Review: "The Border" by Don Winslow

I don’t much go in for book series’, with my reading habits making it hard to latch onto arcs over multiple books (I do not read more than one book by a certain author during a calendar year), but a few have made their way into my heart. Two come immediately to mind: one is Justin Cronin’s The Passage Trilogy and the other is Don Winslow’s drug epic, which I like to call the Art Keller Saga, beginning with The Power of the Dog, continuing with The Cartel and ending with this year’s The Border. I was entertained, horrified and deeply moved following the story of this flawed man who was there at the beginning of America’s misguided drug war and stuck with it as it evolved and morphed into a more ravenous and merciless monster with Adan Barrera as its head. If you have followed it too, you will enjoy this final part of it, the longest at a massive 716 pages, pulling from the headlines, narco hearsay and Winslow’s vivid and rhythmic imagination as Art Keller, exhausted, spent and pieces of his soul picked away like rotted flesh, still having hope that all of it will be worth it. It begins, like the other three with a prologue of things to come before stepping back to the end of the first novel where (SPOILERS) Keller walks out of the Guatemalan jungle, the Zetas finally defeated and Keller finally ridding the world of Barrera. After this, one of those who financed the covert mission to destroy the Zetas invites Keller to head up the DEA. He takes the job, knowing that even though Barrera is dead (despite the signs that crop up claiming he is alive) the vacuum left in the Sinaloa Cartel will be quickly filled, this time by the sons of those who started the whole bloody empire. And much like The Cartel, the book is not only focused on the story of Art Keller battling the cartels but stories completely separate from this blood feud, featuring a junkie undone by opioid addiction, an immigrant trying to avoid gang life as he makes his way from Guatemala to New York City and of course John Dennison, the pale horse candidate of the 2016 election, vowing to make America Great Again and build that wall, even though it is his own party who find themselves in the pocket of the cartels. Like all of Winslow’s books, it has a propulsive pace, with action scenes that feel authentic and over the top at the same time, under laid with a great passion for the subject ta hand; it’s ecstatic highs and horrid faults. If the Power of the Dog was about regret and The Cartel was about forgiveness, I’d surmise The Border is a book about hope, a hope that stems from the worst circumstances, a hope that stays a live and well lit when everything else seems to be falling apart. Winslow believes in this deeply, I think, and so do I. If this is the last book I will surely miss Art Keller and hope he has found some peace. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "You Know You Want This" by Kristen Roupenian

A book like Kristen Roupenian’s debut book of short stories, You Know You Want This, was published this year to great anticipation, with the story “Cat Person” being published in the right place (The New Yorker) and the right time (in the midst of the MeToo movement). I tend to steer clear of books with a clear political message, so when a friend bought me this book as a birthday present, I was both interested and a little hesitant as to whether it would live up to the hype or simply be an artifact of our current moment. Thankfully, I do not feel that is the case and found this book to be a little bit more complex than your average feminist screed. These are some of the creepiest stories I have come across in a while, reminding me of the work of Ottessa Moshfegh and Marina Enriquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire but instead of Mexican history Roupenian is more preoccupied with how modern people fail to connect with one another, how things like paranoia, selfishness, our need to be loved and our overriding fear that we do not deserve such a thing take us down dark roads that we only realize lead to ruin and horror long when it is far too late. There is not a weak story here, although some I like more than others. The first story, “Bad Boy” about a couple who find that they get off watching their male friend drift in and out of a toxic relationship and can only have sex in the process of humiliating him is a good primer for what is too follow, the banal horror of the situation Roupenian deviously crafts only showing its ugly face when we are too far to go back. The stories take a welcome strange turn with “Sardines”, about a lonely divorced woman, her daughter and the results of her daughter’s birthday wish has echoes of Clive Barker’s “In the Hills, the Cities” in its grotesque ending. I also feel I have a differing view on a handful of stories than other readers might, such as “The Good Guy” about the inner thoughts of a man whose sexual shame, pitiful submissive nature and failure to be honest with himself turns him into a callous monster, “Biter” about a woman’s obsession with biting one of her male co-workers which has the book’s best ending and the aforementioned “Cat Person”. Far from casting women as victims or men as villains or worse, foils, Roupenian uses the aberrant relationships in these and the rest stories to interrogate modern romance, its focus on selfish need and instant gratification and frames it as the kind of horror story Shirley Jackson would right which makes you question every misinterpreted sexual encounter, every awkward first date, every affectionate gesture from the opposite sex as something sinister, masking one’s darker desires that they have talked themselves into justifying. This is the kind of incendiary, thought provoking and original short story collection that reinvigorates my love for this lost art form. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Black Leopard, Red Wolf" by Marlon James

