Review: "The Willow Tree" by Hubert Selby Jr.

The Willow Tree is the first Hubert Selby Jr. novel I have read since high school, and with the reading of this novel came a few realizations of the kind of person I was back then; filled with intense passion and curiosity, but very little knowledge. Even now, his novels, or at least the memories of them, still intrigue me with its graphic violence and relentlessly moral storytelling. But now that I have grown up, I find a lot of the elements that made me like a book like this when I was younger really fail to satisfy me, much like the books of Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk, but the book does still maintain its core heart that made his books the emotional roller coasters that they were. It is very hard to walk away from one of Selby’s books without feeling someone just bared all of their wounded heart to you. This book starts rather quickly, with the chaotic event that starts the book down its dark path happening within the first ten pages. Bobby, a young black kid, and his Mexican girlfriend Maria, are attacked by a gang, with Bobby being badly beaten, and Maria is badly burned when lye is thrown in her face. While Maria is taken to the hospital, Bobby runs away from his damaged home life and falls under the tutelage of Moishe, a Holocaust survivor whose caught between fostering Bobby’s need for vengeance with his own memories of his time in concentration camps, and trying to save his soul and avoid his mistakes. The real problem I found with this book, and the past books of Selby, was that his ideas seemed to overdrawn to fit the length of a novel. The books I fondly remember, like Last Exit to Brooklyn and Song of the Silent Snow, worked because the ideas were in short form, and gave off the desired emotional impact in the proper way. I’m not sure if I should recommend this book wholeheartedly, but I do feel Selby is still deserving of his cult status.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Transatlantic" by Colum McCann

I have been curious about Colum McCann ever since he won the National Book Award and the IMPAC Award for his 2009 novel Let the Great World Spin. It has a cool premise, one of the few cool ones that a National Book Award winning novel has had in a few years, and I was excited to read his follow-up novel Transatlantic, which came out this year, coincidentally a few days after a similar novel, The Son, which happens to be my favorite book of the year. It isn’t nearly as good as that novel, but it does show McCann as a great talent that has many more good books in him. This is far from a perfect novel, and I have a few issues with near the beginning and end, but what it does well really warrants a reading if you can look past its glaring flaws to enjoy it. The book is really three different stories that have a bloodline running through it, much like Philipp Meyer’s book, and spanning a similar time line. The first story deals with a flight team in 1919 flying across the Atlantic to deliver a cache of letters to Ireland. Then the book flashes back to the 1850’s, where Fredrick Douglass is giving a speech in Ireland. Then we go forward into the president, where a US Senator is trying to broker peace between the warring factions in Ireland. These three threads never form a cohesive narrative, but for what McCann fails to provide with scenes of grandiosity, he gives us in the smaller moments, like the scene where Douglass lifts barbells made from slave shackles to inspire his writing. Scenes like that are profound and powerful, and make this book a pleasure to read, even when large portions of the book fail to deliver.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "The Cold Six Thousand" by James Ellroy

When the reviewer called this book the Finnegan’s Wake of crime novels, they really weren’t completely off base. While it is not as scattered and confusing as that novel (nothing is), James Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand is still a hard novel to follow that really acts on a purely emotional and aesthetic level and not so much narrative as an experience. It is also a novel that would be really cool in audio form because of its direct, almost aggressive prose style and many different character voices. But even though it seems to be written and acts on an emotional level, it is very hard to be invested in what is happening around the three main characters, not the least of which is because you don’t have a clear idea of the action. But on a sentence-by-sentence basis, this is a very memorable book, easily quotable, with many phrases that will stick to the tip of your tongue. It follows two of the three main characters from the first book in the Underworld USA trilogy, and begins right after JFK’s assassination. Ellroy does a great job with explaining the darker side of history, even if it isn’t quite as true or as downbeat as he would like us to think. Wayne, a crooked cop on the tail of a ruthless pimp, Ward, a sleazy lawyer, and Pete, a hit man with ties to violent revolutionaries who finds himself in the jungles of Vietnam. All three act as unseen architects to the kind of history lesson we weren’t supposed to learn. This is a violent book, filled with violence that begins and ends quickly, leaving the reader breathless, but unchanged in emotion or feeling. It is still a cool book for conspiracy buffs whose view of things is a little more skewed than the rest of us.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "What I Loved" by Siri Hustvedt

