The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen raised a fuss a few years ago when Oprah selected this National Book Award Winner as an entry in her famous book club. Franzen objected, indicating that Oprah's club members were lemming-like in their voracious appetite for any literature that was O-approved. Oprah withdrew the selection, no doubt instantly erasing millions in potential income from the balance sheets of both Franzen and his publishers. The book was a major best-seller anyway.

The Corrections is about the Lambert family, a brood brought up traditionally in the American midwest. While there apparently is nothing terribly special about this respectable middle class clan, their lives are unraveling terribly by the time the children reach adulthood. Father Alfred is battling against dementia and Parkinson's; his wife Enid is barely coping and wondering why her children are so distant. Son Gary is clinically depressed, living with his family in Pennsylvania and wondering where it all went wrong. Chip is a disgraced college professor, sponging off of girlfriends and wondering where his next break will come from. Denise is a well-known chef whose personal life involves breaking up marriages by seducing the male and female parts of the couple. As Alfred slides towards complete dementia, Enid longs for one last Christmas, with all of the family together in the family home. Sounds like a set up for a tale about a bunch of lovable losers who somehow manage to maintain our compassion and empathy. But......

I never really came to care about any of the Lamberts, with the possible exception of Alfred, an absentee father and non-communicative spouse. Alfred takes a bit of the brunt of blame for all of his family's problems- unfairly so in my estimation. While there are some great vignettes and the dialogue is strong, the story is just disjointed enough that it tested my patience. And I like big, sprawling, all-over- the-place novels as a general rule, but I have to care about the characters, and this time out I did not.

One of the problems is that Franzen can be too clever by half. He is clearly extremely intelligent, and much of the book is very well-researched. He writes with authority on a number of topics, from railroad engineering to commercial kitchens. Unfortunately for me, a lot of it came off as show, and did little to move the story or the characters forward. The book could have used substantial editing.

While I wouldn't classify it as a waste of time (and, after all, the book has been very successful; clearly someone likes it), I had high expectations which The Corrections failed to live up to.

The Story of Lucy Gault

This novel, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2002, is a haunting story of missed connections and the long-lasting effects our impetuous mistakes can have on our lives.

Lucy Gault is a young girl living an idyllic life with her mother and father in 1920s Ireland. Because her mother is English, the family has been targeted by Irish activists and lives under the threat of violence. Her father, Captain Gault, decides it is time to move the family to England. In order to delay or postpone the move, Lucy decides to hide in the woods on moving day. Through a series of plausible coincidences, she is believed to have drowned in the sea. Heartbroken, her mother and father move away, wandering Europe aimlessly, and more important, without permanent address.

In actuality, Lucy was injured in the woods, and is found barely alive after her parents are gone. So begins a lifetime of patience, of waiting, of self-denial, of loneliness, and of forgiveness. Thematically, it reminds me of McEwan's Atonement.

William Trevor hits all the right notes while touching on many major themes in this book. There are a lot of big ideas, but he does not hit you over the head with them. The words seep into you and imbue the reader with a sense of melancholy, but of continuous hope- much the same feelings that Lucy experiences throughout the novel. Very skillfully plotted and hard to put down.

The Invention of Curried Sausage

The Invention of Curried Sausage represents exactly why I love reading books from the list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. I have almost no doubt that without the list, I'd have never discovered this gem of a book. For every dog on the list (see: Choke), there are several great finds (see: this book).

This short novel by Uwe Timm, and translated from the German by Leila Vennewitz, has a whole bunch of Big Themes wrapped up in one small and extremely readable package. The book deals with a man who spends his afternoons in Hamburg visiting with an old family neighbor and listening to her story about how she invented currywurst, which is the national 'fast food' or street food of Germany. The woman, Lena Brucker, begins her tale in the waning days of World War II in Hamburg. Conditions there are, as you can imagine, rather dire. Lena, never a party member or sympathizer, is hoping the war will end soon so life can begin to get back to some sense of normalcy. She meets a younger soldier who is scheduled to head to one of the fast-falling fronts and has basically been assigned to become cannon fodder. She decides to conceal him in her third floor apartment, where they become lovers and she becomes his only link to the outside world.

