Review: "Stranger, Father, Beloved" by Taylor Larsen

With proud echoes of Lionel Shriver, Kelly Braffet and, most notably, Tom Perrotta’s Little Children, Strange, Father Beloved, the debut novel of author Taylor Larsen is a tight, eloquent literary act of subterfuge whose twist, as obvious as it should have bee, snuck up on my easily and made this tale of suburban woe one of the more resonate novels I have read this year. With quiet language, direct dialogue and near gothic descriptions of Rhode Island upper crust suburban dwellings, Larsen takes apart a man’s carefully constructed life, showing the wounds hidden behind ill fitting bandages, the cracks in the refinished ceiling broken souls who sleep beside each other, alas alone, in master bedrooms. It has been quite a long while since I have read such a brilliant and hypnotic take on the kind of depression that seems to fester away in those whose lives are seemingly picturesque, at least by anyone who is alive (Richard Yates, who I recently read, immediately came to mind). It is hard to plum such excavated depths and come up with something not only good and engaging but also original and truly thought provoking, and this book did so and ruefully smashed my expectations. It begins at a party, the last party, as we are told, of Michael and Nancy, a couple who seem to live a life of ease and modest yet substantial wealth. We see all this through Michael’s eyes. We see him float from one person to the next, talking with them briefly, ruminating on their relationship and moving on. We don’t get much of a clue as to the motional devastation that awaits us when he spots a stranger talking to his wife. He sees the man with his wife, and all of the sudden, he realizes that this is the man his wife is supposed to marry. The rest of the novel, he methodically tries to insert this man, named John, into his family’s life, which not only includes Nancy, but his teenaged daughter Ryan and their young son Max, who has a severe case of asthma. We learn more about each one as the novel progresses. We learn about Michael’s mental breakdowns and his strained relationship with his tough father. We learn about Nancy, who Michael settled for after he abandoned his mission to become a professor, and her tolerance of Michael’s chaotic manor. And for me, the best part was entering the world of Ryan, who we slowly find out near the end is following Michael’s winding road of self deception and regret. The book has quite a few scenes that stuck with me, one, and the book’s strongest scene, involves Ryan’s cruel treatment of an old friend’s mother, and a short scene involving Michael and an old college friend, which holds the book’s painful truth in it’s brief couple of sentences. Never showy, over the top or full of itself, this fantastic novel if a brilliant character study of a man coming to terms with his life and the painful realization that it’s too late.

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Black Swan Green" by David Mitchell

Just for his versatility alone, David Mitchell is easily one of the best writers working today. You can see every the effort he puts into his original and breathtaking stories in almost every sentence. For a writer who can give us something as historically rich as The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, as wondrously humane as Number9dream and something as mind bending and enlightening as The Bone Clocks, and to do so with such narrative skill and non-ironic love for storytelling, it is no easy feat. Even his worst book (for me, that is his first novel Ghostwritten) have a playfulness that is challenging and inviting, and with this novel, Black Swan Green, his most earthy, and accessible novel, is no different, taking the classic youthful bildungsroman and turning on its head the way only Mitchell can. It focuses on Jason Taylor, a thirteen year old who, like Mitchell himself, is afflicted with a severe stammer. He sees the world through a youthful lens, where the wide-eyed wonder of adolescent is slowly being crushed by the onslaught of the real world and real problems. A family spat at the beginning of the story, where Jason is chastised for answering the incessantly ringing phone in his father’s office leads directly into a scene set in nearby woods where Jason meets what might or might not be a witch. The relationship with his friends and his need to fit in coincides with the Falklands War, which claims the life of one of his friends older brothers, his love of poetry, which he keeps a secret, is perpetuated by two seemingly nefarious characters, one being his anti-social and methodical cousin and an aging woman who berates his literary tastes. While not as earth shattering as The Bone Clocks, this is a hearty story of youth and growing up by a writer both comfortable and in love with what he is doing.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "The Revolutionaries Try Again" by Mauro Javier Cardenas

Roberto Bolano and Julio Cortozar (As well as Gabriel Garcia Marquez) are to Latin American writers what Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison are to black writers. For better or worse, any new book by someone who shares their ethnicity is bound to be compared to them even with a modicum of thematic similarities. While I have not read any Julio Cortozar, I am a huge Bolano fan, and the only similarities The Revolutionaries Try Again; the debut novel of Ecuadorian writer Mauro Javier Cardenas has with Bolano’s novel The Savage Detectives is it two central male characters and their shaky relationship. This is more of a modernist work of vibrant and intense innovation that left me a little breathless but undeniably impressed. It’s a tough read, not unlike the books by the authors mentioned, but one I found rewarding and thought provoking. It is quite the task to unpack such a novel, but I will do my best. While the back of the book says that there are three central characters, there are really only two. One, the person whose story takes up the most page space is Antonio, an ex-apt living in San Francisco who gets a call from his old school chum Leopoldo, a government worker still living in their hometown of Guayaquil. Leo has a plan to overthrow the government, which exists in a state of comfortable corruption and under the ghost and possible threat of violent revolution. It is hard to pin down what this books thematic heart is. Is it the futility of revolution? Is it about the finite passion for it that deprecates with age? Or is it about age itself, and the disappointments that invariably come with growing old? It’s probably somewhere in between, but this novel, with its acidic language and unconventional structure, which layers timelines, thoughts and feelings on top of each other, is sure to get your blood flowing.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "The Broom of the System" by David Foster Wallace

