THE SON

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The Son, Philipp Meyer, HarperCollins Publishers, 2013, 572 pp

Perhaps because this was the final book I read for the Tournament of Books and I was a bit weary of the project by then, I found reading The Son a chore. 

Perhaps because I so admired American Rust, I longed for a similar emotional impact and became annoyed when that sort of jolt came so much less often in this novel.

In any case, I was disappointed. It was only my self-imposed intention to read the entire TOB list before the tournament ended that kept me going. I felt pretty intrepid as a reader for making the goal-the first time in my four years of following the tournament-but I hold a slight grudge against Philipp Meyer for making the last sprint feel like a marathon.

I did not mind taking another look at Texas history, since half of my immediate family now lives there. In fact, my 12 year old granddaughter is being forced to study the history of Texas at school. Perhaps it is shallow of me, but I like Larry McMurtry better. 

There are actually a plethora of sons in The Son. Only one daughter rather saves the reader from drowning in testosterone, though I'm afraid she did die a slow death from poisoning by that hormone. None of the sons lived up to the sheer balls of Colonel Eli McCullough. In fact, his great granddaughter Jeanne Anne won the contest on bringing the Colonel's philosophy of life into the 21st century.

I felt the author was trying a little too hard to write a Great American Novel, not that he shouldn't have tried. He has an agenda in The Son. He also had one in American Rust but made it more palatable or visceral or personal for this reader.

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

ELEANOR & PARK

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Eleanor & Park, Rainbow Rowell, St Martin's Press, 2013, 325 pp

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

The token young adult novel on this year's Tournament of Books has it all: troubled teens, bullying, first love and music. It is a modern day Romeo and Juliet. All I can say is that I wanted to read it everyday, I was completely immersed, and I didn't want it to end.

Eleanor lives in virtual squalor with her dysfunctional parents. Her large body and unruly red hair make her an object of ridicule at her new school. She can't understand her mother's weakness and worries about her horrible crazy stepdad. Surrounded by a self-imposed shell of mistrust, she is always blowing it with Park.

Park is Korean/American with basically good parents, except his dad who is a former soldier wants Park to be more macho. He takes pity on Eleanor during a classic school bus incident and eventually falls in love with her.

You basically know the rest but it turns out you don't exactly. That is why you keep reading. I think the sexual exploration was nicely done and realistic and should not worry parents but it probably does anyway. I am giving this book to my teenage granddaughter.

(Eleanor & Park is available in hardcover and eBook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

LONG DIVISION

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Long Division, Kiese Laymon, Bolden Books, 2013, 267 pp

Here is another book I would not have read or possibly even heard of if not for the Tournament of Books. It is gut wrenching and powerful. The writing reminded me sometimes of James Baldwin, other times of Alice Walker. The story is a testament to the reality of racism and its continued presence in American culture, despite our half-black president, despite the unparalleled success of Oprah Winfrey.

City is an Alabama boy raised as much by his small town grandma as by his mom. He is smart, he goes to an exclusive high school, and his Black swagger is melded with the insecurities and confusions about life for a Black male in 21st century America.

Due in part to a book called Long Division, given to him by his school counselor, and in part to the ghostly presences in the woods by his grandma's house, City time travels back to 1964 and 1985. A second narrator named City lives in the 1985 sections. Also included in the rather large cast of characters are a missing classmate named Baize, an enigmatic female whose favorite punctuation mark is the ellipsis, and Shalaya Crump, unrequited crush of the 1985 City.

It is a tangled story and sometimes hard to tell which City is narrating or which time period is going on. In the end, that confusion is the book's charm as well as its theme. Time passes, cultures change, technologies progress, but the color of one's skin is still the deal breaker.

In 2013, City and his frenemy Lavender Peeler take part in a grammar competition called "Can You Use That Word in a Sentence," supposed to be free of cultural bias. Turns out it has a liberal agenda designed to prove we are no longer a racist society. After City creates a historic meltdown over the word "niggardly," the video of which goes viral, the contest goes by default to the other minority, a Mexican contestant.

Kiese Laymon, born and raised in Mississippi, is now an associate professor of English and Africana Studies at Vassar College. He has clearly taken to heart the necessity for a Black person to run twice as fast to get half as far. In fact, he has probably run four times as fast. I will read any novel he writes. As Toni Morrison ages, I've wondered who could take her place. I may have found him.

