This is a fairly twee and in many ways adorable book produced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt's hitRECord open-collaborative creative arts company. The book's...moreThis is a fairly twee and in many ways adorable book produced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt's hitRECord open-collaborative creative arts company. The book's cover boasts that it features "67 contributors from the 8,569 contributions on the Tiny Stories collaboration on hitRECord.org." Contributions are both very, very tiny stories (never more than two sentences) and black-and-white hand drawings. The concept itself is to take online submissions, under online user names like wirrow (the main architect) and Metaphorest and RegularJoe (the handle for Gordon-Levitt himself) and publish them. The book sells for about $15 and promises that all profits will be split 50/50 between hitRECord and the collaborators themselves.
The concept is more intriguing than the book, really, which is not to say it doesn't have its pleasures. The drawings and caption-like stories give the book a childish feel, even if a few of the lines -- "Thunder always let lightning come first!" -- sneak in like the dirty jokes someone overheard from his father (in 1950). The overall theme of Tiny Book is one of being -- and trying to be -- delightful, and the book wouldn't feel out of place on a shelf of slightly older children's stories. ("The mumble bee had a fuzzy buzz. Whenever he tried to say 'honey,' it came out all funny.")
This slim volume has the feeling of a summer camp collaboration -- full of partially hidden wit (and probably some in-jokes), nostalgia, and earnest observations made brilliant by the love of fellow collaborators. Basically, it's a little hard for outsiders to fully appreciate, but I'd guess that the 67 contributors (and their thousands of other friends) probably get two or three levels of enjoyment out of seeing their work in print. A new edition -- an annual edition -- is supposed to be printed again next year.
It's not likely a book that would have seen the market without the support of a well-known artist, a fact I'd feel a bit more callous about mentioning if RegularJoe didn't manage to show up as at least a co-contributor in 12 of the 70 some contributions throughout the book. As vanity projects go, though, this is a particularly cute one, and the concept of encouraging further collaboration and creativity online is admirable. Two tiny thumbs up.
Disclaimer: I received this book for free to review it. (less)
**spoiler alert** The second book in the Heroes of Olympus series, the second part of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson stories, actually brings Percy back...more**spoiler alert** The second book in the Heroes of Olympus series, the second part of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson stories, actually brings Percy back to the action. After the first book, where he appeared in the title but never in the story, this book begins with Percy outrunning a few vicious Bargain Mart-employed Gorgons, having no memory of his previous life at Camp Half-Blood.
Instead, Percy charges into Camp Jupiter, home base for Roman-worshipping demigods, carrying Juno (Hera) and a message of certain doom. Now known as a son of Neptune (instead of Poseidon, his god-father's name in Greek), Percy's very presence sets the superstitious, battle-ready Romans on edge, and he's instantly an outcast again.
This is pretty smart planning on Riordan's part. Percy ended the last series triumphant, revered by his fellow campers even if he was resented, a bit, by the gods. No one really wants to read about a popular dude who has an easy life, though, and here, most of Percy's ease is revoked before the story can even begin.
This doesn't mean he loses his skills, though. When he's drawn into a quest with his two new, equally unpopular friends, Percy shows a tremendous ability to fight and survive, and that is mostly fun to watch.
More fun, though, is the introduction of Percy's new companions, Hazel Levesque, a daughter of Pluto (Hades) who has, well, something of a strange personal history, and Frank Zhang, a seemingly cherubic Canadian orphan whose own painful past gets even more painful as the story goes on. Hazel, Frank, and Percy end up (of course!) on a quest, this time to free Thanatos, better known as death. Along the way, they discover quite a bit about their own histories and run into one of my favorite Riordan gags of all time when they stop in at Amazon in Seattle.
In Hazel and Frank, Riordan seems to be preparing to create heroes who must die -- if not in this story, then soon -- which would be a major departure for his stories. I think I'm reading on in part to see how he'll manage to violate his own written prophecies and keep these kids alive.