My biggest take away from reading The Broom of the System, the first novel by David Foster Wallace, is the key as to why some people, and maybe rightly so, call him one of the most overrated writers. It is less apparent in his most famous novel, Infinite Jest, simply because it is a better book, but looking back the same fatal flaw that runs through this rather enjoyable book runs through this one as well, and it’s Wallace’s inability, or unwillingness, to tie his narrative together into something that feels like it belongs together and not something with a meaning hidden behind post modern musings and a rather vague intent. Reading this, I feel confident in saying that the novels that came after Infinite Jest, such as House of Leaves, 2666 and even, more recently, A Brief History of Seven Killings, are for sure standing on Wallace’s shoulders, but they have improved on the template he created. The story, which is a bit easier to comprehend than the story of the Incandenzas, concerns one Lenore Beadsman, an office jock in a future version of Cleveland, Ohio, who simultaneously finds herself in the romantic crosshairs of her older boss, the insanely jealous Rick Vigorous and having to unfurl the mystery of her grandmother, also named Lenore, who went missing from her nursing home along with about twenty other patients and staff, who might be hiding in a giant manmade desert just outside the city. As always, the answers are never as much fun as the asides in any Wallace story, and this is one funny book, a quality he rarely gets lauded for and improved on his more famous novel, with scenes involving a bible beating parrot, college students wanting girls to sign their ass and one little story involving three campers and their rules for cooking prove that in another dimension Wallace would be one of our greatest stand up comics. An early version of a novelistic formula I have come to enjoy the more I get into it, this first taste of one of our most fascinating literary figures was better than I expected.

Rating: 4/5

Review: "The Green Man" by Kingsley Amis

My only previous connection to Kingsley Amis was through his son Martin, of whom I have read four of his books. I find them to be a bit tawdry stylistically and not very impressive to varying degrees (I really liked Money: A Suicide Not and Time’s Arrow but really didn’t care for London Fields, although that has been on my re-read list for a few years), an attribute that his father now shares, because I was wholly, unabashedly unimpressed with The Green Man, a novel that is part ghost story and part family drama. I appreciate the trajectory of Amis’ work, which runs the gamut from kitchen sink realism to full blown science fiction, but this uninteresting mash up of two very unlike genres can only be seen, at least for me, as a staggering misstep. I at least like the opening, where we are introduced to the life of Maurice Allington, a former scholar who now owns a century’s old inn that only appears haunted to him. He lives there with his second wife Joyce, his two kids Nick and Amy and his feeble 80 year old grandfather. After a series of events, which include the death of his grandfather by possible ghost sighting, the rebellion of Amy and a rather hilarious interlude where he is cast out of the threesome he initiated, Maurice must contend with the ghost that haunt his abode and threaten to tear his life apart. After introducing really strong characters, Amis fails when it comes to action and motivation, with vague scene after vague scene leading to an underwhelming climax and realization on Maurice’s part. While his varied output promises a different kind of book each time (my interest might lie with Lucky Jim), like his son, I don’t see myself in a big hurry to read anything else by him. 
Rating: 2/5

Review: "Revolutionary Road" by Richard Yates

I really dislike it when people automatically think that the book is better than the movie that is adapted from it. It always comes off as beyond snobbish and it compares two art forms that are experienced in different ways. No matter what kind of film or what kind of book, movies are a passive experience and books are experiences that must be engaged in. I was a movie fan before I was a bookworm, and movies can do things books can never do. But now, I am going to be one of those snobby people: Revolutionary Road, the novel by Richard Yates, I worlds better than the movie. It’s a matter of impossible translation and no one involved, but the heightened melodrama people say onscreen is nothing compared to the brutal, emotional smackdown that the book is. If we are just judging on sheer feeling, this is one of the most violent books I have ever read. In one descriptive sentence or in one line of dialogue between two characters, there is enough violence and ugliness that makes the violence and gore of some horror novels feel like rays of sunshine. This is also a horror story of the highest order, but it is a horror of the hidden, a horror we feel toward what our true selves might be and the horror of what our place in this big world really is. It is easily one of the best novels of the sixties and the last half of the 20^th century. It begins, as the movie did, at a performance of the play The Petrified Forest. We are slowly, through the painful rendering of an awkward and shoddy performance, introduced to the couple of Frank and April Wheeler, two souls, infected with wanderlust and two kids, who consistently tell themselves that they are better than those around them and are meant for better things. The novel, which takes place in 1955, shows us how they fail at this endeavor and destroy themselves in the process. What makes this different in the book is that we get many different perspectives, not just the Wheelers. There is also Shep and Milly Campbell, neighbors who’ve made the Wheelers best friends out of necessity. Shep in particular has a scene near the end that is beautifully and painfully revelatory. But the real center of this book, kind of hidden if I may say so, is john Givings Jr., the son of Howard and Helen Givings, also neighbors of the Wheelers. He is unstable enough to be a patient at a mental hospital, but his three scenes with the Wheelers are biting, aggressive, men and nasty but they are filled with a harsh truth that no one else in the book will admit too. It’s hard to say too much about this book without repeating the words of those before me. This lost classic, which seems to be lost no more, is a compulsively readable gem about the ways in which we delude ourselves into inaction, and what happens when we face the consequences.

Rating: 5/5