Tag: contemporary fiction

Day 727: I Know This Much Is True

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Cover for I Know This Much Is TrueI have only read one other book by Wally Lamb, the more recent The Hour I First Believed, and when I began reading I Know This Much Is True, it was like deja vu all over again. In a very long novel, crass, belligerent, macho protagonist with anger issues ignores his own problems in attempting to cope with a family member with serious mental health difficulties.

In this case, Dominick Tempesta has a twin brother Thomas who is a paranoid schizophreniac. Thomas has seemed to do very well lately, so Dominick is shattered when Thomas goes to the public library one day and chops off his own hand in an effort to halt Operation Desert Storm. When Thomas is sent to Hatch, the high-security facility for the most dangerous patients, instead of Settle, where he usually goes, Dominick is convinced there is some mistake. His misgivings are confirmed when Dominick himself is severely beaten by one of Hatch’s security guards while he’s trying to get someone to call Thomas’ doctor. He begins trying to get Thomas out of there.

In his efforts, he meets with Thomas’ social worker Ms. Scheffer and with Dr. Patel, one of the therapists who is supposed to evaluate Thomas. Dr. Patel asks Dominick to discuss his and Thomas’ past with her so that she can gain more insight about Thomas. But eventually she begins treating Dominick.

So, the present-day chapters of the novel, set in the early 90s, are interspersed with chapters describing incidents from Dominick’s childhood and adolescence. These incidents include upbringing by a mild-mannered mother and abusive stepfather Ray, Dominick’s constant curiosity about the identity of his real father, Dominick’s jealousy at their mother’s favoritism for Thomas.

In the end, you get to understand and feel for Dominick, if not actively like him. His insight about himself is helped along by finding a manuscript written by his grandfather, another similarity with his other novel. This novel explores issues such as bullying and abuse, mental illness, the way Americans raise boys, the closeness of twins, the way our own history flows from the history of our parents.

As with the other book, I liked it well enough but perhaps not well enough to subject myself to another 1000 pages of Wally Lamb.

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Day 724: & Sons

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Cover for & Sons& Sons is a novel about fathers and sons, but it is really most about sons and the effect on them of their father’s actions. It is also about the fate of a lifelong friendship.

The friendship seems to be the catalyst for events. Charles Topping has died, and his funeral is packed with people waiting to see his best friend, the reclusive novelist A. N. Dyer, give the eulogy. Dyer is noted for several excellent books, but Ampersand has become a classic about prep school life.

At the funeral, though, it becomes clear that Andrew Dyer himself isn’t quite all there. During the eulogy, he becomes upset about the whereabouts of his young son Andy and has to be removed from the podium.

The story is told by a narrator who is not at all trustworthy, Charles Toppings’ son Philip. When Andrew Dyer meets him at the funeral and finds he has split from his wife, he kindly invites him to stay.

This suits Philip, who grows more malevolent as we get to know him. He is on hand a few weeks later when the Dyers reunite at their father’s request to discuss something important. He can be there to eavesdrop and look through old papers, but generally he cannot possibly be privy to all the details of the story he tells.

Andrew Dyer has been estranged from his ex-wife and two sons since the family learned about the existence of his third son, Andy. Andy is now seventeen. Andrew has tried to avoid neglecting him, as he did his two other sons, and do a better job of bringing him up. But Andrew knows he is nearing the end and is afraid Andy will be alone. He fears Andy is just as messed up as the other sons, only in a different way. Andrew has formed another preoccupation about Andy that shows how divorced he is from reality.

Andrew’s oldest son Richard is an ex-drug addict who has stabilized his life with great difficulty. He is now a drug counselor and has a wife and two teen children. The other son Jamie is a documentary filmmaker whose films for years have dwelt on the darkest of subjects. Philip Topping has a grudge against both of them for the teasing he received as a child.

