Review: "You Should Have Left" by Daniel Kehlmann

While it is entirely unintentional, I tend to be reading in patterns as of late, with the book I finished earlier today Binary Star being very thematically similar Chemistry, I book I finished earlier this week. And now, Daniel Kehlmann’s You Should Have Left being a haunted house story very similar to a book I read last week The Grip of It. But instead of being a weaker version of an earlier book I have read, this is a stronger version of the earlier book, one that gets everything right, from its size (it is a brisk 114 pages that I finished in a little over an hour), to it’s fractured narrative structure all the way down to it chilling atmosphere, which seeps into your bones and has you reaching for the nearest night light. I liked The Grip of It for what it was, which was a simple, if unapologetically modern haunted house story, this slim novel (really a novella) I feel tackles a bit heartier and deeper material such as the ambivalence of the creative process, parental short comings and horror of finding out you are not as strong as you think you are. And it is the kind of short little book that I could only expect from someone like Kehlmann, a writer I have been obsessed with since reading his novel in stories Fame a few years ago, and I am happy to see him match that flash of genius with something even more compact and, maybe, even smarter. It starts out with an unnamed male narrator (another trope that I have come across frequently as of recently) dragging his family to the German countryside so he can writer a script for the sequel to the female buddy movie that gave him his name. I will try not to spoil anything, but for a book this short, it is going to be hard for me to review it without giving too much away. The weird things start immediately. First it is a simple sound interrupting his writing, one that couldn’t possibly have come from his wife Susanna or his four-year-old daughter Esther. It only gets worse from there. There is a strange dream sequence involving a woman with narrow eyes whose picture appears and disappears, a strange trip to the local grocery store where the clerk is eerily vague about his intentions and what is actually going on in the house, to a revelation that brings forth the book’s harrowing final few pages that is guaranteed to send shivers down your spine. It is the little details in this book that really got to me; such as the way what is happening seeps into his script, sections of which make up a significant portion of the book, the things his daughters say and the whole book’s ambiguous nature and the questions it leaves unanswered. I have compared Kehlmann to Auster before, but I don’t think Auster could ever have the guts to grab you by the throat like this. I am both in awe and in fear of such a book.

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Binary Star" by Sarah Gerard

Binary Star, the 2015 debut novel by Sarah Gerard is a lot like a few novels I have been coming across in the past few years, novels about women on the edge, written in sporadic, aggressive styles that talk liberally and openly about sex, addiction and the waning search for happiness and fulfillment in modern life. Some are really good and rise above their stylistic shortcomings, such as Merritt Tierce’s Love Me Back and more recently Weike Wang’s Chemistry. None of them have been bad, but a significant few are underwhelming and of a repetitive and tiring nature, like Jade Sharma’s Problems and this one, unfortunately, a book made up of some rather interesting and staggering metaphors that made me think deeply about drastically troubled people as well as directly conveyed scenes that slip past profundity and into overbearing, sometimes laughable melodrama. Like many books such as this, the narrator is left unnamed, but we find out through a brief few sections at the beginning is that she suffers from a severe form of bulimia and weighs under 100 pounds. The bulk of the novel concerns her and her boyfriend John’s road trip across America, where they discover a book about veganism and anarchism that gives them a purpose in life. While the narrator’s problems concern foo, with a few sections where online diet articles, celebrities and restaurants they find on the road are listed in almost pornographic detail, John’s problems are alcohol and violence. He gets into many fights throughout the book, and the inevitable breaking up creates a tension brought about by the question of if these two people will fix themselves. One cool connection I made between this and another book were its similarities to Hubert Selby Jr.’s The Room. Both concern people on the edge of infinite despair, which brings into question the validity of the book’s events as well as the their strange sense of place. This book doesn’t break any new ground, but it is far from a bad book and a waste of your time.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Selection Day" by Aravind Adiga

