Four Quicks
So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman
The Gospel of Anarchy by Justin Taylor
There Is No Year by Blake Butler
Three Stages of Amazement by Carold Edgarian
(Note: You should really purchase and rapidly read all four books under consideration.)
Holy shit is this a beautiful book: this is what to read next if you finished the ravising Visit From the Goon Squad and felt that sick internal fall, the one you taste when you get through a work of glory and beauty and then go wait, what can I read next that'll come close? The one to read next: Egdarian's gorgeous, gorgeous book.
It is, very simply, the story of a marraige: Charlie Pepper and Lena Rusch are a San Francisco couple negotiation present life—and very present, I mean: real people are in here, real issues (Obama's election's mentioned, and, at a ritzy party, Al Gore's in attendance). Charlie's a doctor (ha ha ha, Dr. Pepper—it's the only cheap joke Edgarian tries in the book, and it's not even cheap, just cutesy; it works) who's trying to get funding for a robotic surgery process he's helmed with a colleague. Lena works part-time as a writer (I may not be 100% on that fact—she works for someone else, punching up scripts, maybe, or in some way connected to advertising—the fact that I can't remember shouldn't be a sign of my lack of concern but at the insignificance of Lena's work as a plot device). They've got a son, and they've got a daughter who was one of a pair of twins; the other twin died. I want to make it that stark and black + white because it's one of the things Edgarian does best in this book: the fact of Charlie and Lena's life together, as a family, are presented just as that. In a lesser writers' hands, the fact of a dead child would be the engine for the whole novel.
Not so here: the book is fundamentally about the process people go through to become themselves, even at middle age. The challenges and trials of youth—defining oneself through pursuits, allegiances to idealogies, etc.—continue, Edgarian shows, throughout: Lena's uncle, from whom she's estranged (rightfully), shows up to complicate things, as does an old beau of Lena's. These are, however, silly to write about like this: the book's glorious and moving and jaw-droppingly pretty: there are sentences in this book which should be taught to anyone trying to write. It's a shockingly good book. If you want a novel which'll have you caring and believing and breathing deep and hard because of what happens to the folks therein, you've now found what you've been looking for.
I don't want to say too much about Blake's There Is No Year—it's fantastic, better than
any of us could've expected or hoped even having read Ever and Scorch Atlas. The book's a madhouse depthcharge, and Blake's got language in rivers in him that nobody, nobody, has got. If you claim to care about contemporary fiction and you're not reading Blake Butler, you're lying to yourself or dumb (see my interview with the guy here)
And, because of the HTMLGiant connection, there's Justin Taylor's debut novel The Gospel of Anarchy. What could've been an easy, brief, disposable read—post-college or college-age kids hanging out, trying to find meaning, something to give a shit about and/or believe in—is, in Taylor's hands, a really, really good first novel. I don't mean to downplay that: the book's very good. Is it great? I'm not sure. It's a hell of a good read. It captures the desperate energy of a certain age better than many books. There's an oh-I-get-it aspect to the book, in a way: it's about young people who live in the same house and want some hook on which to hang their wanting beliefs. There's a trickster, there-and-gone figure, who blasts mightily in these young peoples' sky. I'm not saying this stuff's been written of well before, necessarily: I'm saying that if you've gone through yr late teens/early 20′s with a certain aspect of desire and hope and searching, you've felt what Taylor's written.
Is it a great book? It's a very, very good book. The praise is earned. Taylor's absolutely a writer to watch: dollars to donuts his next one, whatever it is, is a mind-blower of magnificent proportions.
The book's an attempt to make a high school shooting make ideological sense, and, to do so, Hoffman puts her cards hard down. I can't give too much away—the book is, fantastically, written with the plot unclear throughout—chapters swap voices, and the principle characters all get their chances, hinting about something that's happened on April 14th (two days away from what all VT students remember as being The Day). It's weird: the book's tremendous and great and a phenomenal read. It's also, I've got to point out, an attempt sensically sort out violence, which is fine, to a degree, but there's an aspect of So Much Pretty which feels contrived, which feels as if it takes too easy a view of causality. That's a bigger discussion than needs to be gotten into here: you should for sure buy/read So Much Pretty, but you should also let your own questions bubble to the surface as you read it. You should for sure wonder if the answers or assumptions provided mirror the world you know and live within. That said: Hoffman joins a stupidly small group—Bolano's in there—of folks who are boldly wrestling with real questions regarding violence and gender, and, for that alone, she deserves massive applause and support.
