“Normally you can’t get a proper look at your own conscience because it only ever comes out to gash you with its beak and you just want to do whatever you can to push it away; but put your conscience in the cage of this paradox, where it can slither and bark but it can’t hurt you, and you can study it for as long as you wish. Most people don’t truly know how they feel about the Holocaust because they’re worried that if they think about it too hard, they’ll find out they don’t feel sad enough about the 6 million dead, but I’m an expert in my own soul.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  SEP 13, 2011)

First-time author Ned Beauman really lays it out there in the first chapter of this extraordinary novel, which begins with an imaginary surprise birthday party thrown by Hitler for Joseph Goebbels in 1940. It is an exhilarating, outrageous opening to a book that will in fact take a quite different course. But it is important as a way of establishing the moral parameters (and this IS a moral book) and freeing up an imaginative space in which Beauman can explore some ideas that are normally unapproachable.

Actually, Beauman reminds me of nobody so much as Evelyn Waugh. He writes about the same period (England in the 1930s), he inhabits some of the same milieux (a house party in some noble pile), he shares or even tops Waugh in his outrageous use of absurd humor, and he writes about serious subjects at heart. His debut novel explores the world of British Fascism in the years before WWII. Despite the opening, the German Nazis never make an appearance other than as tutelary deities. In its place is a gaggle of mostly well-connected amateurs, a sort of lunatic fringe of the upper class, pursuing theories of eugenics and a universal world language. Yes, they had their real-life counterparts; Lord Claramore’s family is in the book, the Erskines, somewhat resembles the Mitfords; Evelyn Erskine, the daughter who shows her independence by becoming an atonal composer, is virtually identical to Elizabeth Lutyens; and Sir Oswald Mosley, the real-life leader of the British Union of Fascists, makes a cameo appearance, but his 1936 march of supremacy through the largely-Jewish London East End is shown as the farcical debacle it really was.

This period background is viewed from a modern frame. Kevin Broom, the narrator and a collector of Nazi memorabilia, gets caught up in a rivalry which leaves two other collectors dead and Kevin himself in danger of his life. The goal of the rivalry is not at first clear, but it turns upon a letter from Hitler to British scientist Philip Erskine thanking him for an unusual gift, and some as-yet-unspecified connection between Erskine and a diminutive London Jewish boxer named “Sinner” Roach.

Do not look to the story for any great plausibility, though. It propels the plot with exhilarating efficiency, but it is more in tune with the popular adventure stories of the earlier part of the century than with modern expectations of verisimilitude; Kevin’s role model, for instance, is Batman. Waugh used such devices also, but Beauman is very much of his own time in translating Waugh’s absurdity into shock or even disgust. Kevin, for instance, has trimethylaminuria, a genetic disease that makes his bodily secretions smell of rotting fish; there is also strong undercurrent of homosexual violence, which may turn some readers off the book.

Which would be a pity, because the best parts are very good indeed. I am thinking especially of a dinner conversation in New York involving Sinner, two Rabbis, and an American architect, showing how easily some humanitarian endeavors such as mid-century town planning may be perverted into crypto-fascism. Or a brilliant discursion on the quest for a universal language that would unite mankind, discussing real attempts such as Esperanto and Volapük together with the fictional Pangaean, invented by an Erskine ancestor. Or Philip Erskine’s own work with beetles, breeding them for extraordinary aggression and strength, an obvious parallel to the human Eugenics programs of the Nazis for the enhancement the Master Race — though the principle had earlier advocates in both Britain and America. This is a valuable and serious subject for a novelist (it is also examined in Simon Mawer’s excellent Mendel’s Dwarf), and though Beauman chooses an absurd and at times offensive vehicle in which to present it, his obvious intelligence and meticulous linking of his story to real events makes this a far better book than a mere summary might suggest.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 17 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA (September 13, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ned Beauman blog  and website
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon Second Glance by Jody Picoult

Bibliography:

• Boxer, Beetle (2010; September 2011 in US)

“I am a smart guy. I recycle. Once I found a lost cat and took it to a shelter. Sometimes I make jokes. If there’s anything wrong with your car, I can tell what by listening to it. I like kids, except the ones who are rude to adults and the parents just stand there, smiling. I have a job. I own an apartment. I rarely lie. These are the qualities I keep hearing people are looking for. I can only think there must be something else, something no one mentions, because I have no friends, am estranged from my family, and haven’t dated in this decade. There is a guy in Lab Control who killed a woman with his car, and he gets invited to parties. I don’t understand that.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (AUG 19, 2011)

Special –> interview with MAX BARRY!