As the war ends and the British occupy Hamburg, Lena deceives the young soldier into thinking that the war is still ongoing so that he will not leave. She has fallen in love with him and she is sure that once he can return to his young family she will be left alone. Her husband has been missing in service for years and her children are far away.

I'll let the reader discover how and why all of this has to do with the invention of curried sausage. The novella tackles themes of duty, loneliness, conditional ethics, and the horror of the Nazi campaign for those who were willing and unwitting collaborators. I liked this book so much, I'm going to try making some curried sausage for myself.

Fat Kid Rules the World

One of the great things about having a girlfriend who is a librarian is the amount of Young Adult literature I've been able to read. As a whole, YA lit has come a long way in the past 20 or 30 years. When I was a teenager, there was Judy Blume for the girls and S.E. Hinton for the boys and it seemed like that was about it. Today, there are a multitude of choices for kids of every age, ethnicity, proclivity, and set of interests.

Fat Kid Rules the World by K.L. Going is one of the best books I've read for a long while, and that goes beyond its YA designation. The story is about Troy, a severely overweight teen who lives in New York City with his father and brother. His brother is everything Troy is not: popular, athletic, and outgoing. Into this black hole that his life has become enters Curt MacCrae, a lower-east side guitar legend and high school drop out. Curt is emaciated, troubled, and may or may not be on drugs. He and Troy strike up an odd friendship when Curt recruits Troy to play drums for his new band. Troy's complete and total inability to play doesn't deter Curt, and soon Troy begins to go through a transformation, as does Curt.

The character of Curt is clearly inspired by Kurt Cobain, and the writing on bands, music, and punk rock is very well done. The story is essentially about how two troubled individuals can overcome major obstacles through their belief in each other. While the summary may make it sound like a 'feel good' book, or something treacly, it isn't- the characters are handled with realism and in a mostly unsentimental way. The great thing about this book is that adults can enjoy the story as much as teens. I would recommend it for high school aged kids. There is some language and some situations that may raise questions, but that is never a bad thing.

Choke

Chuck Palahniuk is certainly no stranger to controversy or success. Fight Club was an international sensation, and the film, featuring Ed Norton and Brad Pitt is a certified cult classic. I enjoyed Fight Club, but I can't say the same for Choke, Palahniuk's most recent best-seller and movie adaptation.

The story revolves around the character of Victor Mancini, a generally unlikable sex addict and scam artist. In order to support his mother, who suffers from late stage dementia, he resorts to pretending to choke to death in restaurants. The patrons who save him invariably end up sending him money for years to come, because he has somehow given their lives meaning. Or something like that. The psychobabble is pretty dense in this book, and I was never convinced that Palahniuk had the slightest idea what he was talking about. There are the usual assorted weirdos and cast-offs in Victor's life, including his rehab buddies and co-workers at a colonial theme park.

Several of the vignettes in the book are clearly designed to shock and succeed at doing so. Victor's encounter with a woman in an airplane bathroom and with a fantasy rape sequence made me nauseous. I have no problem with 'adult' or controversial or even distasteful subject matter, if it is done to a purpose besides just attempting to be shocking. This book didn't make it on any level for me, and to be honest, its appeal escapes me. The trailer for the film I saw looks like they are playing it as more of a comedy, which might work. As it stands, this book was a big disappointment.

The House of the Seven Gables

With the exception of Edgar Allen Poe, I have to admit that I have read very little by the great American writers of the 19th Century. My knowledge of Melville, Cooper, Hawthorne and others has been tempered by my great appreciation for their British brethren of the same time period. The House of the Seven Gables is the first (and so far only) Nathaniel Hawthorne I have read.

I don't know what I was waiting for. This is a great novel which I enjoyed very much. The story concerns the residents of the titular house, the once mighty and now down at the heel Pynchone family. The spinster Hepzibah is the only resident of the rotting old home save for a border, Holgraves, who is an artist. Legend has it that the progenitor of the Pynchone family, several generations previous, stole the land from another family and had the patriarch condemned as a witch. The latter cursed the former, and ever since, strange deaths have occurred at the house.

