BILLY LYNN'S LONG HALFTIME WALK

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Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, Ben Fountain, HarperCollinsPublishers, 2012, 267 pp

I enjoyed reading this novel. Ben Fountain won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, was a contender in the Tournament of Books, and had written daily for 18 years before his first book was published. He knows about dreams, struggle, and delayed rewards.

Billy Lynn is one of several novels to come out recently about the war in Iraq. I haven't read any of the others so I can't say it is the best, but it is a good one.

The eight soldiers in this novel are the survivors of a firefight with Iraqui insurgents. Because a Fox News tape of the battle went viral, Bravo Squad became America's most famous heroes of the moment. Due to falling public support for the war, they have been dispatched on a nationwide media "Victory Tour" and for Billy Lynn and his comrades it is a Magical Mystery Tour as surrealistic as anything ever conceived by John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

I can't imagine what this would be like, being feted and fawned over, fed and boozed and drugged, back in the USA with full blown PTSD and knowing all the while that you would return to the war to finish your tour of duty. Yes, you survived but you still stand a 99% chance of being killed.

Ben Fountain imagined it for me. Billy gets to have an early Thanksgiving dinner with his mother and sister, he and Bravo Squad spend a hungover day at the Dallas Cowboys stadium and participate with nearly disastrous results in the halftime show alongside Destiny's Child. Billy, who has a crashing headache all day but can't find a single aspirin, falls in love/lust with a cheerleader. A Hollywood agent has come along on the tour, trying to get a movie deal for the squad, promising untold riches, if it happens, if they live to see it.

Billy Lynn is a 19-year-old Texas native. He is just a guy with no prospects, barely any experience except as a soldier and tries to process what he sees. It is equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking.

The novel could be called anti-war, anti-American, anti-big business, and I suppose it is. Fountain portrays us as we are and it's not pretty. When the Dixie Chicks protested the war, it ultimately ruined their career. Billy and his buddies are faced with a similar quandary but enough time has passed that Ben Fountain made his career instead.

What a country. What a world. When will we ever learn?

(Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

BRING UP THE BODIES

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Bring Up The Bodies, Hilary Mantel, Henry Holt and Company, 2012, 410 pp

Just great! Hilary Mantel is hands down my current favorite historical fiction author. In her sequel to Wolf Hall (and her second in a proposed trilogy about Thomas Cromwell) she continues her fascinating study of a man who served Henry VIII, doing most of the king's dirty work for him, and who lived in conflict both internal and external.

This volume concerns the elimination of Henry's second wife, Anne Boleyn. She had also failed to give him a male heir, but worse she was wildly, recklessly adulterous, opening the door to Cromwell when it was time for her to go.

Anyone who claims that Bring Up The Bodies can be read with enjoyment and full understanding without having read Wolf Hall is probably just trying to sell you the book. Not possible!

You need to know Henry VIII in all his megalomaniac obsession with obtaining a male heir. You must be one with Mantel's version of who Thomas Cromwell really was. It is required to have lived with Katherine, the first wife, and Anne Boleyn in her early days as the usurper. Not to mention having the background on the Seymours of Wolf Hall and why they would even agree to put forward the virginal Jane as the next queen.

As Cromwell goes about his work of being the henchman, wending multiple paths between the gossip, self-seeking, and power struggles, I felt his every self doubt and his sense of impending doom. He never loses his cutting edge but knowing the outcome and knowing the stakes takes nothing away from the intrigue, tension, and danger of his machinations.

Waiting for and watching the progression of events that lead to Boleyn's exposure, trial, and final demise is deliciously excruciating. It is Mantel's triumph that she can wring so much drama and insight from what has been recorded history for almost 500 years. She deserves all the acclaim and prizes she has won.

(Bring Up The Bodies has now been released in paperback. It is available also in hardcover and eBook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

WHERE'D YOU GO BERNADETTE?

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Where'd You Go Bernadette?, Maria Semple, Little Brown and Company, 2012, 221 pp

 

 

 

A Tournament of Books contender recommended by a friend whose tastes often parallel mine, this is an easy entertaining read that makes humor out of many contemporary foibles but has the offbeat Bernadette, who keeps it from being trite.

