Between the Covers

"My New American Life" by Francine Prose - a review

Lula, the 26-year-old Albanian immigrant dutifully assimilating in Francine Prose’s droll new novel, is fairly clear on what being American means to her.

You get your own bathroom (“How quickly she’d switched from making do with a filthy communal apartment-block latrine to needing her middle-class personal space”). You can reframe your past in intriguing ways (perhaps by implying that your father died a heroic freedom fighter in Kosovo instead of in a car accident while crossing the border in hopes of unloading some tribal muskets). You benefit from the unfamiliar phenomenon known as the “win-win situation” (“The Balkans had no expression for ‘win-win situation.’ In the Balkans they said, No problem, and the translation was, You’re f-----”).

My New American Life is — happily — vintage Prose: cheerfully pessimistic, smart, funny, with characters unnervingly spot-on in their stages of outrage, denial, malaise or disillusionment. After her last novel — the lovely, poignant Goldengrove, about a teenage girl coping with her older sister’s sudden death — Prose has come roaring back to the world of satire, where she is supremely at home. She is welcome here anytime. The author of such brilliant works as the National Book Award finalist Blue Angel, which skewered the pretensions of academia, Prose manages a fabulously cynical world view that never entirely abandons hope or compassion for human flaws, whether the people flaunting them are Lexus-driving criminals, mopey corporate souls who long for more honest work or vampire-obsessed teenagers who wear too much black.

Click here to read the rest of my review.

"Him Her Him Again The End of Him" - funny title, funnier book

In a rare fit of sanity I decided to take a friend's advice and read (for pleasure!) Patricia Marx's comic novel Him Her Him Again The End of Him, which I've had sitting on my shelf for awhile now (long enough for it to have been out in paperback a few years now).

I took the book home because how could I not be intrigued by that bizarre if unwieldy title? Glad I finally picked it up and read it. Marx, a former Saturday Night Live writer who was the first woman elected to the Harvard Lampoon, has taken the bad boyfriend tale to new levels of comedy, skewering men, women, academia, television and various other deserving targets with what certainly seems to be delight. That knife on the book cover? It ends up in everyone and everything, figuratively speaking.

Here's how the story goes: Girl meets boy at Cambridge. Boy is a pretentious wanker (he's pursuing a degree in Ego Studies). Girl's own academic goals are unclear (she changes her thesis as often as I change my Brita filter - thank you, Parks and Recreation, for that joke). Boy is deeply unreliable. Girl is deeply obsessed. And so it goes, until it doesn't.

Marx is a master of painful, revelatory comedy, the sort that makes you laugh even as you cringe at its all-too-keen perception of human nature (ie, your own personal failings). But that makes Him Her sound a lot less fun than it is. Read it. You'll laugh.

 

"The Tragedy of Arthur" by Arthur Phillips - a review

Arthur Phillips’ new novel is more triumph than tragedy, a clever, funny literary deceit that skewers everything in its path — scholars, Shakespeare lovers, anti-Stratfordians, family dynamics, the publishing world, bookish pretensions, even the author. It also slyly tackles some pointed questions about what we consider art and why, and if a rose by any other name would indeed smell as sweet. Yes. That’s the sort of wonderful novel this is: It dredges up every familiar line that ever lodged itself in your consciousness.

The Tragedy of Arthur is structured as an introduction to a lost Shakespeare play written by a selfish, wounded, profoundly petty Arthur Phillips who shares many — but hopefully not all — the traits of the actual man. There’s a play, too, at the end; it’s not so interesting or well executed as the rest of the book, but it’s also easy to skip or skim, should you lack curiosity about Phillips’ ability to mimic the greatest playwright of all time.

This narrator Arthur — who, like the real guy, has written four novels entitled Prague, The Egyptologist, Angelica and The Song is You — would disagree with that last sentence. He is not exactly in awe of the Bard; in fact, he sort of hates him. “If it didn’t have his name on it, half his work would be booed off the stage, dismissed by critics as stumbling, run out of print,” he sneers. “Instead we say it’s Shakespeare; he must be doing something profound that we don’t appreciate.” Don’t even get him started on Harold Bloom’s theories.

Click here to read the rest of the review.

 

Rober Parker's Spenser to live on

Crime writer Robert Parker died last year, but his best-loved characters will live on.

The Associated Press reports that Parker's estate and his publisher Putnam announced that new novels featuring Parker's popular characters Spenser and Jesse Stone will be written, with Michael Brandman handling Jesse Stone duties and Ace Atkins tackling Spenser.

Parker's last Spenser novel, Sixhill, was completed before his death at 77 and is due out next month.

"The Summer Without Men" by Siri Hustvedt - a review

“The transience of human feeling is nothing short of ludicrous,” muses the wry poet Mia early on in Siri Hustvedt’s elegant new novel, a smart and surprisingly amusing meditation on love, friendship and sexual politics. “My mercurial fluctuations in the course of a single evening made me feel as if I had a character made out of chewing gum.”

Mia is referring to how swiftly her mood shifted from morose to buoyant after a pleasant evening with a young neighbor. As so often happens on talky, aimless evenings, wine was a factor. But the simple delights of human connection are a force more potent than chardonnay.

The Summer Without Men explores and celebrates such alliances between women without ever losing its sense of humor. As Mia points out: “Shorn of intimacy and seen from a considerable distance, we are all comic characters.” Mia, 55 and mother of a grown daughter, is well aware of the painfully cliched nature of her torment: Her researcher husband Boris has requested a “pause” from their marriage that sent her reeling into a psychiatric ward. “He did not say I don’t ever want to see you again or It’s over, but after thirty years of marriage pause was enough to turn me into a lunatic.” He did, however, move in with a colleague 20 years younger than Mia (“French with limp but shiny brown hair”).