Soon, Hepzibah's solitary life is altered as first her distant cousin Phoebe, and then her mentally disturbed brother Clifford join her and her border. Phoebe manages to bring light and relative happiness to the shadowy existence of her older cousins, and begins a chaste romance with Holgraves. The idyll is broken up only by the infrequent visits of the wealthy and evil cousin Jaffrey, a local judge who for some reason terrifies Clifford and Hepzibah. Phoebe leaves for a short period of time, and soon the old curse of the house revisits the present occupants.

Hawthorne, in his forward, lets us know right away that the moral of the story is that the sins of the fathers can and will be brought down on the heads of those who come later. The house, a grand edifice when it was new, is a powerful symbol of the ruin that can befall once proud families when wealth and prosperity and built upon deception and greed.

Although the book runs for 270+ pages, very little in the way of action occurs. While that hardly sounds like an endorsement, the truth of the matter is that Hawthorne's prose is so amazing that the reader never feels bored by the lack of a steamroller plot. He spends an entire chapter in the company of a corpse over the course of a night, and his descriptions and intimate way of addressing the reader will put a chill up your spine. There is a great strain of the supernatural in this book, and it is easy to understand why Hawthorne was such a favorite of his contemporaries Melville, Thoreau, and Alcott.

White Teeth

I'm not sure how I missed White Teeth when it was published in 2000. It seems to have garnered almost universal praise from critics and readers alike, and was turned into an acclaimed mini-series in Great Britain. White Teeth was the debut novel from Zadie Smith.

White Teeth has many characters, all of whom interact on a variety of levels, but at the heart of it all are Archie and Samad, friends who met during World War II who have continued to be friends. The novel jumps back and forth in time, focusing first on Archie, then on Samad, on Archie's daughter Irie, and then on Samad's twin sons Magid and Millat. The characters' lives are intertwined, allowing us to meet Archie's wife Clara and Samad's wife Alsana, both an entire generation younger than their husbands and with different views on the world. Archie and Samad are both, in their own ways, stuck in the post-war promise of England, and have trouble adapting to modern times and modern problems. Indeed, much of the plot revolves around the constant push and pull of the various traditionalists as they rub up against more modern times.

Their progeny further complicate things. Irie is an independent thinker with a strong pull towards a past that her mother would rather forget. Magid and Millat take different paths (due to an astonishing action by Samad) with Millat embracing the lifestyle of a young English hood and Millat sent off to the east to become a more traditional Bangladeshi Muslim. Needless to say, things don't really go as planned or anticipated for either Archie or Samad.

What makes this novel so memorable are the epic scope, the memorable characterizations, and the facility Smith shows with language and dialog from so many different types of characters. She seems to have mastered the nuances of both genders and of a number of nationalities. Thoroughly engaging and hard to put down, White Teeth is a fantastic novel.

Saturday

I read Ian McEwan's Saturday several weeks ago and I still can't decide if I really liked it. Part of my annoyance was no fault of the book's. I had read a string of books that were essentially about navel gazing middle aged men from the late 20th Century pondering Their Place In the World. American Pastoral. Underworld. The Sea. And now, Saturday.

The book is about Henry Perowne, a successful neurosurgeon and his perfect life and family. His wife is a successful lawyer, his daughter a just-published poetess, his son a locally acclaimed blues guitarist. His father in law is a famous poet who lives in France, and all is swell in Henry's wealthy, just-so universe. Talk about a character it's hard to like!

The novel takes place entirely on the titular day of the week, and begins with a potential harbinger of doom. Henry awakes early to see a plane apparently crash on entry into Heathrow. Terrorist act? Henry seems sure that it was. His day is busy and eventful, and he has scheduled a game of squash, a trip to the market, a visit to his mother (who has Alzheimer's) and finally a big family dinner that is meant to be a reconciliation between his daughter and her grandfather, who had a falling out the summer before. However, during the course of the day, a fender bender with a sociopath named Baxter threatens to change the whole game plan.

