THE MOTHERS

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The Mothers, Brit Bennett, Riverhead Books, 2016, 275 pp

One day in late February, in a spree of book buying, I bought The Mothers in hardcover because it was on the Tournament of Books 2017 list and had a long wait at the library. Then I kept putting off reading it and when it fell out of the Tournament in the early rounds, I resigned it to the TBR stacks. 

One day in late March, I read an astute interview with the author on The Millions blog and was so intrigued by her approach to the subject matter that I just picked up the book and started reading. The novel is essentially a look at both sides of abortion from the viewpoints of middle class African Americans in a California beach town north of San Diego.

Nadia Turner lost her mother to suicide, unexpected, unexplained. Nadia is a good girl, a good student, with aspirations. She wants out of her little community and has been accepted with a full scholarship at the University of Michigan. 

But her grief over her mother and her father's distant ways of parenting send her into depression, partying, and her first sexual relationship. The minister's son at their church, Luke, who is five years older than Nadia and an injured football player whose goals in sports have been ruined, gets her pregnant.

Nadia is determined to get an abortion. Luke gets the money from his parents, but on the day of the procedure he deserts her. Further developments include new partners for both and it all gets complicated. The novel is a study in ambiguity. The main characters get what they want but not who they want.

Life is messy. Brit Bennett's writing style contains a bit more detachment than I would have liked. You are told what happens with the characters but you don't quite feel it. Still, this is a first novel about big current issues brought down to daily existence for individual human beings. I have always been pro-choice politically but pro-life personally. The Mothers showed me how it is possible to carry both in one's heart and mind. There are no simple answers but we are all working on it. 

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

 

BLACK WAVE

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Black Wave, Michelle Tea, Feminist Press, 2016, 325 pp

I was not sure I was going to like Black Wave. It was a contender in the 2017 Tournament of Books. I had listened to an interview with Michelle Tea on the Otherppl podcast. So I took the plunge. She has written and/or edited 14 books. This one, like several earlier ones, is a mashup of memoir and fiction with a meta-fiction section in the middle. I guess you could call it experimental. I was surprised by it and it worked for me.

The first section is set in San Francisco. Michelle writes about herself in third person. She is in her late twenties, a published poet, living the life of a poor, substance abusing, promiscuous lesbian in the Mission district. It is 1999. 

This part is raw in the extreme and Michelle is an unlikeable woman. She is unfaithful to her lovers, unable to reciprocate in love, living on the edge of poverty and usually drunk. She also experiments with heroin and feels unconcerned about getting addicted because she inhales rather than shoot it. Truly it is a wonder she remains alive and out of jail.

One day she decides she needs to get her life more together so she moves to Los Angeles intending to write screenplays. She gets a job at that bookstore on Franklin Ave in Hollywood. She drinks wine until she passes out every night. She tries to adapt her life to a screenplay by changing herself into more accessible characters. That is the meta part and the second section.

Then the story gets even more weird because the world is going to end and by the final page, it really does. But as life around her gets more strange by the day, Michelle gets it together. She gets sober, makes peace with her two lesbian mothers, and finds a state of grace.

That is where she got to me. I still felt I was obsessively reading about a messy, sometimes disgusting breakdown of a person and the world, but the juxtaposition of the two became brilliant and full of truth about human beings. Each of us as an individual has an inescapable destiny, she seems to be saying. In parallel to that sobering fact, so does the human race.

Black Wave is not a feel-good book, not at all. It is in many ways appalling and readers will either love it or hate it. I didn't hate it because it has too much about it that is great and I almost loved it for reasons I find hard to articulate. I am extremely glad I read it. At the end, I felt good.

(Black Wave is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

ALL THE BIRDS IN THE SKY

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All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders, TOR Books, 2016, 313 pp

Summary from Goodreads: Childhood friends Patricia Delfine and Laurence Armstead didn't expect to see each other again, after parting ways under mysterious circumstances during high school. After all, the development of magical powers and the invention of a two-second time machine could hardly fail to alarm one's peers and families.

But now they're both adults, living in the hipster mecca San Francisco, and the planet is falling apart around them. Laurence is an engineering genius who's working with a group that aims to avert catastrophic breakdown through technological intervention into the changing global climate. Patricia is a graduate of Eltisley Maze, the hidden academy for the world's magically gifted, and works with a small band of other magicians to secretly repair the world's ever-growing ailments. Little do they realize that something bigger than either of them, something begun years ago in their youth, is determined to bring them together--to either save the world, or plunge it into a new dark ages.