With the exception of one other title released earlier this year, no other book this year got me more excited than Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf, his follow up to A Brief History of Seven Killings, and by the end of the year, it is near impossible to think of something that will disappoint me more. In all fairness, that is partially my fault. I have never been one for high fantasy, still remaining unimpressed by both The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring, (so much so that I have not read the two subsequent novels of the trilogy) and that is really the main inspiration for this book, placing that kind of high fantasy in an ancient and uniquely unfamiliar Africa, a very admirable quality this book maintains even as it wholly lost me multiple times through its 620 pages. The plot, which concerns a character named Tracker who is tasked to find a missing boy with a varied group of discontents, but really, it feels like a halfhearted reason for James to craft a world that is creative and original but also dense, obtuse and rarely if ever wanting to meet the reader halfway (at least it felt that way to this reader). What kept me going is James’ rich use of language and descriptions, which allows the reader to hear smell and even taste abstract ideas that seemingly float forth through thin air. Whether he is describing a knife cutting through flesh, a gory ritual involving humanoid creatures or an ancient delicacy that might or might not be a real thing, it is this book’s strongest point, especially if you are liable to get lost amongst the mountains of world building James seems a bit too eager to drop at the feet of his fans. 

Rating: 2/5

Review: "Bunk" by Kevin Young

My one thought throughout reading Kevin Young’s nonfiction book on the history of the American hoax, Bunk, was what his take would be on the Jussie Smollet case from earlier this year and how that would fit into his narrative. I will try to remain politically neutral and judge this book on its literary merits, but with something so caustic it is a little hard to avoid such discussion. I won’t go as far as to say that throughout the books 450 pages (and more than a 100 more of notes and index) that Young seems obsessed with the idea of the hoax as another tool of white supremacy, but he does so at the cost of a few other interesting ideas he could have covered. Throughout the book, whether he is discussing P. T. Barnum, the godfather of the American hoax, the many cases of him putting non-whites on display such as Joice Heth, George Washington’s 161 year old nurse or the first ever “moon landing” in the 1830s, he never tries to explain why these hoaxes were believed, putting the blame entirely on the perpetrator and never on the public who wholly bought into it. It sounds harsh but at times his got to answer seems to simply be racism (but then again, that might just be what this books is and I might as well be complaining that their isn’t enough cake recipes). But amongst the activism, there are some good sections, such as the one of fake memoirs where he talks about how James Frey and J. T. Leroy crafted fake stories (and in Leroy’s case, fake authors) to great success. But overall, the book is a little long and quite repetitive, with an eye roller of a coda where you know who is talked about with typically unoriginality. There is an interesting idea here in the history and psychology of the hoax, but again, I do not think that was the book Young was trying to write.

Rating: 3/5

Review: "The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen

It has been almost exactly 10 years since I first read Jonathan Franzen’s game-changing novel The Corrections and after reading it a second time, it was like a whole new experience, as clichéd as that sounds. I don’t think it is the kind of novel a 21 year old can fully understand. There is a lot to enjoy as we watch the Lambert family succumb to their misfortunes over the course of 566 pages, but reading it at 31 it feels painfully real for anyone who struggles with this idea of family (so, everyone). It brilliantly catalogs the myriad of contradictions surrounding the idea of family: they are the ones we love most and our connections to them are tribal in nature and go deeper than any other we encounter in life, but rarely are these connections interrogated, rarely do they extend past our mere familial duty to our relatives and sadly, most of the time, the rift between loved ones is something that can’t be repaired no many how many Christmas dinners there are. With this novel, Franzen captured it perfectly with a compelling narrative that is sweeping yet intimate, sad and tragic but always hopeful. The book begins in the basement of the Lambert household where Alfred, the family patriarch, restless and confused finds himself in the basement, the ancient Ping-Pong table covered in postal detritus. He argues with his Enid, almost saintly in her hopeless optimism, about a letter from Alfred’s old job. It is a striking image of decay that lingers throughout the book, this once hopeful family, after many setbacks and disappointments, is messy beyond repair and ready to collapse. We are introduced to their three children, scattered all over the country each in their own private hell. There is Chip, the middle son who picks them up from the airport in New York. The least successful of the three children, Chip is a disgraced gender studies professor who becomes entangled in a plot to defraud American investors devised by the Lithuanian refuge whose wife he was dating. Gary, the oldest son, is a successful stockbroker, who’s on the edge of depression with a wife and three kids who are not helping him in the slightest. Denise, the youngest daughter, is a famous chef whose promiscuity and affairs with her boss and her boss’s wife cost her her job. The key to Franzen's genius is the many risks he takes throughout this story. His descriptions are rich in detail clever and very funny and he is so good that they rarely slip into a sort of gross parody of good writing. And some of the more crazy situations, such as Alfred’s fecal hallucinations, Chip’s drug trip and Gary’s home repair mishap, reminded me of similar scenes in Infinite Jest, where something so absurd is also very poignant and, underneath it all, very sad. The last section is an absolute beast and I think the book’s reputation depends on this one last Christmas, where the Lamberts decision, one a lot of people have to make, is rendered beautifully with a perfect last line. If you have not read this book, I urge you to do so. It’s as good as everyone says it is, especially reading it a second time. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "Cherry" by Nico Walker