After a streak of sub-par titles, it was nice to read a home run of a novel like Siri Hustvedt’s What I loved, a thrilling piece of modern noir where the mystery at the heart of the story is one of the human mind and it’s emotional machinery. It might sound cheap for me to say this, because Husvedt is married to him in real life, but this does seem like the Paul Auster novel that Auster never wrote himself, which is refreshing now since he has not published in a few years. That may sound like I am underselling the value of Hustvedt’s novel, but I am not, because it in no way hinders the enjoyment and suspense this novel got out of me. It had been awhile since a book swept me up completely in its narrative, making each character real to me, and each of their actions making me cheer or cry as if they were people I knew in real life. It took me back to the first time I read any Paul Auster book, where that sense of intrigue melded so well with volatile states of mind like grief, loss and betrayal. And betrayal and lies play a big role in what makes this novel so good and so memorable. It has many twists and turns in it that do keep you guessing not just because the story is exciting and enthralling, which it very much is, but because you have so much invested in the outcome of these people. The plot centers around the relationship that develops between Leo, an art history professor and Bill, an aspiring artist, as well as their respective wives, Erica and Lucille. They develop a strong bond that is very familial, even as their children, Matthew and Mark are born. That relationship is tested very rigorously as time goes on, by sudden tragedies, and the intimate betrayals by those that are close to them. The real heart of this novel is in the actions of Bill’s son Mark, who grows from a seemingly loving boy, into an amoral monster who tells lies just to tell them, even when he has nothing to gain from lying. He falls into a disturbing group of artists, whose work is shocking and violent for violence’s sake, which is led by Teddy Giles, a performer whose lack of talent is hidden by a mysterious and extroverted presence that seems to fool everyone who admires him. I don’t want to spoil anything, but this story thread leads to an intense 100 pages at the end, which will scare you, as well as break your heart. Like her great husband, Hustvedt’s novel is a solid, heartfelt meditation not just on the surface value of art and artistic expression, but of the ways it can permeate other areas of our life, and create things that aren’t always good and drive us away from our humane instincts. It was quite the pleasure to exist within this book for a short while, and I cannot recommend it enough.

Rating: 5/5  

Review: "Life After Life" by Kate Atkinson

I have been in kind of a book slump lately, having not read a really good book in a few weeks. Even though I plan to end it if the book I am reading right now is good, it still stunk to be stuck in a reading rut, especially by a book that I had high hope for like Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. It seemed like an easy read after reading a few tough ones recently, but it turned out to be just as boring, leaving me shaking my head as to why this book got the publicity it did, even with a big name author like Kate Atkinson. The premise is cool, but it doesn’t capitalize on the story aspects that would have made it cool, focusing more on side trips into other areas that simply didn’t have the gusto of the central storyline. The cool premise deals with a woman named Ursula who is born at the beginning of the 20^th century and keeps on dying and being born again with the knowledge of her quasi-mortality. She succumbs to accidents around the house, drowning, and the great influenza epidemic of the late 1910’s. All the while she is on course toward the great moments in history, with a second sight that help and harm her in her personal and altruistic quests. The big problem with this book is that Ursula is the only concrete character here, with many side characters simply acting around her, which wouldn’t be an issue if they were not given as much time in the story. And some of them are not important to the main story thread, making this book one that has too many characters from a writer who cannot manage them. If it was more cohesive and direct in its approach, like having events play out in clearly similar ways with divergent storylines, it would have been great, but it left me wondering why Atkinson didn’t just publish another Brodie novel.

Rating: 3/5