“Perhaps there is a line in everyone’s life that, once crossed, imparts a certain truth that one has not been able to see before, transforming solitude from a choice into the only possible line of existence.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 21, 2014)

“Perhaps there is a line in everyone’s life that, once crossed, imparts a certain truth that one has not been able to see before, transforming solitude from a choice into the only possible line of existence.” For four friends, that line was crossed during their late teenage years, when one of them was poisoned, perhaps deliberately, perhaps accidentally, lingering in a physical limbo state until she finally dies years later.  The young man, Boyang, remains in China; the two young women, Ruyu and Moran, move to the United States. Each ends up living in what the author describes as a “life-long quarantine against love and life.”

Kinder than Solitude is not primarily a mystery of a poisoned woman nor is it an “immigrant experience” book, although it is being hailed as both. Rather, it’s a deep and insightful exploration about the human condition – how one’s past can affect one’s future, how innocence can be easily lost, and how challenging it is to get in touch with – let alone salvage – one’s better self.

“To have an identity – to be known – required one to possess an ego, yet so much more, too: a collection of people, a traceable track lining one place to another – all these had to be added to that ego or one to have any kind of identity,” Yiyun Li writes.

In the case of Moran, who married and divorced an older man she still cares for, what she called her life “…was only a way of not living, and by doing that, she had taken, here and there, parts of other people’s lives and turned them into nothing along with her own.” Riyu, the most enigmatic and detached of the characters, is an empty vessel, unable to connect or to experience much pleasure or pain, who strives to receive an “exemption from participating in life.” And Boyang, a successful entrepreneur with a cynical sense of the world, has discovered that “love measured by effort was the only love within his capacity.”

This is a deeply philosophical book, one that delves into its characters, with an ambling narrative that shifts from the shared Chinese past to the present –China, San Francisco, the Midwest. It is not for everyone – certainly not for readers who are anticipating an action-packed, page-turning suspense novel. But for those who seek insights into the human condition and love strong character-based novels, Kinder Than Solitude offers rich rewards.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 16 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (February 25, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Yiyun Li
EXTRAS:	Q&A and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Pen/O’Henry Prize Stories 2010 edited by Laura Furman

Bibliography:

• A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Stories (2005)
• The Vagrants (2009)
• Gold Boy, Emerald Girl: Stories (2010)
• Kinder Than Solitude (February 2014)

“Five viral strands propagate, infecting the air with runaway joy. At three and a half minutes, a hand scoops Peter up and lifts him high above the blocked vantage of his days. He rises in the shifting column of light and looks down on the room where he listens. Wordless peace fills him at the sight of his own crumpled, listening body. And pity for anyone who mistakes this blinkered life for the real deal.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (MAR 20, 2014)

The protagonist of Orfeo, Peter Els, listens at age thirteen to a recording of Mozart’s Jupiter symphony and is transported. This novel continues the author’s literary exploration of cutting edge science and its impact on its practitioners. Peter Els becomes a composer of serious music, very much of the current moment in the arts. He is a musical idealist, with a belief in the power of music to truly move the listener. As he matures, his work becomes ever more difficult and timely. As a young man he was a prodigy in music with talent in science as well. The creative juices of both flow in his veins. In college he starts out in chemistry, but becomes enmeshed in music through the musical connection with his first love, Clara. In graduate school at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, his work becomes ever more difficult and “modern,” in part through his collaborations with Maddy, who becomes his lover and later his wife for a while, and with Richard Bonner, an experimental theater director who he meets while in graduate school. Richard pushes him to become ever more radical.

Peter teaches music at a small university for some years, but retires fairly young and returns to chemistry, taking up biohacking as a hobby, encoding music into the DNA of the serrata marcescens bacterium. Peter chooses it because of its ubiquity in scientific research and ready availability despite the fact that it can cause illness. On the surface, this might seem like an implausible fantasy to write art onto DNA, but Joe Davis, an artist, in Cambridge, MA, hijacked the expertise of molecular biologists at Harvard and MIT more than 30 years ago to modify the DNA of e-coli to encode a bitmapped image as well as the decoding scheme onto areas of that organism’s “junk” DNA. Through a Kafkaesque series of happenstance Peter becomes pursued by the authorities who are concerned that Peter might be a bio-terrorist.

