[Please note that this review does include spoilers.]

I will admit that before I read The Bonfire of the Vanities I only knew two things about it: that it was made into a movie that no one walking this earth seemed to truly enjoy, and that the story involved Wall Street traders and trading. That’s really about it. Needless to say I didn’t have very high expectations when I decided to pick up this book when I was suddenly seized by the desire to read a well-known ’80′s book that was not written by Bret Easton Ellis or Jay McInerney. The book does include a Wall Street trader (in so much as one of the main characters, Sherman McCoy, is a trader) and trading, but that facet of it, especially when it comes to any details about Wall Street and the company that McCoy works for, comprises only a small percentage of the book. As for the movie, I still have not seen it and have no desire to do so. But as far as the book goes, it is deserving of some praise. This is a very good novel, a very good window into the NYC of the ’80′s, and an all-around fun read by Mr. Wolfe. And by fun I mean fun in like a paint-by-numbers kind of way. I’ll expand on this later.

What I don’t want you to think is that book consists of actual fun, because it does not. It has its moments of humor for sure but the center of The Bonfire of the Vanities revolves around racial tension, class wars, wealth, and the ease in which the poor can manipulated into being pawns for the media and for the neighborhood organizations who are trying to keep up in the political games of the city. With regards to the last point I found myself thinking at times that Wolfe had done a wonderful job of re-examining the same things that Ellison was interested with Invisible Man and Dostoevsky with The Possessed (but with Wolfe giving it an ’80′s, macro application of makeup to it instead of the literary and more serious lens that the aforementioned books use).

The Bonfire of the Vanities centers around Sherman McCoy missing the interstate exit back into Manhattan after he picks up his mistress, Maria Ruskin, from the airport. The two find themselves lost in the Bronx (in McCoy’s new luxury coupe) and wind up near an exit ramp that will take them back on to the interstate, but the ramp has been blocked by some garbage cans and tires. Two black males approach the car and Sherman and Maria assume that they are going to attack them and, through a series of events that are first described in the novel from Sherman and Maria’s POV and then from the people on the street’s POV, Maria takes control of the car and backs into one of the black males and he winds up going into a coma at a nearby hospital (the same hospital that released him the night of the accident after only looking at his wrist).

From here, the novel takes some predictable turns (young black male put in coma by rich white people and their rich white people automobile becomes a sensationalistic story and cause célèbre; caricatures are created in the media and in the streets pitting Park Avenue against The Ghetto) and introduces some predictable characters (McCoy, the clueless rich guy who can’t possibly understand why a crowd of angry black people are yelling in front of his Park Avenue apartment; the District Attorney who is so idealistic it’s almost sickening). But Wolfe takes these (and other) predictable elements and still churns out a really well-written and engaging book. Almost every passage involving Reverend Bacon, the black minister whose hands are in many of the community groups in the Bronx, is superb—especially the conversation he has with a lawyer in which he talks about the house that they are sitting in. The way that Peter Fallow, the drunken Brit who works at a tabloid and is chosen to be the first to write about the black kid in the coma, is written and the whole British vs. American angle that seems to consume the back of his head came across as believable and nicely fleshed out. (In the epilogue of the novel, we learn that Fallow won a Pulitzer for his reporting on the McCoy case and he’s basically living the American Dream, no doubt muttering his disdain for the whole charade to himself and being more vocal about it amongst his ex-pat friends while dining in expensive, Brit-frequented restaurants.)

The Bonfire of the Vanities is a novel that I would definitely recommend for anyone who has a diverse reading palette; someone who will see Wolfe’s tics (his overuse of ellipses and exclamation marks in the beginning) and embrace some of its flaws (it does a feel a little dated but still strong, like a first season episode of Law & Order) with care and forgiveness.

Which brings me back to my paint-by-numbers remark at the beginning of this review.

What I mean by that remark is that a paint-by-numbers piece is fun because you know what it’s going to look like in the end. The flip side to a paint-by-number piece is that it’s not always fun to do (because you know what it’s going to look like). When you read this novel you know that Sherman McCoy is going to get nailed; you know that Maria is going to sell him out; you know that the D.A.’s office is going to play dirty; you know that McCoy’s lawyer are going to play dirty; you know that the racial stuff will be a little maddening (Wolfe does an outstanding job of hitting the right notes when writing about both sides of the fight for the boy in the coma). The Bonfire of the Vanities is a 690 page novel, a somewhat demanding paint-by-numbers piece.

There are many aspects of this novel that I genuinely enjoyed. The fact that it is a nearly 700 page novel that, to me, read like a 300 page novel is a feat not easily accomplished and one that I have to tip my hat to. I really enjoyed this novel and would recommend it to anyone who is not scared by books that exceed the 500 page barrier, or to anyone who is in the mood to revisit the ’80′s.

In a spiritual context, I would hazard a guess and say that the phrase “the world to come” implies the encroachment towards heaven for most people. To me, it seems to imply a departure of this world and a deliverance to another—which, when looked at in that respect, probably causes whatever notions of heaven to come to mind when asked for first associations upon hearing that phrase. (Obviously, I could be wrong as I am admittedly generalizing here.)

Dara Horn’s The World to Come is at its root a novel that deals with spirituality, authenticity (in a fundamental way, not in a Brooklyn hipster searching for fringe delights kind of way), and cultural inheritance. Because of the spiritual element it is the type of novel that if I were to explain the plot with a good amount of detail, I would imagine that a lot of people would shut down and shrug and think of a polite way of saying Why would I ever want to read that? Which then puts me in the awkward position of trying to be descriptive of the novel in this review without overstepping my bounds and causing the reader to become deaf and blind to this unexpectedly great discovery of a book. I myself would have probably passed on this book if I knew more about it. The only thing I knew about the book was that it revolved around Benjamin Ziskind stealing a print by Marc Chagall from a museum because he believed that it was stolen from his family (the print hung in his house and he thought that someone had taken it after his mother died). I knew that the book was about Ben and Sara Ziskind, twin brother and sister, and their search through their family history spurred on by the events that happened at the museum, and I assumed that the book would center around Jewish life (and mythology) dating back to the times of Chagall leading up to the present day.

