Review: "Bunk" by Kevin Young

My one thought throughout reading Kevin Young’s nonfiction book on the history of the American hoax, Bunk, was what his take would be on the Jussie Smollet case from earlier this year and how that would fit into his narrative. I will try to remain politically neutral and judge this book on its literary merits, but with something so caustic it is a little hard to avoid such discussion. I won’t go as far as to say that throughout the books 450 pages (and more than a 100 more of notes and index) that Young seems obsessed with the idea of the hoax as another tool of white supremacy, but he does so at the cost of a few other interesting ideas he could have covered. Throughout the book, whether he is discussing P. T. Barnum, the godfather of the American hoax, the many cases of him putting non-whites on display such as Joice Heth, George Washington’s 161 year old nurse or the first ever “moon landing” in the 1830s, he never tries to explain why these hoaxes were believed, putting the blame entirely on the perpetrator and never on the public who wholly bought into it. It sounds harsh but at times his got to answer seems to simply be racism (but then again, that might just be what this books is and I might as well be complaining that their isn’t enough cake recipes). But amongst the activism, there are some good sections, such as the one of fake memoirs where he talks about how James Frey and J. T. Leroy crafted fake stories (and in Leroy’s case, fake authors) to great success. But overall, the book is a little long and quite repetitive, with an eye roller of a coda where you know who is talked about with typically unoriginality. There is an interesting idea here in the history and psychology of the hoax, but again, I do not think that was the book Young was trying to write.

Rating: 3/5

Review: "The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen

It has been almost exactly 10 years since I first read Jonathan Franzen’s game-changing novel The Corrections and after reading it a second time, it was like a whole new experience, as clichéd as that sounds. I don’t think it is the kind of novel a 21 year old can fully understand. There is a lot to enjoy as we watch the Lambert family succumb to their misfortunes over the course of 566 pages, but reading it at 31 it feels painfully real for anyone who struggles with this idea of family (so, everyone). It brilliantly catalogs the myriad of contradictions surrounding the idea of family: they are the ones we love most and our connections to them are tribal in nature and go deeper than any other we encounter in life, but rarely are these connections interrogated, rarely do they extend past our mere familial duty to our relatives and sadly, most of the time, the rift between loved ones is something that can’t be repaired no many how many Christmas dinners there are. With this novel, Franzen captured it perfectly with a compelling narrative that is sweeping yet intimate, sad and tragic but always hopeful. The book begins in the basement of the Lambert household where Alfred, the family patriarch, restless and confused finds himself in the basement, the ancient Ping-Pong table covered in postal detritus. He argues with his Enid, almost saintly in her hopeless optimism, about a letter from Alfred’s old job. It is a striking image of decay that lingers throughout the book, this once hopeful family, after many setbacks and disappointments, is messy beyond repair and ready to collapse. We are introduced to their three children, scattered all over the country each in their own private hell. There is Chip, the middle son who picks them up from the airport in New York. The least successful of the three children, Chip is a disgraced gender studies professor who becomes entangled in a plot to defraud American investors devised by the Lithuanian refuge whose wife he was dating. Gary, the oldest son, is a successful stockbroker, who’s on the edge of depression with a wife and three kids who are not helping him in the slightest. Denise, the youngest daughter, is a famous chef whose promiscuity and affairs with her boss and her boss’s wife cost her her job. The key to Franzen's genius is the many risks he takes throughout this story. His descriptions are rich in detail clever and very funny and he is so good that they rarely slip into a sort of gross parody of good writing. And some of the more crazy situations, such as Alfred’s fecal hallucinations, Chip’s drug trip and Gary’s home repair mishap, reminded me of similar scenes in Infinite Jest, where something so absurd is also very poignant and, underneath it all, very sad. The last section is an absolute beast and I think the book’s reputation depends on this one last Christmas, where the Lamberts decision, one a lot of people have to make, is rendered beautifully with a perfect last line. If you have not read this book, I urge you to do so. It’s as good as everyone says it is, especially reading it a second time. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Cherry" by Nico Walker

