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Stuff Previous: Capsule Reviews of Books about the Vietnam
War Next: Recommended Books about Physicists
(Also have reviews of good non-fiction, nasty reviews of bad books, reviews of good physics biographies and memoirs and capsule reviews of books about the Vietnam War. My favorite poetry is by James Dickey.)
"Holy Cow! What kind of crazy people used to live here, anyway?"
Acts of the Apostles by John Sundman
Ever heard of John Gilmore, Ken Olsen and Christine Peterson? Then John Sundman's "nanoscopically famous technoparanoid thriller" is well worth your attention. Acts is a plot-driven, well-paced novel that still manages to get most of its electrical engineering and biotech details right. Unlike Tom Clancy, Sundman features realistic well-rounded characters (including many female ones) that you will still be able to tell apart after a few hundred pages. The realism of the characters stems from the fact that they are almost all based on actual people, many of whom you may recognize if you've been hanging about in Cambridge and Palo Alto for a few years. A portion of Acts is available on-line for free, but you should really be old-fashioned and buy the hardcopy. That way you'll be able to take the story with you to the bathroom when you get to the exciting part.
Ellis Island and Other Stories and A Soldier of the Great War, both by Mark Helprin.
The first volume contains my favorite short story ever, "The Schreuderspitze," while the second is a novel about WWII in Italy. Both works are about coping with loss by finding solace in the beauty of nature, and both are poignant enough to move many a reader to tears. "The Schreuderspitze" is one of the few works of fiction (along with Murder in the Cathedral, see below) that I have read more than one time as an adult. In fact, I have read it dozens of times. If you are obsessive about getting regular exercise, you must read this story! A Soldier of the Great War is marred by some implausible turns of plot, but the loveliness of the images (mostly avian and lunar) carry the reader easily over the few rough places. The descriptions of Alpine battles are gripping. Helprin is one of the few novelists (like my other favorite, James Dickey) who can describe adventure in as irreproachable a way as he describes interpersonal relations or scenery. Mark Helprin really is the writer that people wish Hemingway was.
Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd
This fascinating book takes place both in Cornwall and Africa (Mozambique? or Angola?) and contains insights about plant biology, human evolution, and the graduate school life. For sheer originality and interest of plot, Brazzaville Beach is a winner. The narration is fairly simple and linear, for people who prefer that type of thing. One wonders if this book is a roman a clef about the Leakeys, Goodall/von Lawicks or whoever, or if it is all fanciful.
By the same author, Stars and Bars was a great disappointment. Englishmen may be a bit overambitious trying to do a comic Southern Gothic novel. I should have been warned off the "zany frolic" quotes on the cover (but it was a library book). A Good Man in Africa, on the other hand, is a hoot. The comic struggles of poor everyman Morgan Leafy against the world's worst boss in utterly impossible circumstances will arouse amused sympathy in every reader. A Good Man in Africa has the hilarity that Stars and Bars aspired to but lacked.
The Second Coming by Walker Percy
Like many of Percy's books, a moving and sympathetic portrait of mental illness. Anomie portrayed in an appealing way. The Moviegoer by the same author is also one of my personal favorites but the characters in TSC are more sympathetic. Some other books by Percy are either too depressing (Lancelot) or too strange (Love among the Ruins) for my taste. The Second Coming is actually a sequel to The Last Gentleman, also good, and which should probably be read first.
Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone
So beautiful it hurts. One version of the truth about America, although not a book to read if you're already depressed. The long shadow of the Vietnam War is here described by a survivor in a way that's not easy to forget. Probably my favorite novel ever, although I reserve the right to change my mind!
By the same author, Outerbridge Reach, about a round-the-world sailing contest, is a bit grim and predictable despite being well-written. A Flag for Sunrise tells the story of a missionary's self-destruction in the midst of a guerilla war. This book is a surprising reminder of just how concerned we all were with Central America in the early '80s. Children of Light, Stone's novel about Hollywood, is a nasty story about self-pitying types who only get what's coming to them. A Hall of Mirrors has a similar plot (Boy gets half-crazed Girl, Boy loses her) but more sympathetic characters and a truly creepy New Orleans setting. The final over-the-top denouement is reminiscent of James Dickey's Alnilam in that the author seems to lose control of the plot a bit. I'm looking forward to reading Bear and His Daughter, the new book of stories.
