Review: "Hold Fast Your Crown" by Yannick Haenel

It is highly unlikely that I will read a more interesting and unique book as French writer Yannick Haenel’s novel Hold Fast Your Crown, and that is partly due to its last minute addition to my reading list. I picked it up having read no reviews or heard any press about it and it proceeded to wow me over the course of 332 brisk and enlightening pages. From its rich yet light prose, credit of which goes partly to translator Teresa Lavender Fagan (I don’t talk too much about translators in my reviews and I feel I need to remedy that), its loose structure and the constantly shifting ideas and enigmas that lave the reader guessing like the most hardboiled of mystery or crime thrillers, this is easily the biggest surprise of 2019. The book is told as a flashback with the unnamed (as far as I can tell) narrator recalling a time when he was crazy by introducing us to his obsession of choice, which is massive and most likely unfilmable screenplay about the life of American literary giant Herman Melville. Not a single producer is interested and his pitch about examining the “honeycombed interior of Melville’s head” does nothing to help sway them in his direction. And then Pointel, one of his contacts gives him the number of American film director Michael Cimino, known for winning big with his breakout film The Deer Hunter, losing big with his epic gaffe Heaven’s Gate and then falling off the face of the Earth until his death on 2016. Of course, the narrator thinks that Cimino is not only the best fit to direct his great white whale of a script, but is the only director who can do it justice. He manages to get a meeting with Cimino in New York City, where they share a night on the town, trade in esoteric worldviews and ending with Cimino’s promise to direct the movie. That is the bare synopsis of this scatterbrained enigma of a book. We learn of the narrator’s habit of watching movies in search of a holy deer, finding something close to that in repeat viewings of Cimino’s films and Apocalypse Now (which he watches at least once a day) his relationship with Tot, his neighbor, Sabbat, Tot’s Dalmatian, Pointel and Lena, who might just save him from himself. Thematically, I was reminded of various books, such as those by Herman Koch, whose undercurrent of menace flows through here as well and oddly enough Tim Lucas’s Throat Sprockets in how the book lays out cinematic obsessions that lay outside of respectable society. On the surface this looks like a dark book, evidenced by a grim seen near the end involving Tot and a hunting trip, but by the end I think it is a hopeful one, with a scene at the funeral of Lena’s long suffering and deeply religious sister being the book’s high point. And even if the writer is still crazy by the end, I get the feeling he has some newfound clarity. 

Review: 5/5

Review: "Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe?" by Brock Clarke

I have been circling the novels of Brock Clarke for more than a few years. I’ve read two of his short story collections and his four novels have been in my collection for as long as I can remember but I have never read them, but I think his new novel Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe? is a good representation of his work in the long form. Like his short stories, they possess a cozy sense of whimsy that I have come to associate with any writer hailing from New England (even Stephen King): larger than life portraits of quaint, quirky folks with undercurrents of tragedy and screwball comedy woven into the fabric of every sentence, and presented to us by a narrator both baffled by and an accessory to the strange story that follows. The eponymous narrator at the heart of this story fits that description to a T. Calvin, named after the religious icon his mother wrote an extremely popular book about, is 47 still living at home and reeling from the recent deaths of both of his parents. He has little time to mourn though because at the funeral, his mom’s twin sister Beatrice, whom Calvin does not remember at all, trick him into going on a trip throughout Europe that involves espionage, gerbil porn, an obsessed fan of her mothers and a chair belonging to John Calvin. The one thing you can’t call this book is boring. For a book I described as quaint there is a lot of action and wild scenarios, which I will not reveal here and while they are fun to encounter, they come really close to crossing the line of believability, especially toward the end as it pertains to one of the book’s big twists. But this is still a really entertaining book, shot through with bright, sincere optimism to go with its large heart. 

Rating: 4/5

Review: "The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill" by James Charlesworth

