Review: "Team Seven" by Marcus Burke

While my first reaction to any book that mentions pro wrestling, the Wu-Tang Clan and Outkast is to immediately give it a perfect rating, I have to stick to my initial reaction to Marcus Burke’s debut novel Team Seven, and point out that it has a few flaws, albeit minor ones that in no way detract from what was a pleasurable reading experience. On one hand, this is a book that has more than a few unique qualities to it. We have a narrator that is three dimensional, with inner thoughts and unreached desires, but he is also not the hidden genius you find in many of these kinds of urban stories. He isn’t stupid, but his intelligence is only slightly above average, and it is clear his only way out of this monotonous life is through sports. But the book tends to suffer from a few pitfalls, such as it’s urban-speak, which goes beyond being poetic and musical, and instead becomes something of a parody. The narrator is Andre, Dre for short, who lives in a town south of Boston, who grows up surrounded by conflicting elements from both his home and social life. His father is a deadbeat Reggae musician who is sometimes at home and sometimes in the bed of another woman. As Dre grows up and finds that he has skills on the court, he comes under the nefarious tutelage of Reggie, a local drug dealer who is at odds with Smoke, a former friend and fellow dealer. This book has quite a few memorable scenes, such as when Dre’s father, for his birthday, takes him and his other son from a different woman, to the mall. In Dre’s anger toward his half-brother, you see his moral blindness and imperfections, as well as the harm his father has done to both his sons. I found some of the language, as I said, to be overkill, and a shock ending, which should have been a punch to the gut, is out of place in a Dre’s hostile, but harmless world. But that might be what Burke was going for. Either way, this book is filled with flare and energy, and I'm sure it won’t disappoint.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Rant" by Chuck Palahniuk

For at least the first part, Chuck Palahniuk’s Rant works really well describing our main character's early life. I haven’t read any of his books since high school, feeling I have outgrown him, but felt like taking a trip back into his bizarre fictional world. I had my doubts, but I had no idea how uninteresting this book would be. I used to really bash Palahniuk, but I feel really bad that I did. For one, he gets a lot of people reading books that normally would not, and that is always a good thing. Second, he has been described as Swiftian in past reviews, and that is very accurate. He takes brutal looks at harden American values, and points out the seeping flaws in all of them. Whether that be masculinity in Fight Club, the idea of beauty in Invisible Monsters (which I hated when I read it, and still do), or romance in Choke, he sees how hollow these ideas have become, and has a laugh while doing so, but not at the expense of the reader. But a majority of this book simply doesn’t work. It takes the form of an oral biography, where many people are interviewed about a subject, and that subject is Rant Casey, a perverted messiah to people in a dystopian future, as well as patient zero for a rabies epidemic. He is a fascinating character, a sort of detached sociopath who wreaks havoc in ingenious and cruel ways. But once he becomes a “party crasher”, someone who participates in a public demolition derby, I found myself tuning out. A lot of work went into this book, as with all of his other books, with many obtuse details we didn’t know and don’t want to know, but it is merely a fancy coat of paint on a novel that never seems to take off. I will say that my opinion of Palahniuk has changed, even if this book didn’t help.

