Review: "Augustown" by Kei Miller

I had a great time reading Kei Miller’s Augustown. It is an engaging novel filled with precise prose and crackling dialogue that flows easy across the wrinkles in my mind. But what it gives us in those regards can’t distract from what it doesn’t have, and that is a firm grip on story and narrative. It attempts to cram a lot of mythos, history and a wife range of people into the small space of a 239-page novel. It has been done before and has been thought provoking in other books, but that is not the case here. I always felt Miller was playing with big ideas, and by the end I can’t help but think he held back quite a bit. I picked this book up based on its settings and its recommendation on the back from Marlon James, and sure enough it is very much like his first two novels John Crow’s Devil and The Book of Night Women, both all right books that pale in comparison to his flash of brilliance that was A Brief History of Seven Killings. The novel tells two stories that, now that I think of it, really should have been one. First, Miller trains his eye on the character of Ma Taffey, an old blind woman who acts as a godmother to the rest of the town and a lynch pin of the book’s events. Kaia, a young boy, comes to her door crying because his beloved dreadlocks have been forcibly cut off. She sits him down and tells him the story of The Flying Preacherman, a local legend of a preacher who claimed to fly who was oppressed by the local government. This section feels quite out of place, and it isn’t until we leave the past and focus on the present, which takes place in a single day and tells the tragic story of Gina, Kaia’s mother and what leads to the book’s violent final few pages. This is a book full of wonder with a firm grip on the past and present, and something worth looking at.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Broken River" by J. Robert Lennon

It is really nice to see a story you read early this that was not very good done extremely and uniquely right. Earlier this year, Joe McGinnis’ second novel Carousal Court disappointed me, and when I think about it still, it bothers me even more. But thankfully, Broken River, the new novel by J. Robert Lennon (a last minute addition to my second half of the year reading lost) does everything right that Carousal Court did wrong, and with a nice twist that in hands of a less skilled writer, would turn the whole novel into a hackneyed mess. But with Lennon, it elevates what is a rather simple story of murder in a small town to something more ethereal, otherworldly and deeply haunting. My only other contact with Lennon’s writing was his last book, the short story collection See You in Paradise, and with the exception of one story (his most famous story, “Portal”, which is way better than it should be on paper, which I see now as a pattern with Lennon’s writing) not much contained within its pages is that memorable. But those apathetic feelings are smashed with this meditation on truth, time and family disguised as a break neck thriller. While not as out there, I couldn’t help but think of Dan Chaon’s Ill Will: both novels move between the somber and the disturbing with the greatest of enviable ease. You’ll know your in the hands of someone who wants to give you something new just by the first chapter alone. A family is fleeing their home in the middle of the night. They try as hard as they can to escape their fates, but it is too late for them. All of this is being watched by some being, which presides over the events in the novel. Called the “Observer”, we never really know who this being is. Are they an angel, doomed to watch events unfold yet unable to intervene, much like the angels in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire? Or are they an alien or human from the future, looking out toward the past at the wreckage wrought on a few select people? What they aren’t for sure is a cheap ploy to draw your attention from the main story, which involves a family of three moving into the house where the murder takes place. Karl, a womanizing artist, his wife Eleanor and their daughter Irina moved there from New York to heal from Karl’s transgressions. Slowly each sinks into their own world of lies, as the past crimes come forth again in harrowing and violent ways. As the cast grows, so does Lennon’s ability to draw you in. He can make you sympathize with Louis, under the thumb of the violent and evil Joe, as well as Sam, whose link to the past is tenuous and brought by Irina’s obsession. This is an entirely unconventional take on a rather tired trope, so much so that as the book closes, much in the same place as it started, there are no easy answers, great personal revelations or emotional breakthroughs. Bad things simply happen to people and life goes on whether people are ready or not. A strong thriller that smashes expectations while entertaining the hell out of you, this is one novel worth seeking out as soon as you can.

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Encircling" by Carl Frode Tiller

It has been awhile since I have come across something as fiercely original, inventive and fun to read as Carl Frode Tiller’s Encircling, the first in a trilogy I cannot wait to dive deeper into. Though deceptively simple in nature, the narrative, broken up between prose passages and what I assume to be letters or emails, offers up a world of ideas that are seemingly infinite, building on top of one another an ever deepening well of thoughts on subjects as diverse as identity, memory, perception and the shaky bonds of a broken family. While it does mention the series on the back, I couldn’t help thinking about Karl Ove Knausgard’s gigantic 3600 page, six-part self-referential novel My Struggle and how different it is from a book like this. While I liked both, I found My Struggle, at least the first book in the series to be a rather solipsistic experiment whose effects wore off soon after the 100 page mark, but Tiller’s novel sustains its unique breathe and speed, offering new ideas and ways of looking at events that belays the world’s complexity. It reminds me of the first time I read the novels Paul Auster and Daniel Kehlmann: the gleeful feeling of finding an author whose view of the world around them is both compassionate and all-encompassing. At the center of Encircling and what I assume to be the other two preceding novels is the character of David who has recently lost his memory. What sets him apart from any other main character I have come across in recent books is that we never really get to see David really at all, at least not as a flesh and blood character. All we know about him is gained from the letters written by the three people who answered an ad he placed in the paper, Jon his former best friend, Arvid, his stepdad and Silje, his former girlfriend. This setup begs a lot of questions, all which are rich and detailed. Is everything each of the three people say about David true? Are the personal biases clouding their judgment of events? Do they even know David? Is David even a real person? I enjoy books like this that creates such interesting ambiguities that offer rich questions instead of cheap answers. But if the book were only as good as its unique structure I wouldn’t be raving about as much as I am. In between the long letters are passages that give us a glimpse into the shattered lives of each character, all with dates that take place before the letters are written. Jon is a failed musician and closed homosexual who comes home to his mother and is berated by his brother, a successful right wing politician. Arvid is laid up in the hospital and craves human contact. Silje is in a loveless marriage whose only enjoyment is lying to him about affairs she is not having. Each prose section informs on its epistolary counterpart, which crafts a view of the unseen David as both unquestionably faceless and full of an infinite number of possible character traits. A sullen yet funny book about our crushed hopes and dreams, our fractured families and the ones we tend to blame and project our faults onto in the worst of times, this is an explosively fun novel I hope gets wider recognition ASAP. 
Rating: 5/5