Orfeo is literary science fiction of the highest order. It is not about the future, but rather takes the cutting edge of contemporary science and makes it part and parcel of the novel. Among other things it is also a learned and passionate discourse on western music as it has developed over time to the present with an emphasis on more recent work. Powers’ description of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony is remarkable. My composer father wanted to name me Jupiter because the Jupiter Symphony was, in his opinion, the greatest symphony of all time. I’ve listened to it many times and find it quite wonderful, but I do not have the musical vocabulary to really appreciate its depth. Powers’ description of Peter Els listening to it for the first time showed me why my father felt so strongly. The poignant and elegiac description of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is wonderful poetic history. It is a piece that I’ve enjoyed many times and one whose history was familiar to me as well. Powers’ sympathetic appreciation of music is admirable.

I’m familiar with much of the contemporary music he describes and as far as I can see, the details, historical and artistic, are correct. The composers, old and new are as described. Powers gets his science right as well. The writing is brilliant, not dumbed down in any way, and evocative as all get out. I recommend this novel and author without reservation.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 34 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (January 20, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Richard Powers
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Generosity: An Enhancement The Echo Maker

Bibliography:

• Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985)
• Prisoner’s Dilemma
• The Gold Bug Variations (1991)
• Operation Wandering Soul (1993)
• Galatea 2.2 (1995)
• Gain (1998)
• Plowing the Dark (2000)
• The Time of Our Singing (2003)
• The Echo Maker (2006)
• Generosity: An Enhancement (2009)
• Orfeo (January 2014)

“The children are frozen, too frightened to move closer to one of the women. The sound they heard while still in the house has advanced, roaring its way above them. There is a crash against the storm door, and they all scream, ducking with their arms held over their heads. Ellis drops his candle and, in the weak light left from the candle Mae is still holding, she sees his terrified face. Ruby is crying. Lavinia has Little Homer’s face pressed into the front of her dress as if she can shield him by blocking his sight. Mae reaches out her arms and Ruby and Ellis come to her immediately. She blows out her candle and drops it so she can hold both children tight against her. In the darkness, Lavinia cries, “Dear Lord! Oh, dear Lord!” Then the roaring moves on, like a train careering over their heads. The sound recedes and, eventually, even the wind seems to subside. When there is no longer any sound except rain on the cellar doors, the children hold utterly still, waiting to see what will come next.“

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 5, 2014)

Falling to Earth is the kind of novel that makes me want to grab the very next person I see and urgently say, ”You MUST read this.” I read this rabidly with increasing awe and respect that Kate Southwood had the chops to create a debut novel with this degree of psychological insight, restrained power, and heartbreaking beauty.

The story centers on a tragedy of unimaginable proportions – a tornado hits the small Illinois town of March in 1925, causing devastation and grievous loss in the homes of every single resident of the town.

Except one.

That one is Paul Graves, a man of dignity and integrity, who lives with his wife Mae, his three young children and his mother, Lavinia. Incredibly, nothing in Paul’s life is touched – not his family, not his home, and not his thriving lumber business…which, in fact, is even more in demand as townsfolk order coffins for the burials of their loved ones.

As the townspeople are forced to bear up under nearly unbearable grief, their envy of Paul’s “unfair” providence reaches a fever pitch and they begin to turn on him – and against him – in droves. Paul, meanwhile, labors under extreme survivor’s guilt as Mae increasingly falls into a dark depression.

Kate Southwood writes,

“A tornado is a ravenous thing, untroubled by the distinction in tearing one man apart and gently setting another down a little distance away. It is resolute and makes its unheeding progress until, bloated and replete, it dissipates. A tornado is a dead thing and cannot acknowledge blame.. If a tornado smashes your house or takes your child, it does no good to blame it…Even after you’ve yanked up another house in the place the old one stood and planted flowers in the dirt where you laid your child, your fury remains as well your desire to lay blame.”

A parable of sorts, this magnificent novel strives to answer questions that have haunted humankind since early times: how do we comprehend the forces of nature and our own fates? How do we manage the extreme hostility and envy that result from nature’s unfairness? How do we break the cycles of revenge, vengeance, retribution and reprisal? These questions transcend this book and can easily be asked of modern tragedies – Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Sandy, for example.