The story takes place in Seattle with side trips to LA and Antarctica. Bernadette, who used to be one of only a few famous female architects, suffered a "big, bad thing." She and her Microsoft genius husband are raising a daughter in an odd decrepit "home" that used to be an asylum for disturbed girls. Bernadette is not as bad a mother as the one in The Glass Castle, but I kept thinking of that deranged artist as I read. Bee, the daughter, is precocious and self-sufficient; not surprising given the parents.

I had fun reading it but it faded fast from my memory. Maria Semple has been a successful screenwriter which explains to me why reading her book felt like watching a movie. I don't usually remember movies unless they have a huge impact on me.

The use of documents (emails, faxes, letters, articles, journal entries) is I guess a modern version of the epistolary novel. Semple does it well but it felt somewhat precious or contrived to me.

Actually I liked Bernadette and was kept engaged as her story revealed why she ran away but I felt bad for Bee. She deserved better parents. I suppose most kids do.

To summarized this disjointed review, I had mixed feelings.

(Where'd You Go Bernadette? is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

BEAUTIFUL RUINS

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Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter, HarperCollins Publishers, 2012, 292 pp

You can read all the reviews and reader comments and blog posts and blurbs, but you never really know about a book until you read it yourself. I was excited to open Beautiful Ruins but my high hopes were gradually but steadily reduced to disappointment.

Too bad because the premise was great: aspiring actress finds herself in the midst of the filming in Rome of  "Cleopatra," a movie that was plagued by the contentious love affair between Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, budget overruns, and box office disaster. It was the early 60s and Jess Walter's descriptions of the Italian coast are great.

But description hardly makes a novel. Unfortunately most of Walter's characters are flat. I don't mind a novel that jumps back and forth in time but in Beautiful Ruins the jumps are awkwardly placed. Much of the drama in this tale of life's disappointments is written without originality and did not move my emotions.

A few sections are excellent. His portrayal of Richard Burton shimmers with that actor's power, alcoholism, and self-absorption. A chapter where a washed up rock star tries to make a comeback at a festival in Scotland gets the details, the sordidness, and the exploitation just right. The long-suffering reluctant hero, Pasquale Tursi, a young Italian man in love with two women and with honor, was the character who held the story together and made me keep reading.

As uneven as the shores of Italy's Cinque Terre, the novel has peaks of stark wonder and slimy pools of quite mediocre writing. It kept me off balance and hoping but ultimately left me bruised and tired.

In this year's Tournament of Books, the book was paired against The Song of Achilles and both suffer from similar problems. Beautiful Ruins won that round but fell to Gone Girl in the quarter finals. If I had been the judge of either round Beautiful Ruins would have won both times. Comments anyone?

(Beautiful Ruins is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

IVYLAND

Ivyland, Miles Klee, OR Books, 2011, 528 pp

It seems that every year the Tournament of Books features one off-beat, somewhat experimental novel by an under known author. Ivyland takes that spot this year.

A sort of post apocalyptic, disjointed, phantasmagorical romp by way of multiple voices, it left me confused and reeling.

At least it is set in New Jersey, where I grew up, so I am familiar in a hazy way with Trenton and the Pine Barrens and the Jersey shore. The characters are mainly teens from broken families but everyone suffers from a Big Pharma created scourge, either economically, emotionally, mentally, or because of a gruesome physical disability. Everyone is also on multiple drugs plus heavy alcohol intake.

So the story is a nightmare, owing much to Kafka, Bob Dylan and television...I could go on but I would only be showing off or feeling more confused. Underlying all the weirdness is a deep, pulsing sadness, festering like a wound not healing properly. By the time I reached the end I felt quite hopeless about the future of anyone or anything.

Did I like Ivyland? Not really. But somehow I kind of respected whatever Miles Klee was trying to do. I would read his next book just to see where he goes from here.

(Ivyland does not appear to be available through independent bookstores, except through the Kobo Reader link at Once Upon A Time Bookstore, but can be obtained on-line from OR Books. I read it as an eBook from Barnes&Noble.)

MAY WE BE FORGIVEN

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May We Be Forgiven, A M Homes, Viking Penguin, 2012, 466 pp

I started out almost hating this book and ended up loving it. A M Homes appears (if you believe everything you read on the Internet) to have a prickly reputation for upsetting people and going out on limbs as a writer. This is the first I have read by her.