Max Barry’s books take a satiric look at humans within the corporate machine. In Syrup, a marketing graduate named Scat devises a new soft drink called Fukk, only to discover that he’s the victim of corporate theft when his idea is stolen by his nefarious roommate, Sneaky Pete. Max takes a futuristic look at the corporatization of the planet in Jennifer Government, and in Company, a business school graduate finds himself unexpectedly and suspiciously promoted when he questions some of the company’s peculiar business practices.

Machine Man, an off-kilter tale of a man who accidentally loses a leg and who then discovers that the enhanced replacement is more efficient than the original, seems to be the natural progression of Max’s grimly hilarious, eccentric, yet uncannily spot-on skewering of corporate culture. The novel is the tale of shy, isolated scientist Charles Neumann who works for a large company called Better Future. Since this is a company that’s in the business of scientific research and development, security is tight:

“I swiped for the elevator and again access to Building A. We were big on swiping. You couldn’t go to a bathroom in Better Future without swiping first. There was once a woman whose card stopped working and she was trapped in a corridor for three hours. It was a busy corridor but nobody was permitted to let her out. Ushering somebody through a security door on your pass was just about the worst thing you could do at Better Future. They would fire you for that. All anyone could do was bring her snacks and fluids until security finished verifying her biometrics.”

Charles Neumann isn’t particularly thrilled with his body and considers himself weak and puny. Then he has an accident that leads to an amputation–a tragedy for some, but to Charles it’s just the beginning of an obsession to build a better body.

The amputation also marks the beginning of a social life for Charles as a number of new people enter his life. First comes an annoyingly bouncy physical therapist, and then there’s prosthetist, Lola Shanks, “with a bunch of artificial legs under each arm like a Hindu goddess.” Lola is tickled to hear that Charles doesn’t care about a “natural look,” and that he’s much more concerned about function. Charles and Lola share an obsession when it comes to the performance of bodily parts, and so Charles selects the relatively high-tech attributes of the “exegesis Archion foot on a computer-controlled adaptive knee. Multiaxis rotation, polycentric swing. … The Olympics banned it because it provided an unfair advantage over regular legs.”

But to Charles, the leg needs improvement, and since he’s a scientist, he embarks on a one way ticket to bodily perfection. In his quest, he’s aided, abetted, and funded by Better Future. Better Future dabbles in pharmacological products, non-lethal weaponry and bioengineering. Suddenly the company, represented by brisk manager Cassandra Cautery, wants to provide Charles with a lab fully staffed by eager young things ready to improve the human body. The quest to improve the body becomes the latest link in the money-making frenzy at Better Future, but are there more sinister motives afoot?

In spite of the fact the book includes self-mutilation, Machine Man is extremely funny. Max Barry successfully captures the insanity of bodily perfection, meshes it with corporate greed and takes it, with hilarious consequences, to its logical conclusion. In this age of cosmetic obsession (yes, botox specials on the lunch hour, and you can finally grow thicker, longer, lashes), organ harvesting, and robotic prosthetics–a technology heralded as “an opportunity” for the multiple limb amputees pouring out of the Iraq war–Max Barry once again writes with vision, humour, and a poignant look at the humans trapped within corporate machine.

(Syrup is currently being made into a film, Jennifer Government has been optioned by Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney, and Universal Pictures acquired screen rights to Company.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 19 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Original edition (August 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Max Barry
EXTRAS:	Guy Savage interview with Max BarryExcerptGuy Savage’s additional blog comments…
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Company Jennifer Government

Bibliography:

• Syrup (1999)
• Jennifer Government (2003)
• Company Man (2006)
• Machine Man (August 2011)

“My poor family was in shambles.

It had not always been thus. Ten years before, we’d been a solid unit, dollhouse style, mother, father, boy, and girl.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (AUG 1, 2011)

The Astral, by Kate Christensen, gets its title by way of its namesake, the Astral building in Brooklyn, New York. This building houses the protagonist of this book, an aging poet named Harry Quirk. His last name befits him and his family. They are interestingly dysfunctional in many ways.

