Review: "The Third Hotel" by Laura Van Den Berg

By coincidence I came across and article today talking about Laura Van Den Berg’s second novel, The Third Hotel, as a literary noir novel. That is partially true in retrospect. It shares many themes of a classic noir tale: it’s sunny setting that belies hidden fissures of one person’s waking world and the depersonalization of a someone on the brink of a mental collapse. But while I was reading it, I could not escape its roots as a horror story, one where the biggest monster is the unknown (when is it ever not?) and ghosts are just people whose souls have left their walking, talking bodies. This slim, 209-page novel is a perfect representation of these two genres and what inexorably links them together. Noir relies on horror as a feeling and at the center of every horror story is a kind of mystery that, if and when it is revealed, shows the true, ugly monster hiding at the center of the unknown, both concepts that this book plays around with in brilliant and sometimes cruel ways, exposing our lonesome status in growing society and the idea that we can only rely on ourselves is the thing that scares us the most. Clare (I’m making the argument right now that this could or could not be her real name) is feeling such a way following the death of her husband Richard. Whether it is curiosity, grief or the numb feeling she can’t quite shake, she heads down to Havana, Cuba to attend a film festival featuring the world premiere of Cuba’s first big budgeted horror film, which is about zombies. Her husband was a horror film scholar, while she was a travel writer focusing on the history of the elevator. She takes in the sights of Havana, forms little, temporary friendships with a few of the people she meets and one day, at random, she spots Richard wearing a suit he would never wear and smoking a cigar which he never did while he was alive. I won’t reveal what happens after this, but it is the moment I talked about earlier where Clare’s mind begins to fracture. She starts seeing eels crawling across her skin (a scene from the zombie film), her interactions with those around her start to possess a sharpened edge of menace and once she misses her flight back to the states, her journey produces more questions than it does answers, although Clare and us as readers, are fearful of what those answers might be. This book is not the kind to give them away and it is more powerful for it. Much like I’m Thinking of ending Things, this story, its present and its past, like the couple’s awkward meeting, Clare’s early life when her parent’s ran a seaside motel and her strange stays in motels, where friendly receptionists named Samantha and a fingernail found in a drawer take on chilling dimensions, all seem to exist within the consciousness of s doomed, unreliable character. It makes for a hypnotic and creepy book, tinged with feelings of sadness regret and longing that linger long after the book is finished. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Lost Empress" by Sergio De La Pava

It won’t take an experienced bibliophile very long to find out what two writers influenced Sergio De La Pava’s second (first with a major publisher) novel Lost Empress. In its length, it scope and in its complexity, comparison to David Foster Wallace and William Gaddis are par for the course, with its settings very reminiscent of Infinite Jest and its habit of involving its characters in long swaths of dialogue with denoting who is speaking being a trademark of Gaddis’ difficult novels. But what really sets this apart is how De La Pava, sometimes, not always, allows the story to breath and goes down smoothly for the reader, a quality the two aforementioned authors are sometimes guilty of not doing. It is both the book’s strength early on and its detriment as the story progresses, with its early scenes filled with humor and a ridiculous yet cohesive story lulling me into a false sense of security when the book becomes a harder, less enjoyable read as it is bogged down in didactic diatribes and clunky narrative elements. The novel centers on two very different aspects of American culture: football, represented by the floundering Paterson Pork indoor football franchise that Nina Gill, daughter of the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, is determined to turn into a sports mega power, and the criminal justice system, represented by Nuno DeAngeles, a famous criminal whose fight for justice is constantly interrupted by powers he can’t control. It’s easy to see the parallels between these two entities and the tennis academy and the halfway house in Wallace’s novel. Both books act as a summation of a great theme two, and try to contextualize complex American themes. And much like these kinds of books, it can be terribly uninteresting in parts, be way longer than it needs to be and sacrifices its more engaging aspects for browbeating that can or cannot be eloquently written. I ended up liking parts of it, like the poor saga of Travis Mena, and a climax that had me thinking about DeLillo’s opening to Underworld, but as a whole it is a still a mystery, and I know some people who enjoy that level of disconnect in their fiction, if you do, than this book is for you. 