My only real quibble with Rick Riordan's books is that they follow an extremely predictable pattern in terms of their three heroes. First, please understand that any male character in Riordan's books who comes into contact with an available female character will automatically pair up with her. Second, understand that this always happens in the happiest, least-likely-to-cause-external-conflict way possible. In the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, a boy hero who feels unworthy but is actually awesome (Percy) sets off on a quest with a brainy, tough girl (Annabeth) and a side-kick quirky dude (Grover). Instead of this forming into a love triangle, Grover is clearly not available -- he's a satyr with his own happy love ideas -- so Percy and Annabeth (spoilers) eventually get together.
In The Lost Hero, Jason Grace, a boy hero who feels unworthy and is amnesiac sets off on a quest with a brainy, tough, charming girl (Piper) and a side-kick quirky dude (Leo Valdez). Here, the math is a little trickier. Leo isn't automatically disqualified from questing for Piper's love -- but the Mist that has allowed Jason to appear, without a memory of his own, as a major figure in fake memories of Leo's and Piper's has made his pairing with her almost inevitable from the start. Plus, Leo is drawn to a certain type of girl -- unattainable and unimaginably hot -- and holds no grudges.
In this book -- you've perhaps guessed? -- the three questers are Percy, who can remember nothing but the fact that he's very, very taken (by Annabeth); Hazel; and Frank. Hazel and Frank start the story already making eyes at each other, and there's just about zero suspense for the audience about whether they'll eventually get together. What is done well, as usual, is the amount of internal hand-wringing that each potential pair engages in. Does she hate me now? Will he think I'm terrible if he finds out...? Etc. As a way of keeping two teenagers (or, here, pre-teens) apart, it's a solid, time-honored, pretty truthful method, but it's also a little old after 8 books. When are we going to see the ill-suited couple? When the Bad Idea Boyfriend? Is it only the gods who get to play around?
Perhaps. Riordan has modeled several of his characters upon his own children and their friends, I seem to remember, which has got to make your evil-doing options pretty slim. Still, I do have a cynic's hope after this book that at least one or two all of the tragedies predicted must come to pass eventually. Riordan creates some sympathetic and interesting characters; now I'd like to see how they react to something beyond triumph. (less)
I really enjoyed the original Percy Jackson series. They managed to capture some of the charm and childishness of the Harry Potter series while moving...moreI really enjoyed the original Percy Jackson series. They managed to capture some of the charm and childishness of the Harry Potter series while moving the stories into a modern, American setting. They threw in a slew of Greek history to boot and made all of the main heroic characters children with ADHD or dyslexia, a fascinating and clever way to tell a group of kids used to being singled out that they are, in fact, special in a very positive way. Nice work.
The Lost Hero picks up about two months after the end of the last series, and Percy Jackson is the hero mentioned in the title. Readers who were waiting for a return to Camp Half-Blood might at first be a little disappointed with this book, as the main characters are all new and the settings are, mostly, too. However, the world is completely the same, filled with godly parents, random pop culture connections, and enough demigod hijinks to make up for the missing Percy Gang.
The main plot of the story follows Jason Grace, a teen who shows up on a school trip to the Grand Canyon with absolutely no memory of how he's arrived there. He's already got two friends in this reform school, however: Piper McLean, a charming young woman who's managed (most recently) to talk a car dealer out of a BMW; and Leo Valdez, a fast-talking, easily distracted, orphaned mechanical whiz who stays in no school for very long. Slowly, our heroes realize a few things: Jason's amnesia is real, while Piper's and Leo's existing memories of being his long-term friends are fake; they're being used by a goddess with an agenda; and they're about to be toasted by a group of impossible-to-kill wind spirits.
Eventually, they find themselves on a quest to help free the meddling goddess in question. Along the way, of course, each of the trio has his or her bleak life story revealed. By the end of the book, a broader, world-wide threat has also been discovered, making any victories the trio manages in this book at best temporary.