But I didn’t anticipate the thickness of the spiritual themes and religious imagery and symbolism. And I certainly didn’t anticipate that I would like the book all the more because of their inclusion. The World to Come is full of bridges, angels, heaven, and the duality of life. But again, I’m cautious about going into great detail for fear of turning people off. If I had read a full review of the book that includes details of what occurs in the last 100 pages I probably would’ve passed too. And I wouldn’t have passed on it because of the inclusion of the spiritual symbols and themes of the book, but because the inclusion of these things in a novel can be boring or overly didactic or allegorical to read if written by the wrong hands.

Dara Horn does a fantastic job with writing this novel. The World to Come does a good job of balancing the serious (Jewish life in eastern Europe pre- and post-WWII; the life of Der Nister; what happened to Sara and Ben’s father in Vietnam), the typical (the story of Ben and Sara and, to a degree, the people tied directly to them), and the surreal (the end of the novel, with its imagery of eating paintings and drinking books). My biggest gripe with this book was that I never fully believed the relationships that Ben and Sara have with their girlfriend and husband, respectively, but since these story lines aren’t central to the book it didn’t bother me too much.

As I said earlier, this is a book that I would recommend—especially as a summertime read as it reads pretty quick and is only a hair over 300 pages long—but one in which I don’t want to reveal too much of. So with this in mind I will end this review with an excerpt; an excerpt that I feel does a good job in not only showing off Horn’s writing ability but also because it does a great job of balancing the joyous with the sad. For this book does have, to me, an unexpected amount of death in it. (But like any book worth its salt that deals with death it redeems itself at the end, which is why I think Horn swung for the fences with the ending that she went with.)

Below is the excerpt, a brief passage about Ben and his thoughts about his pregnant twin Sara:

But now he thought of Sara and remembered all the biology facts he had gathered for American Genius, the DNA and RNA and chromosomal combinations and matching nucleotides and Punnett squares and probabilities and genetic futures. Tiny secret blueprints of their parents were floating within her, growing invisible and silent, engineering a soul. Every pregnant woman was carrying the dead.

The World to Come is not a perfect book. But as is sometimes the case, it’s not always the perfect books that resonate but rather the unexpected ones.

“If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.”

— Richard Yates, when asked about the central theme of his novels

**********

The best thing about “The American Dream” is that its duality is so perfect. On the one hand, The American Dream^[1] is great in that it is, at root, an idea that has numerous dreams and incentives already built-in: you can buy that house; you can get that car; you can Have It All. And it does all of this in a (mostly) secular way—instead of praying to God or Jesus for the deliverance of things, you can simply worship an ideology and an economy- and market-based way of life. On the other hand, The American Dream^[2] provides such fertile ground and fuel for outstanding counterpoints, opinion, writing, deconstruction, and commentary. This is based on a secular methodology too—why pray for answers when they’re right in front of everyone’s face, decodable by irony instead of archaic texts? Why blindly praise things and writings when there’s more to be learned by taking it apart?

And so because of the second way you can say the words “the American dream” you had many writers and voices beginning in the ’50′s starting to dissect things like the suburbs, marriage, promiscuity, and a litany of other things previously deemed taboo in mainstream American culture. (If you are reading this and you over the age of sixteen you probably already know this.) So, if I were to tell you that here is this book, and it’s called Revolutionary Road and it was published in 1961 and the story takes place in 1955 and it follows the crumbling marriage of Frank and April Wheeler and one of the satellite storylines of the novel revolves around abortion and the central storyline focuses on the crumbling of a marriage: you would probably be able to easily imagine—to some broad extent—what this novel will entail. You will probably be able to picture uncomfortable scenes involving fights between the Wheeler’s and Frank’s descent into irritability with his career, all amongst a backdrop commentary showing that life can sometimes suck in the suburbs; that the suburbs do not always live up to its projection and marketing of an idyllic zone of happiness.

And you would be correct in assuming and picturing those things. Yates is certainly not reinventing the wheel, from a thematic perspective, with this novel. But what he does do with this novel is fill it with some truly wonderful writing; writing that treads a very careful line, one that never comes too close to embracing all-out discomfort but one that feels realistic enough as to not ever feel terribly dated. For example, below is an excerpt from late in the book. April Wheeler is at a bar with the Wheeler’s friend Shep Campbell while her husband has driven Shep’s wife home (Shep’s car was blocked in at the parking lot so they agreed that Frank would take Shep’s wife home in his car and then Shep would drive April after his car was free). April and Frank had a huge fight earlier in the day and, while drunk, she has sex with Shep in the back of his car. Look at how Yates writes April’s inner monologue—it’s engrossing and complex, and parts of it will smack you in the face with its realism (a down-to-earth realism at that too; nothing so complex as to only be enjoyed literary circle members):

“So it hadn’t been wrong or dishonest of her to say no this morning, when he asked if she hated him, any more than it had been wrong or dishonest to serve him the elaborate breakfast and to show the elaborate interest in his work, and to kiss him goodbye. The kiss, for that matter, had been exactly right—a perfectly fair, friendly kiss, a kiss for a boy you’d just met at a party, a boy who’d danced with you and made you laugh and walked you home afterwards, talking about himself all the way.

“And how could anyone else be blamed for that?”

To be sure, this style of writing—this communion of omniscient and second person narratives—has become quite common when deconstructing characters’ thoughts, especially when it comes to the modern deconstruction of The American Dream (say it in whatever voice you deem fit). But look at the way Yates writes that passage: how April views Frank as a boy when she kisses him, the concision in how the dots are connected that shows the unraveling of their marriage. It’s wonderfully constructed and gets its point across easily. Its doom has poignancy. (Which makes me wonder why the hell anyone would even attempt to make this into a movie. Seriously, how do you capture the above excerpt and attempt to transfer it to film? Why even try? It seems like such a Sisyphean task.)