Cherry, the debut novel of Nico Walker and  one of the most talked about books of last year, also feels like one of 2018’s most divisive books after a few reviews I have read from people whose opinions I greatly respect, and it is due to its divisive nature that I found myself liking it so much. It is a story utterly free of any literary pretense whatsoever, running towards its ambiguous finish line almost purely on passion, anger, regret and a dormant sense of hope. But it is also a very vulgar book, one I was keen to enjoy wholeheartedly before my 20’s, with many scenes of transgressive behavior like graphic depictions of sex, violence, and lots and lots of drug use. It is one of two novels that came out last year that deals directly with the opioid crisis that is ravaging the Midwest, the other being Stephen Markley’s Ohio. I like both, but this is a different kind of book all together, feeling less like a novel and more like a thinly veiled memoir in story form like Mitchell S. Jackson’s The Residue Years. And this feels even more accurate when you look at the history behind its publication, which might add more to this book’s notoriety than I would like to admit (and my affection for it, since books by prisoners or about prison are some of my favorite kinds of books to read). The book’s narrator, and obvious stand in for Walker himself, seems to have sprouted up from nowhere when the book begins after a startling prologue. Not really and everyman or even a victim of circumstances (he’s decidedly middle class), he exists in a grey area, beset by disappointment and ennui, and when he meets Emily, the “one to break his heart”, he sense that his life has found meaning, but the reader and maybe Walker in hindsight from his jail cell, know differently. His love for Emily takes him down the dreary road of addiction, to a stint in the Army as a medic, back to addiction and finally to robbing banks, which is what put Walker in prison. It is catalogued in excruciating, sometimes frustrating detail that took some time to get used to, but it is effortlessly compelling once you do. What I found most interesting was each section share similarities that you would not expect, like how the section in Iraq and the section right after where Emily and the narrator are deep into their mutual drug addictions have an overstuffed cast of characters with shady motivations the reader is never sure because the narrator feels the same way, whether that be an order from a higher ranking officer or what the couple must do to obtain their next hit. The book is filled with memorable scenes that are still lingering in my mind, from the funny, like the section where the narrator’s testicles become contused, to the sad, like the scene where Walker describes what a few of his fellow soldiers do to rats, which recalled a similar scene in All Quiet on the Western Front and a scene toward the end where a fellow junkie brings a baby to a drug deal. It is all overlaid with this sense of longing and regret, a wish to right terrible wrongs and make up for lost time, which I hope the success of this novel does for Walker, who seems to have a bright future when he is released some time next year. 

Rating: 5/5

Review: "The Octopus" by Frank Norris

Picking up any Frank Norris book feels like entering a world that is not only gone but also totally forgotten. Popular in his time at the turn of the 20^thcentury, his output is not looked upon too fondly in modern times due to his views on race and the blatant anti-Semitism in his work, but it is hard to look at the work of Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis and a lot of the best noir of the 1930’s and not see Norris’s strong influences, from his rich interpretation of the average person and their role in larger society to the grotesque hell he puts them through, Norris was born (and died, at the tender age of 32) way too soon. With The Octopus he is working with a much larger scale then he is with McTeague, which I read last year, this book being nearly twice its size. Through the bloody conflict, based on a real incident of a group of ranchers staging an attack on the government-backed railroad companies in Southern California in the 1880’s, Norris paints a rather brutal picture of progress while never once picking sides, casting both parties as equally greedy in pursuit of their goals. The cast of characters is rather rich, but sometimes one dimensional, with a few standouts being Anixter, one of the ranch owners, whose got the book’s most developed arc as he goes from selfish pragmatist to future father with something to fight for and something to lose and Presley, the obvious stand-in for Norris, whose didactic inner monologues divulge the book’s heart. It’s scenes are memorable as well, like the brutal one near the end detailing the horrid downfall of the family of a minor character and the ending itself which rivals McTeague in its ghoulish comeuppance of one of the book’s villains. A book with a dark heart but with an oddly hopeful message for the world at large, this is a strange, curious forgotten oddity from the early days of Modern America. 

Rating: 4/5