Review: "We All Sleep in the Same Room" by Paul Rome

The number of books that look and sound like American author Paul Rome’s debut novel We All Sleep in the Same Room is countless, so any writer wanting to approach a similar subject matter, that of an aging male, almost always white, seemingly successful on the outside but crumbling on the inside, his demons taking many forms such as drinking, infidelity and sometimes outward physical aggression, the writer must do something radically different to dispel any notions that they are barking up a tree that is already heavily populated. While this is not a terrible book: it has a few good scenes and characters that break through their built in stereotypes in surprising ways, there is nothing here I have not seen done before with more gravitas, more grandiosity and with tons more skill. Whether it deserves to or not, a book like this seems destined to be lost among identical titles. The aging white guy in this story of Tom Claughlin, a labor lawyer still trying to maintain the youthful, revolutionary enthusiasm for his job he’s held for decades, even in his 40’s. He has a pretty decent life in New York City with a loving wife Raina and a toddler son Ben. But a series of nightmares (all subtle and well written) based around the upcoming case of a fired Coney Island clinic receptionist and his dangerous flirtations with his young legal assistant Jessie bring forth a reckoning that has been building since Tom was a child. Nothing you see here is new, from the eventual romantic betrayal, to the crumbling marriage and Tom’s failure as a father: anyone whose read a lot can follow along in their sleep. What stands out are a few keys scenes, like one in a Central Park circus, another near the end at a gala celebrating the broken Tom and the strange final pages as well as his surprising characterization of Tom’s son, who in stories like these tends to become a periphery character, an empty symbol for the protagonists failure and impending doom. It is a bright spot in a book I can already feel slipping from my memory. 

Rating: 4/5

Review: "The Known World" by Edward P. Jones

At the risk of sounding cynical, I do not think that a novel like Edward P. Jones monumental The Known World would get much love in such divisive political times. It was published in 2003, which now seems like ancient history, and I’m sure even back then its ideas, its bravery and daring were something to behold and perhaps maligned. But what can’t be dismissed is Jones’ unparalleled empathy towards his wide cast of characters, his delicate prose and his ability to make this story move both backward and forward at the same time that, while it takes some time to get used to, once it does the true brilliant heart of this book shines forth, taking a footnote from the greatest stain on this country’s history and crafting a historical epic that stands at the forefront of a short list of the greatest American novels and is surely one of the best books of the century so far. That footnote, to put it bluntly, is the fact of freed black slaves owning slaves themselves. I do not know the extent to which this occurred (I don’t feel it is my job as a reviewer of mostly fiction), but within the context of this story Jones uses it to build a very elaborate world, ask tough questions and really look upon a time long since past with the eyes and the gentleness of a modern person. The book begins with the death of Henry Townsend, a freed young black man who owns a successful plantation in Manchester County, Virginia. This singular act and person acts as a sort of satellite that the other characters orbit around. There is wife, Caledonia, unsure if she has the will power to run the plantation herself, Moses, Henry’s first purchased slave and arguably the most central character besides Henry, a man who is tired of life as a slave (and more than a little jealous of Henry) and John Skiffington, the sheriff of Manchester County who is conflicted about his feelings toward slavery and his need to uphold the law. These are just a few of the large cast that make up this book, which, as I said, seems to be going both backward and forward. There are many times when the narrative will take a breather and zero in on a minor character, describing their future, good or bad, like the fate of Rita, one of the slaves who was a surrogate mother to Henry when his parents, Augustus and Mildred are freed by William Robbins, the most successful plantation owner in Manchester County but Henry is not and Alice Night, the book’s enigma, a seemingly crazed woman whose presence feels more like a one person chorus than anything else and who I think is the key to unlocking the book’s intricacies. I can’t stress enough how well this works, making for an intriguing moral dilemma where characters like Skiffington, his employees Harvey Travis and the Cherokee Odeon Peoples, villains in a another work are seen as conflicted, fully formed beings, more victims of their time than cruel monsters. Simply put, you’d be hard pressed to find a more worthy modern classic than this astounding piece of fiction. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Hardly Children" by Laura Adamczyk