The themes are universal: love and loss, family, jealousy and suspicion, guilt and survival. I will not spoil the ending but I will say this – it is masterly and seamlessly brought together all the themes of the book and literally let me gasping.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 44 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (March 5, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kate Southwood
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another tornado-based story: Sing Them Home By Stephanie Kallos

Bibliography:

• Falling to Earth (March 2013)

“As part of leaving Bloomington for college and my brand new start, I’d made a careful decision to never ever tell anyone about my sister, Fern. Back in those college days I never spoke of her and seldom thought of her. If anyone asked about my family, I admitted to two parents, still married, and one brother, older, who traveled a lot. Not mentioning Fern was first a decision, and later a habit, hard and painful even now to break. Even now, way off in 2012, I can’t abide someone else bringing her up. I have to ease into it. I have to choose my moment.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shultman  (FEB 15, 2013)

The most absorbing books I read have a vital lesson at their core: they teach me what it means to be human. Karen Joy Fowler’s latest book tackles this crucial theme and by doing so, captured my heart and reduced me to tears.

There is no getting around that this is an agenda book. Ms. Fowler’s purpose is to show us—through fiction—that the most complicated animal – the human animal can be disastrous to the rest of the animal kingdom through sheer arrogance.

Typically, I avoid authorial intrusion like the plague. But this book was so irresistibly readable, so original, and so psychologically nuanced that I couldn’t help but turn the pages compulsively.

Rosemary Cooke, our narrator, is the daughter of a family of scientists. It takes her 77 pages to reveal a central truism of her life (which, inexplicably, is revealed by the publisher on every book blurb about this novel): she spent the first eighteen years of her life defined by the fact that she was raised as “twins” with a chimpanzee named Fern.

“I tell you Fern is a chimp and already, you aren’t thinking of her as my sister,” Ms. Fowler writes. “You’re thinking instead that we loved her as if she were some kind of pet.” But that just wasn’t so. Rosemary astutely realized that her father was not really studying whether chimps could communicate as humans. Rather, he is asking, “can Rosemary learn to speak to chimpanzees.”

Fern is sent away when Rosemary turns five, for reasons that remain obscure through most of the book. But her absence affects Rosemary the way the sudden disappearance of a sister would. By the time she goes to kindergarten, her mother must work with her to stand up straight, not put her fingers into anyone’s mouth or hair, not jump on tables and desks when she is playing, not bite anyone.

Her whole life is impacted by the “experiment” of being raised with her sister Fern. “What a scam I pulled off!” Rosemary reflects. “What a triumph. Apparently, I’d finally erased all those little cues, those maters of personal space, focal distance, facial expression, vocabulary. Apparently all you needed to be considered normal was no evidence to the contrary.”

I believed in the connection between Rosemary and Fern. This emotionally devastating book – which folds back on itself to reveal more and more of the story through false and real memories – confirms what I have long believed: that the rest of the animal kingdom has much to teach us in being human.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 316 readers
PUBLISHER:	Plume (February 25, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I Shultman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Karen Joy Fowler
EXTRAS:	Q & A and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Jane Austin Book Club Sister Noon And other chimpanzee books: Captivity by Debbie Lee Wesselman Lucy by Laurence Gonzales The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale

Bibliography:

• Artificial Things: Stories (1986)
• Sarah Canary (1991)
• The Sweetheart Season (1996)
• Black Glass: Short Fiction (1998)
• Sister Noon (2001)
• The Jane Austen Book Club (2004)
• Wit’s End (2008)
• What I Didn’t See: Stories (2010)
• We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (May 2013)

Movies from books:

• The Jane Austen Book Club

“When people asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up, Paul Krovik did not say he was going to be a fireman or soldier or pilot, as some boys will before they know the kind of drudgery and danger such jobs entail. He did not want to be an actor or rock star or astronaut, nor did he harbor secret desires to dance, design clothes, or write poetry — the kinds of dreams most in his world would have regarded as evidence that his parents had failed to raise a true man, whatever that might mean.

He always wanted to build houses.

And now they are trying to take away the only house that belonged to him. He is not about to give up the one thing he ever wanted.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (JAN 23, 2014)

A perfect title for a stunning book. Its literal meaning is explained in the 1919 prologue, when a tree on which two men have been lynched falls deep into a sinkhole with the bodies still on it. The rest of the novel takes place in the present, or perhaps the not too distant future, when the land has been developed as an upscale subdivision for a rapidly growing city in the Midwest. But we are not quite there yet. In a second, slightly longer prologue, a woman goes to visit a convict on death row. It is a creepy, brilliant scene, although we know little of either of them, except that his name is Paul Krovik, and she regards him as a destroyer.