(Long Division is available in paperback and eBook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE GOOD LORD BIRD

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The Good Lord Bird, James McBride, Riverhead Books, 2013, 417 pp

I read this for the Tournament of Books. As of this morning, it won its fourth round and could very well go on to win the Tournament. It also received the 2013 National Book Award. I've not read either of James McBride's previous novels even though I loved his memoir, The Color of Water. I wasn't expecting to like The Good Lord Bird that much so I'm happy to be able to say I did.

I have recently complained about satire not successfully done in The Dinner by Herman Koch and praised it as well done in Mohsin Hamid's How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Both of those books went down in the first round of TOB. I'm not sure James McBride is on a winning streak due to his satire, but in my opinion it is the most impeccably done of the three but is also so subtle, it is easy to miss.

The story of John Brown and his ill-fated raid on the Harper's Ferry armory is one you always hear about but without much detail. Now I have possibly more detail that I know what to do with, but I certainly know what happened. Thank you James McBride for turning your research into an entertaining story.

McBride's narrator is Onion, freed from slavery by John Brown but curiously enslaved to the man in other ways. As a scrappy 12-year-old boy pretending to be a girl, he is an unreliable source of information whose combination of innocence and self-protective impulses provide wry interpretations of John Brown, abolitionists, and the white man. By the end I was pretty sure Onion's voice was James McBride, a trick requiring some very cool literary skill.

You may wonder how the Civil War got started. If you have read much literature about the war, you will have come across numerous answers to that question. If you believe James McBride, it was the cauldron of Bleeding Kansas which spawned a man like John Brown, driven by the word of God to free all the slaves; whose fanaticism put him in Harper's Ferry at just the right time.

But then you finish The Good Lord Bird, nearly convinced that maybe the author was just putting you on. As one slave character says to Onion, "Every nigger got the same job. Their job is to tell a story the white man likes."

(The Good Lord Bird is available in hardcover and eBook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. The paperback will be released in July, 2014)

HILL WILLIAM

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Hill William, Scott McClanahan, Tyrant Books, 2013, 200 pp

Here is another book I would never have come across if not for The Tournament of Books. It is a coming of age tale but not much like any such story I have read before.

The opening sentences: "I used to hit myself in the face. Of course, I had to be careful about hitting myself now that I was dating Sarah. One night we got into a fight and I went into the bathroom to get rid of that sick feeling in my shoulders, and I did it. I wasn't feeling any better afterwards, so I hit myself in the face one more time."

I don't know to whom I could recommend this book. It is dark and gritty and unrelievedly disturbing. I guess I could recommend it to people like myself who like to read dark and gritty stuff. It is the story of a boy who grew up in poverty in Appalachia with bad parenting and numerous sociopathic types for boyhood friends and neighbors.

It is also a story of this young man trying mightily but not completely successfully to overcome his origins. I'm pretty sure it is autobiographical so the fact that Scott McClanahan has written and published six books is proof that he is in some ways winning his battle.

I read stories like this to remind myself now many people in the United States live so far from the "American Dream," lest I forget. Whatever the American Dream is though, it is a powerful force and here is this guy reaching for it in his own way.

 

Reading Hill William, I felt ridiculous for ever once complaining about my life. I realized again what an awesome responsibility it is to be a parent. I wondered for the billionth time why life in the world has to be the unbalanced mess that it is. Yes, the resilience of the human spirit, that driving force of fiction, produces amazement whenever we contemplate it, but I can't help wondering if the optimism with which I regard that resilience is misguided.

Getting better, making progress, being and doing and having more? Is that a worthy plan for a sentient being? Is there even an answer to that question? It's what we do no matter the cost.

(Hill William is available in paperback and eBook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING

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A Tale For The Time Being, Ruth Ozeki, Viking Penguin, 2013, 418 pp

I loved this book because after all is said, it was so cool. Besides it various charms, it is about Buddhist philosophy and I have a weakness for philosophical fiction. And I think of myself as a time being (defined in the second paragraph of the first page of the first chapter in the novel as "someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or will ever be.") And the title is a play on words. My father taught me about plays on words and we delighted in making them up, so I am still making them up with my husband and still delight in coming across them.