I always go out of my way to read up on whatever is being published by the FSG Originals imprint. Whether it be good, like any of the books Frank Bill puts out or their startling nonfictions books like A Burglar’s Guide to the City or People Who Eat Darkness, to middling like Lindsay Hunter’s Don’t Kiss Me to Laura Van Den Berg’s The Isle of Youth, to disappointing like Dennis Mahoney’s Fellow Mortals or Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy. After a few hours thought, Laura Adamczyk debut short story collection falls into the latter category, with some really good short selections, but also some that were not that good at all. But like everything put out by this imprint it is interesting, unique and makes me question my preconceived notions on what novel, short story collection or a book of essays should be. These stories range from the creepy to the confusing, from frightening to frustrating, focusing on the horrors of adulthood, especially for those still seemingly stuck in the purgatory between childhood and the adult world. As always, I’ll pick out a few of my favorites. The first story, “Wanted”, only a few short pages, sees a disaffected adult woman finding a common bond with a young boy she meets in a public playground. There are wanted signs posted up, but the ending is not what you think, as is the case with many of these stories, a motif that helps some and hurts others. It helps the story “Danny Girl”, my personal favorite, about one woman finding her identity in decidedly amoral actions, but hurts a story like “Gun Control”, a dud of a selection that struggles for a purpose, fails and is totally tedious. A selection that rose above it’s strange, one-note premise is “Wine is Mostly Water” where a shiftless man takes a gig as the centerpiece of a weird art project that involves being hung from the ceiling. I’m not sure of it’s all supposed to mean, but it has hypnotic creeping dread that I won’t soon forget, which is how I would describe the collection as a whole. 

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Red Sky in Morning" by Paul Lynch

I predict that in a few decades, the novels of Irish writer Paul Lynch will be considered, undeniable, undisputed modern masterpieces. While they don’t pluck the right heart strings for me, his prose is simply unmatched and earns him rightly made comparisons to Daniel Woodrell and Cormac McCarthy: descriptions rich and hearty but somehow flow easily and smoothly even when they snuff out any resemblance of strong narrative clarity. And I think that is the point with his debut novel, which I just finished, Red sky in Morning and his two subsequent novels The Black Snow and Grace. These are old time tales of futility and violence, where the low down and dastardly are given, through seamless stream of consciousness passages, more eloquence and humanity than even they think they possess. A lot of the time it is at the expense of a really good and enthralling story, but the skill is simply unparalleled. The story begins near the middle of the 19^thcentury in Donegal, Ireland. Coll Coyle goes to confront the heartless landowner who is evicting his family and in a brief scuffle winds up killing him. With no choice, and with the terrifying and effective tracker John Faller only a step or two behind him, he leaves his family in the Irish countryside and hops aboard a boat to America, where he ends up working for the railroad. But Faller is not too far behind. As the book went on, each section had the unreality of an epic poem: weird character after strange encounter add up to quite an otherworldly experience that is welcome and scarily unfamiliar, whether it is the disease infested boat headed for America or a poorly lit tavern just before violence explodes. And despite the book’s tendency to over explain to the point of utter confusion, Faller casts a dark shadow over this book, and his presence, whether hanging Coll’s brother by his thumbs, forcing a drunk to dance for money or using a small child to shield himself from bullets, feels almost demonic, and is easily the most memorable item I will take away from this complex book. 

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Found Audio" by N. J. Campbell

One good thing I have found out as I have grown older is my openness toward new forms of storytelling continues to grow. If I had read N. J. Campbell’s debut novel Found Audio when I was 25 instead of 30, I’m quite sure I would not have liked as I much as I did. I don’t think I would give myself a chance to understand its ambiguity, its originality or its beating heart underneath its off-putting syntax and strange story structure. I’m finding myself okay with questions not being an answered and mysteries left unsolved, in both the books and movies I consume as well as the life I live and despite its small, swift 140 page length, that is exactly what this book tries to convey through it’s  mystical, sometimes dreadful and always enlightening story that is sure to invite comparisons to House of Leaves, the Patient Zero of the Russian Nest Doll Novel, with the initial narrative level being us, the reader, which keeps us questioning through the book’s many forms what role we play in the story, if everything, fiction and not fiction, we experience we are either dreaming or being dreamt of. Like Danielewski, Campbell puts himself in the story’s second level, claiming to have been assigned to edit the manuscript as an undergrad and he, in an almost unwilling gesture, introduces us to the third layer of storytelling , concerning historian  Amrapali Singh whose specialty is analyzing audio recordings with laser-like precision. She is handed a heft sum of money when a strange man drops off a series of recordings at her Alaskan office to be transcribed. This introduces us to the fourth level of the story, which concerns what is found on the recordings. The three that are presented to us are recorded by an unnamed American journalist, where he discusses his quest to find the “City of Dreams” a kind of nebulous entity that can mean many different things, can be in any number of places around the world and seems overwhelmingly impossible to find. The first section follows him to the bayou where he is writing an article about a snake hunter of mythic proportions named Otha Jackson. What begins simply enough quickly devolves into a fever dream of the journalist’s deepest desires, flashbacks to his time with his ex Bianca and a total absence of temporal logic. The second recording follows him to the stacked city of Kowloon before its fall. It deepens his search for this city that has an infinite number of names and lads him into the deserts of South Africa, where his reality is even more fractured and lands him in the hospital. The final section follows the journalist to Turkey to cover a legendary chess player who he has seen in his dreams. This section, the book’s best, offers the most concrete insight into this book’s strange logic, where the chess player might be a being greater than God or the devil, and reveals a truth the journalist may have known all along. It’s hard to out the bizarre nature of this book into words, it perfects its dream logic, existing on that ethereal edge between sleep and wakefulness, fantasy and reality. It casts an oddly satisfying spell and I’m better for having fallen under it. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "The Ecstatic" by Victor LaValle.