The next 380 pages tell of Paul’s crime, among much else. He starts out as a property developer, building neo-Victorian houses with more love than skill, and when the recession hits and he is sued by purchasers demanding repairs, he goes bankrupt and his own house is foreclosed. It is bought cheap at auction by Nathaniel and Julia Noailles (pronounced “no-eye”), a couple who move from Boston with their seven-year-old son Copley. Large sections are told through their eyes, but they have two watchful neighbors who ad the protagonists of their own sections. One is Mrs. Washington, an African-American woman whose century-old farmhouse gets condemned to make way for the new development. And the other is Paul Krovik himself, who cannot bear to lose touch with his former property. So the title gets another meaning: the erasure of farmland and the rural way of life to make way for subdivisions springing up like faceless Stepfords. And it is all focused on the house, like a horror movie in the making. Nathaniel and Julia gut it of all its detail, paint it white, and install security, but still feel they have moved into an alien environment. Copley, brilliant, unhappy, and borderline autistic, believes the house has been invaded by strangers, but his parents merely take him to the doctor for medication.

One of the remarkable things that Flanery does is to recalibrate our sympathies. Yes, we will discover why Kravik is arrested, but he is not the worst villain of the piece. The company that Nathaniel works for, a Haliburton-like global conglomerate called EKK, specializing in total security, has virtually rebuilt the city as a company town, requiring compliance to its right-wing rules. I mentioned Ira Levin’s Stepford Wives; there are also after-echoes of Orwell’s 1984 in the inhuman authoritarianism that only seems futuristic if you ignore the changes that have already taken place over the past dozen years. That is the third meaning of the title: the moral fall of this land, America, from a country of humanity and individualism towards a managed state of paranoid conformity.

And it starts young. The scenes in the company school where Copley goes made me livid, especially as the parent of a once-troubled child myself. Indeed, the more the boy was in the limelight, the more disturbing the story became. For there are other themes in play beyond corporate security. The legacy of abusive parents, for example. The tyranny of psychologists and psychiatrists. The intolerance of anything a little bit out of the ordinary: an old black woman who won’t sell her land, a sensitive boy who prefers reading to sports, a same-sex couple who set up house together. Although this is in no sense a personal confession — indeed it has the makings of a good Hollywood movie written all over it — it is hard not to look past its mounting terror and political commentary, and wonder about what experiences the writer must have had to write with such conviction about outsiders. And that makes a special book very special indeed.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 32 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (August 15, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Patrick Flanery
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Absolution

Bibliography:

• Absolution (2012)
• Fallen Land (August 2013)

“We are on our way to Budapest: Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina and me. We are going even though we are not allowed to cross Mzilikazi Road, even though Bastard is supposed to be watching his little sister Fraction, even though Mother would kill me dead if she found out; we are just going. There are guavas to steal in Budapest, and right now I’d rather die for guavas. We didn’t eat this morning and my stomach feels like somebody just took a shovel and dug everything out.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe (JAN 5, 2014)

NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel, We Need New Names, is the story of Darling, a young Zimbabwean girl living in a shantytown called Paradise. She is feisty ten-year old, an astute observer of her surroundings and the people in her life. Bulawayo structures her novel more like a series of linked stories, written in episodic chapters, told loosely chronologically than in one integrated whole. In fact, the short story “Hitting Budapest,” that became in some form an important chapter in this “novel,” won the prestigious 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing.

In addition to Darling, the stories introduce her gang of close friends. They are vividly and realistically drawn and we can easily imagine them as they roam free in their neighbourhood and also secretly walk into “Budapest,” a near-by district of the well-off… One of their goals is to get a glimpse how the other side lives, but primarily to find food and anything useful to trade. They enjoy climbing over walls, peeking into gardens and houses, and heaving themselves into trees to get their fill of guava, a fruit that can temporarily lull their constant feeling of hunger… but with unpleasant consequences.

Darling’s story is bitter-sweet: her father has left the family for the mines in South Africa and her mother ekes out a living, trading in the border region. Darling is left in the care of her grandmother, Mother of Bones. They all had a better life once, and Darling went to school then, but the family was expelled from their “real” house during an earlier political unrest in the country. In the first half of the book, the backdrop is Zimbabwe in the early years of independence and issues of poverty and inequality, violence and suppression of human rights, disappointment with the lack of democracy, are touched upon without breaking the flow of the young protagonist’s authentic voice. Consistently, Bulawayo stays with voice of her young protagonist whose natural curiosity helps her to make sense of the things she doesn’t quite understand. She expresses her views in often comical ways in a mix of unusual imagery and associations, as astute descriptions of life as she sees and understands it from her limited experience that is mingled with her witty interpretation of stories she hears from adults. Her language can be crude and raw, but also gentle and sensitive. I very much enjoyed the vibrant fresh voice of Bulawayo’s young protagonist.

