It would have saved us all a lot of time and exasperation if the author of Mostly Dead Things had just included a note at the front of the book:
Dear rIt would have saved us all a lot of time and exasperation if the author of Mostly Dead Things had just included a note at the front of the book:
Dear reader, please note that the family in this book is grieving and they have let things go a bit. Therefore, whenever any kind of household item is mentioned, please assume it is dusty, dirty, sticky, and/or broken. Whenever anyone has a runny nose or dirty hands, please assume they wipe them off on the clothing they are wearing. Further assume that said clothing does not get washed anytime soon. Please be aware that no one is ever taking out the garbage. It is really, really important to me that you know everything is as gross as possible. Thank you for your cooperation. Enjoy the book!
So yes, Mostly Dead Things is dirty and grimy to the point that it quickly becomes rote and repetitive. But that's not all that's wrong with it. Although this book is competently written, it doesn't help that all the characters are crazily awful people. Maybe the best one is the mother, who nonetheless seems determined to ruin her kids' memories of their father, long after he's around to defend himself. Beyond her, there's people who (view spoiler)[kill animals, in cold blood and illegally. (hide spoiler)] There's the main character, Jessa-Lynn, who (view spoiler)[is clearly an alcoholic and gets stopped for a DUI, but somehow manages to avoid charges (hide spoiler)]—a circumstance that's portrayed as completely normal and unremarkable. And even a character who otherwise seems normal and shockingly well-groomed eventually (view spoiler)[commits arson (hide spoiler)]—another act portrayed as fairly run-of-the-mill. Hardly anyone suffers negative consequences from any of these actions.
At a certain point I had to stop and ask myself why it bothered me so much that no one suffered any negative consequences from their horrible behavior. I am well aware that in real life people engage in horrible behavior all the time without experiencing negative consequences. What's more, I'm usually happy to defend books where women are portrayed as something other than gleaming paragons of selflessness and purity. What made this one different?
Eventually I figured it out, I think. Oftentimes when literary novels have female characters behaving poorly, there's something truly subversive going on; points are being made about gender roles, societal restrictions, etc. But there is nothing truly subversive happening in Mostly Dead Things. That's one of the book's other major flaws: Eventually all the book's wildness is resolved with a painfully written (view spoiler)[heart-to-heart (hide spoiler)] that Jodi Picoult would have been embarrassed to write, and our main character even (view spoiler)[gets a conventional happy ending, pairing off with a gorgeous woman who doesn't seem to mind the fact that Jessa-Lynn never changes clothes or takes out the trash (hide spoiler)]. Maybe the way the book subverts its own subversiveness is its true act of subversiveness, but it sure didn't work for me.
The (suspiciously high number of) five-star reviews for this novel all seem to mention how the fact that Jessa-Lynn is gay is treated as unremarkable: There is no coming-out narrative, no one giving her a hard time about it, etc. And that is true. So if you want to read about a character who has no issues around her gayness and is also (view spoiler)[an alcoholic enabler of illegal animal deaths who can't clean herself or her home to save her life (hide spoiler)], AND you don't mind many graphic descriptions of taxidermy procedures, congratulations! Mostly Dead Things is the book you've been waiting for. Best of luck with it....more
The Nickel Boys was my first Colson Whitehead, and it may not have been the best one to start with. This novel is about a very important topic, a momeThe Nickel Boys was my first Colson Whitehead, and it may not have been the best one to start with. This novel is about a very important topic, a moment in history that deserves to be brought to light, but to me it felt like Whitehead was burdened by the high level of responsibility involved in taking it on, and it sapped all the energy from the writing. The book had moments when it came alive, but I thought it was mostly slow, the writing mostly kind of uninspired, and the episodic nature/shifting POVs just didn't work for me—it was hard to get absorbed in the narrative. It pains me to say this! I would never tell anyone not to read The Nickel Boys, and I think it would be good for high schools and hope a lot of them take it up. And while it may not have been the best Whitehead to start with, it certainly won't be my last....more
This was my first Tessa Hadley, and it turns out I had totally the wrong idea about her. For some reason I thought she was dark and edgy and sardonic,This was my first Tessa Hadley, and it turns out I had totally the wrong idea about her. For some reason I thought she was dark and edgy and sardonic, but if Late in the Day is any indication, she's none of those things. This was a fairly standard domestic drama, but done quite well—maybe like a more dense and vivid Anne Tyler. Once it got going I was absorbed the whole time, but I can't say I was wowed, and I also thought the younger characters were pretty unconvincing. This is maybe a 3.5 for me, but definitely not a four so I'm rounding down. I'd try another Tessa Hadley book but, sadly, I don't anticipate becoming a devoted fan....more