I felt like some of the scenes in this novel were gratuitous, especially when Baxter holds the family hostage. The writing is strong, but the story could only truly be of interest to someone who felt some kind of familiarity with Perowne's life and lifestyle. I didn't. But maybe that was the point. Maybe McEwan wanted to point out that even in the most perfect of lives, there is a constant threat of upheaval and unhappiness. If that was the point, Roth did it much better in American Pastoral.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

This is a terrific book and it's hard to think of anyone who wouldn't enjoy it. Although it might technically be classified as a book for Young Adults, it is appropriate for anyone who enjoys great writing and wonderful characters. Author Mark Haddon apparently drew on his experience of working with autistic children in order to write this book.

Christopher John Francis Boone is a teenager with Asperger's Syndrome, which is a form of autism. Chris is in some ways a normal kid, but in others, his condition takes the forefront. An absolute whiz with numbers, Chris can't stand to be touched and can't let his foods touch each other. He intensely dislikes anything brown or yellow, and needs his routines to be just so.

Told from Chris' point of view, the book begins with the gruesome discovery of the neighbor's dead dog, lying in the yard with a pitchfork stuck through it. After being initially suspected, Chris decides to investigate for himself, and the book is supposed to be his record of his discoveries. In actuality, the book is about Chris, his beleaguered father (his mother having died suddenly previously), his assorted neighbors, teachers, and even his reactions to complete strangers. The chapters are numbered with prime numbers only, and Chris educates us all by including several illustrations and math problems.

The term 'heart-warming' is overused and can indicate that a book is uncomfortably close to melodrama or pathos, but it is applicable in this case. Having a protagonist who is maddening but perfectly honest is a rare and unusual feat, and Chris' story shines a light on the joys and challenges of real people who have similarities with this fictional character. A very unique reading experience.

Too Loud a Solitude

"I do not so much read as savour the words. I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck on it like a fruit drop." This quote from the protagonist of Bohuml Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude is as good a description of the love of reading as any I've come across. I have reread this slim novel several times and can definitely count it amongst my favorites.

Hanta is a trash compactor, specializing in paper and books. Living in a repressive Czechoslovakia in the 1970s, there are plenty of books to crush. Books that have been banned or purloined from wealthy out of favor families are brought to Hanta and his compacting machine. But Hanta can't bring himself to destroy many of the books. He carefully smuggles some of them to academics, others he keeps for himself. He fashions huge piles of books in his home, some embedded in the compacted remains of other books, wrapped in beautiful art prints. Although he is a modest and simple man, his knowledge of the classics is excellent. When he retires, he buys his compactor and brings it home to continue his life's mission.

'Crushing' is the operative term for this novel. The books are crushed, the human spirit is crushed by repression, and Hanta's fate is not difficult to figure out. There is not a lot of straight plot to this novel, but something about it just stays with me. The writing is beautiful and at 98 pages, a quick and satisfying read.

The Talented Mr. Ripley

Most people know of the all-star Hollywood film made of this a few years ago, starring Matt Damon, Jude Law, and Gwenyth Paltrow. I've never seen the film, but knew that Patricia Highsmith had written three or four books featuring sociopath Tom Ripley, and that this was the first.

The plot revolves around the 25 year old Tom, an obviously intelligent young man with some serious, for lack of a better word, issues. He is grifting his way through life in New York, scamming people out of tax money they think they owe to the IRS and sponging off friends. He runs across the father of an acquaintance, Mr. Greenleaf, who offers Tom a free trip to Europe if he'll go to Italy and try to persuade Greenleaf's son Dickie to give up his artistic lifestyle and come home to the family business and an ill mother.

Once Tom encounters Dickie and his casual girlfriend, Marge, in the little seaside town in Italy, he knows he has his work cut out for him. Dickie has no interest in returning to the States, and is living comfortably off of an independent inheritance. A major subtext of the novel is Tom's ambiguous sexuality, and it soon becomes apparent that Tom is obsessed with Dickie, much to the discomfort of Marge. Eventually, Tom murders Dickie and steals his identity (I'm not giving anything away; it is at this point that the book really gets going).

Tension mounts as Tom's seemingly impossible ploy threatens to go off the rails again and again. There is amazing suspense in trying to figure out how on earth he's going to pull this off. If you're a fan of detective or crime fiction, you'd be well off to pick this one up. It was highly unusual for Highsmith to write a book featuring the 'bad guy' as the protagonist. Tom Ripley is a fantastic creation and I'll be anxious to read more books in this series.