Speaking of movies, I am sure that we all have a few personal favorite movies that are personal favorites because the writing and/or the acting are so good and so brilliant that it doesn’t matter to us that the actual story of the movie is less than stellar. Two examples for me are The Shawshank Redemption and Sunshine Cleaning. From a dispassionate point of view, both movies have mundane stories: the former is about a wrongly accused man, the latter is about two women who clean up crime scenes. And from a dispassionate eye, the writing in both of these movies is not awe-inspiring. But… in the former you have Morgan Freeman’s presence (both in his acting and in his narration) and some transcendent scenes (the opera album/prison yard scene and anything involving Brooks after prison), and in the latter you have Amy Adams who owns just about every scene in a thoroughly relatable way (the scene where she sits next to the old woman on her porch is beyond touching). The writing in these movies is good, don’t get me wrong. But it’s the actors and the other intangibles that really sell it all, for me anyway. Whereas with books that are my personal favorites the opposite is true: if the writing is great enough, it can outshine the characters and the story to the point that I’m not really bothered if the story isn’t technically interesting.

And this is what Revolutionary Road did for me. The writing is outstanding, to the point that I don’t really care that Frank Wheeler, as a character, isn’t fundamentally interesting. I don’t really care that April is mostly kind of unlikable. And I don’t care about these things because the framework and the writing of the novel are so damn great. The novel begins with April in an acting troupe performing on their first night, and it ends with two different neighbors talking about the aftermath of what happened to April, how it effected Frank, and where he moved to. By framing it this way, you are asked to see the Wheeler’s through other people’s eyes. Just like you see your neighbors. Again, Yates did not invent this style of writing—he just did a helluva job executing it with this novel.

On the back of the edition of this novel that I have there is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut and it reads: “The Great Gatsby of my time… One of the best books by a member of my generation.” This is not hyperbole.

Revolutionary Road is not an uplifting book. It is about people who mortgage their dreams in exchange for overlooking everything that is around them. It is the type of book that probably won’t be an attractive read for many people. But if this story (or this review of it) has piqued any interest, buy the book. You will not be disappointed.

[1] You should read this phrasing of “The American Dream” in your head with a very ’50′s-sounding politician’s, or commercial actor’s, voice; very polished, with gleaming white teeth exposed.

[2] You should read this phrasing of “The American Dream” in your head with a very modern-sounding snarkiness and ironic detachment. You should mentally roll your eyes as you say it, and possibly even curse George W. Bush immediately afterwards while you’re at it if only because it feels sensible to do that too.

Reading Lolita is like listening to the most technically perfect guitarist perform. The technically perfect guitarist will wow you with his precision and render any complexity into a shell of a joke. The guitarist’s fingers will hit all of their marks on the fretboard with frightening and spidery ease; their other hand will glide over the strings like a wizard hitting their perfectly tuned chords. Their music won’t be seen as music per se by their adoring audience, but something that transcends “music”; it will be explained as being more a manifestation of atmosphere and an exercise of perfection rather than mere performance. (In fact, to call it a performance would probably be insulting.)

There is one other caveat to watching, or listening to, a technically perfect guitarist perform, and the same caveat applies to reading Lolita: its perfection and its essence begins to transition into boredom.

To me, Lolita is the example by which a case could be made for a literary Uncanny Valley; its prose and its structure was so well-executed that it actually became more and more disorienting to read the further I got into the book. The prose tried so hard, too hard, that I found myself thinking that the book was like a printed version of an animated movie by Robert Zemeckis—in its attempt to be as real-looking as possible, it only amplified the minor flaws I was picking out and caused more thoughts of annoyance rather than praise to infiltrate my head.

To put it another way: this book comes across as a little too professorial. Maybe if I took a semester course that only focused on this novel, with a professor that kept my interest, I would have been in the proper mindset to adequately worship this book. But then again, therein lies the rub. I actually do admire this novel. I do realize what it’s strengths are. I do recognize its significance. I do recognize that it is Important, and deserving of a spot in the canon of modern American literature alongside Invisible Man and To Kill A Mockingbird and Infinite Jest. I stood in awe of some of the writing. I understand now why Nabokov worshippers exist and I have begun to understand their platform. I will admit that this book should be on the list of novels you should read before you die.

That said, I just didn’t like this novel.

The primary reason I did not like this novel is because it ultimately wants to be too many things throughout its pages. It is a book that wants to be treated like an experience, filled with double entendres, word play, and psychological and subconscious observations of tyranny, and the objectification of girls. I get that. I would guess that this is exactly why the people who love this book love it so much: because, technically speaking, you can dissect many parts of it and be amazed at its individual structure and prose as well as marvel at the cohesive whole. Me? I found the cohesive whole—specifically, the second part of the novel—to be just mostly uninteresting. I found myself getting bored by the technically wonderful prose… just like how I begin to get bored by the technically wonderful and perfect and classically-trained guitarist. It becomes too much too care about.

The first part of the novel (excluding the foreword) is brilliant, make no mistake about it. It’s uncomfortable and it attempts (successfully, I think) to force you to care about Humbert Humbert, one of the most grotesque characters in modern literary history. It wants you to feel sorry for—or, at the very least, quell our knee-jerk predispositions—about a pedophile, and it wants us to do this in a fundamental sense but to still care about it through the lens of the pedophile himself, even when we know that his narration goes through valleys of fog and outright lying. The second part of the novel? Again, the prose is so good from a technical aspect but I also found it to be suffocating. At times, I wanted to throw the book against the wall and scream Get on with the story already! Stop being so fucking scholarly with your prose! Sometimes, the book felt more like a writing project than an accessible story.