Lost Children Archive is a difficult novel to review; I've been turning it over in my head for more than three weeks now, trying to figure out how to Lost Children Archive is a difficult novel to review; I've been turning it over in my head for more than three weeks now, trying to figure out how to sum up the reading experience. For me, it's first and foremost a road-trip novel; when I think of it now, I think about the family on the road: the places they stayed, the people they interacted with, the sights they saw and the things that happened to them. The road trip is initially described by the unnamed female narrator, wife to the driver of the car and mother/stepmother to the two children in the backseat. Her account of their travels put me in mind of the "south" section of Joan Didion's South and West; it's evocative but, to my mind, nonjudgmental; I didn't feel like anyone, even if they seemed a little iffy, was treated unfairly.
The husband and wife are experiencing some marital discord that to me is reflected in the research projects that are the reason for the trip. Both are audio documentarians—although there's some discussion about the differences in their style—but the husband is interested in documenting the past; he wants to go to historic sites and record the ambient sounds around them, the echoes of long ago. The wife is all about the contemporary; in this case, extremely contemporary. She wants to record people's stories, and the stories she's most interested in are the stories of immigrants, both in her NYC neighborhood and at the southern border. Her interest is made more urgent by subplots involving two missing girls and a border crisis that includes flying children out of the U.S. in a private plane. These differences in their interests may literally keep the husband and wife apart but also suggest a chasm between them that's more than just geographical.
Lost Children Archive has a lot of themes and a lot of threads, some more straightforward than others. Throughout there's a strong sense of past mistakes being repeated, particularly as regards detainment, containment, border crossings, and role shifting. The book has some evident literary influences (e.g., the narrator reads and quotes from Susan Sontag's journals) and others that are more subtle (see the spoiler-free notes at the back if you want to know more about these before reading). Each member of the family has packed boxes that are stored in the trunk of their car, and the contents of the boxes also play a role in the story. In fact, I came to feel that the novel itself was in boxes, each with a different feel, purpose, and point of view, and that this was very deliberate on the part of the author, meant to constantly pull us out of the narrative and make us think about what was being attempted/accomplished. This structure might annoy some readers; for the most part I thought it was fascinating and actually more effective than a straightforward narrative.
There's no doubt that Lost Children Archive is ambitious. Near the end of the book, there's a sentence that runs for many pages (30? 40?) and shifts viewpoints between the narrator's two children and two missing girls. A multipage sentence? I was skeptical when I realized what was happening here—in fact, it was the moment when I felt my planned 4-star rating might drop to a 3—but it wasn't long before I was completely absorbed, and by the end of the sentence I was fighting back tears on my commuter train and my rating had gone from a 4 to a 5. Three weeks later, I'm still thinking about the different parts of this novel and how they all work together. Lost Children Archive is not perfect, but in its depiction of a blended family shouldering the lessons of the past while confronting the issues of the present, it gives us an idea of what the next iteration of Great American Novel might look like. ...more
In many ways The Mothers was a pleasure to read. It had all the things I want in literary fiction—great writing, memorable characters, an excellent usIn many ways The Mothers was a pleasure to read. It had all the things I want in literary fiction—great writing, memorable characters, an excellent use of setting, and just the right amount of description. But I just couldn't figure out what this novel's ethics were, and that bothered me. The Mothers—a group of church ladies—act as a kind of Greek chorus, but Greek choruses are usually the voice of reason or the moral center of the drama, and I wasn't sure I viewed the Mothers that way. Often they just seemed like busybodies who would judge a girl more harshly for wanting to be independent, leave her hometown, and make something of herself than they would judge her for (view spoiler)[having an affair with her best friend's husband (hide spoiler)]. I also didn't like the way the boyfriend seemed to be idealized for (view spoiler)[wanting Nadia to keep the baby (hide spoiler)]. And I could never tell if the Mothers were narrating the entire novel or only some of it.
