Review: "What Belongs to You" by Garth Greenwell

Usually by the end of the year, I am very worn out from completing my reading goals, and am sometimes a little too harsh with the last few books I read for the year. But not this year, because Garth Greenwell’s sumptuous debut novel What Belongs to You, while I don’t think it will top my year-end list, it certainly will be in my top five. With a scant 191 pages, all of which are packed to the brim with beautiful, razor-sharp prose, Greenwell packs enough pathos, complexity and earthly wonder for books twice maybe three times it size. No matter your sexual orientation, you will find connections in this book to your own feelings, feelings much like the one had by the smart, if malleable unnamed narrator of the story. I do fear that much like this year’s film Moonlight, this book’s greater, more universal qualities will be buried under its more immediate social and political aspects, which I’d argue, are not in this book, but I digress. The book is short, and is split up into three different sections, the first of which was published previously as a stand-alone novella. It begins on a warm autumn day in Bulgaria when our narrator, a teacher from America, meets Mtiko, a fresh 20[-year old hustler, in a public bathroom underneath Sofia’s National Palace of Culture, and pays him to give oral sex. Mitko stops the narrator before he can climax, takes his money and leaves. The meeting is a tawdry affair, accented by the few friends Mitko has around him brooding just outside the bathroom stall. We know it as readers, but the narrator, who is not used to such affection and seems conditioned toward vulgar masochism, refuses to see it as such and becomes enamored with this young man. He visits him many other times, and convinces himself that there is something real between them. Mitko predictably inserts himself into the narrator’s life and begins using: he borrows money from him to use the train and when he stays over at the narrator’s apartment, he uses his computer to Skype with other clients. After a stay at a resort, where an argument about Mitko masturbating finally reveals the true roots of their relationship, and he throws Mitko out. The second section, centered around the narrator’s past life, we learn about his sexual history, as well as that of his father and younger sister. I won’t reveal the details of this section, since one scene is, I think, the key to the heart of this book, but it the scene is callous and heartbreaking, and you can see how it mirrors the actions or inaction of our narrator in the face of his emotional abuse. The final section, where we see Mitko reenter the narrator’s life with news that he has an STD and most likely gave it to him, caps off the story and brings everything full circle, as we, and thankfully the narrator, see just how large and impassable the divide is between what we desire and what attainable for us. Filled to the brim with memorable scenes and exchanges, like the tiny conversation the narrator has with the hotel manager, which pretty much sums everything up, to an extended scene on a train, where the narrator and his mother watch a misbehaving child, this is a rich, passionate book that slowly draws you in and leaves you aching.

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Glamorama" by Bret Easton Ellis

For the first time rereading a book at the end of the year, my feelings on a book have not changed. That book, Bret Easton Ellis’ most forgotten novel (but not most underrated), Glamorama, has neither aged poorly or positively in the time that I have read it, I just feel now that I can talk about it more eloquently than I did when I first read it back in 2010 (I think). A good description of this book is that it is a beautiful mess. There are parts of it that I really enjoyed, parts where Ellis’ skill at creating blurry realities brought on by chaos, excess and detachment award the reader with some entertaining, and sometimes brilliant renderings of violence and sadness. But the book is still a mess. The paperback version which I read clocks in at 546 pages, which is simply too long for a book like this; where characters enter and exit the story rapidly with very little distinguishing features of characteristics, and the whirlwind narrative constantly threatens to leave you behind. The book can be divided into two sections and focuses on male model and aspiring actor Victor Ward. In the first section, he is struggling to open a club in the Bowery section of New York, he is sleeping with two models and he is trying to negotiate a deal to star in a sequel to Flatliners. The second section sees him whisked away to Europe where he is forced into a terrorist group of other pretty people who store bombs in high-end luxury bags and videotape the tortures of diplomatic relatives. I found it impossible to follow everything, and it doesn’t help when the main character is kind of a passive idiot who only comes alive during a few hilariously overwritten sex scenes. But some details, like Victor’s inability during some of the more violent sequences to distinguish between real violence and movie violence and the book’s really bizarre ending, which work out really well. It’s not for everyone, and it certainly isn’t his best book, but this bloody look at the elite, a kind of Zoolander drenched in gore, is still fascinating to me.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Dodge Rose" by Jack Cox

Even while almost exactly half of this book is totally lost on me, there is not another book that came out in 2016 like Dodge Rose, the debut novel from Australian writer Jack Cox. For this book to find any family company as far as style and audacity, you’d have to go to the beginning of the 20^th century. This is a maddening, frustrating odyssey of two people stuck in the loopholes of Australian property law as well as that of some being, whether it is human or not, alive or dead I’m not sure nor will I ever be, although I have some good ideas about what it might be, but even those might be totally wrong and misleading. This is not a book for everyone, and that everyone probably includes me, but I will try my best to describe what is happening and what is going on. The first section, which is mighty dense but accessible, concerns Eliza, who travels by train to her Aunt Dodge’s apartment, who has just died. While there, she meets Maxine, a stranger, in Dodge’s apartment. What was supposed to be a quick collection of a sizable inheritance turns into a dull wait as the two women find themselves enmeshed among many bureaucracies. The second section, which begins around page 109 of this 201-page book, features a disembodied voice, seemingly lost in time, describing their history, which devolves by the end into gibberish. The first part, which reminded me of a more sophisticated version of Jonas Karlsson’s The Invoice, is a great curiosity, especially a section where one law, The Health Act of 1958, is described in excruciating detail, which brought me back to the descriptions of pharmaceuticals in Infinite Jest. The second part is a curiosity as well, but one without an immediate solution. If this book comes across your path, I’d say pick it up. You’re in for a challenging ride, but don’t expect to see here you are going.