Before I end this review I must repeat an earlier clarification: though I didn’t like this book, I still respect its “classic” status. It is a very smart and complex novel. If nothing else it is amazing to read how Nabokov wrote a story about pedophilia, a story in which he is prevented from giving you any real details about the act that Humbert so desperately craves; an act that is central to the story. It is truly impressive. It’s just that this novel spoke to me on maybe one or two levels rather than the five, six, or eleven levels that classic novels usually speak to you on. So, yes, I did not like Lolita but I would be the first to recommend that everyone include it on their “to read before I die” list of books. The flashes of brilliance in this book are remarkable—remarkable enough that having to wade through its oceans of boredom in the second part are worth it.

[Please note that this review does include spoilers.]

Microserfs is one of those types of books that is somewhat difficult to properly categorize, because to do so would cause one to start using contradictions as the basis for its review. Some examples: this book is dated, yet it still reads (and feels) like a book that is still pertinent in the here and now of the second decade of the 21st century; this book is a work of fiction but much of the time it feels like nonfiction; the characters in the book, for the most part, are quite insulated yet they also seem fully fleshed out and level-headed too; there is not a terrible amount of character complexity in this novel, but you do feel as if you know these people.

In summary: this book does excel at being a microcosm of the early ’90′s tech arena—itself a series of charming and bewitching contradictions, in which practicality was overlooked in favor of stock purchase plans and level-headed business acumen was ditched in favor of the “we can do anything now, we’re in the midst of a technological revolution”-type naivete with which countless suburban kids dreaming of one day becoming an astronaut in the ’60′s used to have instilled in them. (Except that, you know, not everyone gets to be an astronaut. And the flying car and the kitchen that will make your food for you while you’re at work is a myth too. Just a heads up.) The moment that the first version of the Mosaic browser was released, there were quite literally a million new ideas born overnight. A practical graphical web browser coming to fruition was, in many respects, on par with man’s taming of the moon.

But because the release of the Mosaic browser was not a televised event, the Internet became a series of buzzwords and acronyms, all of which came together to create a hyper-frenetic world in which many people believed that quite literally anything was possible. And since few people in the mainstream knew how most of the tech stuff worked anyway, they pretty much had to nod in agreement with it all not unlike many in the ’70′s had to just nod to most of the theoretical technology that NASA spoke of; they did send a man to the moon—all limits were off, right? There are many, many similarities to the space boom of the ’60′s and the computer boom of the ’90′s but the biggest difference is that the space boom was brought to you (mostly) by the government. Which is to say that there was not a stock bust when people lost interest in aeronautics.

Microserfs does a very good job of putting you inside of the 1993-94 versions of Redmond, Washington and Silicon Valley. The book uses a digital epistolary (blog) format via the main character Daniel. Daniel and his friends, Todd, Bug, Karla, and Abe, all live in a “geek house” near the Microsoft campus in Redmond. All of them (and some other friends) eventually leave Microsoft to follow one of their co-workers, Michael, when he decides to form his own start-up in California. The strength of Microserfs is how it handles the characters’ lives once they have moved to the Valley. A lesser book would have focused on the new business, or become an allegory for the blind and vapid desire of all of them to make as much money as possible.

Instead, the book focuses on how all of these characters begin to grow as a group and as individuals. Their identity of being directly tied to their work or their project eventually begins to bend. Daniel and Karla have a real relationship. Bug announces his homosexuality. Todd, the bodybuilding geek, meets another bodybuilder and they have a child together.

Another strength of this book is that it can be externally projected upon in a few different ways. A friend of mine loaned me this book and one of the things he told me was that he thought it provided a good glimpse of the hedonism of the ’90′s. I never got a strong whiff of hedonism in these pages but at the same time I can completely understand why others would detect it. Microserfs is an elastic, dynamic book containing everything from glimpses into the tech sector of the early ’90′s to the kind of crazily intelligent observations about technology that stoners in the ’70′s might have said with embarrassment but were now being said with total honesty:

“[a description about a video game Michael developed] It was a game about a beautiful kingdom on the edge of the world that saw time coming to an end.

“Michael said the citizens of the kingdom were all allowed to do this because they had made it to the end of history without ever having had the blood of war spill on their soil. He said that it would have been an affront to all good souls who had worked for a better world over the millennia not to engineer a system for preserving finer thoughts after the millennium arrived and all ideologies died and people became animals once more.”

In many ways, this book is elastic as the mindset of the ’90′s itself. And while I like that the book ended on a solid personal note (everyone rallying around and helping Daniel’s mother after her stroke), and while I thought that, conversely, the ending was ruined slightly because it relied a bit on a hammer-to-the-head type of observation about technology (as in Look, technology can help the sick in different ways!), I also fully realize that trying to be humanistic without irony is not an easy thing to do. And if that is this book’s only failing, then it is ultimately a minuscule flaw.

It is fitting that Jonathan Franzen has one of his main characters (Patty Berglund) reading War and Peace, and that he intermittently references Tolstoy’s epic masterpiece here and there throughout Freedom. It is fitting because the way Franzen maps out his characters’ lives in this book, and how they try to navigate themselves out of their own fate and undoing, is as close to being Tolstoy-ian as I have read. Note: I am not saying that Franzen is as great as Tolstoy, or that he deserves to be joined with Tolstoy when speaking about the greatest writers of all time. I am saying that the way he writes about his characters’ unhappiness and their inner monologues is very Tolstoy-esque. Under normal circumstances, I am loathe to compare, however abstractly or directly, modern writers (or artists or musicians) to any classic counterparts but in this case making a dotted line connecting Franzen’s writing ability to Tolstoy’s writing ability, albeit in a very static sense, is something that I will stand by.

Yes, Freedom is that great.

