Review: "Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist" by Sunil Yapa

If you are still reeling from last night’s election, this boring book sure won’t help. The debut novel of Sunil Yapa, Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, is easily the worst novel I have read this year, although not the worst book (that dishonor goes to David Searcy’s book of navel-gazing essays Shame and Wonder). Not once did I find myself entranced or even passively interested in the goings on of a seven rather dull people who find themselves in a protest at the turn of last century that has gone completely array. I never once found any hint of greatness (although, to be fair, that doesn’t mean it is not there. I can never be that mean) or found myself swept away by the story’s urgency. The father I went on the more I wanted it to end. It begins in 1999 in Seattle during the WTO protests and focuses on seven people caught up in the events. At the center of the novel is Victor, young and full of vigor and wanderlust, whose plan to sell as much weed as possible to the protesters is trampled once his police chief father, Bishop, lets loose a few canisters of tear gas. Along with this father and son dichotomy, you have a few police officers whose loyalties shift, radicals who must come to terms with their amorality and a Sri Lankan delegate who is desperate to meet with President Clinton. None of it is very fun, and besides a few lines of dialogue (such as a description of hot dogs in a distant second to how Roman Craig put it) and the fascinating possibility of the female character King, I was happy when this book was over. The good news is that it only lasted a few days and not four years. 

Rating: 1/5

Review: "The City of Mirrors" by Justin Cronin

The biggest hurdle The City of Mirrors has to jump over is the passage (no pun intended) of time. It has been four years since Justin Cronin’s second book in his proposed Passage trilogy, The Twelve came out, and now, with the third one here so long after the last installment, a lot of the grandeur that kept me enthralled over books one and two has sadly faded away (I guess I know now how Game of Thrones fans feel). If you are picking this up after having just read the first two books, you’ll be fine and the story will be able to work as a grand, complex whole. If like me, it has been awhile since you visited these characters, you’d be obliged to read up on them in someway, whether rereading the books, which I rarely do, listening to the audio versions, which I did for the first one back in 2013, but even that and a prologue at the beginning of this book, didn’t help bring this series of novels to a satisfying close for me. I won’t get into the heavier details, since a lot of what this book is about hinges on what happens in the first two books. Let’s just say that thing seem normal at the beginning, with a few people and loyalties scattered across the southern tip of what used to be the United States. Of course they aren’t and that is mainly due to the rise of Patient Zero of the viral epidemic, Fanning, whose sad story is the best part of this novel: a fresh tale of woe among characters and settings I could barely recall at times, let alone bask in their importance. It might be an unfair assessment of this book, which is well written and more sophisticated than other books like it, but this final installment of a series that fascinated me has left me more than a bit underwhelmed.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Hurt People" by Cote Smith

Hurt People, the debut novel of writer Cote Smith is a real barn burner and easily one of the year’s best. It covers familiar territory but does so with gusto, bravery and a keen sense of adolescent wonderment and precariousness. It skillfully inserts the reader into the shoes of these two unnamed brothers whose world is small yet still shrinking, whose adult counterparts are not much better off, and even a faint-hearted glimpse at a different world, or an interesting one, is enough to make one of them fall into a black hole of menace and the other one follow willingly due to his brotherly duty. It is a dark novel with dark themes and great amounts of sadness, but it is told through the eyes of a young boy whose worldview and intelligence is limited to what his parents tell him and what he sees on the schlocky B-horror films he likes to watch. I always try to make note of what other books I am reminded of while reading, and the one of many that kept coming to mind was Scott Heim’s first novel, Mysterious Skin, oddly enough, another novel that turns the barren landscape of Kansas into wasteland of shaky dreams and nightmarish predators using eloquent, poetic descriptions of rural economic and social decay to create a kind of modern fairy tale where the goblins walk on two feet and the prize at the end is the discovery of love in our imperfect relationships. At the beginning of the novel, it is the start of summer. It is 1988 and in Leavenworth, Kansas, a city surrounded by four different prisons, two brothers simply want to spend their time at the pool of their apartment complex. But beyond that, we see second handedly the world of their parents falling part: they are recently divorced, and the mother, Aggie, has shacked up with a quietly cruel ex-con named Rick, who also happens to be her boss at the golf course she works at, and their dad, a respected policeman, is exhausted by the continued search for an escaped con and finds relief in the bottle and poor decisions. Out of this windstorm of neglect comes Chris, an older man the boys meet at the pool, who slowly seduces the older brother by teaching him new dives and letting him in on certain secrets, like what the tattoo on his ankles means. Slowly, his influence begins to poison the older brother, who acts out toward his mother, father and Rick, until things take a really dark turn during an apocalyptic tornado. I didn’t expect this novel to have such a dreamlike quality, much like the abduction angle in Heim’s novel. For me they worked because of how much empathy the two young boys emitted, even when they were at each other’s throats. It adds another layer of otherworldliness to action, especially one scene near the end that takes place in the woods behind their apartment complex. Filled to the brim with witty scenes, revelatory dialogue and a haunting final few pages, this adult novel with youthful energy was a dark, brooding pleasure. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "A Gambler's Anatomy" by Jonathan Lethem

