to book in Stephen King's writing.

While not my favorite of King's books -- The entire Dark Tower series claims that honor followed by The Shining and The Stand -- Joyland is a good read, perfect for summer.  Multiple reviewers have complained about the "deus ex machina" type ending, but I think if you look past the obvious, it's an appropriate way to finish out the story -- a way to say that goodness is always repaid in some form or another.  Don't let the mix of crime and ghost story get in your way of enjoying this book. I didn't.