The two main time beings in the story are Nao (pronounced now) and Ruth. Nao is a Japanese teenager who grew up in the Silicon Valley where her dad was a programmer for a start up but lost his job in the recent economic crash. Now they are back in Tokyo, poverty stricken. Nao's dad is depressed and suicidal, her mother is disturbed and clueless, while Nao is being bullied at school making her depressed and suicidal but trying to get a clue by writing a diary.

Ruth is a writer living on an island in the Pacific Northwest with her brilliant but challenged husband. One day Nao's diary washes up on the shore inside a Hello Kitty lunchbox. Ruth has been trying to write a memoir but has become completely blocked. When she finds the lunchbox, she develops an obsession with Nao's diary and in fact with the girl's existence, fearing that the lunchbox has arrived as a piece of debris from Japan's tsunami.

The rest of the story is about a mysterious connection between these two time beings, so if my overly long synopsis sounds intriguing you must read the novel. It is not a perfect novel. It is uneven at times, there is not exactly a plot, Nao's voice is narcissistic teen angst and Ruth's voice is narcissistic middle-aged blocked writer angst.

In the end, especially due to Nao's 104-year-old great-grandmother who is a Zen Buddhist nun, it all worked for me. One of my earliest life decisions was to live 100 years. Now I am not sure I want to but if that is my fate, I want to be as wise and cool and hip as Nao's great-grandmother.

(A Tale For The Time Being is available on the shelf in paperback at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES

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The People in the Trees, Hanya Yanagihara, Doublday, 2013, 362 pp

Culture clash! A research scientist of dubious moral character discovers a source of extreme longevity in the meat of a turtle on an unspoiled Pacific island. It is one of the oldest tales on earth: the serpent in the garden; the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; the discovery of fire; the splitting of the atom; test tube genetics; information technology. What will those humans do next?

I happen to like the story of man's perilous road to scientific knowledge. I would not for a moment dream of seeking to halt it. My world view is comprised of what I call "optimistic anarchy" meaning that I have a slender but sturdy belief that mankind can work out its destiny into eternity.

But we need such tales of caution as Ms Yanagihara presents in The People in the Trees. Ann Patchett told hers in State of Wonder. Barbara Kingsolver tells hers in almost every book she writes. Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy is another example. The People in the Trees has as its mad scientist Norton Perina, a suitably complex character. He goes too far, though he wins a Nobel Prize, and his attempts to make amends are foiled by his own troubled nature.

The author chose to have Perina's story told by a worshipful associate, a man who is blind to Perina's faults and whose certainty that genius trumps, even excuses, behavioral lapses is clearly stated. The brilliant writing in the novel enables us to see through this hagiography. Actually she creates a double veil for us to peer through, since the associate is the transcriber and editor of Perina's memoirs.

Not for the squeamish, The People in the Trees reveals tribal custom, jungle living, and the scientific method in full living color and detail. It raises just about every conceivable question about the fine lines between science and spirituality, ceremony and abuse, sanity and madness, progress and destruction. 

Of all the Tournament of Books contenders this year, I found this one the hardest to read in terms of horrific scenes and yet the most rewarding for it provocative nature.

(The People in the Trees is available in hardcover and eBook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. The paperback will be released in April 2014.)

THE TUNER OF SILENCES

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The Tuner of Silences, Mia Couto, translated from the Portuguese by David Brookshaw, Biblioasis, 2013, 282 pp

I read this because it was on the short list for the Tournament of Books. The reading experience was similar to reading other novels set in African countries and written by African writers. It felt very foreign and outside of my own experience. And yet I felt an affinity with and understanding of the characters caused by the excellence of the writing and I suppose the translation also.

The other morning I looked up some reviews of the novel and background on the author. While doing so, I realized The Tuner of Silences could be read on two different levels. One is to take what is there with no preconceived ideas which is how I read it.

I found a remnant of a family (a father and two sons, a servant and and uncle) living on the grounds of an abandoned game preserve somewhere in Africa. The wife of the father and mother of the sons is dead. We don't know until near the end of the book how she died but the father has become almost mad with grief and an undefined guilt.

The father runs his sons' lives with an iron hand, literally at times, determined to keep them entirely separate from the outside world. There has been a war (the servant is an ex-soldier) and you get the idea that all is irredeemably lost.