If it had come from any other author, I would label Selection Day a successful novel. It is quite good, a cut above the rest, if you will, with a rich story filled with humor, horror and tragedy, all three spread out throughout the novel, co-mingling with the greatest of ease. But since it comes from Aravind Adiga, (his third novel and fourth book overall), it is a giant step back for a writer who wowed me twice over with his debut novel The White Tiger, still, even seven year after finishing it a favorite and his second novel, Last Man in Tower, both of which were novels of India with teeth, forgoing the magical realism associated with fiction from that area in favor of a gritty, harsh atmosphere adversely affected by Western values, where the greedy succeed and the good sometimes, if not always, suffer. This novel is not nearly as caustic or angry as those two, and while I like it more than his tepid story collection Between the Assassinations, its’ quality is not too far off. It concerns the lives of two brothers whose world consists of their overbearing father and the sport of cricket, which they both excel at. While Radha is primed to make it big, being sponsored by a wealthy expat with the skills to prove it, his younger brother Manju has skills of his own, but once he meets Radha rival, his life begins to unravel as new experiences fill his life with confusion and indecision. I like how it takes an overused trope, which I won’t spill here and create something new for it, so instead of it being a story of self-discovery, it is instead a story of the consequences of inaction. But this little nugget of wisdom doesn’t really help this novel’s story, Adiga’s weakest or the swath of disposable characters, like Sofia, a sort of cricket groupie. Adiga is still young and I will chock this little novel up as a minor misstep.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Chemistry" by Weike Wang

Chemistry, the debut novel from Weike Wang is the most assured, confident and fully formed debut novel I will read all year. It is short and sweet at an easy 211 pages, but none of those are filled with any kind of disposable fat. Everything found on the page is important and integral to the ideas the book puts forth, much like the numbers in an equation or the steps in an experiment. Reading it (which is rather quick and not just due to the page length), I was reminded of other great debuts of the past few years, thoughts that bring with them good and bad qualities. This is the kind of debut novel that announces itself loudly and proudly: both an eloquently written account of a messy life and keen presentation on how a unique individual surveys their surroundings and deals with their problems, which are of both the interior and exterior variety. I was reminded of self-assured debuts as varied as Teju Cole’s Open City and Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds, all three compact, tightly woven stories that give a fascinating glimpse into the minds of their original protagonist (and the other two besides this novel having won the prestigious PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction). But also, all three of these books hint that there is very little left in the creative well after finishing. They say seemingly everything the author needs to say, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Wang doesn’t produce another novel, or at least one quite so soon after this. At the center of this cerebral novel is an unnamed PhD student in chemistry at a prestigious school in Boston (which is likely Harvard given Wang’s credentials) who’s ordered life begins to unravel once her boyfriend Eric proposes to her. The novel is loosely structured as our narrator tries to make sense of the world and her own burgeoning unhappiness, and the book shifts rather sporadically between past and present, where we learn about our narrator’s troubled relationship with her immigrant parents and the their cruel pragmatic cynicism toward life and work, her history with Eric, whose little quirks about music and science widen the gulf between the couple as well as her attempts to get back on her feet after she quits the PhD program in dramatic fashion. In between these varied vignettes are little tidbits of scientific history, such as a few pieces on Marie Curie, a few Chinese proverbs and our narrator’s own interpretations of such themes. While it is a bit more lighthearted than Open City and The Yellow Birds, it doesn’t shy away from darker themes of loneliness and the ephemeral nature of romantic love, characterized by the narrator’s best friend’s volatile marriage and pregnancy, ending rather abruptly on the cusp of what could be the deepening or the alleviation of our narrator’s depression. This is the kind of debut novel I seek out throughout the year as long as I am reading something, a book filled with a ferocious energy whose odd world becomes something poetic and moving through the skilled and knowledgeable hands of wise beyond their years writer. 
Rating: 5/5