Jonathan Franzen did an excellent job of writing about a family with all sorts of problems in his previous novel The Corrections, a novel that was met with enough critical praise to fill the New York Times Building. (Full disclosure: as much as I loved and was thoroughly blown away by much of the writing in The Corrections, I found the ending to be cold. I was rather disappointed by it, almost to the point of retroactively being indifferent to the novel as a whole. I was afraid that Franzen is to writing what the Coen Brothers are to moviemaking: extraordinarily gifted, but incapable of producing satisfying endings.) And while The Corrections and Freedom have some similarities—both focus on the shifts and minor (and major) self-inflicted destructions that can happen to a family, both have a male child going to a foreign country because of their job, both have at their core an attempt by Franzen to try and reconcile the differences (and similarities) between people near his generation’s age and his parents’ generation, etc.,—the biggest difference is that Freedom focuses mostly on the parents, Walter and Patty Berglund, throughout the novel whereas The Corrections focuses mostly on the Lambert children, Gary, Chip, and Denise, and makes the parents, Alfred and Enid, appear to be quite plastic at times. To put it a different way: The Corrections is like John Lennon; Freedom is like Paul McCartney. The former will probably always be more popular and have signifiers like genius thrown around because that art has been deemed to be Important (when, in actuality, a lot of it is kind of self-gratifying and a little too-cool-for-the-room), whereas the latter is more upfront in its greatness. This is the part where I tell you that I’ll take McCartney over Lennon; “Rocky Raccoon” over “Revolution 9,” “Wonderful Christmastime” over “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).”

Freedom follows the lives of Walter and Patty Berglund, from the University of Minnesota where they met to Nameless Lake to Washington, D.C., and everywhere in between. Patty is a tall girl, a scholarship basketball player for the Gophers, whose athletic gifts were at natural odds in her New York household growing up, living with a political mom and a lawyer father who would have rather championed their other kids’ Bohemian-style artistic creativity than Patty’s ill-fitting talents. Initially, Patty is attracted to Walter’s college roommate and frontman of the local band The Traumatics, Richard Katz. (Katz is described at one point as being a more attractive version of Muammar Gaddafi.)

Walter, on the other hand, is from Minnesota. His childhood involved an alcoholic father, a mother who seemed fated to be unhappy, and siblings that were purposely useless and seem to always be looking for the easiest paths in life to take. Walter spends countless hours working at and fixing up the family business, a sorta run-down motel. Walter is inherently good, is smart, and is capable of making a very good amount of money; Patty reaches a point where she just wants to get married, have kids, and stay at home. They get married. And you can probably guess that most of the novel involves unhappiness and poor choices, just based on this and the previous paragraph. The rest of the novel unfolds with an organized chaos of events that anyone who seeks out and loves great fiction will enjoy immensely.

We have somewhere in our minds a default image of what we think a writer looks like. Some of us may think of an older-looking man from a different time writing on sheets of paper and pausing to dip his pen in the bottle of ink. Some of us may think of a Jack Kerouac type slaving over a typewriter. Reading this book, the image I had of Franzen writing was of him sitting in an oversized room with one or two giant whiteboards, which would have numerous connecting points and notes to create a large map of this novel. Everything in this novel comes across on the pages as if everything were rigorously thought out in advance. Every word in this novel seems to have a definite purpose because Franzen routinely cross-references things that are split apart by tens or hundreds of pages with ease.

I will refrain from going into any great detail about the story for fear of ruining even the slightest part or sub-plot for you. But I will say that my one main criticism of the novel is that the parts that are written from Patty’s point of view (she writes an autobiography as part of a therapy exercise) seem to be a little too similar to that of the omniscient narrative voice throughout the rest of the book. I would have liked to have seen Franzen change it up a little bit more and given Patty a slightly more distinctive voice. But at the end of the day this is nitpicking. Buy this book and read it. Now. It more than lives up to the hype and praise that it has received.

And the ending is great.

The first forty pages of Carter Beats the Devil has some of the best and genuinely intoxicating writing to read. Within these pages you have the wonderfully flowing introduction of magician Charles Carter (or, Charles The Great, as he’s known at this point) and a summary of his roots leading up to his performance on the night that would turn out to be the last night that President Warren G. Harding was alive. Gold’s prose in describing Carter’s three acts and, specifically, the third act which is called “Carter Beats the Devil” and involves Carter having a magical duel with the Devil culminating with Carter catching the Devil cheating at a card game, is truly wonderful and entertaining and masterful. This writing is on par with some of the best blocks of writing from Michael Chabon’s The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a book that is one of my all time favorite novels and one that is on many reader’s short list of best novels of the previous decade.

After this prologue, the novel dives into Act I and the background of Charles Carter and how he was introduced to magic, and how his mother was more or less addicted to whatever was new in the field of psychology, and how his father had made a nice name for himself and made a fair amount of money, and the differences between Charles and his brother James, etc., etc. Throughout the three acts in the novel one can very easily pick up on the fact that Glen David Gold is a very good writer, but his biggest problem with this book is that he seemed to want to put too much into this story. And, unfortunately, this sense of not knowing when to quit is something that I picked up on very easily too.

Carter Beats the Devil is historical fiction, and historical fiction when it is done well can be one of the most rewarding fiction sub-genres to read because it can be used (whether intentional or not) as a reference point to show, sometimes counterintuitively, how similar the past is compared to the present. Example: there is a scene in the last 1/3 of the book in which Philo Farnsworth, a pioneer in the development of the television, is pitching his invention to an auditorium of private businessmen, students from technical schools nearby, and other professionals from the nascent world of technology. This scene instantaneously serves two purposes very well–one is obvious (that Farnsworth’s invention, television, must have looked like a magic trick to those in attendance), the other is more subtle (when Farnsworth tells the audience that television will eliminate wars). The former helps create an image of Farnsworth as a solo magician with only one assistant, his wife, performing an illusion that is so grand that almost everyone in the audience is dubious and skeptical of what they are seeing (even though it’s plainly right in front of them). The latter falls into why I think historical fiction can wake us up to our own surroundings.