Darling has an aunt in the USA and she often tells her friends of her and that she will move to America to live with her aunt and to experience everything that goes with wealth and comfort: her American dream. It is not surprising, however, that life, when she has arrived in Michigan, is quite different from what she imagined it to be. Still told in episodic chapters, Darling appears to lose her vibrant and innocent voice; it becomes more mature and even, but also flatter. Also, the stories are no longer as closely connected as they were in the first part. While giving insights into her daily life and that of her close family, we lose the astute and wittily critical observer we have come to like and engage with.

Darling’s life follows more or less the usual paths of young (or older) people arriving on visitors’ visas and staying on under the radar. Darling makes every effort to “fit in” and to adapt to the realities she encounters. She adopts an American accent that her mother and her friends on the phone have difficulty understanding… Darling still thinks of “home,” her mother and her close friends, but… with nostalgia as well as resignation into the impracticality of such a visit. In the chapter, “How They Lived,” written in a voice that is not Darling’s, Bulawayo generalizes the experience of immigration and the efforts immigrants from all over the world put into sounding happier than they are, not telling friends and family back home honestly how their lives have turned out in order not to sound discouraging and ungrateful. A strong story in its own right, but will Darling be able to draw any lessons from it?

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 139 readers
PUBLISHER:	Reagan Arthur Books (May 21, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	NoViolet Bulawayo
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Boy Next Door by Irene Sabatini

Bibliography:

• We Need New Names (May 2013)

“He wondered if religion was partly the love for an imaginary parent and whether any steps to make contact with this parent were justifiable.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (OCT 30, 2011)

Once, many years ago when I was living in Northern Michigan, Jim Harrison walked into the restaurant where I was dining. He didn’t so much walk in, in retrospect, as lumber in. It was the Blue Bird Cafe and I confess that I’d been hanging out there in the hopes of catching a glimpse of him. I was young, trying to turn myself into a writer, and seeking out an idol. Even back then, over thirty years ago, he had lassoed my imagination. Like, many other Harrison readers, it started with Legends of the Fall (1979), then continued with Dalva (1988), and later, The Road Home (1998), a book that changed my life. Much later, I devoured his memoir, Off to the Side (2002), then started filling in the gaps. I studied his poetry, for Harrison thinks of himself first as a poet–and of course there was the column, The Raw and the Cooked in Esquire and Men’s Journal. I used to read the column at the grocery store, between the frozen foods and the bread rack, returning the magazine when I was finished. (Harrison was a foodie before it became sexy, though his style in no way suggests an affinity to the current legions of balsamic vinegar-sniffing poseur journalists.) The man has no gap in his repertoire.

That by way of introduction and confession: there will be no objectivity to this review.

I wish I’d mustered the courage to introduce myself and tell him how much I appreciate his work, but that’s not my style and I image it’s not his either. How do you approach someone who has peered so throughly into your being? A man the critics cite as the progeny of Faulkner and Hemingway? A real died-in-the-wool man of letters? A quiet and respectful distance is the way to go, at least that’s what we do in the Midwest from which we both harken. Anyway, he was seated at the bar. Bothering a man at a bar is bad form.

It has been said that Harrison is that rare writer who can successfully blend the life of the mind with the life of action. It is a formula, though I am hesitate to use that word, that most often appeals to the male reader. That said, the voice he created for Dalva, a woman, in the book of the same name, astounded critics for being so spot-on a female voice–and this from a manly man.

The Great Leader falls soundly into the Harrison oeuvre. It is the story of a hard-drinking, female-ogling fiercely-independent male, Simon Sunderson. (Harrison’s men ogle without the uncomfortable squeamishness of, say, those created by Roth or the hormonal blindness of Updike.)  Sunderson, a recently retired detective, lives deep in Harrison territory, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. “It was good to live in a place largely ignored by the rest of the world,” reflects Sunderson. Though now officially off the job, Sunderson can’t seem to call it quits and the novel finds him in pursuit of a religious cult leader with an affinity for young girls. Like so many of Harrison’s characters, Sunderson is not so much a reflection of biography as an amalgam ideas. Attempting to explain his current pursuit: “My hobby has always been history,” Sunderson says. “I became interested in the relationship between religion, money and sex.”