But boys will be boys, especially at ages eleven and sixteen. The uncle and the servant are wild cards as is a Portuguese woman who arrives out of the blue. All of these characters work against the father's desire for disconnection from the world, each in their own different ways.

I ended up loving the story and being moved by everything about it. But I did finish it wondering about its setting and the details of the surrounding world, so that would be the other level on which I could have read it, if I had known those things. I am glad I didn't because part of the spell worked on me was the dribbling out of clues and facts, creating in me the same desperation to know that drives the younger son who is the narrator. I learned what I wanted to know only as he did.

(The Tuner of Silences is available in paperback and eBook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE DINNER

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The Dinner, Herman Koch, Hogarth, 2013, 292 pp

This is going to be one of my signature rambling reviews. It will not have a theme nor will it have a through line, except that even a week after finishing The Dinner I can't decide what I think about it.

When I first heard of the book last year, because it had a big buzz, I was repelled by both its description and the reviews I read. I decided not to read it. Then it reared its head on the Tournament of Books 2014 list. I'm not exactly sorry I read it but I could have gotten along just fine in my reading life without it.

Two things I somehow hadn't realized are that this is a translated book (from the Dutch) and that it is set in Amsterdam. While the first person narrator (do we ever learn his name?) did strike me as a foreign version of a particular kind of man, someone I would call an asshole/bigot type best avoided at parties and family gatherings, the rest of the novel could have taken place just as easily in Boston or San Francisco or even Houston. So I don't think the problem stems from location.

The voice of Mr Lohman, narrator, was annoying to me in the extreme. I'm fairly sure that was intentional. Besides his misanthropic views, he goes on and on like a right-winger on talk radio. I did not totally buy that his personality defects could be blamed on his unnamed mental illness, though I suppose I do consider people like him to be mentally unbalanced.

What did work for me was the painstaking and intricate revealing of what was really going on with these two sets of parents. It kept me glued to the pages in morbid fascination. Both marketers and readers have compared The Dinner to Gone Girl, another book I read only because of TOB and still can't make up my mind about. I agree with the comparison for two reasons, one being the painstaking intricate reveal.

The other similarity is a slippery as well as disturbing sense of moral ambiguity. I am currently reading Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut and marveling at his ability to write on the bleeding edge between moral ambiguity and satire; wishing there were authors in the 21st century who wrote that way.

I'm not totally sure but I suspect Herman Koch was going for such a thing. Ultimately he didn't quite pull it off due to a bit too much heavy handedness on the moral ambiguity and a certain less-than-exact rendering of satire. The bleeding edge became a chasm in his hands into which I fell and I can't seem to get out.

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

HOW TO GET FILTHY RICH IN RISING ASIA

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How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Mohsin Hamid, Riverhead Books, 2013, 228 pp

I was so impressed by the writing in this short novel that I am determined to read both of Mohsin Hamid's earlier novels.

This one is the story of one Asian man's rise from the poorest of rural boys to wealth and corporate power. Hamid uses the construct of a self-help book with the book's author speaking to the aspiring man in the second person.

Many readers and reviewers found both the self-help book conceit and the second person voice either unimpressive or annoying. I found it an inventive if not brilliant way of telling a story that has featured in various novels over the past several years, including The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga as well as Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire.

This novel is also a consummate piece of satire about business practices in today's world including rapacious criminality and the personal sacrifice entailed in becoming a self-made success.

The relationship between this unnamed entrepreneur and the one woman he ever loved is bittersweet but again creates an underlying treatise on the ways that both poverty and materialism can break down the human requirements for family and connection.

That all this depth and breadth is packed into a slim and compulsively readable novel is a feat not found in several of the long novels published in 2013.

(How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

LIFE AFTER LIFE

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Life After Life, Kate Atkinson, Little Brown and Company, 2013, 529 pp

A good deal of great writing kept me going in Life After Life but overall I was left feeling less than thrilled by the end. In fact, at the very end I was confused and had to talk it over with a couple reading friends.

Ursula Todd gets born in 1910, then she gets born again and again with different scenarios ensuing. It is kind of like that movie Ground Hog Day, without the humor. She also lives through various parts of her life several times and because of her choices ends up in better or worse states than other times.

