Review: "The Financial Lives of Poets" by Jess Walter

The Financial Lives of Poets by Jess Walter really came out of nowhere for me, and I ended up finding this book to be very readable and very poignant, while at the same time being scathingly funny in moments of spiritual ruin. I knew very little about Jess Walter until this book came out a couple of years ago. It had a cool premise and cool cover art, but I never got around to buying it until I got the paperback for Christmas last year. I was very curious to dive in and put this very high on my to-read list. And after reading it, you should to, because unless you are a cynical literary type who finds entertaining narratives low brow (then I don’t think you would be reading my reviews), there is something in here I think everyone will like. We meet Matt Prior, a failed Internet mogul who just got fired from a newspaper job he had to crawl back to, as he is souring the aisles at a local 7/11 at midnight looking for overpriced milk. He has six days to pay of 30 grand, or he will lose the house he worked hard to build and his somewhat materialistic wife, who may be flirting with a former boyfriend on Facebook. While at his lowest, he gets high with a bunch of 20-something stoners, which leads him down a path of hilariously bad decisions, that may destroy his life, but that may be the kind of rubble he needs to find hope in the ashes of his life. Not to give too much away, but this is kind of like a very funny version of Breaking Bad, a television show I recently became a fan of. Prior is more sympathetic than Walter White, and less sociopathic the deeper he gets, but they both represent the insane kinds of things likeminded citizens will do when the world they have put their trust in for so long decides to toss their lives aside like a candy wrapper. But the message of this insanely funny and ultimately hopeful book is the meaning we put behind material objects, and what it means to let go of things in order to keep the real, emotional bonds we make with those that we love. We find out about Matt’s past and his wife’s, and how money problems have plagued them with a since of financial urgency that no one but truly poor people can really fathom. They cannot help but equate money with happiness and connection, because they see what happens to loved ones when money becomes scarce. But by the end of the book, as contrite and simple as it may seem, the overall theme of this book is that it really is going to be okay. Despite how cynics may treat that phrase, the people you surround yourself with can make things better given a chance. A kind of cheesy review, but my feelings and the feelings of this book are not. I highly recommend it.

Rating: 5/5

Review: "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" by Michael Chabon

Every since Wonderboys, I have been waiting for Chabon to blow me out of the water with a story filled with just as many zany plot twists and antics as there are real human characters with very serious dilemmas. I thought The Amazing Adventures of Kavelier and Clay had the great character elements that Wonderboys had, and I feel it introduced two of the most memorable fictional friends you are likely to find in modern literature, but I thought the story relied too much on the reader have the same amount of love for comics as Chabon did, and I was left slightly disappointed. His other two books I have read, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Werewolves in Their Youth, were simply forgettable, with Mysteries verging on Foer-like badness in places. While The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is the best book of his I have read since Wonderboys, it is still only okay, but at least not forgettable. It is a classic Chandler-esque story of an unsolved murder being investigated by a surly detective about to reach his breaking point in life, and all the wild people he meets on his way to finding out why this person was killed, and how close he himself is to the murder. The twist Chabon presents here is that everything takes place in this Jewish town in Alaska that was started as a safe haven for Jews during an alternate version of World War II. It presents the idea of Hasidic Jews being involved in organized crime, which reminds me of Once Upon a Time in America, but more funny. Overall it is not bad, but not great. It has many cool plot points and presents esoteric information that doesn’t bore the reader to death, (I know a lot more about Chess now, but still no interest in playing it). I do recommend it, and I do plan on reading the next Chabon book that comes out, hopefully soon.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "American Tabloid" by James Ellroy

This is my first foray into the seedy, gross, and morally aberrant world that James Ellroy presents in his novels, and, despite a few road bumps on the way, I will definitely be taking that journey again someday. Ellroy is an interesting figure in the world of modern writing. He is a much more complex and sophisticated version of the average hard-boiled detective fiction, but he manages, in interviews and such, to be down right bat shit crazy, which I honestly think is an act he puts on for the camera. He writes like a wounded wolf, determined to tell his brutal side of the story before he succumbs to the injuries this world perpetrates on him. But there is a great beauty to his prose, which fires off from the page like a tommy gun. It has rhythmic jazz-like quality to it that fills his stories of pimps, trannies, murderers, rapist and other kinds of degenerate monsters with a kind of angelic quality that elevates his stories to mythic proportions. I wanted to start with American Tabloid because of it being Time Magazine’s best fiction book of 1995, and the premise interested me: three guys, Ward, an underdog lawyer wanting to do right, Kemper, a suave slimy FBI employee, and Pete, a brutal hit man/bodyguard for Howard Hughes, as Ellroy uses them to rewrite history from ’58 to ’63 in his unique way. But I found it easy to get lost in historical data that had me chasing the plot and losing it many times, although it is interesting to see figures like JFK, J Edgar Hoover, and especially Howard Hughes in such a negative like. And that is where this book shines and made me want to finish it. The people Ellroy walks out onto his stage are so interesting, finely drawn, and sometimes too morally repellant not to want to follow them through five hundred pages and two longer books. Despite the hefty focus on historical data, American Tabloid is worth the time spent in Ellroy’s underworld of American history.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves" by Karen Russell