Review: "The Burning World" by Isaac Marion

I am surprised that a book like Isaac Marion’s The Burning World, the follow up to his sleeper hit Warm Bodies, did not come out with much fanfare. Its predecessor was a surprise success that had enough mainstream appeal to warrant a big budget movie, but it was also much more than that. It was a quaint, eloquent story about the elusiveness of love, shot through the familiar lens of a zombie tale. I read it back in 2011 (I think), but after having read its sequel, some of the book’s flaws are now pretty apparent, especially after finishing this souped up sequel, which clocks in at an even 500 pages, and tries to thread in a few different story threads that don’t really add up until the very end, which left me a little disappointed and not quite satisfied. The book begins where the other one left off. R is enjoying his new life, really his third one, after transforming from a flesh-eating zombie into something in between a human and the undead. He has the love of Julie, who sacrificed a lot to save R’s life, and they are trying to carve out a life in the shell of what was once Earth. But after an attack and an invasion by a mysterious company that promises to restore order, R and Julie, as well as a few people they meet along the way, literally take flight from them in search of a cure and a place to hide. There are three story threads that come in at out at different times, and it is hard to tell what is set during a different time period, what is happening now and what is a dream. Marion is very good at making something that would corny in a lesser writer’s hand seem profound and moving, and this proposed trilogy is a testament to that, but the journey the group takes and where they end up didn’t have the power the first lean novel promised. I will be eager to finish out the trilogy, but I will be quite weary about doing so.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "The Grip of It" by Jac Jemc

As much as I loved reading it earlier this year, I feel somewhat hindered for having read Iain Reid’s monumental debut novel I’m Thinking of Ending Things because it makes books that are skillfully written and rendered, such as Jac Jemc’s novel The Grip of It, which I just finished, sort of fall by the wayside and faults in it I would have forgiven otherwise are glaring in the shadow of a superior work. Jemc’s novel is quite good actually. Divided by chapters that are never more than five or six pages, this is an effective and thought-provoking haunted house story for the millennial age, where our culture’s obsession with independence drives wedges between those we love and ourselves: our problems become ours and ours alone and we suffer in silence. This novel takes that idea and expertly places in it in the confines of a familiar genre. The two people at the center of the story are James and Julie, a couple who move from the city into a remote house to help James rid himself of his gambling addiction. The weird stuff starts up right away. Strange noises come from the vents that are more animal than mechanical, stains and crude drawings appear on the wall, their creepy neighbor Rolf is spying on them and all that is before they learn of the houses dark, sad history. Soon, James becomes obsessed with finding out more about the house in between strange blackouts and Julie develops painful large bruises all over her body. I was reminded of the work of Blake Butler and his novel 300,000,000, in that both novels present really cool ideas that demand answers or at least a cool payoff and never really get there. It offers some really cool scenes, such as the ones with Julie’s parents, another where they are staying with Julie’s friend Connie and a few scenes involving cops who might be linked to the house’s malevolent nature, but none of these really lead anywhere and the book ends with a quiet whimper and not a profound bang. I still like this book for what it is though and think it is worth checking out.
Rating: 4/5

Review: "Pages from a Cold Island" by Frederick Exley

I wouldn’t be surprised if I (with the exception of one person, more on that) was the only person within a 50-mile radius to read Frederick Exley’s Pages From a Cold Island, a widely unread sequel to book that still very few people have read. It is an odd feeling. It’s like you are reading something just for you. It’s a good book, one that I don’t think surpasses its predecessor A Fan’s Notes one of the great unheralded works of 20^th century literature, which I read back in 2009, and the reading of this makes me curious to revisit it. Exley is skilled at these self eviscerating swaths of prose that both impress you and fill you with pity for a person who seemingly had mountains of talents but for some reason, both personal and impersonal, seems destined to remain on the fringes of literary history, a writer whose constantly being discovered, the quintessential writer’s writer, something the title of his first book quietly implies. The plot is meandering and a bit hard to follow on the surface, but it does take place after the publication of A Fan’s Notes. Exley has found himself mourning the death of writer and mentor Edmund Wilson, and takes to drinking to stave off the grief and other demons introduced in A Fan’s Notes. During the course of the book, he obsesses over a meeting with Gloria Steinem, infiltrates Wilson’s family, badmouths Norman Mailer and begins having affairs with students he teaches at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. There is a harsh truth to these vignettes; they use the real names of people (one being Dan Wakefield, a writer from Indiana who taught at my college) and don’t always say the nicest things. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that a lot of Exley’s obscurity is self-imposed. At times charming, at times annoying and at times sad, this forgotten book by a forgotten author isn’t quite the hidden gem as some others are, but it’s worth checking out if you come across it.

Rating: 4/5