She DID upset me for the first long while in the novel. Despicable George, the younger asshole brother, who by the way is the only character who changes not a whit. All the violence, gratuitous to the max. I thought I was in for a slog through our dysfunctional, medicated, materialistic world including horrid kids.

Then there is Harry, the older brother. Such an interestingly complex character who changes big time from indecisive, sexually weird victim to responsible, caring human being. In fact, the degree of change is almost not believable except that A M Homes so competently chronicles his every experience and his inner life through a first person voice without excess of any kind. By the end I was wishing there were more men like him in the world.

Lest I have made it sound like this is merely a sad, heavy story (actually it is), let me assure you that great heaps of absurdity, satire, and laugh out loud moments abound. Did I mention the kids? Yes, she does kids perfectly and they are not wholly horrid.

Instead of a slog, I was treated to a romp through our dysfunctional, medicated, materialistic world which addresses the true questions of our times: what is the meaning of family anyway and how do we recreate it out of the mess we have made?

Out of a list of 16 novels for the 2013 Tournament of Books, I have found six so far that are exceptionally good and May We Be Forgiven is one of them.

(May We Be Forgiven is available in hardcover and eBook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE?

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How Should A Person Be?, Sheila Heti, Henry Holt and Company, 2012, 306 pp

What is it about Canadian women who write? The level of intelligence is somehow a bit higher. Readers of this blog know my opinion of Margaret Atwood as one of the most intelligent women alive. Then there is Emily St John Mandell.

How Should A Person Be? touched many a nerve among readers, some pleasurably, some unpleasantly. I loved it as an honest look at the perils and responsibilities of friendship between women. That the women in the story are both artists (one a painter, one a playwright) only made it more intense for me.

I also dived right into Sheila's troubles with being married. The question of this novel set in the interrogative mood is how to be faithful (not necessarily sexually) without sacrificing one's own personhood. Another aspect of the question is how to stay in love with another person and still be selfish when one needs to be. 

I think what raises Heti's novel above the navel-gazing of which she has been accused is its philosophical underpinnings. Now that I consider that last sentence, I realize that at least a couple of my favorite philosophers were quite the navel-gazers. Didn't one philosopher say that the unexamined life is not worth living, or something like that?

I thank Sheila Heti for examining her life and having the courage to write about it. I also thank the Tournament of Books folks for putting her book on the 2013 list.

(How Should A Person Be? is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

HHhH

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HHhH, Laurent Binet, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2012, 327 pp

Facts: Laurent Binet is French. This is his debut novel and won the Prix Goncourt for a first novel in 2010; the French equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. The book I read is translated from French and is on the Tournament of Books list for 2013.

Opinions: Anyone who can write a historical novel set during World War II and do something new is alright with me. Laurent Binet bravely, perhaps recklessly, put himself as author into the story, all very meta-fiction, and created an absorbing read.

It was cool to go straight from reading The Russian Debutante's Handbook, set partially in modern Prague, to reading HHhH, set in 1939-1942 Prague. The title is an acronym for "Himmler's Brain is called Heydrich." If you don't know who Himmler and Heydrich were, don't worry. Binet is a teacher by profession and knows how to teach history while making it exciting.

This is a tale about assassination and bravery and evil Nazis and war and people. Despite the authorial intrusions, or maybe even because of them, there is not a dull moment or paragraph. In fact, the intrusions create suspense.

I have not had this much enjoyment from historical fiction since I read Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. I have gotten the biggest benefit so far from pushing myself unmercifully to complete the Tournament of Books list by March.

(HHhH is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE SONG OF ACHILLES

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The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller, Ecco, 2012, 369 pp

Here I go again. The lone dissenter. It seems that everyone but me LOVED this modern fictional account of Achilles and the Trojan War. (I am not saying that The Iliad was not fictional. Even Homer is considered fictional by some.)

In any case, Homer's classic about the great war of ancient Greece, written in the style of his times, was an ode to Greece, its heroes, its glories, and its close relationship to the gods. I read it five years ago just because I thought I should and did not enjoy it much. Dick Lit, the original example, I thought.

I wanted to read The Song of Achilles because I had so admired The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon, a story about Alexander the Great as a youth. When Song of Achilles made the 2013 Tournament of Books list, I just sat down and read it.

Madeline Miller says it took her a decade to write her first novel. She teaches Latin and Ancient Greek. She obviously poured her knowledge and love of the period into her writing.