Ultimately what it boils down to is that The Mothers just wasn't really for me. But it's clear that Brit Bennett can really write, and I'm still looking forward to reading her second novel....more
I guess I'm going to have to be the outlier on this one, at least for now. When I got this ARC in my latest Indiespensable shipment, I was immediatelyI guess I'm going to have to be the outlier on this one, at least for now. When I got this ARC in my latest Indiespensable shipment, I was immediately pulled in by the description on the back cover. It sounded like such a creepy, amazing thriller that I started reading it almost immediately, which is pretty rare for me--usually books have to sit around the house for a while before I feel drawn to finally dig in.
I knew enough to know that this wasn't going to be a conventional thriller, that it was going to be more literary and/or experimental, and I was totally on board with that. But I wasn't really on board with what I actually got. The story was told in spurts, skipping around from time period to time period and character to character. On the rare occasions where some momentum was built, the author immediately cut it off at the knees by jumping to another viewpoint, place, and time. I don't expect every book to have the momentum of a freight train, but Universal Harvester was pretty plot-heavy, and all the skipping around did it a complete disservice. Meanwhile, the action of the story was somehow simultaneously implausible and mundane, and it mostly just made me impatient.
I wavered between 2 and 3 stars, but ultimately went with 3 because there were things I admired about the book. It was definitely atmospheric, and there was some interesting wisdom about people and places dispensed here and there. I'm not sorry I read it, and I know there'll be those readers who love it. I'm just sorry that, in the end, I wasn't one of them.
EDIT 3/12/17: You know, in my final paragraph I tried say some nice things regarding this book and the people who like it. Unfortunately, the people who liked this book aren't returning the favor. Their reviews are full of remarks implying that those of us who didn't like it were just too clueless to "get it." So I want to add one more thing: This book is actually not hard to "get." It's just hard to like. If you can't praise a book without insulting the people who didn't like it, maybe the book actually isn't as great as you think....more
It wouldn't be fair of me to review this when I read so little of it, so I will just say that it seems like the cutesiest book ever written about the It wouldn't be fair of me to review this when I read so little of it, so I will just say that it seems like the cutesiest book ever written about the Holocaust....more
This is a novel about identity. Our narrator, a fraternal twin, had become so entwined in her twin's life that now that she's on her own, she barely sThis is a novel about identity. Our narrator, a fraternal twin, had become so entwined in her twin's life that now that she's on her own, she barely seems to know who she is. In the course of the book, she shifts identity several times, adopting new names and stories, but we never find out her actual name. In fact, we never find out the actual names of most of the characters with speaking parts in this book, including some who are quite crucial to the plot. Meanwhile, the important characters who are named remain mostly completely offstage, with not a single line of dialogue. The shifting identities and the doppelgangers reminded me of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, and the narrator's numbness and hollowness reminded me of Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays, but the book has a contemporary, almost cinematic, feel all its own.
I'm making this sound like heavy stuff, but in fact this book is exceedingly entertaining and readable, occasionally funny and sometimes suspenseful. I enjoyed it immensely and would have given it five stars, but some aspects of the plot strained credibility a bit too much for me. Also, the big question of the book remains unanswered, but that's not really a spoiler because this novel actually contains several big questions, and your feelings about what the big question really is could be completely different from mine. Pretty impressive for such a short book! I'm definitely going to check out Vendela Vida's other novels, and I'd recommend this one to just about anyone.