Schooling

Based on some message boards I've read and reviews I've seen, Heather McGowan's Schooling seems to divide readers pretty evenly into those who really enjoyed it or those who really loathed it. Much of the writing slips in and out of various styles, sometimes stream of consciousness, sometimes like a screenplay. The effect can be maddening and it is definitely not an easy read. However, for the open minded reader, it can be a very satisfying reading experience. Strict realists will struggle with whether or not the events being described are really happening as they are being described, but one willing to take the ride McGowan offers will ultimately be rewarded with a fairly clear story arc.

Schooling is about young Catrine Evans, a young American girl who's father enrolls her in the English boarding school he attended after her mother dies. You get the sense that he loves her but just doesn't know what to do with her; boarding school allows him to care for her without having to look after her. Catrine's assimilation is difficult to say the least, and her relationship with some of her classmates and especially with one of her instructors forms the centerpiece of the novel's plot.

I felt like McGowan did a good job of capturing the bizarre ways a thirteen year old's mind works. The disjointed nature of the narrative is a good representation of the chaos of the early teen years and the extremes in emotion and temperament most teens deal with. I was able to hang with the plot, although there were a few times I felt a little lost. As long as I kept going, eventually all was made clear. I'm glad I read this book. It is a perfect example of why I like the list. This is definitely one I never would have picked up on my own.

The God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things is a Booker Prize winner, a wonderful feat for a first novel. The writing is fluid, descriptive and beautiful. Set in Kerala, India, the novel is about an Indian family that is going through a slow change in fortune. Ammu has moved back to her family's home with her twins, Rahel and Esthappen, products of an undesirable marriage that has caused great consternation within her family. Her mother and aunt run the house while her brother Chacko runs the family food business, a pickling and canning company. The novel opens with the funeral of their English cousin, Chacko's daughter Sophie Mol. The plot of the novel unfolds towards the death of poor Sophie Mol, creating great suspense even though the ultimate outcome is known. The fallout from this event shadows the lives of every member of the family. While this book in many ways can be read as an indictment of the caste system, its focus is more personal than public, and it is the character's search for forgiveness and redemption that drives the novel.

I have to say that I love the plot device in books like this: a known ending and suspense and interest that lies in how we are going to arrive at that ending. Roy's writing is very fluid, mixing a sense of traditional storytelling with very modern incursions. She builds believable and flawed characters who the reader comes to care about. There is a sense of melancholy and tragedy that hangs over the entire work, although there are lighter, almost comic moments. She does an especially good job of putting the reader at home in a part of the world that might be entirely foreign. My understanding is that Roy has given up writing to become a full-time activist. Noble as that is, it is a shame we don't have more stories like this one from her.

Willard and His Bowling Trophies

This book is subtitled 'A Perverse Mystery'. There's not much mystery but it certainly is perverse. Richard Brautigan's writing style is very interesting. The chapters are very short (usually 2-3 pages) and the prose is very simplistic. It is almost as if his audience is a group of fifth graders. The content, however, is definitely adult.

This short novel features two sets of couples who live in the same apartment building. The upstairs couple, Bob and Constance are going through some difficult times. Constance has given Bob a venereal disease and Bob is having a hard time dealing. The couple are attempting to work through their issues via soft S and M but are struggling. Downstairs, John and Pat are enjoying a successful relationship and seemingly content. In their front room is Willard, a stuffed bird, and a collection of bowling trophies.

Looming over this are the Logan brothers, once upright young men who enjoyed family and bowling, now hell-bent and obsessed with finding their purloined bowling trophies. They have gone from petty theft, to assault, and finally to murder in their quest. The book leads up to the inevitable coming together of the principal characters, with odd fate thrown in for good measure.

I view this story as a reaction to the mid-70s hangover from 60s ideals. To me, the Logans represent all that was right with American society, and how quickly it could turn very wrong once the goals and aims it sought were gone missing.

I can't say I loved this book, but it was interesting and I read it in one easy sitting. Brautigan committed suicide in the early 1980s. His best known work is probably Trout Fishing in America.