The novel is told using letters between Andrew and Charlie, passages from Ampersand, and other artifacts from Andrew’s life, as well as Philip’s testimony. We find Andrew feverishly manufacturing an “original draft” of Ampersand because he burned up the original manuscript in disgust at what he did to his old friend Charles in fiction. Now he needs one to leave with his papers.

I waited to write my review for a few days after I finished the book, and I’m still not sure how much I enjoyed the novel. It is well written and absorbing, and it provides a lot to think about.

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Day 719: To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

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Cover for To Rise Again at a Decent HourThe descriptions I’ve read of this book in reviews and on the cover don’t really do a good job of conveying what it is like, and I’m afraid mine won’t be any better. Still, I’ll give it a try.

Paul O’Rourke is a rather neurotic New Yorker, a middle-aged dentist who loves the Red Sox. He wants to belong to something so badly that his desire has messed up his two most significant relationships. Each time, he has fallen madly for his girlfriend’s family—the first a close-knit Catholic family whom he offended by announcing he was an atheist, the second a close-knit Jewish family he tried to impress by his research into the Holocaust.

Paul feels he needs to engage more with life but instead engages less. He records and watches baseball games and eats take-out and does little else except worry about how little his patients floss. At least, that’s all he’s done since he and Connie, his office manager, broke up.

Although Paul texts, he does not use other Internet technology, so he is surprised when someone puts up a web site for his dental practice. He immediately contacts the designers of the site and asks them to take it down. Soon, someone is posting odd messages about a group called Ulm on the site and has also started a Facebook page and Twitter feed in his name.

Rather than simply working through a lawyer, Paul engages with this other “Paul” in long philosophical arguments by text. Soon Paul’s other self is trying to get him to visit his “homeland” in the Negev desert.

This novel creates a distinct personality in Paul as well as a fair amount of humor. I enjoyed it even though I thought many of the discussions were gratuitous and the plot a bit whacky.

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Day 712: Literary Wives: My Father’s Wives

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Cover for My Father's WivesToday is another Literary Wives discussion about the book My Father’s Wives by Mike Greenburg.

Be sure to read the reviews and comments of the other wives! If you have read the book, please participate by leaving comments on any of our blogs.

* * *

If there is such at thing as a male equivalent for chick lit, My Father’s Wives fits in the genre. Take a similar focus on romance and family, keep the background of wealth and focus on expensive brand names, replace shopping with basketball and witty dialogue with earnestness. Mix in a bunch of underdeveloped characters that readers don’t care about. Make it light as a feather despite themes that could be heavy and also make it thoroughly predictable. There you have it. This genre can even have a similarly rhyming name, but it would be rude to say it.

Jonathan Sweetwater has led a privileged existence. He is the son of a U.S. senator. He has a job as a banker that he enjoys, and he has been taken under the wing of the CEO because of a mutual love of basketball. He is happily married with two kids that he loves.

One day before he is due to leave for a business trip, he decides to come home early from work and sees what he thinks is evidence that his wife Claire is having an affair. I’m not giving away anything here. This happens almost at the beginning of the book.

Instead of simply walking into the room or, failing that, asking his wife about what he saw, Jonathan hires a private detective. This is what movie reviewers call the lame-brained plot, the plot that continues when the problem could be cleared up with a few sentences. If he had behaved at all rationally, there would be no story, however. By the way, this detective’s shenaningans, supposedly an effort to protect his client’s anonymity, are ridiculous.

Then for some reason, Jonathan decides he really needs to find out about his father, from whom he and his mother have been estranged since he was 9. I would call this the McGuffin if it had any other purpose than making the book a little longer. To do this, he tracks down all six of his father’s wives, doing so while pretending to be on business trips.

I felt the premise behind this novel, although not unlikely, didn’t really relate well to its trigger. That is, why would thinking his wife was having an affair make him run out to find out about his father? The people in the novel are very thinly characterized, even Jonathan. We know, for example, that he’s supposed to be destroyed by his discovery, but we don’t feel it. In any case, I think we all know that there will be some explanation for Claire’s apparent infidelity.