Oh, right: I won this in a First Reads giveaway, but my free copy never arrived, so I paid for this one. Just in case anyone was wondering.
I was expecting to like this novel. I received it as part of my Powell's Indiespensable subscription, so it was already pre-vetted by the trustworthy I was expecting to like this novel. I received it as part of my Powell's Indiespensable subscription, so it was already pre-vetted by the trustworthy Powell's staff. And, having lived for many years in nowheresville myself, I'll always be interested in novels that take place there.
So it was with an odd disconnect that I began to realize that I didn't really like this very much at all. The themes were straight out of an after-school special: the withholding immigrant parents; the abusive alcoholic asshole dad; the trouble-making kid who really has a heart of gold; the burning desire to get out of the narrow-minded small town. The book takes place in the sixties, so naturally there were mentions of Vietnam, hippies, Woodstock, the Beatles, the Stones. It was like an R-rated Wonder Years episode. When our narrator (view spoiler)[hooked up with the girl next door, a college girl who was thinking about running away to live on a commune, and they spent a few days at the house of some hippies they chanced upon (hide spoiler)], my eyes rolled so hard and often I think it counted as a cardio workout. And the language felt so overwrought to me, with countless labored similes. My favorite: the sun smelled like wind. How did that make it out of Slouka's ninth-grade poetry journal?
Don't even get me started on the one female character, a textbook manic pixie dream girl: "She was beautiful, of course, and graceful, with a tendency to whirl around on the playground like a child. But what I loved most about her was the way she made me feel about myself." That's a paraphrase, but not by much. As far as I'm concerned, the manic pixie dream girl has no place in fiction that purports to be serious. I could've forgiven it if the book didn't have so many other flaws; in this case it was just the final straw. I'm pretty much the only person on Goodreads who didn't like this book, so I'm willing to accept that I'm the problem, but ... meh, I don't feel like thinking about it anymore....more
I think about perception a lot these days. This is partly because I've been learning about Buddhism for a few years now, and one of its main tenets isI think about perception a lot these days. This is partly because I've been learning about Buddhism for a few years now, and one of its main tenets is, essentially, "Try to see things as they are without laying a bunch of your own shit on top of everything" (said in the most compassionate, nonjudgmental way possible, of course). When you pay attention to this, it's amazing to realize how rarely we think about anything without creating our own little story about it. It's what we do.
Then, too, I think a lot about perception when it comes to the books I read: How would I feel about this if someone handed it to me as an unpublished manuscript, rather than as a nicely designed paperback with a ton of positive reviews quoted on the cover? How would I feel about it if it had a different author's name on the cover? How would I feel if someone told me a book was "literary fiction" versus "women's fiction"? I wonder all the time how to get out from under my own preconceptions. Maybe someday I will.
So this novel was relevant to my interests. The heroine of the story, Harriet "Harry" Burden, believes she's never received the respect she deserves as an artist and wants to prove that how the artist is perceived strongly affects how the art is perceived. She creates three installations fronted by three different men--a straight, white, young guy with no reputation in the art world, a gay black man with a slight reputation in the art world, and another straight white man with a major, positive reputation in the art world--to see how perception of her work differs based on who purportedly created it. It's a fascinating experiment, but a flawed one--too many variables, and too many people who see the whole thing differently from the way Harry sees it.
The book is written as a semi-scholarly account of Harry's art project, with copious excerpts from Harry's journals; "reprints" of relevant magazine articles, interviews, and reviews; statements and interviews with people who knew Harry or were involved in the project. We're told up front that one big piece of information--one entire volume of Harry's journal--is missing. It's up to us to figure out (if we can) what this journal may contain, as well as to piece together what version of the story we believe from the various players involved, all of whom seem unreliable in one way or another.
Interesting stuff, but if I'm being honest, this book started off feeling a little like homework to me. It took a while for it all to come together, both because the beginning is more expository and the plot doesn't really pick up until later, and also because I was initially only able to devote little bits and pieces of time to it. If you read this, I would strongly recommend trying to give it an hour or two (at least) of uninterrupted reading time at the start, so you can immerse yourself in the project and familiarize yourself with the key characters and their voices. Once I was able to do that, the book moved much more swiftly for me.