Rating: 3/5

Review: "Hope: A Tragedy" by Shalom Auslander

I feel weird writing on my opinions of Shalom Auslander’s debut novel Hope: A Tragedy, since I am in no way Jewish. But before that, I would like to say that I loved it. It was a refreshing book that came along at the write time for me in my chaotic and ambiguous life. I feel I must be honest with myself, and admit that for someone who has a lot of scary anger and rage inside him right now, this book felt like a warm hug. It is not a book for everyone, that is for sure. Some will find it appalling and offensive, while other will find it too ironic, to self-indulgent, merely the ramblings of a fashionably cynical man. But I am also sure that everyone will find it funny. The Philip Roth comparison on the back of the book is very apt. Reading this, I couldn’t help but think of Mickey Sabbath and his theater of perversions, which I had the pleasure of reading earlier this year. But even Roth has his limits, Auslander does not. He takes every taboo about his people, every crime they have been accused of, every crime that they have been a victim of, and shines the brightest light possible on them, and makes jokes from beginning to end. I am in a quandary with many of the ideas Auslander presents: on one hand, they seem painfully true, the way they expose many of our shortcomings, but he doesn’t offer any levity within a given situation, making them seem brutal and nihilistic. It is important to see them as strictly satirical, and meant to invoke deeper thinking on his given subjects. The novel tells the story of Solomon Kugel, an urbanite from NYC who moves to the small town of Stockton, a town “famous for nothing”, after misreading the advice given to him by his therapist, Professor Jove, easily the worst therapist you will ever come across, who sites hope as the leading cause of most people’s misery; give up hope and you’ll be happy. As he moves in, he hears tapping coming from the attic at night. He goes up to investigate, and finds Anne Frank, the Anne Frank, living up there. She isn’t the little girl we all know from her famous diary: she is a foul-mouthed, chain-smoking, thought-to-be dead part of history that comes to ruin Solomon’s life. Through this creative device, Auslander lampoons not only the ways in which Jews hang onto the past, but our overall need to define ourselves by the accomplishment of our ancestors. This is further fleshed out through Solomon’s dying mother, who brings up the horrors of the Holocaust every time she can, even though she didn’t even live through it. Auslander has crafted a brilliant, if a bit pessimistic look at the ways we are driven to change ourselves, but continuously held back by external circumstances, such as family and the world at large. While I can’t say the same for anyone else, I can say that I found something eloquent and entertaining in this book.

Rating: 5/5

Review: "The Children Act" by Ian McEwan

British author Ian McEwan, like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem, is an author who I find myself reading once every year, at least when a new book comes out, despite diminishing returns in the quality department. While I am proud to say I have read every piece of fiction he has put out, there are very few books of his that standout, Atonement is great, Enduring Love is his best, and I think more fondly of his earlier, more macabre fiction as time goes on, but very little of almost twenty published books is something to cheer for. The Children Act, his newest book, has elements of his best books, so this is a return to form for McEwan after a few very dull books, but at points I felt like I’d much rather have been reading those other books, so my enthusiasm wouldn’t feel cheap. The book starts off on a somewhat hilariously tragic note when Fiona, a family court judge, finds out that her husband wants to sleep with other people while still remaining together. Obviously furious after he leaves, she comes across a case of a teenaged Adam, who is refusing the treatment of a blood transfusion on the ground of his religious faith. His family are Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they believe it is God’s plan to let Adam die. Angered by her husband’s betrayal, she overturns the parent’s rule, and gives Adam the treatment, which produces surprising, and eventually tragic results. While it has a lot of the structure of Saturday, this book feels a lot more like Enduring Love, with a simple act causing a person’s life to take a sudden turn, but never achieves that book’s intimacy, with many characters taking away from the story of Fiona and Adam. If you are a fan of McEwan, this will be a welcome return to form from a writer who has more misses than hits.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "The Flamethrowers" by Rachel Kushner

I am sure most of the critics who reviewed Rachel Kushner’s sophomore novel The Flamethrowers were hard pressed to say that it was not ambitious. This is most definitely a book that goes places, from the salt flats of Utah to a large villa in Italy; this is a book of big places, and, to Kushner’s credit, big ideas. It attempts to encompass an entire generation, that of the late 1970’s, and that generations ideals. It is successful at that, but it is more of a symbolic novel than something that I can see occurring in real life. There isn’t a bad character here, although some are dispensable, but they never break through the microcosm on the page and become something that I can truly care about. While I don’t really dislike this book, I feel it is the kind of book that critics will heap huge amounts of praise on, some of which it actually doesn’t deserve. The book focuses on a woman named Reno, a film student and motorcycle enthusiast, who finds herself waist-deep in the artistic underground, filled with big personalities and over the top shenanigans. She is drawn to it immediately, and finds romance when she meets Sandro, a man fourteen years older than her who is estranged from his family, who wealthy owners of a motorcycle manufacturing company. Once she goes to meet them, all hell breaks loose, and she is surprised to find little comfort in the community she put so much emotional stock into. That is the part this book gets right, how the overly artistic and flamboyant crowd can be just as hallow and vacant as any other group, categorized perfectly early in the novel, when Reno rebukes a nice man’s advances, which I kept going back to when she was with Sandro. But it is hard to find anything special in this book, something that would warrant it’s unanimous praise. It is still good, just not great.

Rating: 4/5