Once I got used to not knowing when it was and to finding the clues to when it had been, I didn't mind the time shifts. Anyone who made it through The Time Traveler's Wife, a book I loved completely, can make it through this novel. Some parts were quite gripping, especially the section on the London Blitz in WWII. 

I liked Ursula's crazy aunt and the beloved brother. I didn't think Sylvie, Ursula's mother, quite hung together as a character.

I guess I liked the concept of the book better than the reading of it. It must have been fun to write. Of course, it all got me thinking about points in my life where I could have made different choices and thus have had a different life.

There you have it. A disjointed and inconclusive review, not unlike the novel itself. You are what you read? Most definitely! 

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

THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS

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The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert, Viking, 2013, 499 pp

Oh my. I loved this book. I didn't want it to end. I wish I was still reading it. Let me see if I can stop gushing and say something intelligent about why I loved it so much.

First of all, Alma Whittaker, so flawed a character yet so brave and in the end so wise. I suppose not all readers will feel that way, especially female readers. I admired her and suffered with her. Of course, I recognized that Gilbert put a good deal of herself into Alma but found nothing wrong with that.

As a piece of historical fiction, the book excels in terms of evoking the times without showing off the research. I am a gardener and the daughter of gardeners so I was captivated by all the botany stuff.

Finally, Gilbert writes in this novel with such balance between the plot and her empathy for her exotic characters. She has got the controlled abandon of Neal Stephenson, the wit of A M Homes, but is fully herself. She kept upending my expectations as to where the story was going in such a brilliant way that I was willing to follow wherever she took me.

Alma, who put almost all of her mind and energies into science, who used her studies and experiments in botany to make sense of the world, eventually arrived at a theory similar to Darwin's. She had published other books and plenty of articles in scientific journals but put off publishing her theory because she had an unanswered question about life, an anomaly that did not fit. Then Darwin's book came out, he acquired fame and credit for the theory of evolution.

By this time Alma was elderly and I loved most of all the insight and light-handed approach Gilbert took with this final disappointment in Alma's life. Between the lines of these final chapters, much gets said about science, truth, men, women, fame, and integrity.

(The Signature of All Things is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE LUMINARIES

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The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton, Little Brown and Company, 2013, 830 pp

I was dying to read this book from the moment I heard about it. The Booker Prize winner for 2013, a young female author purported to be highly intelligent (I love young intelligent female authors) from New Zealand (I have a thing for fiction from down under.) Finally I got through the holidays and all that end of the year stuff, cleared the decks, and settled down for a nice long winter read.

Well! Reading the beginning of The Luminaries is an eye-of-the-needle proposition. If you can make it through Part One, 360 pages, you will probably make it to the end. Many are called but few are chosen, though I must say that is rather true of most Booker Prize winners.

Before I had gone even 100 pages, I switched from my beautiful hardcover copy (graciously sent to me by the publisher free of charge, I guess because I have a blog) and began reading the digital galley edition on my iPad. Because the hardcover was so heavy it was hard to switch back and forth from the page I was reading to the character chart at the beginning. That chart of characters is essential to following the story.

Yes, the characters. There are 20 main characters, one of whom is dead; all important and intrinsic to this tale of the 1860s Gold Rush in New Zealand. At first I was annoyed by the lengthy description of each person. It felt like too much telling, but it turned out that the author had painted vivid pictures of each in my mind helping me to remember them as I got to know them further through the story.

I tried to make sense of the astrology connection but finally gave it up. I don't know enough about astrology to get what she was doing, though I might have missed a whole level of the novel.

It took me a full week to read The Luminaries. By the end I was reading over 200 pages a day due to the telescoping nature of the book's structure, but the beginning was rough. I'm not sure quite how she captured me. I do like gold rush stories for the sheer lawlessness and desperation involved. This one is also a mystery with possibly a few too many red herrings and ultimately it's a love story though that does not become apparent until the end. She does a good end, tying up all the loose threads and sorting out all the clues. I became extremely fond of the lovers and don't guess I will ever forget them.

I felt a sense of accomplishment in finishing The Luminaries. I didn't love it but I knew Eleanor Catton had had her way with me for which I admire her immensely. Not a book for the faint of heart or the light-minded, but a rollicking, honest, and in-depth look at human nature run amok.

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