Rating: 4/5

Review: "The Line That Held Us" by David Joy

As a genre, I am beginning to tire of any novel or short story collection that would fit the label of “country” or “southern” noir. For the most part, they are quite entertaining: gritty, hardboiled stories of lowlifes trying to carve out their little piece of happiness by any means necessary, which usually consists of drug deals gone bad and a lot of homegrown bloodletting that churns the stomach and creates tension. But these past few years, I’m starting to think the genre has very little room to grow and each subsequent entry feels derivative of novels and stories that came before it; second rate versions of a Larry Brown, Tom Franklin or Donald Ray Pollock. I don’t want to be too harsh when talking about David Joy’s third novel The Line That Held Us: it is an enthralling read with a scary villain and a flawed hero whose actions we totally buy, but it is quite obvious that this story has been told many times before. The plot is simple: Darl Moody is poaching on private property hunting a huge deer that promises to fill his fridge for the winter. He shoots what he thinks is the deer but it turns out to be a person, but not just any person. The man he shot is Carol Brewer, whose older brother is the monstrous Dwayne Brewer, whose introduction involving a teen he witnessed bullying another kid shows his skewed sense if justice as well as his own gift for inflicting pain. Darl enlists the help of his best friend Calvin Hooper to hide the body, sets off a bloody series of events that threatens to destroy everything Calvin holds dear. It is a swift and brutal 256 pages that goes down smoothly, but it sometimes seems too eager to release the tension, evidenced by its final, frustrating pages. And overall, it is nothing I have not seen many times over by writers as equal in skill to Joy. 

Rating: 4/5

Review: "Trenton Makes" by Tadzio Koelb

It has been a little whole since I have read a book that I did not think was good. Since I’ve retooled my reading habits (cutting my reading quotient by about half), it has given room for certain books to breath instead trying to race through them to meet a certain goal by the end of a calendar. That doesn’t mean all of them have been home runs since I’ve passed book 1,001, but at least I found the act of reading them to be a joyous an enlightening experience. But with last year’s novel Trenton Makes, the debut of author Tadzio Koelb, more times than not I found it to be a grating, obtuse and frustrating experience to get through, with it’s fluffy sentences and rather interesting premise not shielding it from poor plotting and sloppy jumps between time periods. It’s premise is what sold me, focusing on an unnamed woman whose been beaten down by factory work while all the men were fighting in WWII who one day kills her husband, a man named Abe Kunstler after a domestic dispute and takes on his identity. It offers a few clever scenes explaining how she can pull this off, with many of the ancillary characters such as co-workers and bar patrons, commenting on his/her small stature and one scene with Inez, his/her eventual wife describing his lack of male genitalia as a result of a war time injury, which then leads to the scene where Inez and Abe trick a drunk young man into sex with her, a disturbing and blackly comic scene that is the highlight of the book. But it’s plot I felt was always kept at arm’s length, shaded by purple prose that is fun to read but offers very little, even in the second half where the product of Inez and Abe’s orchestrated rape, a sensitive young man named Art tries to help a friend dodge the Vietnam War draft. A shoddy dissection of masculinity that lacks a punch, I really wished I liked this novel more than I do. 

Rating: 2/5

Review: "Virgil Wander" by Leif Enger

Leif Enger was a writer who I discovered just as I was beginning to take reading very seriously, and read his two novels, Peace Like a River and So Brave, Young and Handsome within a year of each other if I recall correctly. But that was years ago, and I have matured greatly since reading both of them, so when it was announced that his first novel in ten years was coming out, I was excited but skeptical as to if it would deliver years after the magic of his first two books casts their spell over me. Thankfully, I was wrong to be skeptical and Enger’s new novel, Virgil Wander, is a total joy from beginning to end, featuring a weightless small town narrative, an indelible cast of locals and just enough intrigue in what is a relatively uneventful book to keep even the most jaded reader turning the pages. It begins with its central character, the eponymous movie theater owner crashing his car into Lake Superior. Somehow, he survives, but with a few neural faculties, such as memories and almost all adjectives, having sunk to the bottom of the lake along with his only vehicle. This lone act is a catalyst for the rest of the story and sets up Virgil as the central character in the many stories that take place in the town of Greenstone, Minnesota, the kind of town where Virgil not only owns the movie theater but also acts as the city clerk. The first of which, and arguably the most important comes in the form of Rune, an elderly man transplanted from Norway in search of his long lost son Alec Sandstrom, a minor league baseball sensation and town legend who rode off in a buddy’s plane and disappeared. Along with this newfound friendship, Virgil rekindles an “old torch” and begins to pursue Nadine, the former wife of the vanished Alec and offers Bjorn, Alec’s son a job at the Empress, the movie theater Virgil owns and operates. It is really amazing that Enger is able to pack so much into a clean and crisp 300-page book without the story feeling like it is about to burst at the seams. Along with this thread, Enger introduces Galen Shea, the son of the town drunk whose obsession with the sturgeon that he thinks drowned his father gives this quant story an aura of the fantastic that doesn’t feel shoehorned or unearned. On the flipside is the character of Adam Leer, who is Greenstone’s other famous resident, a filmmaker who has returned who always brings with him the spectral of doom, with many of Greenstone’s most mysterious deaths involving his presence. The novels’ more outlandish aspects never take away from the emotional impact of the story, such as one show-stopping scene where Virgil sees what may or may not be the grim reaper adding another layer to this story about mortality. This is not the kind of novel to offer neat answers or solve mysteries and some of the characters, even the saddest ones do not get a happy ending, but it is a near perfect example of great storytelling, from it’s unexpected climax to its downright beautiful final pages. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "The Mere Wife" by Maria Dahvana Headley