Sunderson, not without his personal challenges, is trying hard to be a better man. He misses his wife Diane who left him three years earlier, though they remain in close contact. (“With Diane he always felt a little vulgar and brutish…”) He is a father figure to a neighbor, a sixteen-year-old hottie who seems hell-bent on seducing him. (“The frankness of young women these days always caught him off guard and made him feel like a middle-aged antique, or like a diminutive football player without a face guard on his helmet.”) He drinks too much and is trying to cut back. He spends a lot of time by himself in the woods, thinking, walking around and resolving to make retirement work. His progress is slow on all fronts. He is wracked with ideas, but execution is haphazard.

There is a character in the novel, a friend of Sunderson, who ruefully observes “that a central fact of our time was the triumph of process over content.” That notion is at the core of the Harrison attraction. His prose, like his characters, is direct and intelligent, without many grace notes and devoid of filigree. There is, in other words, a zen-like transparency to the Harrison process. That process, the act of conveying content, is trumped every time by content. Pulling that off consistently, as Harrison continues to do, is a talent that is reserved for the best of the best. This novel is an example of how rare such a voice has become.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jim Harrison
EXTRAS:	Interview and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Disaster Was My God by Bruce Duffy

Bibliography:

• Wolf: A False Memoir (1971)
• A Good Day to Die (1973)
• Farmer (1976)
• Legends of the Fall: Three Novellas (1979)
• Warlock (1981)
• Sundog: The Story of an American Foreman, Robert Corvus Strang (1984)
• Dalva (1988)
• The Woman Lit By Fireflies: Three Novellas (1990)
• Julip: Three Novellas (1994)
• The Road Home (1988)
• The Beast God Forgot to Invent: Three Novellas (2000)
• True North (2004)
• The Summer He Didn’t Die: Three Novellas (2005)
• Returning To Earth (2007)
• The English Major (2008)
• The Farmer’s Daughter (2009)
• The Great Leader (2011)
• Brown Dog: Novellas (December 2013)

Children’s books:

• The Boy Who Ran to the Woods (Illustrated by Tom Pohrt) (2000)

Nonfiction:

• Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction (1991)
• The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand (2001)
• Off to the Side: A Memoir (2002)

“And his girl was sleeping beside him, her wonderful blue-and-white flowered nightgown twisted up around her bare, freckled waist. Soft belly rising a little with each breath, her warm damp head resting on Lamb’s outstretched arm, sweat shining at her temples, her mouth open, her little lips open – Christ, she was small – and he was swearing mutely into the space above him that this was good for her. That as long as he was honest and approached this thing from every possible angle, everything would line up and fall into place of its own accord, like atoms helixed and pleated tight within the seeds of cheatgrass needling the hems of her tiny blue jeans: fragile, inevitable, life-giving, and bigger than he.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (OCT 12, 2011)

David Lamb has the emotional life of a Rubik’s Cube. All the pieces are there but it seems impossible at times to get his emotional life organized, put together, and working well. He’s like a chess game played by one person, every piece under his dominion, tutelage and control. Only he can checkmate his own self. Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.

Lamb’s father just died, he is recently divorced and his boss wants him to take a leave of absence because his affair with a co-worker is detrimental to the functional dynamics of the office-place. Lamb is fifty-four years old going on seventeen, graying in the hair, thickening in the middle, and skin loose in places where it once was tight and firm. He lives with adolescent angst in a world of one where his ego is as big as the universe, a narcissist of the first order.

Lamb lives in Chicago and one day is approached by a pubescent eleven year-old girl named Tommie who asks him for a cigarette. Lamb realizes that Tommie is the brunt of her friends’ joke and he decides to get to know her, to make something of her and to teach her about the real world. If this sounds like shades of Pygmalion, it is.

Lamb meets up with Tommie on several occasions and proposes to her that she go on a five-day trip with him to see the true west. He tells her they will go as equals and only if she acquiesces. Tommie agrees and they head out in Lamb’s car to a west that exists only in Lamb’s head; for where they go, there is not much more to see than some domesticated cows, deer, birds, and flora mixed in with strip malls and cheap motels. No matter that Tommie has a mother that will most likely report her missing. Lamb concocts a story that he and Tommie will share so that no one will know the truth about what they are doing together.