Rating: 4/4

Review: "The Fighter" by Craig Davidson

With his novel The Fighter, his first one published, Canadian author Craig Davidson establishes himself as one of today’s most interesting and compelling literary voices. Coming from a long line of masculine and trangressive authors as varied as Ernest Hemingway and Hubert Selby Jr. all the way to Chuck Palahniuk and Bret Easton Ellis, I have yet to come across an author who writes about the limits of toughness, manliness and the human body in ways that are equally repulsive and off-putting but also revelatory and emotionally complex. His first book, the short story collection Rust and Bone, later made into a movie, expresses these themes of the bloody human heart in a variety of capacities such as dog fighting, whale training and of course, boxing, or fighting in general, which, along with dog fighting, are the focus of his brilliant novel Cataract City. With this novel, published in 2007, Davidson just focuses on boxing and some of the mythic and tragic elements that embody the sport and those who take it up. It is hard to me to read a story or a novel about boxing and not think of the great short story writer Thom Jones, my pick for America’s most underrated writer, who sadly, as I just found out in the midst of writing this review, passed away in mid-October. But while this novel, and the title story of Rust and Bone, share the sadness and fatalism of Jones’ stories, this novel is meaner, more vicious and quite a lot bloodier. The book opens inside the mind of an unnamed fighter in a foreign land listing off the number ailments he has gotten from fighting, from the scars on his body to the missing teeth. We will find out which of the two main characters this is by the end. After such a graphic prologue we are introduced to our first main character Paul Harris. The son of rich parents who own a winery in Canada, Paul is shocked out of his comfortable life after a slight from a stranger causes him to get beat up. He begins to question himself, his worth and his importance in life, and this leads down a dark path that involves bodybuilding, steroid abuse and eventually an illegal boxing club across the border known as the Barn. Meanwhile, the young, fresh faced Rob Tully, the pride of his small town, whose boxing skills are seen by his father Reuben as a way out of their poverty-stricken existence, struggles with his place in the world and the limited options for the future. Soon, these two warriors will cross paths in the most aggressive and brutal ways possible. Davidson seems to relish the ways in which he accurately and graphically describes what happens to the human body, whether that is the ways the skin on your ass can harden when you inject steroids or the painful procedure Paul gets so his nose won’t bleed. But even with the violence, I was moved by the somber tone throughout, mostly from Rob’s uncle, the washed up boxer Tommy and Paul’s helpless parents, who watch his transformation with horror and more than a little regret. There are so many memorable scenes, some of which come in the form of out of left field hallucinations, but I won’t spoil them here. This is a heart stopping, plasma soaked account of manhood gone berserk. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it is for anyone looking for great fiction.

Rating: 5/5

Review: "The Lost Time Accidents" by John Wray

John Wray’s gargantuan; mind melting new novel The Lost Time Accidents is the hardest yet most rewarding book I have read all year, and my favorite melding of Science Fiction and high literature since Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things. At times it was maddening trying to keep track of everything. This is a very rich and complex book: the hard work it took to craft something so original must be reciprocated by the reader’s hard work in reading it. It was frustrating at times, but in a good way: this was such a cool story I just had to take my time with every detail and understand, or try to understand this books twisted logic. I was not as successful as I wanted to be in deciphering all I could, but as some characters remark in the book, they don’t either. This novel recalls, as Colum McCann is quoted as saying on the back cover of the book, the best of Haruki Murakami and the best of David Mitchell as well, both world builders whose creations tell us just as much about ourselves as they do the writers and their stories. This book tries its best to make sense of the madness of life, how brutal and short it can be while at the same time being something we cling to, try to control and try to make better. And all these qualities are shot through one of the more unique looks at time travel I have come across. As the novel opens up, we find Waldemar “Waldy” Tolliver in a very strange predicament. Somehow, through forces we will come close to finding out about as the book chugs forth, kicked out of the present timeline and is stuck on Monday at 8:47 in the morning. He is in the library of his two aunts (two odd people we will get to know well), a place that recalled the menacing trap set up in Mitchell’s Slade House, and he thinks the only way out of this is to write out his family’s history. Splitting timelines three ways, one set in Waldy’s punishment, one about his time right before his punishment where he met Mrs. Haven, the love of his life who he refers to in all three timelines, and the numbered chapters of his family history, beginning with his great-grandfather Ottokar Toula, professional pickler and amateur physicist, who stumbled onto the theory of the title and was quickly hit by a car. We follow that timeline through Otto’s son’s Kasper and Waldemar, the latter of which becomes an infamous Nazi war criminal, to Waldy’s father, a science fiction author who put his family’s history in his most famous book, which inspired enough people to create a religion out of it, one which has more than a hand in Waldy’s present situation. This book is a mental workout, and like most workouts, you’ll feel leaner and stronger afterward. This is a great, big book filled with original characters (special mention of Waldy’s aunts, who fill roles that are typically male) and a story that sucks you in and moves you in odd ways. Don’t miss this one.

Rating: 5/5