Stone's most recent novel Damascus Gate is his strongest since Dog Soldiers. While the essential theme of a troubled seeker embroiled in problems he barely understands is unchanged, Damascus Gate benefits from getting out of the main character's head into modern Jerusalem and its environs. The book has too many subplots and is at times as bewildering as a shoot-em-up movie. Nevertheless the exotic religious elements and the description of the real suffering of real people in the Gaza Strip enliven what could otherwise have been an unfulfilling trip to the same old well. You get the feeling while reading these novels that Stone wants to shake Americans as a group out of their national self-absorption and complacency. While Stone's male leads still fail movingly and heroically, he does seem to be getting a bit more sentimental. Perhaps he's working up to a happy ending in his next book.
Swimming in the Volcano by Bob Shacochis
I initially picked this book up from the remainders table in Barnes and Noble because I thought it was Under the Volcano. Realizing it was not, I was about to put it back when I saw the jacket blurb from Robert Stone and decided to give it a try. The first chapter made me think I was rereading Boyd's picaresque Good Man in Africa, but from then on it was clear we were in Stone Country.
Shahochis' novel is the tale of a group of well-meaning expatriates coming apart both individually and collectively on a Caribbean island during the late 1970's. As in Stone's novel, there are drugs, psychoses, and innocent people getting hurt, but there's also stunningly lyrical writing to describe it all. Despite the fact that the main characters are affluent Americans, the island setting is much more than a backdrop. Shacochis' descriptions of the juxtaposition of affluence and privation, tropical paradise and third world hell, government corruption and social privilege all will stay with the reader long after the book is put down. Shacochis has got Stone's paranoia down, and a surprise ending too! I will certainly be looking for more of Shacochis' books.
Murder in the Cathedral and Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot
I'm not Catholic and don't care a bit about religion but the poetry and prose in these works draw me back again and again. When I am stuck in my writing, I reread some of Murder in the Cathedral or Four Quartets. They have never yet failed to get me going. Eliot's writing shows not only a mastery of the language but a deep insight into the ways that the mind wanders. His sensation of the ever-presence of the past is almost creepy.
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Morrison deserved to win the Nobel, and here's the proof. Yeah, I realize that lots of politically correct one-book-wonders have won, but Morrison is in a totally different category.
Song of Solomon is not as chilling or creepy as Morrison's Pulitzer-winning Beloved, but it's one of the more believable and uplifting works of literature I've read in a long time. Morrison is one of those writers who can reveal the very worst about the human condition and yet can deliver a convincing happy ending. Her latest, Jazz, is not her best.Regular folks can read these and enjoy, unlike As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury, which have to be read with a critical commentary in one hand. Light in August is one of the few books of reasonable length that I actually read in one sitting. I got so absorbed in it that I forgot to eat, drink or piss. My other Faulkner favorite is Absalom, Absalom, although of course many of them are very good. The Reivers and the Snopes Trilogy, for example, show that Faulkner also knew how to be funny.
The Goldbug Variations by Richard Powers
This book is a meditation on Bach and computer science and genetics, but it is an erotic work of fiction, not a collection of Scientific American articles. The Goldbug Variations follows Powers' interesting The Prisoner's Dilemma which is loosely about the ideas of game theory and nuclear testing. TGV, appears to be loosely based on the life story of John Nash, a founder of game theory who developed a serious mental condition and dropped out of sight for many years. TGV takes place in a graduate lab at the University of Illinois in the '50's, when the secrets of DNA are being unlocked, and in the present, in a computer lab in NYC. Like McPhee's books, I enjoy Powers' works just because they present scientists as flesh-and-blood humans.
Operation Wandering Soul and Prisoner's Dilemma are not as good. In the first, Powers' usually tortured writing style veers off into pure incomprehensibility at the end. I liked most of the book, but I could barely read the last chapter or two. Prisoner's Dilemma suffers from having a rather unsympathetic main character whose mysterious preoccupation turns out to be surprisingly banal. Nonetheless both of these books have more intellectual content and more provocative cultural commentary than a dozen other offerings at the local paperback warehouse.
Galatea 2.2 is Powers at his self-absorbed worst. The male narrator is unsympathetic, and as a woman (and therefore an expert), I'd judge him to be a creep. The plot of G 2.2 is very high-concept, and the narrative is full of annoying emotional string-pulling. It pains me to see that this novel appears to be largely autobiographical. Peter Matthiessen's Nine-Headed Dragon River is a similar bad book by a great writer.
Gain finds Powers in his finest form since The Goldbug Variations. In resonant parallel stories of the rise of an American corporation and the death of a cancer patient, Powers revisits several of his obsessions, for example the terminal illness of a family member and the significance of worlds fairs, both featured before in Prisoners Dilemma. Presumably Powers has chosen "Gain" as the title since "Loss" would be too obvious.