Cherry, the debut novel of Nico Walker and  one of the most talked about books of last year, also feels like one of 2018’s most divisive books after a few reviews I have read from people whose opinions I greatly respect, and it is due to its divisive nature that I found myself liking it so much. It is a story utterly free of any literary pretense whatsoever, running towards its ambiguous finish line almost purely on passion, anger, regret and a dormant sense of hope. But it is also a very vulgar book, one I was keen to enjoy wholeheartedly before my 20’s, with many scenes of transgressive behavior like graphic depictions of sex, violence, and lots and lots of drug use. It is one of two novels that came out last year that deals directly with the opioid crisis that is ravaging the Midwest, the other being Stephen Markley’s Ohio. I like both, but this is a different kind of book all together, feeling less like a novel and more like a thinly veiled memoir in story form like Mitchell S. Jackson’s The Residue Years. And this feels even more accurate when you look at the history behind its publication, which might add more to this book’s notoriety than I would like to admit (and my affection for it, since books by prisoners or about prison are some of my favorite kinds of books to read). The book’s narrator, and obvious stand in for Walker himself, seems to have sprouted up from nowhere when the book begins after a startling prologue. Not really and everyman or even a victim of circumstances (he’s decidedly middle class), he exists in a grey area, beset by disappointment and ennui, and when he meets Emily, the “one to break his heart”, he sense that his life has found meaning, but the reader and maybe Walker in hindsight from his jail cell, know differently. His love for Emily takes him down the dreary road of addiction, to a stint in the Army as a medic, back to addiction and finally to robbing banks, which is what put Walker in prison. It is catalogued in excruciating, sometimes frustrating detail that took some time to get used to, but it is effortlessly compelling once you do. What I found most interesting was each section share similarities that you would not expect, like how the section in Iraq and the section right after where Emily and the narrator are deep into their mutual drug addictions have an overstuffed cast of characters with shady motivations the reader is never sure because the narrator feels the same way, whether that be an order from a higher ranking officer or what the couple must do to obtain their next hit. The book is filled with memorable scenes that are still lingering in my mind, from the funny, like the section where the narrator’s testicles become contused, to the sad, like the scene where Walker describes what a few of his fellow soldiers do to rats, which recalled a similar scene in All Quiet on the Western Front and a scene toward the end where a fellow junkie brings a baby to a drug deal. It is all overlaid with this sense of longing and regret, a wish to right terrible wrongs and make up for lost time, which I hope the success of this novel does for Walker, who seems to have a bright future when he is released some time next year. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "The Octopus" by Frank Norris

Picking up any Frank Norris book feels like entering a world that is not only gone but also totally forgotten. Popular in his time at the turn of the 20^thcentury, his output is not looked upon too fondly in modern times due to his views on race and the blatant anti-Semitism in his work, but it is hard to look at the work of Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis and a lot of the best noir of the 1930’s and not see Norris’s strong influences, from his rich interpretation of the average person and their role in larger society to the grotesque hell he puts them through, Norris was born (and died, at the tender age of 32) way too soon. With The Octopus he is working with a much larger scale then he is with McTeague, which I read last year, this book being nearly twice its size. Through the bloody conflict, based on a real incident of a group of ranchers staging an attack on the government-backed railroad companies in Southern California in the 1880’s, Norris paints a rather brutal picture of progress while never once picking sides, casting both parties as equally greedy in pursuit of their goals. The cast of characters is rather rich, but sometimes one dimensional, with a few standouts being Anixter, one of the ranch owners, whose got the book’s most developed arc as he goes from selfish pragmatist to future father with something to fight for and something to lose and Presley, the obvious stand-in for Norris, whose didactic inner monologues divulge the book’s heart. It’s scenes are memorable as well, like the brutal one near the end detailing the horrid downfall of the family of a minor character and the ending itself which rivals McTeague in its ghoulish comeuppance of one of the book’s villains. A book with a dark heart but with an oddly hopeful message for the world at large, this is a strange, curious forgotten oddity from the early days of Modern America. 

Rating: 4/5