I have no idea if Philo Farnsworth ever said in real life that television would eliminate all wars, or if he ever said in real life that his basis for his belief was that if people throughout the world could see live, moving pictures of people who live many miles away from them, that this would result in a tangible feeling of knowing that everyone else is no different from ourselves–thus, why would we ever go to war if we were able to humanize strangers in an instant? But this scene was written in the book, and I couldn’t help thinking of the grandiose plans of the Internet before it reached its ubiquitous status in our society. The comparisons may not be one-to-one but good historical fiction can cause you to think of connecting dots like this, and anything that causes you to want to connect disparate dots is usually a good thing.

But as I noted before my problem with this book is that Gold seemed to want to put in too much. The Farnsworth stuff was good, but was all of it necessary? There was an intangible feeling that gnawed at me quite frequently that said that this book should have been pared down a little. Because here’s the other kicker: the last forty pages are terrific. So, essentially, you have here a book with a great 40 pages to begin it, a great 40 pages to end it, and some great writing in between but, ultimately, this is a book that becomes a little directionless at times. Because Gold is sitting on a great ending, he seems okay with stretching out the story to make the reveal and payoff worth as much as possible. And, to a point, it is successful in this respect; I legitimately enjoyed reading this book. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was reading a B- novel that should have been an A.

Sometimes, the best illusions are the ones without all of the smoke and mirrors.

[Please note that this review does include spoilers.]

The brilliance of The Time Traveler’s Wife is, like all diamonds and other shiny gems, a multi-faceted one. Here you have a book that not only deals with time travel—a potentially murky and confusing and (from the author’s execution) selfishly convenient plot device to choose to go with—but also uses as its axis the ideas of The Everlasting Love, The Triumph of Love, and all of the other romantic ideals that can polarize a reading audience (i.e.–women will buy this book, men will stay away from it). Here also is a book that, if it had been done in a different manner, could easily read like a blatant invitation for a feminist’s ennui (or outright anger) because it’s main female character, Clare, waits around a lot for Henry. Finally, here is a book that is written in two first-person narratives; it relies heavily on dialog and the inner monologues of its two main characters—two things that, if left in the hands of lesser writer (hello, Stephenie Meyer), can be disastrous. In short: this is a book that had a few big things stacked against it from the onset (to say nothing of the fact that this is also a debut novel). And yet… This is a really outstanding book. All of the traps that you might expect it to fall into, it avoids beautifully. It is an exceptional love story, and an exceptional time travel story. It is a truly great modern story, one that gracefully weaves metaphor with genuine emotion, and depth with humor.

One of the main strengths of The Time Traveler’s Wife is that author Audrey Niffenegger knows exactly how to handle the time travel and love aspects of the story: the former is handled with wonderful balance—it is detailed with regards to its dates and times and the scope is large, but the science of it is perfectly minimal; the latter is handled with great care so that the weight and emotion of the ending is earned (even though you have a pretty good idea you know exactly what will happen anyway). Henry and Clare DeTamble will never replace Romeo and Juliet as the de facto fictional couple we think of when we think of love stories, but they can certainly lay claim to an early spot on the Greatest Fictional Couples In 21st Century Fiction list.

The best quality of this book is its use of metaphor. Niffenegger has stated that this novel acts as a metaphor for her failed relationships; that by taking an inventory (for lack of a better term) of the men who have disappeared from her life, the idea of Henry and Clare became much easier to flesh out. That in and of itself is a terrific and poignant (and wonderfully self-aware) metaphor. The other great metaphors in the novel revolve specifically around Henry’s time travel: that stress causes him to physically disappear, and that his mother’s death is the event that he revisits the most. A quick summary of each metaphor and why I think that they are quite brilliant:

Stress causes Henry DeTamble to disappear — Within the realm of science fiction (or stories that lean slightly on sci-fi, or are outright fantasy stories), the poor behavior of men is usually symbolized with monster imagery. Bruce Banner gets stressed and the introduction of the Hulk is just a few seconds away; Frankenstein represented not only Science becoming unstable, but also Man; Mr. Hyde plays upon the dark side that resides in all men, etc. If you were to take these devices and mix them with the accepted modern day notion that men might jump out of a relationship at the first sign of trouble, this metaphor acts as a nice update. Henry isn’t a monster, but his lack of control causes him to literally slip away from Clare.

The death of his mother is his time traveling anchor — At one point Henry tells Clare that the death of his mother is like the center of gravity for him. He has witnessed his mother dying in the same car crash from multiple angles. He has seen her many times before she died. What I found to be so great about this wrinkle is that, whether Niffenegger realized it or not, it does a terrific job of summing up men in general and their relation to women. A guy’s mom is in the overall scheme of things more of an anchor than their dad, regardless of whether or not one or both of them left them or died at a young age. There’s a reason why a woman’s first question to her newly-dating friend is oftentimes “How does he treat his mother?” It’s also worth noting that Henry never once tries to prevent the crash, or talk to his mom before she dies—something that I think most men would do (because they wouldn’t want to tamper with the events that did unfold) but most women would be unable to refrain from trying to do. This indirectly maps out a kind of feminine vs. masculine device.

Most of the time, in literary criticism, props are given to men who write about women and/or feminist themes in a technically sound way but, oftentimes, the rules of vice versa rarely applies. When men write a great story involving strong female characters it often receives the Important label. Yet when women write about men or masculine themes it still usually gets filed under Chick Lit.^[1] Despite its subject matter and inherent imagery, The Time Traveler’s Wife is actually a pretty masculine story.

Niffenegger has created a character in Henry DeTamble that easily resonates with women, complete with many of the usual Perfect Guy tropes. But she has written a subtly complex character too in Henry: because he is naked when he time travels, he has to steal and beat up people routinely if he arrives in a public place; additionally, he still sleeps with other women during his present tense youth. The latter is a function of the time travel plot that dictates that the present tense Henry has no idea what future (and past) Henry know. It might sound gimmicky to some people but I found it to be kind of refreshing that Niffenegger did not put up a story in front of the reader starring two virgins.