Despite this not being as good as Swamplandia!,  it still is a great collection that showcases Russell’s fierce originality and vision, and in no way makes me think any less of this enormously talented writer. I take this book as being kind of an experiment in combing George Saunders’ wackiness with the kind of fantasy stories girls would read when they are children. They take fairy tale ideals, put them in a familiar setting, and throws very real and threatening adult dangers at its off the wall inhabitants. I think that is also why it kind of fell flat for me in some cases. It relies to heavily on its offbeat nature, and it is easy for someone who is not used to reading fantasy to lose details in reading, and even lose interest in the midst of one of the stories. All the stories have long titles, as if they are the names of attractions in a gimmicky and cheap amusement park. A few of my favorites include “Z. Z.’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers” which has twins who share the same sleep problems in a camp investigating g the murder of a pet in a camp with many “disordered dreamer” such as bed-wetters, self mutilators, and those who think a demon is raping them. My favorite would have to be “The Star Gazer’s Log of Summer-Time Crime” which has a geeky kid falling into the wrong crowd, who plan on stealing turtle eggs. It has a weak ending, but is the closets out of all of these stories to connecting emotionally with the reader on a level of reality. That was the main problem with these stories; they lack emotional impact and try to make up for it in wacky creatures and magical realities. Luckily, Russell solved this with her brilliant first novel, and this is a must for fans of an extremely talented new writer.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "2666" by Roberto Bolano

This is the reason I don’t like reading dead authors that much. The amount of books published by them that you are able to get your hands, while may be great, is always going to be limited. The argument can be made that what we have is great enough, but I may be a little greedy in wanting more. Having said that, it is a shame that 2666 and another big novel, The Savage Detectives, are the only two major works by the great Roberto Bolano that we have on Earth. I really loved this book, for its readable, yet exhausting qualities, and the way it crafts an almost living nightmare out of the squalor of the border city Santa Teresa. This is by no means a brisk read that goes by quickly. It is probably the most arduous read I have undertaken since I started seriously reading. It really is a book meant for breaks and vacations. Reading it when you have things to do is a big mistake. It starts to swallow you whole in a way, and you start thinking about it at odd hours, the book itself haunting your everyday activities like the guilt of a crime. And it is absolutely brilliant, despite its excessive nature. The meandering plot involves two seemingly separate ideas: one focuses on the reclusive German writer Benno von Archimboldi, who no one has seen in years and is a sort of fetish object for the literary elite, the other one concerns the almost preposterous number of female homicides in Santa Teresa. We see these two ideas threaded through three different stories that involve three academics searching for the writer in said border town, a philosophy professor slowly going insane with paranoia in the same town, and a black journalist covering a boxing match in the same town who gets involved with the crimes investigation. It isn’t until the last two, very long parts do we go almost too in depth to the main two ideas of the novel, and when we find out how each one is related, the reader will be in awe of Bolano’s mastery of extraneous details and the way he hides important facts in seemingly useless narrative tidbits. From what I can gather from reading it, I see a couple of themes Bolano might have been writing about. Santa Teresa is a city that is being destroyed from within, like a cancer no one seems to care enough to find it and cut it out. The town itself reminded me a lot of Derry, Maine, the town Stephen King’s It takes place in. Santa Teresa might as well have a killer clown committing these horrific crimes; it makes more sense then the reality. I also say themes of the uselessness of academic elitism, and how it really has no affect on the person’s goodness or character, and a smart English professor can be just as cowardly as any individual. But really, a lot of this books magic comes from its inherent mystery and puzzle like structure that confuses and entices the reader all at once. It might seem appropriate for Bolano to die prematurely, because he may have left us the books biggest mystery. The book can’t really be put into words, just read it, in all its maddening glory.

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer

Simply put, this is one of the worst books I have ever read, which is a list that includes five books, including this one. I don’t want this to be a forum of negativity, and reading a really bad book for me is very rare, but this one is truly awful. It is just the right mixture of pretentious, thinly veiled self-service and syntax over talent to make it very unpleasant. I knew I wasn’t going to enjoy this book very much, and read it simply to get it out of the way so I can be qualified to criticize Foer, but I had no idea it was going to be like this. The story concerns Oskar (a representation of Foer himself that is so flimsy, he might as well have named him after himself to save me from typing this) as he searches for the lock to the key he found in his dad’s things, who died in 9/11. Wackiness ensues, along with many pictures, silly topography (it makes the reading go by quicker) and some of the worst dives into arrogant self-appraisal you will come across. Nothing here rings true. We are supposed to believe that Oskar is smart enough to have read A Brief History of Time, but not know what a blowjob is? It forced quirks like this that try to force the reader to put Oskar, and Foer himself, up on a pedestal of purity. It makes for an annoying, and sometime loathsome read that was quick, but not quick enough. I think Foer’s success lies in his ability to make certain arrogant literary types treat their social problems, such as narcissism and just plain old douchebaggery as a quirk, instead of the personality problems they are. He is easily the most overrated writer alive today. I hate being so negative, but this was really that bad, and in no way could I recommend this book.

Rating: 1/5