Review: "A Book of American Martyrs" by Joyce Carol Oates

A Book of American Martyrs, the new novel by Joyce Carol Oates (and her longest if I assume correctly) deals with the subject of abortion, a subject that has been swimming around my head for little bit, in a way that is fictionally interesting even over the span of 736 admittedly bloated pages. It is no secret that Oates is a master of the craft, whose skill is matched by her prolific nature, a rare dynamite combo, but as someone, who has befriended people who hold pro life anti-abortion stances, her rendering of those people in the novel can come across shoddy and one dimensional, but thankfully never insulting. But thankfully Oates makes up for it with two very compelling female characters whose lives are shaped by a violent event at the heart of the book. That event is the murder of Gus Voorhees, an abortion provider by Luther Dunphy, a religious zealot. What opens this book is a rambling account of the event in question, whose violent details are surpassed by its confusing nature. For a story like this, the pieces have to fit together, and throughout the book I didn’t feel they made for a pleasant whole, but by themselves I enjoyed them for what they were, some more than others. I found the look into Luther’s childhood, marked by a confusion toward modern life and a struggle to find a calling in his faith really interesting, as was the look into Gus’ family and the cynical fatalism he instilled in his children, making his death out to be something inevitable. But after the murder and trial the focus shifts to the men’s daughters. Naomi, Gus’ daughter is stricken with anger toward the world and her family, and her detached sections remain the least interesting, especially compared to Dawn, Luther’s daughter, something of a simpleton who finds a way to fight back in the world of boxing. These scenes shows Oates’ in a great way, crafting fights just as authentic and urgent as those of Thom Jones of Craig Davidson. This is a long book, and its length is sometimes not necessarily warranted, but for Oates to produce work like this in such quick spats is impressive and enviable.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Fortunes of War: The Balkan Trilogy" by Olivia Manning

Fortunes of War: The Balkan Trilogy, a series of three novels by late British novelist Olivia Manning is not the usual book I would pick up and read. It’s not like a Science Fiction novel, which I only pick up maybe once or twice a year, but it is far from something I have a massive interest in. But since I try to read at least one 900 page book a year, this was something I came across while searching and it fit the bill. While it is not all bad, I don’t think a normal person would find enough joy in a book like this to read all 924 pages of it at a time. Since it’s three books, I am curious as to how reading them one at a time would offer a better experience. But as a whole, it reminded me of better and even only slightly better books that I came across, and I don’t see myself reading the second trilogy of this story any time soon. It’s a war novel set during WWII, but there are no battle scenes and only a few deaths, focusing on the lives of Harriet and Guy Pringle, and how the war steadily encroaches on them and the lives of those around them. It reminded me a lot of Julie Orringer’s The Invisible Bridge for how the horrors of war introduce themselves in unconventional manners as well as Vikram Seth’s mammoth A Suitable Boy, not only for its length but because the length is made up of quiet, residential moments instead of scenes of grandeur. But the characters, which there are a lot, don’t really stand out very much, expect for Prince Yakimov whose arc is funny, moving and tragic, and the pace is dreadfully slow, leading me to feel all 924 pages. A book like this takes a lot of patience, which isn’t always bad, but I don’t think there is a reward for such patience at the end of this gargantuan book.

Rating: 3/5

Review: "Koko" by Peter Straub

Peter Straub’s Koko is easily the most travelled book I own. Back in 2014, it went with my friend an I as we drove up the East Coast and back and now, I read it a second time while I whiled away lonely hour after lonely hour in the City of Angels on my first solo vacation. The first time I read it, I really didn’t like it. I found it a boring follow up to what I had just finished, Steve Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole. I sped through it, wanting it to end quickly and gave it a barely passable rating. It wasn’t until I read the other two books in the Blue Rose Trilogy, the off the wall novel Mystery and the surprisingly ingenious novel The Throat that my animosity turned to curiosity and I decided to revisit it on my trip. While I appreciate it more, especially some of the characters, I still find it to be the weakest entry in this thematic trilogy of novels. One thing I liked at first about this novel of Vietnam, murder and flip-flopping identities is its opening scene, where Michael Poole, arguably the novel’s center, saunters around Washington D. C. during the Vietnam Memorial dedication. It brilliantly flips between flashback and painful present that foreshadows the breakneck structure of the novels later parts, like the dreamlike sojourn in Bangkok and the rather weak flashbacks to wartime. Also, Koko’s narration in some chapters is quite chilling and a thrill to read alone in an unfamiliar hotel room. It’s vagueness both hinders and elevates the book: it makes its characters rather weak and hard to care about, but it creates some eerie scenes, like its somber final pages. Straub is so often overlooked in favor of his Kingly contemporary, and this trilogy of novels, giant in scope and audacity, show he is one of the great modern horror authors.

Rating: 4/5