As for Clare, as I mentioned early in the review, it would be really easy for some to view Clare as a kind of updated damsel simply waiting for her man but I think that that would be too shallow or short-sighted. Even though Niffenegger has stated that she is not like Clare in real life (the author has said before that she wouldn’t wait around like Clare did) she has nonetheless created a dynamic and unforgettable female character. Clare’s dynamic qualities, like Henry’s, mostly reside beneath the surface. Does a majority of Clare’s life involve waiting? Yes. Is it unfair that her daughter gets to see Henry while Clare does not? Probably. But really great art and fiction takes abstract (or even outright fantastical) things and tries to apply some humanity to them.

Maybe the book would have had more gravity if Clare lived her life more fully but that’s not really the point. The point is that if you knew without a shadow of a doubt that the love of your life would reappear throughout your life, you would wait too. Regardless of how ludicrous it looked or sounded.

The Time Traveler’s Wife plays on this notion to beautiful effect.

[1] This was one of the many reasons I found the writings and interviews from women like Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult to be so fascinating during the release of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom earlier this year. It wasn’t so much that they were calling out The New York Times (they were), but they were also (more importantly) marking their territory. Underneath the surface complaint of the favoritism towards white male authors was the notion that a) not everything written by women about relationships is Chick Lit and b) there should be more perspective when books by women are reviewed—not everything will be up to the same level as The Corrections (few books by men will even reach that level), but not everything by female authors needs to be treated like it’s a feminized, beach reading version of Dan Brown either. I’ve not yet read any books by Weiner or Picoult, but I have a hell of a lot of respect for both of them in speaking their minds in the way that they did.

If I had to choose 5 books that not only represents the canon of American literature—while also defining what America is for someone who only had a remedial knowledge of our country—To Kill A Mockingbird easily cracks that list for me.^[1] It might be the perfect American novel, not because it was groundbreaking or because Harper Lee’s prose outshines everyone before and after her. It’s the perfect American novel because of Atticus Finch—the classic Ideal Man—and Scout Finch—a wonderful character that mirrors social metamorphosis perfectly.

I usually give no weight to all-time lists of any sort when it comes to movies but a few years ago the American Film Institute had their 50 greatest heroes list and Atticus Finch was number one, beating out a myriad of heroes that either required weapons (Indiana Jones, James Bond), or became significantly larger than life within their story (Rocky Balboa, Jefferson Smith).

This is not an accident.

Atticus Finch, I think, is one of the few characters in American literature (and cinema) that everyone wishes they could be on a certain level. We wish that we had his stoicism and unimpeded objectivity. We wish that we would do the right thing more often. The best thing about the novel—the thing that makes it so identifiable to generations of people—is that Harper Lee thoroughly humanizes Atticus Finch. He is entirely relatable, regardless if you grew up in the ’30′s or ten years ago. He is not overly idealized to a fault, or more metaphor than character (see: John Galt).

To me, one of the greatest scenes in the book is when Atticus and the kids stay at Jack’s house. (Jack is Atticus’s brother.) Atticus and Jack are talking about the trial of Tom Robinson and Atticus’s fears of what the aftermath might bring to his family:

“‘[...] But do you think I could face my children otherwise? You know what’s going to happen as well as I do, Jack, and I hope and pray I can get Jem and Scout through it without bitterness, and most of all, without catching Maycomb’s usual disease. Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don’t pretend to understand… I just hope that Jem and Scout come to me for their answers instead of listening to the town. I hope they trust me enough… Jean Louise?’

“My scalp jumped. I stuck my head around the corner. ‘Sir?’

“‘Go to bed.’

“I scurried to my room and went to bed. [...] But I never figured out how Atticus knew I was listening, and it was not until many years later that I realized he wanted me to hear every word he said.”

This passage perfectly displays not only the relationship between a father and his daughter, but also the very essence of both: Atticus and his instinctive nature to protect his family, and Scout and her wonderful naivete that acts as the lens by which we see the story unfold. Finally, the fact that the book is written from the perspective of Scout as an adult providing us with a story from her childhood makes the last half of the last sentence from the above passage all the more flawless.

Before I delve any further into this review, here is a summary of the book (in case you have forgotten, or are one of the few people who weren’t required to read it in high school). To Kill A Mockingbird is set in Maycomb, Alabama in the early 1930′s. It follows the Finch’s (Atticus, Jem, and Scout, and their maid Calpurnia; the kids’ mother died when they were young) up until 1936, the year in which the trial of Tom Robinson—a black man accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell—took place and in which Mayella’s father Bob tried to take revenge on Atticus for defending a black man. Before the trial starts, the book is primarily about Jem and Scout and their interactions and experiences with people ranging from the enigmatic (the unseen, walking rumor mill, specter of a man, Boo Radley) to the walks-of-life characters like their summertime friend Dill and other characters like Miss Maudie and Aunt Alexandra.

The trial is the turning point of the book for obvious reasons: even though Scout and Jem are 10 and 14 respectively, the trial’s verdict and aftermath provide Lee with enough to explore themes involving death of innocence, gender roles, and a questioning of how certain wrongs can exist in a society that holds freedom and humanity as default values.

Mark Twain realized many decades previously that the best way to handle race is to put a child square in the middle of it, and let them be the lens by which adults are forced to look at things, and Harper Lee with this book does a job on par with Twain in this respect. When Atticus sits in front of the jail by himself at night to ensure that no one attempts to get to Tom Robinson, Lee inserts Jem and Scout directly into the scene. The kids are the ones who cause the five men who have arrived to get Tom to turn back around. The men can’t bear to bust in, not when children are looking at them in the face and asking why they are here. And in the hands of a lesser writer this scene would probably have been too ham-fisted or possibly even grossly preachy, but Harper Lee wrote it in such a way that felt real because Scout’s voice was already so wonderful and so textured that we as readers knew that the men were probably not going to hurt Atticus and his children. But what was unexpected about it was its matter-of-factness. Were they going to hurt you, Atticus? the children wondered. No, they just wanted to scare me; these men, they might’ve been acting differently tonight but in the morning they’ll still be the same good people. You can’t damn people who become temporarily misguided, Atticus explains.