I would also like to mention the choices in this novel and the lack of a sense that some of the choices are not ethical or moral. Jonathan sees nothing wrong with hunting up his father’s wives while he’s pretending to work. His boss behaves more like a mafia don than a CEO, and if he was really spending his nights with cocaine-sniffing models, he wouldn’t take an employee along. In any case, that relationship is inexplicable and unlikely. Claire does one questionable thing that is unexplained, and I cannot say more about it.

What does the book say about wives or the experience of being a wife? In what way does the woman define “wife”—or in what way is she defined by “wife”?

Although there are a lot of wives in this book, I don’t think we learn much about them. We don’t even see that much of Claire. Her role seems to be very conventional—to be a good suburban wife and mother. She is warm and someone Jonathan feels comfortable with.

Literary Wives logoOf Percy Sweetwater’s six wives, we learn that he left each one for not being perfect. Jonathan’s mother is intelligent, educated, and cultured, but she doesn’t worship Percy, so he leaves her for Christine, who does. But he soon tires of Christine for her lack of the qualities he admires in his first wife. Next, he marries Elizabeth, a doctor, for her intelligence. He continues on, always marrying his current wife’s opposite. But we barely learn anything about them except their jobs. I don’t think we can gain much of a coherent view from this novel of how the author views wives. Clearly Percy views a wife as someone who has to meet all his needs for admiration, intelligence, charm, and beauty, but just as clearly, that is not Jonathan’s view of a wife. What is his view? That’s not clear. Maybe a companion.

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Day 711: Mother of Pearl

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Cover for Mother of PearlSet in the 1960’s but seeming more appropriate to decades before that, Mother of Pearl is a sort of Southern Gothic mashup. It features a love affair between near relations, a half-Indian seeress, the town slut, a self-educated African-American man, and some other stereotypes. It is energetically written but sometimes so floridly that I wanted to put it down. Still, it captured my attention enough to give it a mild recommendation. For a novel that starts out dark and unusual, it ends up being surprisingly sentimental and unlikely.

Even Grade is an African-American factory worker. He recently helped his older neighbor Canaan after a teenage white boy hit him in the head with a bottle. His deepest sadness comes from the knowledge that his mother abandoned him as a baby and he was raised in an orphanage.

Valuable Korner, a white teenager, was also left by her mother, the town slut. Her mother disappeared after her birth and left her to be raised by her grandmother Luvenia, returning just before Luvenia died. Since then, Valuable has shared the house with her mother and whichever man she is with.

Barely in puberty, Valuable is about to turn her life-long friendship with neighbor Jackson into a full-blown love affair. What neither of them knows is that they are half brother and sister. The adults who are aware of this seem criminally oblivious, except one.

That one is Joody Two Sun, a half-Indian healer and seeress who lives in a hut by the creek. She and Even are lovers. When Valuable and Jackson come to consult her, she can immediately see their relationship and fate but chooses to say nothing.

Joleb, a friend of Jackson, lives with his father, who is as dumb as a post, and his older brother Burris, who tries to see God by standing on a railway trestle as the train approaches. Their mother also lives with them, but she has been in a vegetative state since Joleb was born. He feels closer to Grace, an African-American woman who cares for his mother and nursed him when he was a baby, than he does to his own family.

I had some problems with this novel, mostly involving the unlikelihood that Valuable, with her attitude toward her mother’s affairs, would plunge into her own love affair as soon as she hits puberty, especially as naive as she is. But then again, if she didn’t, there would be no novel. In addition, I can say no more, but the ending of the novel is very unlikely, ignoring legalities, for one.

Still, I enjoyed this book, especially liking the African-American characters, who seem better defined than the white ones. Valuable’s Aunt Bea, who with her lesbian lover Neva takes her in when her mother finally leaves town, seems to have no personality at all. Neva definitely has one but it is mostly destructive. Joleb, although he gets more interesting, seems like a cartoon character at times. And frankly, the two star-crossed lovers are pretty much cardboard figures.