 

 

My Review:

Incredible! Last week I read Dexter Palmer's Version Control, among other topics, a book about time travel. This week I read this sparkling and crazy novel that imagines a war between magic and science taking place as the world enters its final slide into oblivion for the human race. A time travel/anti-gravity device is a possible solution for saving at least a small portion of humanity by sending them off to another planet.

 

There are richly complex characters to love and hate, a magic system and a scientific one, with a world just around the corner from where we are now.

 

If you want an idea of the plot, read the summary above. Honestly, as thrilling as the reading experience was, it was also exhausting and anyway, I hate writing plot summaries. This is a book for geeks of all kinds. 

 

Patricia, the magical witch/healer who can talk to animals and Laurence, the scientific child prodigy, make most of the fantasy or sci fi characters who are outcasts in their own lives look kind of mainstream and well adjusted by comparison. Their childhood friendship and adult romance are more what we are used to but hold up better than other couples in the genres.

 

If this sounds like something you might like to read, be prepared to jettison all preconceived ideas and just go with it. If you like your facts and emotions pinned down and your beliefs kept intact, skip it. This book is crazy good but it is also plain crazy! I loved it.

 

Also it is a TOB 2017 contender and just got nominated for a Nebula award. 

 

 

(All the Birds in the Sky is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.) 

VERSION CONTROL

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Version Control, Dexter Palmer, Pantheon Books, 2016, 495 pp

Back in 2010, I read Dexter Palmer's first novel, The Dream of Perpetual Motion, and I did not like it much. Seven years later I confess that it was more a case of I didn't get it. I was ignorant of the steampunk genre back then so had no way to determine how or if his steampunk setting was any good. Compounding my ignorance, I somehow missed that it was a retelling of Shakespeare's The Tempest not to mention that as of 2010 I had not read The Tempest. My apologies to Dexter Palmer. I will give the novel another read one of these days.

Version Control on the other hand blew me away. I did not even mind the obvious fact that Palmer was intending to blow as many minds as he could. Though the novel is set in a near future time (including self-driving cars, an internet dating service whose actual moneymaker was data collection sold to political and marketing clients, and a President who appears to people personally on their hand-held devices to wish them Happy Birthday and give them words of wisdom about their "private" worries) this is a love story steeped in science.

Rebecca, who had to go back to living at home after college because she could not find a job, met Philip on the dating site where she also finally got a job. Philip is a mad scientist deeply involved with quantum mechanics, string theory, and developing an invention he calls the "causality violation device" but which the press calls a time machine.

In Version Control, Palmer takes the ever and increasingly popular time travel trope into uncharted territory. He is still pretty wordy (he has a PhD in English lit from Princeton University, so), he is still cramming everything under the sun into his story, and his writing style is still a bit pedestrian though he has his lyrical moments. But he has written a highly entertaining story with perplexing twists and turns and made me even try to understand the science.

When the surprising conclusion I did not even see coming signaled the end of the novel, I felt like I would rather keep reading Version Control for the rest of 2017 rather than start another book.

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

THE NIX

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The Nix, Nathan Hill, Alfred A Knopf, 2016, 620 pp

In an interview with Nathan Hill, he talks about how he spent years trying to become a novelist by writing what he thought publishers would buy and worked himself into a defeatist state of mind. Finally he got a job teaching writing and used his spare time to write what he wanted to say. The result was The Nix.

The protagonist, Samuel Andresson-Anderson, is then somewhat of an autobiographical character, a not uncommon circumstance in a first novel. I found him to be a sympathetic character reminiscent of fellows in books by Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. Adrift in a sea of losses (his mother, his best friend, his one true love) he loses himself in on-line gaming as he struggles/procrastinates in writing a novel, long overdue, the huge advance he'd received long spent. Then his long lost mother resurfaces.

The structure of this novel is unwieldy and certain sections could be called over-written. By the time I finished reading all 620 pages, I forgave Nathan Hill everything. He wrote the story of a family that is littered with the universal detritus of failures, cowardice, love, bad communication, terrible parenting, immigration, myths and ghosts.