Throughout, Riordan twines his characters in prophecies and reveals only about half of each character's fate here -- a gift, I'm sure, of the goddess Big Sequel Dollars, who works for Riordan's publisher, Disney. It works, though; at the end of this book, I raced to grab the second volumen in this new series.
I have one major quibble with Riordan's books: they're pretty formulaic. Every Percy Jackson book followed a very similar trajectory in plot and in character development, and this book did, too (more on this in the next book's review). However, there are two advantages to this. First, the pattern works pretty well for what Riordan wants to do: create a satisfying amount of tension over the short term while throwing in bizarro, often amusing little jokes and situations. (Spoiler: They find King Midas living in Nebraska, for instance, because he hear there was an Oracle in Omaha).
Second, this book, and the one that follows it, introduce a new element to Riordan's world that breaks his earlier pattern to an extent and promises a third book that will have to break a few of the existing rules. I've gotta admit, I'm looking forward to seeing what Riordan will do outside of his current comfort zone.
Halfway through this book, I had to set it down for a few days. "I want to read more, but I don't want to read more," I told C. Every charac...moreHalfway through this book, I had to set it down for a few days. "I want to read more, but I don't want to read more," I told C. Every character was clearly on the edge of having everything good go to hell. That isn't really a spoiler -- if you've read any modern "literary" fiction at all, you know that the path the characters take will always be on a downward-trending line for a majority of the second half of the book.
Chad Harbach, in his first novel, follows precisely the path that other literary writers -- and recent critical darlings -- have set out before him. He introduces us to five characters in the first half of the book: charismatic leader Mike Schwartz, a dedicated student at Westish College who studies hard, parties hard, and plays hard on every possible athletic team; bookish Owen, a gay, half-African American student activist for global warming and a decent if disinterested baseball player; Guert Affenlight, Westish College's president and an alum, who's famous for writing about the college's "mascot," if you will, Herman Melville; Pella, his daughter, who flees a cold marriage in San Francisco to return to a college life she spurned; and, most importantly, Henry Skrimshander, the best shortstop anyone's ever seen. It is around Henry that everyone else revolves: Schwartz discovers Henry and brings him to Westish to play; Affenlight helps secure his scholarship and position; Owen is his roommate and the closest thing he has to a friend, at first; and Pella, well, she has her own, later role to play in Henry's lives. Between these five characters there are two romances (one of which is something of a triangle) played out, and a third, arguably, that's blatantly latent.
So, yes, the book can edge, at times, toward melodrama in its second half, as characters suffer from every ailment between anorexia and zoloft dependency, but the characters are so winning, so clearly built to fit together, to bond and conquer the world in the first half that every low feels earned by that earlier high. When things fall apart -- and oh, how they do -- it's a gentler landing than I had expected, even if it's the worst thing each character could ever guess would happen. This book is more the comfort and joy of Richard Russo than the smack in the face of Jonathan Franzen or Ian McEwan.
My major quibble with the book, in fact, has nothing to do with its plot or Harbach's generally smooth, sometimes even brilliant writing. I was disappointed to have only one starring female in the book -- and to have her do nothing but interact with, and often take her cues from, the men around her. Her ambitions were abandoned by the author about 3/4 of the way through the book as she slipped into the background. Though Harbach provides an epilogue, Pella's story remains more unfinished, more uncertain, and less explored than anyone else. That was a disappointment from a writer who seems able to draw characters with tender attention when he wants to. (On the other side of this coin, Owen is, in many ways, too major, too smooth, his path too easy. I wish he and Pella could have traded troubles to even out).
I'd happily read whatever Harbach comes up with next, particularly if, in a second novel, he lets his sense of humor surface further.
This follow-up to Jeannette Walls's popular autobiography, The Glass Castle, moves backward in time and adopts a creative tack in telling the story of...moreThis follow-up to Jeannette Walls's popular autobiography, The Glass Castle, moves backward in time and adopts a creative tack in telling the story of Walls's grandmother, Lily Casey Smith. Walls begins with Lily's childhood, working on a dusty ranch in west Texas -- but that's not the creative part. What's interesting in the form of this book is that the entire story is told in the first person, from the view of Walls's long-dead grandmother (hence the book's dual classification by Walls as fiction and non-fiction).