I might be wrong in attributing this idea to him (and if I am I apologize) but one of my favorite quotes about literature and life in general come from Clive Barker when he said we should have “love for our monsters.” We should seek to understand the pathology, or even the plight of some of society’s castoffs and undesirables at the very least, to look past the label and try to see them as something more human than monster. This idea was racing through my head as I came to the end of Maria Dahvana Headley’s brilliant retelling of the Beowulf myth, The Mere Wife. What might seem like a cheap gimmick on the surface becomes something much more in the hands of Headley, using this often told and well-worn tale to play around with a myriad of themes both modern and timeless such as parenthood, rigid social hierarchies, the tendency to forget the past and the questionable nature of the hero myth. Its feet are firmly planted in both its mythological roots and the era in which it is written in, never once feeling like cheap allegory or a sloppy experiment. I will admit it is hard to get used to and I can see some readers not buying wholly into the blending of these two very different ideas, but Headley’s writing is so crisp and beautifully ambiguous, especially in its use of the royal “we” for some chapters that I was easily mesmerized and hooked early on. I will admit, my own familiarity with the Beowulf story is slim, with my experience with the story being limited to a reading of it in the 6^thGrade and watching two movie adaptions starring Christopher Lambert and Antonio Banderas (the latter is a questionable adaption), so I may have missed some references. In this story, Heorot Hall is not a mead hall but a suburban enclave in the shadow of an ancient mountain: a pillar of technology and affluence. The book opens with the supposed murder of Dana Mills on camera while she is in the midst of fighting a war. She comes home pregnant and gives birth to Gren and begins a shabby life in the complex cave system housed in the mountains, Meanwhile, in Heorot Hall, Willa Heorot, married to the son of the couple that started the enclave, is coasting through a boring marriage and raising her son Dylan, or Dilly. Soon, Gren comes down the mountain and falls in love with Dilly, which sets off a brutal chain of events that span years that pulls in Ben Woolf, a police officer and ideal masculine specimen and puts both mothers on a brutal collision course. What impressed me most was how well Headley is able to hide the actions of the book through her writing, giving revelations and shocking events an extra air of discovery. The book is always exciting, hitting all the right beats in fresh ways, leading to a beautiful final few pages that is uplifting and spellbinding. A truly wondrous and thrilling book that makes the old feel new and the new feel magnificent. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Night Hawks" by Charles Johnson

I can recall in past reviews of short story collections that a lack of cohesion in the stories or no concrete sense of uniform themes was a knock against the book as a whole. I don’t know if I was wrong or if the stories themselves were the problem, but Night Hawks, the most recent short story collection from American writer Charles Johnson just might be the most scattered and diverse short story collection I have ever read, but it also might be one of the best. Instead of hindering the reading experience, the difference found in story to story structure of this book acts not only as a breath of fresh air (never once leaving the reader reeling from the dramatic shift in locale, time period or even style) but as a summation of one writer’s love of the art of the form and of writing itself. I have read one of Johnson’s books before this, his National Book Award-winning novel Middle Passage (it’s been almost a decade since I have read it and do not remember much of it), but it did not prepare me for this collection at all, which is equal parts playful and dead serious, deadpan and emotionally riveting. Like always, I will be discussing a handful of the short stories in the collection, but I can safely say that there is not a weak one in the whole book, although some I liked more than others. The collection opens up with “The Weave”, where Ieesha a recently fired beautician, with the help of her loving boyfriend, breaks into her old beauty shop to steal a large sum of hair extensions, which, as noted in the stories epigraph, are worth more money than you might think. It is a good intro to this varied collection, exhibiting Johnson’s knack for profundity that feels well earned even though the story is only a few ages long. It has a complexity that was really refreshing (such as the reason Ieesha got fired) and is ended as perfect as any short story can end. The symbolism in these stories are great, like the film projector in “Kamadhatu: A Modern Sutra” (one of two stories that reflect Johnson’s Buddhist philosophy) which comes to represent the main character’s desperately sought nirvana, or the jewels stolen by the impoverished narrator of “Occupying Arthur Whitfield”, whose act of robbery reveals hidden depths and pain in a person he projected his desperation onto. What really caught me off guard were the science fiction infused stories found here, such as the amusing but clunky “Guinea Pig” or “4189” a brutal dystopian tale infused with graphic sex and uncanny robots with one of the most brutally unhappy endings I have come across in recent memory. The collection is capped off beautifully by the title story, which fictionalizes (maybe) the author’s late night dinners with late playwright August Wilson, using the quant setting and a bit of shocking violence at the end to speak candidly on life, race and the efficacy of their creative pursuits. I found this collection wholly remarkable, and for someone who has spent the past few years trying to find his way through this dwindling art form, its importance and relevance are invaluable. 

Rating: 5/5