Lamb tells Tommie that his name is Gary and he begins to call her Em. Their relationship crosses many distinct and indistinct boundaries with Lamb’s narcissism its guiding light. He believes that Tommie needs him in order to know what possibilities exist in life, to learn what real love is and how it is possible. Is Lamb a pedophile? Is he grooming Tommie in a predatory way? These are questions that arise throughout the novel.

Together, Tommie and Lamb plot out a plan so that Tommie sees herself as a willing accomplice on this trip. She will be gone for only a short time – away from her mother, her friends, her school, her home – and in these few days Lamb will teach her to become worldly and wise, in his eyes positively impacting the path of her future.

Lamb’s hubris knows no bounds. The relationship between him and Tommie, at first restrained and non-physical, becomes more laden with inappropriate intimacies initiated by Lamb. He sees himself as Tommie’s savior. Tommie is at the cusp of adolescence and she is hungry for unconditional love and acceptance.

The author inserts herself into the book in an effort to garner empathy for Lamb and Tommie’s situation. She refers to them as “our Lamb” or “our man” and “our Tommie” or “our girl.” If they are of us, how can they be bad, repulsive, disgusting? At times, these authorial insertions felt manipulative.

Nadzam understands predation and coercion. Lamb, a man who lies, has a grandiosity to the extreme and a pedophilic streak, manages to be rendered by the author as a lost and misguided soul. Tommie’s emptiness needs to be filled and she is the perfect vessel for Lamb.

Lamb is a book to be read in doses. It is as heavy as a pocketful of bricks. Bonnie Nadzam speaks to the universal need and search for love. Lamb has never outgrown his adolescence and Tommie is eager to begin hers. They magnetize towards one another and get sucked deeper and deeper into a plan that goes more and more awry. This is not a gentle book nor is it meant for the faint of heart. It is, however, a thrilling book, a psychological feast and feat. Nadzam manages to make both Lamb and Tommie sympathetic characters at the same time that the reader cringes with disgust.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 29 readers
PUBLISHER:	Other Press (September 13, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Bonnie Nadzam
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks

Bibliography:

• Lamb (September 2011)

“Baseball was an art but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It did not matter how beautifully you performed sometimes, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. […] What mattered, as for any machine, was repeatability.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (SEP 7, 2011)

Set in the world of college baseball, this is a book about aspiration, failure, and recovery. There are many good things in it, both about baseball and college, but not enough of them for me to recommend the novel wholeheartedly. Harbach captures the baseball world (as in the quotation above) with convincing authenticity; more of this in a moment. He also has some spot-on observations of academe, as in this remark by an English Professor opening a class:

“In lieu of our usual business, I hope you’ll be so indulgent as to listen with me to a recording of the dear dead anti-Semite Thomas Stearns Eliot reading aloud his longish poemlike creation THE WASTELAND, and meanwhile to meditate on the ways in which modernism rejects, retains, or possibly even transforms the traditional elements of orality we’ve been discussing throughout the semester.”

Nice! The shadow of English Departments, here and elsewhere, hangs over the book throughout, though generally lightly. Guert Affenlight, the President of Westish College, is a former football jock from the same college who has built an entire career on a chance discovery of notes made by Herman Melville for a lecture at the college late in his life, and parlayed this into a seminal book on 19th-century literature and academic stardom at Harvard. He is a likeable character, and the only significant non-student in the novel. In one of his smaller epiphanies, he reflects on the downside of literature: “It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your own critical faculties.” Nice again, but ouch! As a reader myself looking in the mirror, this is a little too true. But turn it around: does Harbach think it permissible to treat fictional characters as cadavers for his intellectual pleasure? He might have done well to glance into his own mirror too.

Three of the other major characters are students on the college baseball team. Henry Skrimshander is a phenom, a shortstop with the accuracy of a laser and grace of an angel. Mike Schwartz, as huge is Henry is light, is the team captain, the man who first spotted Henry and recruited him, and remains his personal coach, mentor, and guru throughout his student career. The third is Owen Dunne, Henry’s roommate, brilliant, beautiful, and gay; he plays baseball almost as an afterthought, spending most of his time in the dugout reading until called in as a pinch-hitter. Add to these Guert Affenlight’s beautiful daughter Pella, in flight from an early marriage, who will become involved with each of the other three in different ways.