The book follows the form of Walls's earlier book, too, in that the chapters are often very short and seem to impart large lessons with small (but often thrilling) examples. Through a number of quick chapters, readers see Lily age from a plucky 10 year old with the wherewithal to save her siblings from a flash flood to a practical pre-teen in charge of all hiring on the family ranch. Lily progresses rapidly through boarding school, her first teaching jobs, her first time away from home, her first romance, and before a reader knows it, half the book is gone and an indelible image of Lily Casey has formed in your mind: tough-talking and living, rambunctious but never without purpose, wild but not free-spirited, selfish but somehow, also, always looking out for her family.
This book needs an introduction: namely, it needs the reader to have torn through The Glass Castle with interest and abandon. No, you don't need to know everything that happens in that book to understand the story of this book -- the people are introduced independently, and the story starts long before Jeannette Walls's earlier autobiography -- but you will need to have read The Glass Castle in order to understand the suspense the author embeds in the second half of the book. Once Lily's children are introduced, the tension that exists between mother and daughter -- Rose Mary Smith Walls -- is much less interesting if the reader doesn't understand that all of Lily's fears about Rose Mary come true. In fact, if I hadn't read The Glass Castle first, Lily might have seemed even crueler -- and I'd be interested to hear if others had this reaction, or if it's a trick of the light, so to speak. Does Lily's abusive desperation to keep her daughter grounded seem even worse if you don't know how spectacularly wrong Rose Mary's life went? Is that the point?
Walls's portrait is at once tender and rough. She paints her grandmother as a nearly merciless business woman and an often cold-hearted mother, but she goes to great lengths to show (and to understand) the roots of her distance. The final chapter -- written by Walls in the voice of her grandmother about Walls as a baby -- goes a long way to explaining what may have been the driving force for this project. How could a woman who Jeannette Walls had loved, feared, and been told by multiple sources that she resembled have been both such a force for good and bad? What made Lily Casey Smith tick?
The answer, or at least a version of the answer, lies here. It's a quick, interesting read, as much an exercise in family history revelation as story-telling. (less)
In the eighth entry in the Maisie Dobbs series, Maisie is drawn into the British Secret Service again as fascism begins to flash in Germany and even E...moreIn the eighth entry in the Maisie Dobbs series, Maisie is drawn into the British Secret Service again as fascism begins to flash in Germany and even England. When she's asked to take a position as a philosophy instructor at a controversial, peace-loving college in Cambridge, she runs into not only possible threats to the state but a murder -- all in her first week.
The mystery mostly concerns the comings, goings, and politics of the professors at the College of St. Francis. Founded by Greville Liddicotte (yes, all the names are this rough this time), the college was founded on the idea that peaceful negotiation is always better than war. It's facing an interesting challenge, as Nazism begins its rise in Germany and even England, and this makes for a fascinating philosophical background (if, at times, a very loose thread for the story to follow). When Liddicotte is murdered, his own motives for founding the school become as mysterious as the identity of the killer, and Maisie Dobbs is determined to sort it all out.
Behind all of this are the storylines continuing from the last two books: Maisie's budding romance with Viscount James Compton; the challenges that Maisie's assistent Billy Beale and his family face as a new baby comes to their overcrowded home; and a surprise visitor from her old service days who once again needs Maisie's help and understanding.
It's those last stories that make this book better than just average. The ongoing growth of Maisie's character was actually a pleasant surprise, and the best tension, in this book. The mystery itself is secondary; the state secrets part of the story was woefully underdeveloped and seems to exist only to allow the author to show that Maisie is ahead of her time in worrying about Nazis and fascism. The suspense of whether Maisie will torpedo her own relationship or navigate the tightrope between well-meaning over-involvement with her assistant's trouble and actually being helpful, however, is engaging. Not all of these loose ends are tied up completely at the end of the book, but the epilogue provides enough answers that I'm satisfied for a while.
