Review: "More of This World or Maybe Another" by Barb Johnson

Barb Johnson’s debut collection More of This World or Maybe Another is the kind of collection that acts as apprentice work for a writer. It gets the person’s name out into the public, if you like it, fantastic, but it is nothing more than a sign of bigger things to come from a fresh face with great potential. The name Barb Johnson meant nothing to me a few months back when I was seeking out a new collection of short stories, and had picked this up and read the author blurbs from Donald Ray Pollock (who, if you read my reviews, knows a thing or two about the landscape of rural America) and Robert Olen Butler, who won the Pulitzer for his story collection A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain. With those two thoughtful recommendations, I bought this book, and while it does suffer from plainness and lack of narrative drive I found the story collections I have read this year one story at a time, I am glad Barb Johnson’s name and work is now a part of my memory, for when she really arrives with the great book I know she can write. I wouldn’t describe her fiction as country noir like Pollock, but she uses that same setting to tell a story with more pathos and melancholic nostalgia than violence and aggression. I was very impressed with the first story, which is the title story. It takes place during senior prom in a Louisiana high school during one girls discovery of her love for her female best friend, that reminded me of The Virgin Suicides, even with the bayou setting. These are linked stories, which I thought was the books major problem, it did so well describing high school and youthful hope, that I did not care about the lives these people would end up leading. It made the stories kind of small-minded in its focus on these four people, when I thought the school could be a great character in itself. Not a perfect book, but Barb Johnson is someone to be watched.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Atmospheric Disturbances" by Rivka Galchen

This may be a first for me as far as really liking a book, but Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, is a great book not because of the narrative behind it or the story it tells, but because of how strong the themes come through in what happens and what people do. Another 20 Under 40 writer, I remember her selection not being very good and a little too short to have that great of an effect on me. She is at least had a distinct voice that was new and fresh enough for me not to immediately connect her with a writer from a different generation, and I have nothing but respect for her. The story just did not do it for me. Having said that, Atmospheric Disturbances, was a book that I was looking forward to reading. It had a cool premise that promised intrigue and Murakami like searches for missing girls. I flipped through it, and found the interesting topography a little excessive, but sure as hell not like the kind found in a Foer book. I started this book, like I do all books, wanting to like it, but did not have the investment in it like I would have a writer I have read before. It is the story of a psychologist Dr. Leo Liebenstein, who comes home to find that his wife Rema has disappeared, and has been replaced by a simulacrum, a being just like her in every way. Determined in his knowledge of this imposter, and his desire to get his wife back, he goes to her hometown to find answers, and is thrust into a paranoid world of weather prediction which alienates those around him, even his fake wife. At first, I thought it was a little dense, even for it’s average size of 250 pages. I found that I was bogged down by the constant litany of weather and psychological jargon that I have no interest in. it lasts throughout the whole book, and gets a little tiring even with the constant chapter breaks. But I also found out that it was kind of supposed to be convoluted. Galchen is interested in how cold facts and information can coexist with real human feelings that are simple and truthful. And by the end, I found this books main theme, which is the problem that comes with finding a perfect mate. Leo had so little success with his love life, that when Rema came along, he was couldn’t believe she was right for him, so his mind subconsciously took his doubts, and manifested them in this disorder of thinking his wife if fake (I’m not spoiling anything here). She uses these facts about weather and psychiatry to describe the ways we sabotage good and beautiful things in our life due to self-deprecation, and by the end it is something very touching. I am little weary of my perfect rating, but right now, I feel it deserves one, and I highly recommend it

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Knockemstiff" by Donald Ray Pollock