Somehow, and somewhat ungracefully, he stuffed all of this into what is either a sprawling mess or a brilliant synthesis of American life over the past century. Samuel's grandfather ran away from a hopeless future in Norway, landing in a mid-western American town with a job for a company that produced chemical weapons of mass destruction. He brought with him the Nix, a piece of Norwegian folklore about an evil trickster who steals whatever you love most and breaks your heart.

He raised his daughter Faye on stories of the Nix, leaving her in a state of personality disintegration. She escaped to Chicago in 1968 and got involved with the protests at the Democratic National Convention. Though she eventually returned home and married her high school sweetheart, she was more traumatized than ever. She left Samuel and his father when her son was a boy, disappearing completely. As she enters Samuel's life again decades later, she has been accused of a sordid crime committed in Chicago during the demonstrations.

As in the common current technique of novel writing with the story moving back and forth in time, the mysteries and losses of Samuel's life are revealed to both Samuel and the reader. The result is a heart wrenching story about how we make sense of our parents' actions and the possibility of reconciliation after deep misunderstanding and hurt. Along the way we also get to relive a social history that brings us up to where we are today.

The Nix is a long read that alternates between action and introspection. It won't please everyone but it was a bestseller last fall, has had glowing reviews and 4+ stars on Goodreads and Amazon. I loved it.

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

GRIEF IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS

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Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, Max Porter, Graywolf Press, 2016, 114 pp

Nearly everyone alive has lost someone dear to them. Not everyone can write well about it but Max Porter has done it in breathtaking fashion.

A man has lost his wife suddenly, unexpectedly due to an accident. His two young sons have lost their mother.

Three voices reach out to us:

The boys as a sort of braided, combined consciousness, with the young boys-eye-view of the events, the emotions, the weird adjustment to a life run only by dad and a home without a mom.

The dad, figuring it out day by day, seeking oblivion but tethered to life by his boys.

The crow, an imaginary presence who drops feathers as he performs the role of grief counselor and family guardian. That crow symbolizes the magical thinking so well described by Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking.

Max Porter has been a bookseller and is currently an editor for Granta Books. He loves poetry and this is his first novel. You can learn about how and why he wrote it by listening to his interview on the Otherppl podcast, but I suggest reading the book first.

Very short chapters, some of which read like poetry, take you through the grieving process of the man and his sons. That crow is a trickster myth character who mixes words, sounds, free verse, and shenanigans.

If you have ever lost someone you loved and grown weary of the stock phrases (I am sorry for your loss), the platitudes of grief counselors, the surreal days and nights of dreams and hauntings by the lost one, this book will feel so familiar.

Such grief never really ends and it can make one feel slightly insane, so for me it brought new insights and a sort of reassurance and comfort and forgiveness for my own. 

(Grief Is The Thing With Feathers is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

MISTER MONKEY

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Mister Monkey, Francine Prose, Harper, 2016, 285 pp

I read Mister Monkey for an on-line discussion group. I have always meant to read Francine Prose but somehow never have. Now she has entranced me and I will read more.

I was one of the few participants in the discussion who liked the book. I think because for me it was about people with unfulfilled dreams, one of my obsessions as I get older and look back at the dreams I had.

Mister Monkey is a children's musical adapted from a novel written by a Vietnam vet with PTSD. Said novel was converted by an editor into what became a bestselling picture book for kids, along the lines of Curious George. Now the author is rich but he hates the musical because it makes a travesty of his original story.

Mister Monkey, the novel by Francine Prose (quite erroneously described as "madcap" by whoever wrote the dust jacket copy) uses the musical as a framework to take readers into the lives and souls of various people connected to an off-off-off-off-Broadway production of a tired old show. Included are several of the actors, the director, the costume designer, a grandfather, and Ray, the original author of the children's book. Each chapter features one of them but in circling around begins to connect them all in interesting and surprising ways.

I am not much of a theater goer but one of my sons spent a year of college being a set builder and one of his daughters acts in every play she can at high school. In fact, I have always liked novels set in the theater, so here I was again enmeshed in all the tacky backstage interpersonal trauma of actors, directors, playwrights, and support crew. Ms Prose must have some theater experience because she crafts those scenes so perfectly.

Ultimately though, this is a story about people of all ages and different walks of life who are mildly unhappy but looking for joy wherever they can find it. I could not put it down. 

Today the shortlist for the 2017 Tournament of Books came out and Mister Monkey made the list! I have read 6 of the 16 books that will compete in the tournament. Watch for more reviews of the rest of the books since I always attempt to read as many of them as I can. 

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