The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill, the debut novel of author James Charlesworth that works both in spite of and because of it’s glaring flaws. It is overwritten but beautiful because of it, its timeline is confusing but creates a strange sense of mystery to the book’s proceedings, and its central, eponymous character is so ghoulish, so outside the realm of reliability or sympathy that it works to the book’s advantage, making this trek across the middle of the 20^thcentury and the four battered lives of a relentless, merciless American man feel less like an indictment of traditional masculinity (as the book’s blurbs consistently point out) and more something to akin to the recent spat of art house horror films where nothing is more perverse or terrifying than the idea of family. I’ve read a few reviews not so kind to this book, but its oddball qualities and its dreamlike progression to an inevitable final act had me beguiled and consistently searching for answers, to the dark crazy heart of this dark and crazy story. The first fifty pages, where the life of the title character is laid out are the best part of the book, where we learn about GBH’s sad beginnings, the pressure his father put on him to always be acting, to always looking for a way to get ahead, his first marriage to the failed beauty queen Mary, the birth of his first two sons George Jr. and Jamie, Mary’s shocking act of self harm that signaled the end of their marriage and the chance encounter in the backroom of one of the first ever fast food restaurants that he, and everyone he told, feels is the key to his future success. It is the one section where we get to know GBH deeply and his Charlesworth only attempt to understand the character’s pathologies. The majority of the book takes places in the ashes of 9/11 as GBH’s four children, George Jr., Jamie and the twins from his marriage to Annabelle, Max and Maddie, navigate their shattered world as they are all headed for a collision course with their monstrous father, whose own well publicized immoral business measures have been temporarily forgotten in the wake of the towers falling. George Jr. is reeling from a divorce and the death of his daughter, Jamie is caught between a world of make believe and very real horror in sections riddled with paranoia and events and people who may or may not be real, Max, a pilot in Alaska, lives a lonely life in the wake of not one, but two separate manslaughter charges and Maddie eeks out a living as a Vegas hustler, still waiting for her friend, who disappeared a decade earlier, to come back. There is a mysterious package, a gun in a baseball bat carrier and lots of regret and resentment boiling to the surface as both past and present intermingle and the reader is left with a vague sense of what is going on but can easily feel great undercurrents of longing and hope in every phrase, even the corny final line. This might be a personal favorite, but it comes highly recommended from me. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Inland" by Tea Obreht

Inland, Tea Obreht’s second novel came out this year nearly a decade after her debut The Tiger’s Wife came out in 2010 and you can really see the years of hard work that went into this period novel where two separate storylines converge in a brilliant finale at the tail end of the 19^thcentury. It is beautifully written and never once feels inauthentic or read like a cheap knockoff and its best quality which I will get to in a little bit, in other hands would crumble quickly in lesser hand but here becomes its best feature and what I am sure will be what most people take away from it. Having heaped praise on it, it is not a perfect book, with the two sections never feeling complimentary narrative wise (although they do thematically) and the plot gets overloaded with details that get lost inside each other. The two main characters of the story that takes place in the untamed Southwest of 1893 are Nora, a woman trying to hold her fractured family together on a constantly threatened parcel of land with a missing husband and soon to be missing sons and Lurie, an orphaned immigrant from Turkey whose wild life, from grave robbing to bank robbing and finally becoming a fugitive on the run from the law. It is clear they both share otherworldly qualities in their ability to talk to the dead, with Lurie followed by those he’s known who have died and one he killed on accident, and Nora by Evelyn, her daughter who died young but has grown into adulthood in her mind. These stories are interesting on their own, but until the payoff near the end of the 370-page novel they rest side by side in unharmonious fashion. But that aside, this is one of the most interesting novels of 2019 from an author I’m glad I reacquainted myself with. 

Rating: 4/5

Review: "We Cast A Shadow" by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

It was really hard for me to fully grasp the ideas and themes behind Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s debut novel We Cast a Shadow, but one thing I was absolutely positive of was that I enjoyed the hell out of it. In fact, it is this very ambiguity that makes it so interesting complex and at various times disturbing. It is not as clear-cut as some critics might approach it and is thankfully treats its subject matter in a non-didactic way, which allows the characters became real and not just ciphers for a specific point of view and helps the reader buy in to some of the book’s more outlandish elements. Through the eyes of an unnamed black male narrator, a lawyer living in the near future, we see a skewed, cracked mirror version of our own world, with progressive ideals and historical hierarchies stacked on top of each other, colliding and creating a horrific mish mash of a culture where the top and bottom are indecipherable from each other, and no one knows if they are going backwards or forwards, least of all our tortured confused narrator, whose insecurities and cynicism he lays on the shoulder of his mixed race son Nigel. You know this book is offering something different in its first scene, where our narrator attends a company wide costume party, where he and the other two black employees subject themselves to various types of humiliation in order to save their job and get promoted. It is here where Ruffin’s brilliant eye for satire comes into play, how this world not unlike our own thinks it is moving forward, but here is ample evidence that it is not. Our narrator ends up keeping his job after a staggeringly humiliating action which he thinks might cost him his job, but he keeps his job and becomes entangled with Octavia, the head of the firm, a black woman who would be the paragon of success in any other book, but Ruffin perverts this ideal in brilliant ways with minor details, like the getaways she takes at an old plantation or keeping candy corn in an ancient African mask. Hesitant, our narrator accepts his new position and task to convince a local medical hospital to become a client of the firm, because it would mean he is one step closer to “helping” his son by getting him “demelinazation” treatment for his growing birthmark. In any other writer’s hands, this aspect of the novel would feel contrived and sloppy, but Ruffin takes a different approach, never referring to it in racial terms, and offering up valid points, at least in the mind of the narrator as to its desired outcome. The plot is loose, but it offers looks into the narrator’s past and why he thinks this way, a shady terrorist organization that once again would seem like the heroes in a different story but in this book their virtue is nebulous at best. Ultimately, though, this a novel of family and the sacrifices we make for them as well as a sort of hidden ode to individuality in a society that is always trying to put you in one box or another. 

Rating: 5/5