I was interested particularly in Even and Grace. Joody is too much over the top at times, and Canaan only seems to be there to anchor Grace.

Readers commented that they were not taken with the book until about 100 pages in. That was my experience as well. In fact, if I hadn’t read those comments, I may not have kept reading the book.

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Day 705: The Spinning Heart

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Cover for The Spinning HeartDonal Ryan achieves a remarkable feat in The Spinning Heart. In this very short novel, he manages to depict the effects of the recent Irish financial collapse from the viewpoints of 21 different small town residents. (My caveat: I didn’t actually count them. I am relying for the number on an article about the novel.)

First we hear from Bobby Mahon, who is absorbed in his contempt for his father Frank and his betrayal by his employer. Frank drank away his own inheritance, his father’s farm, and as soon as it was gone, stopped drinking. This all because Bobby’s grandfather said that at least Frank, at that time a teetotaler, wouldn’t drink away the farm. Frank himself was so verbally abusive that Bobby and his beloved mother stopped talking to each other to avert his wrath. That pretense eventually grew into an actual estrangement.

Bobby was the foreman of a crew for a successful construction company until the downturn, when the company folded and the boss, Pokey, disappeared. Now, Bobby and the other men have found out that Pokey did not pay in for their government benefits, instead pocketing the money, so none of them will get unemployment or their pensions.

Josie, Pokey’s father, laments his decision to turn his company over to Pokey and feels sorry for the men left without an income. He blames himself for loving Pokey’s other brother more than Pokey.

Vasya, a contract construction worker from the Caucasus, has even fewer options than Bobby and his men. He relates how Pokey gave him a ride and lied to him about work the last time he saw him, on Pokey’s way out of town.

And so the novel goes, written in many different voices in Irish slang. As the novel moves forward, tensions rise, finally ending in violence. A well-regarded young man is accused of murder. A small child is kidnapped.

Using an unusual technique, this novel conveys the perspective of an entire small community and the impact the economic calamity has had on all their lives. Surprisingly, considering the subject matter, the book is rough and funny, as well as poignant.

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Day 698: The Namesake

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Cover for The NamesakeIn 1968, Ashima Ganguli gives birth to her first child. She has travelled from Calcutta to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to live with her husband, whom she barely knows, and is missing her family in India. When she has a boy, she and her husband Ashoke run into difficulty because they are waiting for a name to arrive from her grandmother. But the American hospital needs to put a name on the birth certificate. Finally, Ashoke picks Gogol, after Nikolai Gogol, a favorite author whom he credits with saving his life after a horrendous train accident when he was a young man.

Gogol grows up embarrassed by his name and rejecting the traditions of his Bengali parents. He is bored through the endless Saturdays spent with his parents’ Bengali friends and the biennial trips to India where they do almost nothing but visit family. His mother, on the other hand, has never stopped missing India. His parents want him to observe the customs of his homeland, while he just wants to be American.

This novel insightfully explores the stresses for Indian immigrants adjusting to American ways and the tensions between the traditional and the present for their first-generation American children. Lahiri’s prose is full of minutely observed details as well as empathy for both generations.

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Day 697: The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

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Cover for Sophie StarkThe Life and Death of Sophie Stark is the striking portrait of an unusual person, a young filmmaker, from the viewpoints of various lovers, acquaintances, relatives, and movie reviewers. The various chapters are possibly interviews for the documentary about her.

The first story about Sophie is one of betrayal. Allison meets Sophie at a storytelling event where Allison decides to tell a story. She makes up a tale about a murder, but later Sophie is able to get her to tell the real story, about how the boy who she’d made the murderer in her story actually raped her. Sophie is a beginning film maker, and she asks Allison to be in her movie. They also begin a torrid affair.