I read this book in sophomore year English class and I liked it a lot. I had planned on re-reading it again a couple times previous to this but each time I found another book that caught my eye. Going into this reading I knew that I would probably still like it, that it would still resonate with me. But I was really surprised with how much I unequivocally love this book. Which leads me to a few words about Harper Lee.

To Kill A Mockingbird is the only book that she ever published. Like J.D. Salinger, she became a recluse (how many people know that she is still alive?) and as she got older she refused to talk about the book even if she allowed someone to speak with her. It is truly unbelievable that not only was Lee’s first book a huge success (it won the Pulitzer, as well as it being a point of reference during the Civil Rights era) but it was also remade into a perfect and iconic movie.^[2]

Has the success of Mockingbird provided more negatives than positives for Harper Lee? Why won’t she talk about the book? Did Truman Capote (Lee’s childhood friend and basis for the character Dill) help write the novel? I don’t know any of those answers. And the fact is that when Harper Lee dies, none of that will really matter. She left us one gift—a timeless, socially relevant gift—and we will always have it to use as a basis to better explain (and learn from) a particular era of American history.

[1] The other four books (in no particular order): The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, and Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Rounding out the top 10 would be (again, in no particular order): The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, and flip a coin between The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.

[2] I think the only major thing left out from the book in the movie is Atticus hinting at incest during his cross-examination of Mayella. Other than that, the movie is practically a carbon copy of the book.

[Please note that this review does include spoilers.]

I went into this year with a New Year’s reading resolution: I was going to make it a point to primarily read fiction from the last decade. I started out by reading Susan Gregg Gilmore’s Looking For Salvation At The Dairy Queen, which is a book I would recommend for summer reading. The narrator’s voice is good, it is light and breezy, and reads like a book that would make for a good movie if put in the hands of a caring director and producers who are faithful to the tone of the book. (So why didn’t I write a review of this book here? I never found the time to do so. It’s a bad excuse, I know, but it’s the truth too.) I then proceeded to tackle The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which was the previous book to be reviewed here. Next up on the fiction-of-the-’00′s theme is Never Let Me Go, the unsuspecting (and almost disguised) sci-fi novel from Kazuo Ishiguro published in 2005.

[Before I get into the meat of my criticism of this book, let me just say that this book is written in first-person narrative, and that, for me, first-person narrative is a tricky proposition because it becomes that much harder for me to warm up to the narrator. Personally, I think it is harder to love a first-person narrator, and, conversely, it is easier to love a third-person narrator. First-person by default allows for certain traps to be uncovered easily; a third-person narrative can conceal almost everything and still be engrossing. Again, these are just my opinions and tastes regarding the two styles.]

Never Let Me Go is written in first-person by Kathy, a carer who went to a school called Hailsham in Britain. From the sound of it early on Hailsham seems akin to an Ivy League school: its prestige can also create an image of elitism to people who are not alumni. Hailsham’s main purpose as a school seems to be its ability to churn out carers—a kind of nurse that comforts and takes care of people who donate organs and body parts.

The first half of the book revolves around Kathy and her friends, Ruth and Tommy, at Hailsham; the second half revolving mostly around the three of them at a post-Hailsham place called The Cottages. The second half of the book is also where the book’s central story unfolds itself in earnest: you find out that the students of Hailsham are actually clones, essentially created to be organ donors for human beings later on down the line. Additionally, you find out that Hailsham was established with the goal of showing society that the clones—the students—had true human qualities and something akin to a soul. All throughout their time at Hailsham, a couple of times a year an older woman simply named Madame would come to the school and take art that the students had produced. None of them ever knew why she did it or what it meant. It turns out that the art was taken and brought to exhibitions as a means of proving that the clones had a sense of curiosity, creativity, and artfulness.

On the whole Never Let Me Go is written very well but I found the overall story to simply be kind of uninteresting. I felt as though I got to know Kathy pretty well—the first-person narration here is strong, which is a good thing—but I never found her story to be enthralling. I will, however, concede that two parts of the book were quite brilliant:

1) the idea that the clones seem to inherently believe that their human counterparts are hookers, strippers, and drug dealers. Once they move to the Cottages Kathy begins to dabble in casual sex, which isn’t terribly unusual especially if you think of the Cottages as a metaphor for college. Except that whenever Kathy has sex she feels a palpable desire to have sex right now, almost like a low-level, abstract nymphomania, which causes her to believe temporarily that she must have been copied from a prostitute and that this sexual desire is residual from the cloning process. I thought that this was a great metaphor for a particular type of confusion that afflicts most everyone as young adults: a confusion born of sexual freedom that makes you question why you are having sex with the people that you are. It is also a confusion that seems very female-centric, as casual hookups seem to cause women to question themselves more than men do.

2) the part about the porn magazines at the Cottages. Midway through the book there is a brief passage about a former student named Steve and the only thing anyone remembered or knew about him was that he had a soft-core pornography collection. Subsequently, any time a porn magazine was discovered, everyone would a) say something to the effect of “here’s another of Steve’s magazines” and b) pretend to be bored and annoyed by their presence. And, yet, no one ever threw them out and whenever someone found one of them they would disappear for about 30 minutes. Of all the many ways it could have been written that the clones and humans were linked together behaviorally I kind of love that Ishiguro decided to write that the clones were just as naturally susceptible as we humans are to playing weird social roles amongst friends and strangers (as opposed to safe things like “they both can feel pain” or “they both yearn to fall in love”).

All in all, though, Never Let Me Go just didn’t do it for me. If you really like first-person narratives and English writing and low-level sci-fi you may like it a lot more than I did. I found the story to be kind of dull and therefore would not recommend it to anyone looking for some general reading to submerse themselves in.