It's a sign of how much I enjoy this series that I put off reading this book for several months because I knew that once I read it, there were no more books in the series to read. Now, though, the #9 book has been announced for release in March 2012: Elegy for Eddie, here I come! (less)
I have been looking forward to this book from the very moment I heard about it. P.D. James! Murder mystery set at Pemberley! A return to Elizabeth and...moreI have been looking forward to this book from the very moment I heard about it. P.D. James! Murder mystery set at Pemberley! A return to Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy! Woo! The trouble is (and there will be spoilers from this point on, so go away if you haven't yet read the book but plan to), this book is enjoyable in exactly that order: It's P.D. James; it's a murder mystery; and after that, there's Darcy and Elizabeth. Don't worry, I'll explain.
The plot of the book is this: While preparing for an annual ball, Elizabeth Darcy's sister, Lydia Wickham, appears as a surprise, screaming that her husband, the villain of Pride and Prejudice, has been murdered in the woods. Darcy forms a search party, and they find that, no, Wickham isn't dead -- he's just kneeling over the bloody, murdered corpse of his close friend, Captain Denny. From this point forward, no one -- seriously, no one -- in the family ever questions whether Wickham is guilty. That may not seem surprising until you realize they all, instantly, believe he's innocent. The driving question becomes, then, Who killed Denny?
I think what I had expected from this book was for smart, capable Elizabeth Bennett to reappear and, perhaps, begin working out exactly what had happened, with the help of smart, capable, influential Darcy. Instead, and probably to its credit, the book takes a much more realistic path. Neither Elizabeth nor Darcy become private investigators. Elizabeth manages the household while Darcy recuses himself from magistrate duties and sets up a legal fund for Wickham. They both try not to wilt under the social pressure of having been associated with a murder and a murderer. Darcy goes, twice, to court. This is not the stuff of riveting social comedy, and it's also not the stuff of action-packed mystery. In short, the middle 50 percent of the book is kind of dull -- not helped by the fact that it often repeats itself.
The end moves more swiftly and provides many of the social twists and turns that Austen's own novels often did, and it's a satisfying ending. I did leave the book feeling wistful and full of want for more time to spend with Elizabeth and Darcy and their world, but the characters I was longing for weren't, really, James's extensions. I wanted the originals.
The book goes in and out of many, many different characters' perspectives; sometimes it's Elizabeth or Jane, sometimes it's Darcy, sometimes -- more often -- it's an invented character like the crochety overseeing magistrate or the old coachman at Pemberley. That's a fine way to put together a typical mystery, introducing villains or bystanders without explanation so that the audience wonders how things will fit together. Here, it made me impatient. I wanted more of the people I knew and much, much less of everyone else. Beyond that, nearly every character is, at some point, asked to do a lot of heavy exposition lifting out loud. The book is filled, as well, with run-on sentences. I've read James's work before, though not extensively, and I don't remember this being a particular problem of hers; I suspect it's supposed to be an imitation of Austen's style. I don't remember being lost in and by Austen's syntax, though, and here, I am lost and exhausted frequently.
This is a harsh review, perhaps, for a book that's actually meant very lightly. It's fanfiction, and it's not a bad sample of its kind. It completes exactly the path that I'd expect early fan fiction to take: James is eager, and indeed dedicates an entire chapter, to fix what she must have seen as flaws or loose ends in the original series. (She answers the question of how Lady Catherine found out about Darcy's proposal very, very unsatisfactorily, I feel). She clearly cares about these characters and has spent a good deal of time considering the realities of their world instead of a romantic vision (they have only just installed indoor toilets at Pemberley, for instance).