Ultimately, I was highly impressed by this book--the varying characters' voices, the differing formats of the chapters, the building momentum, and the way Siri Hustvedt is able to combine non-sappy (but still very moving) emotions with a very high level of intellect (a good thing) all work together to create a novel unlike any I've ever read. I closed it feeling genuinely blown away. I look forward to reading this again someday and picking up on all the things I doubtlessly missed the first time around. This book seems kind of like a kaleidoscope--it's the same parts every time you look at it, but every time you'll see something different. In fact, that's probably exactly what the author intended....more
The word "impeccable" comes to mind. The short stories in this book deal with a lot of important themes: love, marriage, creativity, ethics in an acadThe word "impeccable" comes to mind. The short stories in this book deal with a lot of important themes: love, marriage, creativity, ethics in an academic setting. The language is articulate and often poetic. The book is definitely entertaining and sometimes funny. It seems almost petty to say that, except for the middle story, "Min," it had virtually no emotional impact on me at all....more
It took me a little time to get into this book. The writing was beautiful from the very, very beginning, the subject matter was interesting and vital,It took me a little time to get into this book. The writing was beautiful from the very, very beginning, the subject matter was interesting and vital, and there was an impressive amount of humor for such a grim topic, but I was frustrated by what I saw as a surplus of characters. You don't really need all these people, I thought impatiently. You could have easily cut a few to speed up the story a bit. Wow, how wrong was I? The threads of the different characters' stories eventually wove together in an astonishingly effective (and affecting) way. I felt connected to them, and I also felt very strongly their connections to each other. It was ultimately one of the most moving novels I've ever read.
In an interview I read upon finishing this book, Anthony Marra said that because he couldn't find any novels about Chechnya, wrote the novel he wanted to read. So A Constellation of Vital Phemomena is a gift he gave to himself, but, for the same reason, it's a gift he's given to the rest of us as well. It's a glimpse of some incredibly dark days in a country many of us will never visit, but its beauty and humanity are heartening and unforgettable. I'm so glad I gave this book a chance to work its magic on me....more
Domenica Ruta grew up with an unstable single mother named Kathi who, although she was at times a successful local businesswoman and Harvard ExtensionDomenica Ruta grew up with an unstable single mother named Kathi who, although she was at times a successful local businesswoman and Harvard Extension student, was also a slacker junkie whose house eventually got condemned and who was so thrilled when Domenica “finally” got high for the first time that she gave her a bag of pot (the “good stuff”) for Christmas every year thereafter (although Kathi herself went in for much harder stuff). She was the kind of mother who said “Would it kill you to show a little leg?” when her daughter was trying to figure out what to wear for a tour of a prestigious boarding school. And who said “What? We’re in France, for Christ’s sake!” when her daughter caught her snorting crushed OxyContin tablets on a bench at the Louvre. And who said “He’s such a good guy. And I owe him a lot of money right now, so I’m not exactly in a position to argue. Okay?” when her daughter tried to tell her she’d been molested by an uncle.
If she was your mother, you’d write a memoir about her too—once you’d sobered up yourself.
It must be said, this book is flawed, flawed, flawed. The early parts of the book are somehow a bit dull despite the subject matter. Some of the writing is beautiful, but some of it is callow. Ruta tells her story in a nonlinear fashion, which is fine in principle, but in this particular case it makes things muddled. Mostly, though, it feels like she just doesn’t have enough distance from the story to really understand it yet herself, to know what’s ultimately significant and what isn’t. She wrote this book with only a year or two of sobriety under her own belt and had (understandably) cut off contact with her mother a few years before that, and it’s hard not to think that she doesn’t yet know how both of those things will inform her life story even in the next few years, much less decades. The publisher has compared this book to The Liars’ Club and The Glass Castle, and it also has many parallels to Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, but it’s nowhere near as fully realized as any of those memoirs. I can understand why, as a writer, Ruta had to tell this story. But I also feel like the story hasn’t fully played out yet.