But Sophie uses her knowledge of the rape to manipulate Allison into giving a better performance in the horror movie. The movie, Marianne, becomes a cult classic as explained in the humorously egotistical review by R. Martin.

Gradually, we see how Sophie was mistreated or ignored in school. But Robbie, Sophie’s brother, understands her a little better than others do. He tells about Sophie’s beginning as a filmmaker, when she started following a popular basketball player named Daniel around her college campus with a camera. This episode ends with Cece, Daniel’s girlfriend, getting friends to shave off all of Sophie’s hair. Sophie uses that event to interesting effect in her movie, too.

link to NetgalleyGradually, a picture builds of a woman struggling to express herself. She doesn’t understand people, she says, but she knows how she wants things to look. She can’t explain her feelings even to her brother. She does what she must, destroying relationships in the process. I imagine someone on some part of the autism spectrum.

We never hear from Sophie herself, but her story is oddly powerful. This is the second book for North, whose America Pacifica is a young adult dystopian novel.

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Day 695: The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

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Cover for The Assassination of Margaret ThatcherThe Assassination of Margaret Thatcher is a collection of short stories that reveal an unusual sensibility. Some of the stories echo other of Hilary Mantel’s writings.

For example, the first story, “Sorry to Disturb,” seems as if it could be a chapter from Mantel’s Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. It is about an English woman living in Saudi Arabia who has troubles with a Pakistani man she befriends. Several other stories refer to physical ailments that she talks about in her memoir Giving Up the Ghost. Another story, “Terminus,” is about seeing the ghost of her father on the subway. But of course, many writers’ fiction has an element of the autobiographical.

The title story has more than a hint of the absurd. In the story, an apartment owner is held hostage by a sniper who is waiting for Margaret Thatcher to emerge from the hospital below her window. The hostage, who doesn’t like Thatcher either, begins helping with the planned attack and escape.

All of these stories are impeccably written, some are haunting, and all reflect the workings of an unusual mind.

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Day 693: Fallout

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Cover for FalloutMost of Fallout is told as a flashback, but the opening section is very short, so we can say we really encounter Luke Kanowski in 1961, when he is 14. He has busted his mother out of the mental asylum where she’s lived since he was five to take her to visit the art museum in London. The expedition is not a success, but while they are being questioned by a security guard, Nina Hollings notices them.

Nina is with her mother Marianne, a selfish woman who hands her off to her sister Mat when Nina is in her way but reclaims her before she can gain any stability. Later, she does other things to sabotage Nina’s self-confidence. Marianne works sporadically as an actress.

Luke is a young adult when he meets Paul Driscoll and Leigh Radley. He has been working at a mill, but shortly after he meets the two, he decides his life is harmful to him. Luke feels immediate friendship for Leigh and Paul and has soon moved to London. There the three of them work together with a few others to open a new theater.

Leigh has fallen immediately in love with Luke, but Luke is busy seducing practically every woman he meets, so Leigh becomes Paul’s girlfriend. Leigh’s father was unfaithful to her mother, so Leigh decides to stick with the man she feels is safe.

Then Luke meets Nina, who her mother has essentially pimped out to Tony Moore, a theatrical producer. Tony and Nina are soon married, Nina naively not realizing that Tony is using her as his beard. That is, she doesn’t realize until she finds him with two waiters during a party.

Luke’s first play is being produced as he and Nina begin an affair. This affair and the things Luke is willing to do to try to “save” Nina have repercussions for several people.

This novel is completely different from Jones’ The Uninvited Guests, which I enjoyed more. Although I was compelled to read the novel, I really don’t enjoy fiction where men betray themselves for a woman, or vice versa. Usually, the woman in these novels is bad. Nina isn’t, but she is weak and selfish and eventually asks Luke to betray his friends and his art.

Finally, I feel as if the ending of the novel is unrealistically hopeful and pat, when I think of the wreckage that has gone before. The background of the theater and play production with a bit about the politics of theatre is very interesting, though.

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