The crux of the story, as described in the excellent back-cover summary, comes during a crucial game in Henry’s junior year. Now the most famous player on the team and already being scouted by the major leagues, he makes a single disastrous throw, the first error of his college career. His world falls apart, and the lives of his friends with it. This is certainly a worthy theme for a novel, both literally as it applies to baseball, and as a parallel for life. Baseball players (whom I have observed only at a distance, like other fans) are indeed expected to be artists with the predictability of a machine, as Harbach says. The same is true of actors and musicians, the subjects of my professional work. And we surely have all come into contact with the devastating effect of failure that comes about, not through incompetence, but fear of success. With such a subject, and his obvious knowledge of the game, Harbach could have written a book that went as far beyond baseball as Joseph O’Neill in Netherland went beyond cricket.

So why didn’t he? Largely because of a certain frivolity that leads him to treat his characters as personal playthings rather than rounded human beings — the very thing that Guert Affenlight condemns in himself. There is a clue in many of the names: Westish itself; Chef Spirodocus; players called Loondorf, Arsch, and Quentin Quisp; and the title of Affenlight’s seminal (yes) book, The Sperm-Squeezers. Was the book intended as satire, I wondered? But the humor is not consistent. Harbach writes well for the most part, but now and again you see him reaching a little too hard, such as “his daughter ducked her beautiful port-colored head” and “As he twisted his combination lock in its casing, right left right, he could sense a gentle depression, like the hollow of a girl’s neck, each time he reached the right number.” Then there are the implausibilities, starting with Westish accepting Henry solely on the word of a sophomore, and ending with a sequence of bizarre events that serve no useful purpose other than to bring the novel to a close. But what finally sunk the book for me were the sexual relationships, none of which I could believe: a case of true love at first grope, the cliché of a tense young man getting (almost) cured by the simple fact of getting laid, and an entanglement central to the plot which no reader would accept in a straight context, but which we are asked to swallow simply because it is gay.

Harbach’s themes are valuable, but he will not succeed in making the most of them until he can create rounded characters and let himself be led by them.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 900 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company (September 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Chad Harbach
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Netherland by Joseph O’Neill The Brothers K by David James Duncan

Bibliography:

• The Art of Fielding (2011)

As Editor:

• MFA vs. NYC: Two Cultures of American Fiction (February 2014)

“In a movie there might have been more warning. I might have heard a tiny mechanical click, the sound of him releasing the safety. But in reality that single impatient breath was the only warning I got. Then the muzzle brushed my side and he pulled the trigger.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (AUG 7, 2011)

David Loogan lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with his girlfriend, Detective Elizabeth Waishkey and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Sarah. Loogan edits a mystery magazine, and he has made the mental leap from writing and critiquing stories about crime to tracking down villains in real life. In Harry Dolan’s latest novel, Very Bad Men, David tells us a story that will explain “the motives people have for killing one another.” As we will see, the reasons for taking someone’s life can vary from a matter of convenience to a thirst for revenge. Loogan, who is a witty first person narrator, gets embroiled in his latest adventure when someone drops an unsolicited manuscript at his office, in which the anonymous writer confesses to committing murder and even provides the name of his next victim.

An emotionally disturbed individual has targeted particular men whom he believes must die; if he has to dispatch others who are not on the list, so be it. When Elizabeth and David become familiar with the case, they discover that it is far more complex than it at first appears. Very Bad Men involves a seventeen-year-old bank robbery, corrupt public officials, an aspiring senatorial candidate, and an ambitious young newspaper reporter who stirs things up.

Harry Dolan has created a large cast of characters, each of whom plays a role in what will turn out to be a Greek tragedy, Michigan style. The author is good with details: how to kill someone who is locked up in prison; what it is like to live with excruciating migraine headaches; a fine description of the landscape and inhabitants of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula; and the tricks that tenacious journalists use to get their stories. Although the plot is ridiculously convoluted and not particularly believable, Very Bad Men is entertaining enough to hold our interest. As bodies pile up and events occur that shed new light on what is happening, David and Elizabeth decide to dig deeper into the past. They suspect that the slaughter will not stop until secrets that have been hidden for many years are finally revealed.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 22 readers
PUBLISHER:	Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam (July 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Harry Dolan
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: We All Fall Down by Michael Harvey Misery Bay by Steve Hamilton

Bibliography:

• Bad Things Happen (2009)
• Very Bad Men (July 2011)