I may have said this before, but I will say it again, the books of Michael Chabon (whose new book comes out in a few weeks and is in my library request queue) and Jonathan Lethem are the literary equivalent of the blockbuster superhero movies I, as a film fan, choose to see over the summer. I have not expected them to be good for quite some time, but I feel an odd sense of duty to check them out, even though I have not read a fantastic book from either of them in year. For me at least, the best book by Chabon is Wonderboys, although I enjoyed but did not love most of his other fiction. For Lethem, whose new book, A Gambler’s Anatomy I just read, he has not put out a good book since The Fortress of Solitude, and the other novels I have read of his have come frightfully close to being terrible. It is hard for me to tell, even now as I write this, how close this book comes to embodying that notion. Its premise is cool and made me pick it up. It focuses on Alexander Bruno, whose untouchable backgammon skills, of which he uses to cheat stupid rich men out of their money, is being threatened by a facial tumor that is blocking his vision. He goes back to California, a place he was banished from, and has a surgery paid for by a sketchy old friend, with some expected complications. The first few sections, where Bruno is fighting his ailment and goes through the surgery, performed by one of the most unprofessional doctors in fiction, are splendid. But when it is not boring, I found the anachronisms to be distracting and hobbling. Everything about this story has the feeling of an early 20^th century yarn: the game in question, the character’s names and way people talk, but it is set in the present day. It sounds like a minor complaint, but the more I thought about it, the bigger an issue it became. I can’t say that I hate this book, but from someone who wrote Motherless Brooklyn, I shouldn’t feel okay with just an okay book.

Rating: 3/5

Review: "Cannibals in Love" by Mike Roberts

Across 18 brilliantly conceived vignettes, Mike Roberts’ debut novel, Cannibals in Love, tries its best to condense the experience of those first, fresh-faced millennials at the beginning of the year 2000. This great book brought to mind many other great books as well, such as Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, a book mentioned on the back cover, as well as other works cut from that same cloth, like John Fante’s Ask the Dust and Pedro Juan Gutierrez’s The Dirty Havana Trilogy: stories of a writer sometimes choosing or sometimes forced to exist on the fringes of society and outside of stable conditions like love, romance and direction. It also calls to mind the brutal works of Donald Ray Pollock and Richard Lange in the subject’s amorality. But what sets this book apart from those writers and the books that I mentioned is its undeniable familiarity. This is a book of this moment, and I feel like I know the people it is talking about: a class of people who have been coddled by the generation before them, and are completely unprepared for a world that is collapsing around them. They make attempts to find themselves, but, as is the case for our narrator, also named Mike, they find trouble and confusion. The plot of this novel is quite loose. It reminded me a lot of the structure of Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, where one scene will end abruptly and a new one will take its place just as quickly. It all focuses on Mike, who is just about to graduate college and has no idea what he wants to do with his life, a feeling that many will find mutual. He has his wants and desires, many of which center around women or his unreadable allegorical novel about raising and milking cows, but they never seem to add up to much of anything worthwhile or long term. He has many jobs, such as counting lamp posts in his hometown of Washington D. C. at the beginning, which involves a memorable scene with his sixty year old co-worker Don and a sad trip to an off-track betting site, a gig in Portland, Oregon of babysitting a friendless sociopathic teen and writing spam emails from home in his underwear. But the true heart of this novel, as I see it, is Mike’s tumultuous relationship with a woman named Lauren. They seem right for each other, but through their constant addiction to fighting each other and their tendency to bring one another down, their eventual split and movement away from one another, is quite heartbreaking, even for two people who sometimes don’t have our sympathy. There are a few memorable detours as well, such as one section which talks about the disappearance of someone the same age as Mike and another where Mike’s car breaks down and he lies his way into the house of some well-meaning Christians. This is an energizing almost manic book that is also a perfect, clarifying snapshot of our troubled, ambiguous times. 
Rating: 5/5

Review: "Nutshell" by Ian McEwan

Even though I am always excited to read whatever new novel Ian McEwan puts out (although these last few times I’ve gotten them from the library instead of spending money on them), I can’t deny the fact that the quality of his work has gone down. Simply put, I don’t think he has put out a great book since Atonement. Some have been good, like Saturday and solar, but some of them have been quite bad, like his failed obsession with British spies characterized by his dull novel Sweet Tooth. This novel, Nutshell, easily his most unique and experimental novel, lies somewhere in between. It executes its concept successfully, more so than I thought it would, but it can’t help being a rather rudimentary story of infidelity, murder and disconnect, albeit with a very interesting perspective to say the least, that perspective being an unborn child of the treacherous Trudy. Trudy has betrayed her husband, the poetic and thoughtful John for his brother Claude, a dumb and foolish idiot. The unborn sees this and reacts with scorn and pity, as it is able to experience the events as they take place and the emotions they create, but is unable to do anything about them. This narration, surely wise beyond it years (or year), is what sets this book apart and makes it not be terrible. It is at times nihilistic and oppressive, but it is also thoughtful and poignant at times, revealing the deep trenches we fall into attempting the impossible tasks of trying to understand fully the ones we love. It does a good job of distracting the reader from the rather boring love triangle that is playing out, which involves anti-freeze poisoning and visits from the cops. A solid midpoint in McEwan’s oeuvre, one that at least keeps me interested in what he puts out next.

Rating: 3/5