And so Mia heads to her tiny Minnesota hometown for the summer, to teach poetry to a gaggle of middle schoolers dipping their toes into the waters of adolescent cruelty and spend time with her aging but sharply observant mother, who lives in an assisted living facility and presides over “the Five Swans,” women fiercely determined to mine the best of their intellectual capacities while they still have them.

Author of four other novels, including What I Loved and The Sorrows of an American, Hustvedt clearly enjoys letting Mia vent her feminist screeds in hopes of transforming her broken heart into some blazing insight on the nature of men and women, yet she never allows Boris to completely turn into some terrible, disloyal, caddish creature despite his flaws. Hustvedt’s view roams wider than Mia’s wounds; she taps into poignant truths about women and life’s different stages, from the sly teenage tormentor in the poetry class to the elderly woman who hides wonderfully subversive images in her needlework. As for Mia and Boris: “[W]ho among us would deny Jane Austen her happy endings?” I might deny Boris any good cheer, but Hustvedt, ever generous toward the human animal, has different ideas.

New Charles Frazier book due out in fall

Charles Frazier, who won a National Book Award for the novel Cold Mountain, will release a new book this fall.

The Associated Press reports that Nightwoods takes place in rural North Carolina - no surprise there, as that was also the setting of Frazier's second novel Thirteen Moons - and is about a young woman who cares for her murdered sister's twins in the 1950s.

Sounds promising, though after Thirteen Moons - about which I had a decidedly mixed reaction - I will withhold judgment until I read it. Did like Cold Mountain, which sold more than 2 million copies, though; even liked the movie, despite the presence of the ever-annoying Renee Zellweger (who was actually pretty good in it).

 

 

"The Jump Artist" wins Sami Rohr Prize

The Jewish Book Council has announced the winner of the $100,000 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature: Austin Ratner for his debut novel The Jump Artist, which was based on the true story of Philippe Halsman, who knew Hitler, Freud - and put Marilyn Monroe on the cover of Life magazine.

Joseph Skibell was the runner up and winner of the $25,000 prize for his novel A Curable Romantic. The other finalists: Allison Amend (Stations West); Nadia Kalman (The Cosmopolitans) and Julie Orringer (The Invisible Bridge).

The Sami Rohr Prize honors the contribution of contemporary writers in the exploration and transmission of Jewish values. Nonfiction and fiction are considered in alternate years.

E.L. Doctorow's "All the Time in the World" - a review

How enticing, this idea of walking away from one’s life, of retreating from an unkind world. How dull and constraining to follow the rules. How much better to do precisely what you want. Or is it? The characters in E.L. Doctorow’s latest collection of stories find themselves compelled by the idea of escape from — what? Some don’t even know. “I was not trapped,” admits one protagonist. “I just felt as if I were.”

All the Time in the World features six new stories as well as other Doctorow classics, and they’re all distinctive, sharply focused, glistening with crisp language. Winner of three National Book Critics Circle awards and a couple of PEN/Faulkners, Doctorow is best known for his novels, which include Homer & Langley, The March, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Billy Bathgate and World’s Fair, which won the National Book Award. But he’s also keenly alert to the demands of short fiction, the blend of nuance and straightforwardness that makes stories hum with resonance and vitality.

“A novel may begin in your mind as an evocative image, a bit of conversation, a piece of music, an incident you’ve read about in someone’s life, a presiding anger, but in any case something that proposes a meaningful world,” the author writes in the preface. “A story, by contrast, usually comes to you as a situation, with the characters and setting irrevocably attached to it.” Here the characters rattle uncomfortably in their skins, and the settings range widely. Some stories are set in Doctorow’s trademark urban northeast (“Lord, there is something so exhausted about the New York waterfront, as if the smell of the sea were oil, as if boats were buses, as if all Heaven were a garage hung with girlie calendars, the months to come already leafed and fingered in black grease”). Others take place way down south or west. One story is set in Europe. Liner Notes: The Songs of Billy Bathgate re-imagines the adult life of a familiar character. Wherever they take place, these memorable stories reflect a novelist’s intimate understanding of human frailty and penchant for delusion.

Click here to read the rest of my review of All the Time in the World. 

Meet Joe Hill, author of the crazy-good horror novel "Horns"

"Ignatius Martin Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things."

With that irresistible opening line, Joe Hill's Horns grabs you and won't let go. And when Ig touches his forehead and realizes he's growing horns - and quickly learns that every person he meets will tell him their darkest, ugliest thoughts - you know he's in for a hell of a ride, especially when he realizes that his newfound power may lead him to his girlfriend's killer.

I hadn't read Horns until Herald TV critic Glenn Garvin stumbled out of his office one day to ask: Have you read this guy Joe Hill? I hadn't. Glenn, who keeps me posted on all necessary vampire, zombie and other horror-related events, said: This book is great. Since he was the first person to tell me The Walking Dead TV series was awe-inspiring, I listened to him, and he was right. Horns is dark, twisted, even sometimes funny in a macabre way.

Also worth your time is Hill's first novel, Heart-Shaped Box, which I'm reading now, which involves a haunted suit, a murderous ghost and heroic dogs. But more on that later.

Hill appears at 7 p.m.Tuesday at Books & Books in Coral Gables. You can read Glenn's interview with him here. And if you like Hill's books, you might want to check out some of the stuff his old man writes. He's not bad either. Name of Stephen King.

 

"Memory Wall" wins Story Prize

Anthony Doerr's short story collection Memory Wall won the Story Prize for short fiction.

Doerr, who gets $20,000 for his trouble, is also author of The Shell Collector, About Grace and Four Seasons in Rome. The runners up were Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl and Suzanne Riveca's Death is Not an Option.

The Story Prize was created in 2004 and Miami writer Edwidge Danticat is one of the previous winners.