I came away from this realizing again that the wonder of Austen's masterpiece is that everyone has a different experience of it. Everyone draws slightly different lessons, and everyone experiences a slightly different world. Seeing someone else's recreation of Pemberley wasn't nearly as satisfying as I'd expected, even if it was mostly expertly done, because it did not align well with my own. (less)
Though I'm not a regular Stephen King reader, I picked this up on a whim after seeing it on the New York Times notable list for 2011. I'm so, so glad ...moreThough I'm not a regular Stephen King reader, I picked this up on a whim after seeing it on the New York Times notable list for 2011. I'm so, so glad I did. The story follows a high school English teacher from Maine who, through very strange circumstances, is given the chance to travel back in time to stop the Kennedy assassination.
But wait: There's more. Of course. The teacher, Jake Epping, must start his journey five years before Kennedy's November 22, 1963 assassination, and he must live in the past, undetected and preparing, from 1958 on. That's enough of a premise to be getting on with, of course, but King is a master of the strange circumstance and, here, at least, of what a wants-to-do-right guy like Jake Epping would do: he'd find a way to stop some minor crimes along the way.
The story is awash in what should be Major Moral Dilemmas that actually resolve themselves quickly. Bad Things are Stopped; Bad Men, too. For eighty percent of the book, what's good and bad are black and white; only the faintest, most delicate hint of the universe wanting to balance its books makes a reader uneasy about the choices our hero makes.
There's suspense in every chapter, and not all of it is even Kennedy related. Once Jake makes himself comfortable in the past, there's more at stake than simply the president's assassination. There are the friends he makes; there is also the strangely compelling and ultimately vile character that King has created out of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man Jake Epping must follow and get to know.
One senses, at times, that the main character is on a quest that the author would like to match: they both want to know why. Neither gets the answer, not completely, but the picture we're left with, the motives that are drawn in here, are believable.
Stephen King writes in the afterword that he started this book in 1972 but put it down, feeling he didn't have the time to write it and that it wouldn't be the best topic to undertake within a decade of the Kennedy Assassination. Thank goodness. Had this book come out then, it would miss one of its greatest strengths: its ability to compare now to then. This wouldn't be half as fun, or half as moving, if the main character didn't understand how much different the time is that he's moved back to. No cell phones? No Wikipedia? No 9-1-1? It makes the tension thicker; it also allows the author (and the reader) to stare at the not-so-long-ago with a "Huh, so that's how we used to do it!" wonder that makes the book a delight even when its events are horrific.
This book manages to make the past look horrible and sweet and then horrible again; it manages to make a grand, sweeping political statement about how bad things are now versus how bad they have been; it manages to put ordinary people into absolutely unbelievable circumstances; and it does it all while maintaining the main character as a pretty whole, round, complicated guy. Had he not been so believable, the ending might have been easier to read. As it was, I felt so confident of what he was going to do that the end -- even after 600+ pages -- was a real surprise to me, and I was glad.(less)
I did not resist reading The Hunger Games out of any feeling that it would be average -- I've watched, up close and later via Facebook, as many reader...moreI did not resist reading The Hunger Games out of any feeling that it would be average -- I've watched, up close and later via Facebook, as many readers I trust tore through all three of the books in a binge, singing their praises along the way. Instead, I avoided starting Suzanne Collins's trilogy until now because I believed they'd be captivating and, well, kind of depressing.
I was right on all accounts. Content-wise, the book was captivating, and it was depressing, and it was pretty thoughtful in places (though I guess that there will be further introspection as the stories go on and the characters all grow up). It wasn't particularly juvenile in its subject matter; its ending was unpredictable even though, well, I pretty much knew how it was going to end. The story follows practical Katniss Everdeen, a hunter and a teenager living in coal-rich, cash-poor District 12 in a post-apocalyptic state where America used to lie. Katniss, through unusual circumstances, is chosen to be the female tribute in the mandatory battle royale -- the Hunger Games -- in which the Capitol forces every district to participate. The 24 children -- aged 12 to nearly 18 -- compete to survive in a domed, biosphere-like arena that's televised like the world's largest Big Brother house. The story hinges on whether Katniss and her District 12 companion, a baker's son named Peeta, will survive (or will have to kill each other) and what it will cost them to do so.
