Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows comes recommended by many lists and all of them promise this is both an Important novel and an Enjoyable one, and I’m not convinced its either.
Sure there are some stark descriptions of LA and the madness of the traffic and the absurdity of the people and what they wear/eat/consume/do. Descriptions that are well written and evocative and spectacular in ways that mirror their subject matter AND YET.
Continue readingFiled under American literature, Book I'll Forget I Read, Fiction, Mystery
In the end I didn’t love Nathan Hill’s Wellness (I’m not even sure I liked it): it was bloated, self-important, unselfconscious about the privilege of its themes (like how Hard it Must Be to not be able to move in to your Forever Home on schedule), aggressive in making sure the reader got the themes (your life and its meaning come from the story(ies) you tell yourself about it!) and over-weighted with symbols to reinforce those themes.
But. But! I keep thinking about some of those pressing themes – to what extent you choose anything, to what degree we are all just making choices in reaction to our past or because someone told us something one time that made us sure of some truth, what shreds of identity remain consistent over time and geography and circumstance – in a way that makes me wonder whether a book you don’t like can also be a good one if it helps you reconsider something or see something anew.
If nothing else there is enough in this book for most middle class white lady book clubs to chew on for at least a few hours. Questions of open marriages, of hating your partner but staying married, of whether you too had an Adbusters subscription in the 90s and now find yourself buying bulk paper towels at Costco with nary a thought to the Corporate Giants, of placebos, of the purpose of art, of messages you’d leave your future self, of whether you can love someone for a lifetime, of how we forgive our parents and how we ask our children to forgive us, of the injustices of generational wealth and on.
But I can’t really imagine most book clubs (certainly not mine that has in its four year history only managed to read one book) wading through this 700 page commitment. And so it’s left to S. who suggested this one, and maybe to you, to tell me if this it the bottom of the U-curve and have we started the rise? I think maybe. I think maybe.
Filed under American literature, Book Club, Fiction, Prize Winner, Reader Request
I’d requested Percival Everett’s James from the library before my week of holiday, but it didn’t arrive on time. Oh well, I thought, it’ll take me a month of reading six pages at bedtime to get through it. Not so! The kind of book – the excellent, brilliant, unstoppably great – book that you hungrily read in snatched seconds before someone-needs-help-with-their-sunscreen or you-work-a-regular-job-and-have-to-do-that-job-and-that-job-is-not-regrettably-reading-this-excellent-book.
A rewriting of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (a story I know well because I had a record – a record! – recording of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn as a kid, and listened to that record until it was beyond scratched and no longer playable, but could still recite long stretches – and if this was the 80s answer to the exhaustive library of audiobooks R and L listen to I’m not sure who comes out the winner as That Was a Good Record. ANYWAY), but told from the perspective of Jim, Huck’s slave.
The early ‘adventure’ narrative of Jim attempting escape and Huck joining him while he tries to escape the inevitable violence of his father, continues with the set-piece adventure scenes you’d expect: near misses, narrow escapes, and confounding characters up to no good. All the while the book explicitly and implicitly explores how race means, how it matters and when and to who and what the literal and bodily consequences of racism and violence look like. And how utterly absurd – and crushingly consequential – slavery is as an idea and a practice.
Perhaps not more than race, but alongside it, James is a book about the significance – and here I mean importance and the quality of signifying or giving meaning – of writing, reading, naming, crafting, telling and hearing stories, speaking – and how you speak – and of representation. Scenes of James claiming his name, or the costs of keeping a pencil, or the risks of telling – or not telling – Huck of his family. All wrapped up in what power is made and held in those who own narrative in who they will write/tell about, when and how (in a way that is obvious in a book that is a retelling of the story from the perspective of the historically marginalized-dehumanized Jim into the protagonist, author and creator but is nevertheless threaded consistently and brilliantly throughout the book).
As I write this I worry you will think this is a dry, boring book that is meant to be taught in second year literature courses (it is definitely not dry or boring but will also almost certainly be – or already be – taught in second year literature courses). Not so – this one has plot pacing that moves, all the while dropping impeccable sentences that just hang with gut pulling perfection.
So stop reading this rambling but enthusiastic review and go get the book already.
Filed under American literature, Erin's Favourite Books, Fiction, Prize Winner
S.A. Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed was a refreshing reminder that mysteries do not have to be badly written, predictable garbage (see my very recent experience reading Ruth Ware) and can, instead, hold rich writing, subtle characters and engaging plot.
Following the first black sheriff in Charon county (some southern town that is as much a character in the book as any of the people) (as an aside – how bananas is it that police officers are elected) as he investigates a serial killer, the book cares in equal measure for the thriller plot points that kept this reader up late as it does about the social context where seven black children could go missing with their disappearances uninvestigated for years. With some side plots about white supremacists protecting statues of confederate leaders and other threads following the aggressions that fill his day the reader sees the complexity and injustice Titus has to sit in or respond to just to do his job.
*spoiler: I appeciated, too, that the serial killer was not – as I spent most of the book assuming – a character we’d spent time with as readers, so it wasn’t a whodunnit so much as a thriller-mystery focused on Titus and how he finds the killer.
And some exceptional descriptions of dinner.
Filed under American literature, Fiction, Mystery, New York Times Notable, Prize Winner
Literary Vice 