Because this version gives a portrait of Achilles through the eyes of his companion and lover Patroclus, it paints a much different picture of the hero from Homer's. Reading The Iliad, I found Achilles to be a spoiled mama's boy. Mama, the Goddess Thetis, the sea nymph who made Achilles partly immortal, does her best to keep her son under control but Achilles comes across with more of a mind of his own in Miller's treatment.

I admired the writing and the somewhat idyllic narrative of the first half morphing into the battle scenes of the second. But I could not get past the clearly feminine voice of the entire book, the opposite problem of what I had reading Homer. A snarky suspicion kept creeping into my mind as I read: if the same sex love between Achilles and Patroclus were not the heart and engine of the story, would the novel have been so well received? Is there an agenda underlying both the efforts of the author and the adulation of readers, if not all reviewers?

I am not sorry I read it. I am glad I had read The Iliad first. Currently I am also reading Caesar and Christ by Will Durant, the third volume of his Story of Civilization. Because of reading The Life of Greece, Vol II, I finally read The Iliad. Granted that Durant was writing history, not fiction, but he hoped to reach an audience of regular readers as opposed to academics. In writing about people and life in such long ago times, he always managed to make a distinction between what he had gleaned from his own studies of the past and what were his views from the present.

Perhaps a certain lack of that distinction, sorely missing in The Song of Achilles, is what tainted my view.

(The Song of Achilles is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE FAULT IN OUR STARS

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The Fault in Our Stars, John Green, Dutton Books, 2012, 194 pp

Here I go with the second book I read from the Tournament of Books list, another book I was not ever going to read because of the subject matter. I know I am going against the grain here because it won four awards and is that rare book that has 5 stars everywhere you look. But I was right. I did not need to read this book.

In another way, I'm not sorry I did. It was an informative example of a certain type of emotional enslavement accomplished by writing fiction. Call me what you want but I am not an emotionally cold person. I have strong feelings across the entire spectrum every day. When it comes to writing of any kind though, I subscribe to Wordsworth's dictum that "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." 

Some subjects are still too raw and unprocessed, at least to me, and though I would never endeavor to suppress the creativity or right to communicate of any artist, such subjects must be handled with extreme care in order to produce what I consider art. I understand that this view is utterly personal and that is as it should be.

Having said all that, I also am aware that a large proportion of our society just loves to be emotionally manipulated in ways that I find abusive. This is equally true of the lesser proportion of people who read books. Hence the wild popularity of certain books with reading groups, hence Oprah Winfrey, Dr Phil, etc. Hence most of what is on TV and our news coverage these days and the astonishing pervasiveness of marketing in shaping our society. I won't even begin on our political process.

It was not lost on me that the book Hazel reads over and over turns out to have been written by an alcoholic psychopath. Because adolescence is the most highly charged emotional period of life, it is not surprising that many teens loved The Fault in Our Stars. I don't begrudge them that. But the fault in John Green is that he should have been more careful and less emotionally abusive, because he is a good YA writer and could have pulled it off.

One more thing: (from Chapter 4) "Cancer kids are essentially side effects of the relentless mutation that made the diversity of life on earth possible." Really? Hazel says it but where did that idea come from? I searched the web but only found references to John Green's book. If this idea is part of current cancer research I would like to know how it came about. Does anyone know?

(The Fault in Our Stars is available in hardcover on the Young Adult shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

GONE GIRL

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Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn, Crown, 2012, 444 pp

OK. I have read one of the most talked about books of 2012. I read Sharp Objects last year and didn't like it much, so I was not going to read Gone Girl, but it is on the Tournament of Books list.

So. Plotting leading to compulsive page turning. Check.

The two voices of the wife, the one of the husband. Check. (But an overused device these days.)

The Patricia Highsmith influence. Check.

The surprising twist at the end. That was the best part of the book.

Bad parents do produce dysfunctional offspring sometimes (Flynn's theme in both books, it seems) and often, said offspring never recover. Sometimes great parents, like mine, produce troubled offspring. There are no answers in Gone Girl.

My opinion: the good points including the timeliness (about the current economic scene), do not make up for a novel that is mostly a spectator sport. It might make a good movie. Keep your eyes peeled for that.

(Gone Girl is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)