What's most interesting in this story is that it's managing to tell a story about telling a story using some very, very old suspense novel tricks. Keeping the audience engaged is important -- we read about this how the Capitol shapes the story of the games, always providing a twist to keep the viewers watching. Collins does exactly the same thing to her own readers. Every chapter has a pattern: each one ends on a question (what's going to happen to Prim?) and each one starts with an answer that ends up only raising more questions (what's going to happen to Katniss?). It's Dickensian, almost; it's an old Arthur Conan Doyle trick. This book could be easily serialized to keep people aching for more. Collins, a former book editor, has to know how effective this storytelling device is, how perfectly an author -- like an all-seeing government that can control the setting and plot with only a thought -- can maniupulate her readers throughout the tale.
The story won me over, certainly. I'll pick up Catching Fire soon.(less)
At times very witty, this book is exactly what I knew it would be from the start: depressing as all hell by the end. I know, you're thinking, "Wh...moreAt times very witty, this book is exactly what I knew it would be from the start: depressing as all hell by the end. I know, you're thinking, "What? An Ian McEwan book with Climate Change as a subtopic? How could it make you doubt the goodness of the world entirely?" Yeah.
McEwan does two things that make me doomed to repeat this pattern of reading his books: 1). He writes tragically beautiful sentences that stretch over full paragraphs and half-pages with nary a comma out of place. These sentences often manage to convey within them both whimsy and pathos in such subtle doses that it's not until later, when I review them in my head in the shower or driving my car, that I realize, oh, damn it, that was cold and horrible. But it used such lovely words!
2). McEwan picks such interesting topics and such realistic worlds, populates them with a number of sympathetic people, and then makes his main character the one person all of these interesting people and things revolve around. So once you start, you can't stop -- not necessarily because you always care for the main character, but because you know, soon, he (it's nearly always a he) is going to do something that really, grandly effects the lives of the perfectly nice people around him, and you care.
So it is (was) with Solar, which depicts a thoroughly unpleasant, amoralish man, Michael Beard, one-time winner of the Nobel Prize in physics who now floats about the globe being unpleasant, oafish, and oddly attractive to younger, prettier women. This is the kind of stereotypical male dreamland I'd usually run screaming from, but McEwan makes it clear that this situation is exactly as horrible and hateful as it sounds. It's not a triumph for this fat, balding old man (Beard's own mental description of himself) to bed these many women; it's a failure in a long, long line of failures as a person. His one winning trait is, it seems, his Nobel prize, the victory he's been dining out on for years.
Because this is an Ian McEwan novel, you know from the first page that this glory will be taken from Beard, and that it will be Beard's own doing, and that he will deserve every ounce of awfulness that awaits him, and that -- and this is McEwan's magic -- you'll still somehow feel bad for him at the end. And it's true. That's the one achievement of this book: it takes a pathetic man, makes him worse and better for the space of 10 years, and then leaves him in more trouble than he's even worth at the end.
I laughed aloud at several of the situations and lines in this book, so it's not without its momentary joy. I think McEwan remains one of the better "serious" writers that's out there who can look coldly upon absurdity and make you, the reader, realize that it's not so absurd, that bizarre things do happen every day. (Every scene in the arctic in the book confirms this for me).
I'll need at least a year to recharge my sunniness, though, before I tackle more McEwan. (less)
Toby Barlow's novel-in-verse isn't quietly brilliant -- it isn't quiet about anything. Barlow deals in the loud and the flashy, and he exploits a form...moreToby Barlow's novel-in-verse isn't quietly brilliant -- it isn't quiet about anything. Barlow deals in the loud and the flashy, and he exploits a form -- freeverse poetry -- that's not always an automatic fit for explosions and blood anymore. Here, though, it is a good fit because Barlow creates characters who are most tolerable, most comprehensible, in small bites. He creates a world behind them that is only understandable if it's left to the reader's mind to complete.
In a novel, that would be exhausting. In a verse novel, with so much blank space on the page, it's fitting.(less)
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