Harry was once a somewhat well-known poet, teaching poetry workshops and writing his lyrical poems in rhyming and sonnet style. His publisher and mentor has moved to Europe and his style is now out of favor in the United States. His wife, Luz, decides after thirty years of marriage that Harry is having an affair with his best friend, Marion. Despite Harry’s pleading innocence – and he is innocent – Luz does not believe him and she kicks him out of their apartment in the Astral. It is true that Harry did have an affair twelve years ago with a young poetry student, but since that time he has been true to Luz.

Now homeless and without a job, Harry gets a room in a local flophouse and spends his days drinking at a local watering hole named Maureen’s. He finally lands a job at a Hasidic lumber yard through his crack-smoking Hasidic musician friend, Yanti. Here Harry works in accounts payable and is able to rent a one room apartment in the Astral. He figures that if he lives in the Astral, he’ll be closer to Luz and better able to keep an eye on her comings and goings. He is unable to accept that things are over with Luz and he is determined to win her back.

Harry’s daughter, Karina, is a freegan – she believes in getting all of her possessions for free. She gathers discarded things from the curbside, dumpster dives and goes to supermarket and restaurant trash bins to pick up food. She is very clear that the food she picks up consists only of tossed items with expired dates or unused edibles.

Harry’s son, Hector, is living on a commune and mired in a cult called Children of Hashem. They believe that the Messiah will be coming soon or is already here. Hector is being groomed as the new messiah and also is preparing to marry Christa, the cult’s leader. Karina and Harry want to do an intervention, hoping to get Hector out of the cult.

This is, in its way, a parody of today’s life and also a mirror of what is going on within a certain group of people. These people all live in a little area in Brooklyn and have been friends since the 1970’s. Despite Brooklyn being in New York City, this neighborhood is its own little enclave with everyone gossiping about everyone else. The friends are all interconnected, to the point of all of them seeing the same therapist. The novel makes a big deal of this and the unethical practice of Helen, the therapist they share.

The novel reminded me of what Zoe Heller does so well in her writing and what Christensen tries hard to accomplish but doesn’t quite succeed in pulling off. The parody comes off as stilted and without subtlety. For good parody to work, the reader must be able to see him or herself, or someone they can identify with, in the characters or culture. This doesn’t happen here. The characters are very black and white without hues of gray. For instance, Harry is a complete atheist and Hector and Luz are absolute believers. Things are described as either right or wrong. Luz is a moralistic bully while Harry is a moderate and giving guy. There is a lot of repetition of subject matter as if the author is not sure that the reader remembers what has transpired earlier.

Despite its flaws, Christensen can draw a good description and give frailty to the characters she creates. There is pathos, narcissism, stupidity, and a distinct humor to some of the characters and their situations. Though the book didn’t work for me as well as I’d have hoped, I think that a lot of readers would appreciate it more than I did.

I am a fan of Christensen’s and loved Trouble and The Epicure’s Lament. I continue to look forward to her writings.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday (June 14, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kate Christensen
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read a review of: Trouble The Great Man

Bibliography:

• In the Drink (1999)
• Jeremy Thrane (2001)
• The Epicure’s Lament (2004)
• The Great Man (August 2007)
• Trouble (June 2009)
• The Astral (June 2011)

“The issue finally wasn’t that he wanted to be rich, per se, but that he wanted to be done with so much WANTING.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (APR 12, 2011)

If for nothing else, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism will be remembered as a clear-eyed, unsentimental look at money and our complicated relationship with it. The protagonist in Peter Mountford’s debut novel is a young biracial man, Gabriel de Boya, who is on assignment for The Calloway Group, a New York hedge fund. He finds himself in La Paz in Bolivia—where the novel is set—on the eve of the election that would usher in Evo Morales as President.

Gabriel’s assignment is to predict first the outcome of the election, and subsequently its effect on the Bolivian gas industry. Gabriel’s boss in New York, the aggressive Priya Singh, would essentially like to speculate about whether Morales would nationalize the Bolivian gas industry right away, as he promised. To obtain such sensitive information, Gabriel works incognito in the city passing off as a freelance reporter on assignment.