Over the past few years, American author Victor LaValle has become one of my favorite writers of genre fiction. His four novels are the perfect mixture of human drama and fantastical elements, the mundane and the macabre and the very emotional with the very scary. At this best he channels writers like Haruki Murakami, whose similar since of strangeness derives from a very human place where loneliness, social isolation and family tragedy manifest into otherworldly creatures, secret societies and that sweet spot where the line between painful reality and ambivalent fantasy is slowly frayed away. I’ve jumped around his books, reading them out of order and this year I came to his first novel, The Ecstatic. It is wildly distinctive with a gonzo energy that makes the nonsensical plot work against all odds, but it lacks the emotional core that made the three novels that followed stick so thoroughly in my memory. That is not to say that there aren’t parts of this book that rank among LaValle’s best. At the center of this novel is the horror-film obsessed Anthony James, a 315 pound 23-year old who has just been kicked out of college. It doesn’t help at all that he falls back into the clutches of his family, which include his mom, whom he might have inherited his possible schizophrenia from, his cantankerous younger sister Nabisase who keeps entering and losing beauty pageants and his Grandma, the most poorly defined character whose personality is made up from her extreme actions. The book is at its best when its plotless, cataloguing Anthony’s experiences with a local loan shark, his strange one night stand with a bookish overweight girl and his time in the cleaning business. It is when the quartet hits the road to accompany Nabisase to a pageant for virgins that book adds unnecessary plot details involving a religious huckster and plans to derail the idea of a beauty pageant. This section drags like mad, but the book makes up for it with an incredible, heartfelt ending that demonstrates why it is both easy and hard to root for the portly Anthony. This debut novel is minor work from an author whose stature in modern literature is only continuing to grow. 

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Fish in Exile" by Vi Khi Nao

There are so many indicators in Vi Khi Nao’s novel (if you can really call it that) Fish in Exile of it being a book I seem primed to dislike that the mere fact that I feel the exact opposite is a total surprise to me. It’s total lack of narrative cohesion; the unreliability of its characters and its inconsistent tone should be markers for a terrible reading experience, but somehow, I was hypnotized throughout its slim, swift 194 pages. It does not have to be cohesive, relatable or even make sense most of the time. This book, which straddles the line between this world and the mythological and where grief negates the laws of the natural world, is simply an experience, a mainlined emotional phantasmagoria that left me deeply affected, mesmerized and feeling better once the book came to an end. I will try to explain what constitutes a plot, but it is fruitless endeavor. A couple, named Ethos and Catholic, are reeling from the deaths of their two children (the details of which aren’t revealed until well over hallway through). They deal with this trauma in different ways, Ethos, the man, begins to collect fish and sees his children in them. Catholic, the female starts sleeping with a next-door neighbor and get her tubes tied. Even this is too straight forward of a description of this book, where a haversack is simply a place to put unresolved problems and conversations peel away layers of unease within a relationship until ugliness if the only thing left to cling too. A book like this is really critic proof, and any complaint I could lob at it could just as well be something praiseworthy in the context of the book and what I think it represents, and even that I am not too sure about. Whether your reaction differs or is similar to mine, this is a wholly unique book that dares you to make sense of it. 

Rating: 4/5