Don't forget to read Tom LeClair's fascinating critique comparing Powers, Vollmann and David Foster Wallace.
This is one of the most honest memoirs (or fiction?) I've ever read. Kingston grew up in a Chinatown in the Central Valley of California, born to parents who had been professionals in the old country and who ran a laundry here in America. Kingston's tale is a bit disturbing and shocking in its revelation of hypocrisy and mysogyny in her family's daily life; TWW is sort of the dark side of The Joy Luck Club. In Kingston's book, the families never reconcile and the children never get sentimental about their parents' quaint customs. While I don't think Amy Tan's books are bad, they certainly are sappier and less refreshing than Kingston's.
Not only are Bukowski's novels some of the funniest books ever written, but they are also some of the most poignant. Charles Bukowski was a gambler, a drunk, a whorer, a liar and all in all basically a bum, but he was also a fine writer who unblinkingly recorded what street life in his corner of LA in the '50's and '60's was like. His books tell the truth and are definitely not for the faint of heart. Happily they are not so gratingly confessional that they are painful to read, like bad teen fiction, but instead are plainly written. Bukowski didn't have much education, so his novels are not ones to enlarge your vocabulary, but they will certainly make you think. Some others (like Women or Hot Water Music) are a bit harder to take than the ones I've recommended but are also worth reading. Ham on Rye is another Bukowski favorite.
Smiley's novel is a wallow in the dark pit of human nature in the same way that Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is. As with McCarthy's book, all the characters get to reveal their evil side by the end. I think Smiley's novel is more powerful and disturbing simply because the events take place in such an All-American "family values" context, a striking juxtaposition also used by film director David Lynch. Somehow the ultraviolence in McCarthy's West isn't so shocking in the post-Peckingpaugh era, while farm life is usually portrayed in the media as almost unrelievedly wholesome.
The best aspect of Smiley's novel was the unpredictability of the plot. Since I had read that the book was based on King Lear, I expected about halfway through that I knew the ending, and was happy to find out that I was wrong. A Thousand Acres is more a fugue on the King Lear theme than a simple retelling, with the same characters but a different sequence of events.
I'm curious how Smiley's book was received in the farmbelt. Obviously the portrayal of life in Iowa was rather negative, and Smiley is a faculty member at an Iowa university. Did locals rail against Smiley and demand a fatwa against her ;-), or was her book received as an accurate portrayal of modern farm troubles?
Don't forget to read Tom LeClair's fascinating critique comparing Powers, Vollmann and David Foster Wallace.
The Rifles is a novel which mixes the story of Sir John Franklin's failed search for the Northwest Passage with an account of modern misery among the Inuit. In order to make the whole scheme completely overambitious, snippets about the adventures of a Vollmann alter-ego and the badly treated women in his life are thrown in.
This description makes the novel sound like an incoherent and self-aggrandizing pastiche, which it is not. In fact, Vollmann writes like a well-educated and well-traveled Bukowski, on the one hand dazzling you with insights about polar expeditions and natural history and on the other revealing painful and shameful self-knowledge. Vollmann is a prolific and talented writer who should link up with a stern editor. I look forward to reading his other books in the "Seven Dreams" series about the history of North America, especially since I am fascinated with polar exploration. (See comments about Arctic Dreams elsewhere.)
The first book in the North American history saga, The Ice-Shirt, concentrates on the Norse explorers and colonizers of Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland. The sections about Eric the Red and his forebears in Iceland are full of fascinating tidbits about Scandinavian history, Viking raids, and Norse mythology. As always, the descriptions of the frozen northern landscape are enough to make the reader shiver. The sections about Freydis Eriksdottir go on too long and get grotesque to the point of sheer silliness by the end, spoiling the book's somber mood.
The Vollmann masterwork You Bright and Risen Angels is an epic tale of an apocalyptic battle between intelligent insects and humans for control of the planet. The humans are all cold and scheming electrical engineers, harnessing the power of the electron to enslave nature, while the insects are loyal, loving and sympathetic. The antihero Bug is a human who has gone over to the side of the insects, while the antihero Parker is a plant who supports the engineers. The community of snakes, super-testerone-guy Wayne and the Great Beetle all play major roles. Wayne's semaphoric interrogation of an insect prisoner-of-war is alone worth the price of the book. Of course to describe YBRA in this way is to make it sound much more linear and plot-driven than it really is. In fact, it's a sprawling, sometimes frustrating mess, like Gravity's Rainbow, with flashes of bitter and sly humor worthy of Pynchon.