Donald Ray Pollock is my kind of writer. He is that right mix of hard-edged storytelling that rips through its narrative like an armor-piercing bullet, but also makes you think more deeply about your own surroundings, and unlocks your ability to see magic in the normal, and sometimes darker parts of humanity. This debut collection, Knockemstiff, is a very different book than Pollock’s novel, which came out this year, The Devil All the Time. It is more subdued than that wild tale of mayhem and murder, although a drop or two of blood gets spilled. This book is a lot more like a grimier, dirtier version of another classic of literature of place, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. With the same passion and empathy that Anderson had, albeit with a bloody chip on his shoulder and beer in his gut, Pollock describes what kind of lives people lead in the smaller-than-small town of Knockemstiff, Ohio. A lot of these stories can be very funny, and Pollock has a great ear for dialogue that really catches on the way Lansdale’s stories do. But a lot of the times, these stories are very sad, chronicling people where it is simply beyond their means, both physically and mentally, to ever leave this town. They were born here, and it will eventually swallow them up, along with they’re potential and hopes for escape. A lot of people feel this way about their hometown (although I kind of like Indianapolis) so it is easy to care about these characters, and find it harder on them when they make drastic inevitable mistakes. Most of the stories here are winners and none of them fell flat or had me rushing past the ten or twenty pages to get it over with. A few that stood out among the pack would be the first story “Real Life”, in which a boy’s father introduces him to violence with a cowardly act of cruelty at a drive-in movie theater. It is a harsh way to start, and sets the stage for what kind of landscape Pollock builds for the reader. “Lard” is the sad story of the lengths a teenage boy goes through to convince his father that he has had sex, and another story about dangerous parenting, “Discipline”, where a father pushes his son past his limitations in order to win a bodybuilding competition. But the best story in this collection might be the least harsh, but probably the saddest. The title story tells the story of a man who is working at a small general store, who will probably end up doing that forever. The women he loves, who has never had interest in him, is leaving town for bigger things with a mean boyfriend, and an out of town couple is collecting photos of towns like Knockemstiff. These thing converge at the general store, creating a beautiful moment in this man’s life that is so brief it might as well have never had happened. It ends on a high note though, one, which gives this simple, man a little bit of power and happiness that is real and profound. An excellent collection that deserves a place next to books like Winesburg, Ohio, and proof of Pollock’s greatness.

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Between the Assassinations" by Aravind Adiga

While Between the Assassinations is by no means on par with Aravind Adiga’s breakthrough first novel The White Tiger, it still goes very far to prove his talent at dissecting a corrupt town and exposing it’s faults and cracks (in this book, it is the fictional town of Kittur, India).  I read The White Tiger last year, and knew that it was something special. It was not just another Indian writer trying to be the next Rushdie or Naipaul. He espouses the magic realism and political themes that exist in those writers’ books for something more brutal and ambiguous in the character of Balram Halwai. The book does not try to give a definitive answer as to whether or not Balram’s socio-

pathology is a result of a cruel society forcing him to become cold and calculated, or if he was born that way, and flourishes in a society that rewards such behavior. It is a simple story of a man pushed to the extremes of his personality and discovering a way out. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. This book, like The White Tiger, gives a different kind of description for life in modern India. It is not a place of magic or discovery. It is a harsh place where people can get destroyed by an apathetic system without anyone knowing or caring. It is what I feel Adiga does best and what makes him standout in contemporary literature. The downside of this book is what I feel is its lack of creativity. It is supposed to be a collection of linked stories, but he only titles them after their location, which doesn’t make any of them standout, and after finishing it about a week ago, I hate to say I cannot remember the characters or actions well, and am only left with Adiga’s keen eye for India’s occasional cruelty, which is enough for a slight recommendation.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Great House" by Nicole Krauss

Great House by Nicole Krauss is really just as I thought it would be. Very well written and just as good as I thought it would be. It is very pretentious, and is something that is not only bait for literary awards, but if it were made into a movie, which is possible, it would definitely be the type of movie the Academy would love, that is not intended as an insult, but is indicative of this kind of literature, where being profound and moving is given more focus than the characters or story creating profound moments indirectly. Again, which is not to say that it is a bad book, but one that is simply as good as I thought it would be. It is not a waste of time, and I am thankful to have read this book. It kind of acts as sort of a realistic kind of Cloud Atlas, the David Mitchell book, but instead of a person’s soul, the item her is a large writing desk that falls in and out of the lives of many fragile people. We meet an antique dealer, who is struggling with past demons while raising two kids that are a little too close, a widower whose writer wife’s chance meeting with an eager fan twenty years prior may have revealed an appalling secret, and another writer, whose relationship with an aspiring poet ends in a tragic mystery. All these people have a need for the desk, and when it slips away, things become unbearable for them. The real treat her is figuring out the connection people have, which is done better in Jennifer Egan novels, but is still enthralling here. And Krauss will never be at fault for laying down a bad sentence. She knows what she is doing and does it well. It is very arrogant though, and drags for about 50 pages toward the end, which is where a book should never get boring. A flawed work by someone who is very talented, and hopefully it will be just as or more entertaining to you than it was to me.

Rating: 4/5