My feelings about reading this book are confusing to me. It kept my attention and I certainly didn’t dread going back to it, but at the same time I couldn’t wait to be done. It was uncomfortable. It got into my system, like a virus. Reading it was kind of a visceral experience—there is no emotion recalled in tranquility here. If we want to know what Ruta’s life has been like so far, here is what it’s been like. But if we want to know how she truly thinks and feels about it, I think we’re going to have to ask again later.
I won a galley of With or Without You via Shelf Awareness (thank you to the publisher), but then it was also an Indiespensable selection, so I both got this book for free and paid for it. Either way, my thoughts are my own....more
You know, I like intellectual novels of ideas as much as the next person, but I also really like a book that's a pageturner, that you can't wait to geYou know, I like intellectual novels of ideas as much as the next person, but I also really like a book that's a pageturner, that you can't wait to get back to. When I can get both of these things in one book, I feel like I've hit the jackpot. For me, The Vanishers was one of these books. Weird and imaginative, it made great use of character, plot, and setting, and it also asked a lot of interesting questions. Of course, as my GR friend Nicky points out, it didn't really answer any of those questions. But hey, at least it asked.
4/3/15: I need to think about this one for a while....more
There are other reviewers on GoodReads who've pretty much said everything I have to say about this book, but givenI wanted to like this, I really did.
There are other reviewers on GoodReads who've pretty much said everything I have to say about this book, but given all the hype surrounding it I feel compelled to add my voice to the proceedings.
First and foremost, there was way too much description in this book. Usually I appreciate description--it's good for conveying setting, obviously, and setting a mood. In this case, however, the descriptions continued long past the point of usefulness, and really slowed down the story (such as it is). Over and over again, I wished I could call up the author and say, "You know, you don't have to put every single thing you ever thought of in the book. You can leave a few things out, really you can!" What's worse, all the description is clearly meant to convey a sense of wonder and magic, but I never once actually felt a sense of wonder or enchantment. A laundry list of magical things is still a laundry list.
Second, the love story is completely juvenile and impossible to care about. I never for one second felt that those two were in love and was not the slightest bit invested in whether they were able to be together. It was the kind of surface-y, meaningless love story you see in bad YA fiction (ahem, like Twilight).
Truth be told, I found the whole book morose and dreary (and slow--did I mention slow?). I'm shocked to hear some people compared this to the Harry Potter books--it has neither the gripping plot nor the appealing characters of the Potter books. The comparisons to Twilight make more sense--but even Stephenie Meyer knows how to build up to a gripping climax, whereas this book just kind of fizzled out, the "big moment" at the end just as slow and plodding as the rest of it.
As I said, I really wanted to like this, so I stuck with it until the bitter end. But I won't be reading anything else by this author, that's for certain....more
This novel is very strange and almost pointless. The main character, Celia, slowly realizes that she was a Mean Girl--a very mean girl--as a child, a This novel is very strange and almost pointless. The main character, Celia, slowly realizes that she was a Mean Girl--a very mean girl--as a child, a fact she had apparently blocked out for 20 years. Somehow, we're evidently supposed to feel sorry for her for realizing this. The fact that she grew up in an economically depressed part of upstate New York (although she herself was middle-class) with somewhat repressed (but perfectly nice) parents is hammered home over and over and over again, as if it somehow explains Celia's childhood bad behavior and her brother's drug use. It's unconvincing, to say the least.
There are some truly weird encounters with childhood friends and a troubled but lackadaisical relationship with her boyfriend Huck, which is impossible to care about. In fact, Huck even narrates a few brief chapters for no apparent reason. Really, the whole book should have been longer and more fleshed out, but Celia was so unlikeable I was glad it wasn't. I'd have to term this novel a failure. An interesting failure, but a failure nonetheless.
This is an ARC I received through powells.com's Indiespensable program--the official pub date is October 2010....more