Vollmann's The Atlas on the other hand is simply a mess. There's an arty explanation about the palindromic organization of the stories in the book, but this exposition appears to be a weak attempt to cover up the fact that The Atlas is mostly a fairly miscellaneous collection of magazine pieces. While there are scattered passages of piercingly fine writing, particularly in the title story, many of the other chapters seem like outtakes from a better Vollmann book. Vollmann manages to infect the reader with his fascination with the unconquerability of the human spirit even in the very worst of circumstances, but the self-loathing and loneliness in The Atlas are oppressive by the end.
How Late it Was, How Late by James Kelman
This book is not an easy read: both the semi-fractured stream-of-consciousness form and the slightly opaque Glaswegian dialect take some getting used to. Stream-of-consciousness is rarely done well in my opinion, and there just aren't that many people's heads you'd want to spend hours inside. I didn't much like As I Lay Dying or the Benjy sections of The Sound and The Fury, but I found How Late it Was, How Late to be a page-turner.
The narrator Sammy, a mostly unemployed semi-alcoholic, is engaging but seemingly authentic. The plot jolts into action from the first few pages, when Sammy wakes up in jail, suddenly blind. As a newly blind man, Sammy's ability to understand the outside world is severely limited. His slow trip back to his apartment on foot is as harrowing a passage as any I've read. The stream-of-consciousness is in this section a very effective way of conveying Sammy's understandable despair and frequent spells of panic. The reader knows only what Sammy knows, except for a few places where an omniscient narrator comments. Sammy's growing paranoia and feeling of helplessness is vividly conveyed as the reader too is unable to decide whether he is going crazy, or whether they really are out to get him, or both. The jacket copy likens How Late it Was, How Late to Joyce, an obvious comparison, but the mood and the plot harken back more to The Trial. The difference is that Sammy is a more sympathetic and vivid character than Joseph K.
The book's ending is obviously intentionally ambiguous. I'd like to discuss Sammy's fate with anyone else who's read it.
Ratner's Star by Don DeLillo
Ratner's Star is yet another prodigious classic, with black humor and amazing accumulation of detail like Gravity's Rainbow, only with more of a plot. Like GR, Ratner's Star is difficult to follow at times, but it has an element of suspense that Pynchon's work lacks.
The story concerns the trials of Little Billy Twillig, a mathematical prodigy, as he wanders through "Field Experiment Number One" and "Logicon Project Minus One," two fantastic and strange scientific undertakings peopled by dysfunctional staff. The book is by turns disturbing and hilarious, much like the work of the master. Fourteen-year-old Twillig has been sent to the Field Experiment to assist in decoding a radio message received from extraterrestrials. Linguists, janitors, relativity theorists, Australian aborigines, brain surgeons, logicians and academic functionaries variously help and hinder the hero as he stumbles towards his destruction. DeLillo is no expert on the subject matter of science, but he completely understands the pomposity and unwarranted weirdness of its many of its most successful practitioners. Interludes about Billy's scary childhood in the Bronx are equally compelling. My only complaint is with the character of Robert Softly, Twillig's mentor, whose scenes are uniformly dull.
By the same author, a novel about Lee Harvey Oswald called Libra is unremarkable. White Noise similarly failed to hold my interest. The meltdown of the suburban family is no more interesting as presented by DeLillo than when portrayed by Updike or Heller. The novelty of the Airborne Toxic Event is not enough to relieve the slight feeling of tedium.
Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
This is a Great American Novel. It is also a replaying of the Cain/Abel East Of Eden theme, but SaGN is much better-written than the Steinbeck soap. The Stamper family characters will stay with the reader a long time after the covers are shut. Besides the characterizations, the story is full of humor and suspense as well.
A Hero of Our Time by Mihail Lermontov
A Hero of Our Time is a rollicking tale of adventure and romance, something of a 19th century Russian Les Liaisons dangereuses. The hero Gregoriy Pechorin is a conniving and cold-blooded cad, and simultaneously a soldier in the war to subjugate Chechnya, the same struggle that apparently has been going on ever since. While Lermontov's writing can be awkward, his story-telling is masterful. The translation by the Nabokovs is particularly charming.
The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez Reverte
Pérez Reverte seems to be the Spanish reincarnation of Robertson Davies in that he writes stimulating, intricate page-turners that absorb and tease readers without condescending to them. The Club Dumas resembles Davies' Bred in the Bone with its tales of forgery and deceipt in the fine arts, but the author's remarkable insight into the slick and fickle behavior of humankind harks back more to the Deptford Trilogy. While the text dwells on demons and Alexandre Dumas, the misadventures of antihero Lucas Corso are more in the picaresque Spanish tradition.