It is as a reporter that Gabriel meets, and subsequently falls in love with, Lenka Villarobles—Morales’s press liaison. As their relationship progresses, Gabriel reveals his clandestine operations to Lenka, hoping that she will provide vital pieces of information he will need to keep the ever-demanding boss happy back home. When, at great risk to her job, Lenka does share crucial information with Gabriel, he must decide how to play it so as to maximize his own personal profit in the high stakes world of money markets. As he does so, he must also face up to the moral dilemmas attendant with such manipulations. Gabriel’s mother, an émigré to California from Chile and hardcore liberal, serves as a mirror to his moral conscience. About halfway through the novel, when she makes a sudden appearance in La Paz, Gabriel finds it increasingly hard to keep from lying to mom (thus far she thinks he works for a telephone company). Greed eventually wins and it remains to be seen whether Gabriel’s workings will have him emerge a winner.

Mountford does a wonderful job painting the city of La Paz—the reader gets a real pulse of what it is like to be there. Also well done is the history of the country, as outlined in brief asides, yet seamlessly incorporated into the overall narrative.

YMG is not without its negatives however. For one thing, the key events in the book seem to turn on rather big coincidences or at least chance occurrences. Gabriel’s first meeting with Lenka is one such example. Later on, Gabriel runs into the future finance minster outside a crowded church on Christmas Eve and the minister too shares vital information. It is hard to shake the slight implausibility with which these events occur.

Gabriel too is a frustratingly obtuse character. Mountford has tried to paint him as interestingly complex and at least when it comes to his view of money, he is. “Money, in general—the plain and unassailable acts of acquiring and spending it—had turned out to occupy a more important role in adulthood than he’d expected,” Mountford writes of Gabriel. “The issue finally wasn’t that he wanted to be rich, per se, but that he wanted to be done with so much wanting. It was a feedback loop, and the only way out was deeper in: he needed to have enough money to be done with the issue of money forever.”

But Gabriel ultimately turns out to be a mixed bag of contradictions. He seems too passive initially—just coasting along until Lenka is ready to drop some information and this passivity doesn’t match his later ambitious side.

The gradual buildup to his final high-stakes decisions is too mechanical, based more on game theory (one of the author’s favorite subjects is economics, he has said) rather than on any real human impulses. The same is true of his mother, who when she finds out the true shenanigans of her son, reacts in a rather extreme fashion. And as Mountford himself writes in the novel: “Real people’s motivations [are] too complex and flawed to be fathomed by any mathematics.” In other words, Gabriel comes across as too clinical to be real.

Where A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism does succeed in a big way is in capturing the role money plays in our lives. While most of us consider rampant greed a morally bankrupt concept, it is to Mountford’s immense credit that many a reader will relate to Gabriel’s views about money. So his subsequent actions fueled by greed, become extremely believable, even if they are inexcusable. As Edith Wharton once famously said: “The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.” Gabriel—and many a reader—would definitely agree.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Mariner Books; 1 edition (April 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Peter Mountford
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More money stories: The Financial Lives of Poets by Jesse Walter Das Kapital: a novel of love and money markets by Viken Berberian

Bibliography:

• A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism (April 2011)

“What I like most about the great literature created by Americans of European descent is the Africanist presence within it. I like looking for myself in the whitest of pages. I like finding evidence of myself there, after being told my footprints did not exist on that sane. I think the work of the great white writers is important, but I think it’s most important when it’s negotiating me and my people, because I am as arrogant and selfish a reader as any other.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (APR 3, 2011)

Chris Jaynes has just been fired from his position as the token black professor at a prestigious liberal arts college, and retaliates by visiting the president and snatching off his red bow tie. This none-too-subtle reference to the preferred attire of Leon Botstein, president of Bard College where author Mat Johnson also taught, launches the book as a satire, but gives little hint of the likability of its hero or the fascination of the study of race that will follow. Johnson turns the subject inside out, standing it on its head, looking at race with an outrageous accuracy whose aim falls on black and white alike. Forgive me, therefore, if I set the comedy aside for the moment and concentrate on the book’s intellectual underpinnings.

Much of the debate concerns the nature of blackness itself, beginning with the protagonist’s own racial identity. Jaynes, like the author himself, is a mulatto, “so visibly lacking in African heritage that I often appear to some uneducated eyes as a random, garden-variety white guy. But I’m not. My father was white, yes. But it doesn’t work that way. My mother was a woman, but that doesn’t make me a woman either.” Jaynes refuses to be confined within the expectations placed upon his race, but insists on defining himself in reference to white society. He boycotts the college Diversity Committee as a meaningless sham. He declines to teach the canonical black texts, looking instead to authors like Poe and Melville to discover “the intellectual source of racial Whiteness,” that “odd and illogical sickness” which he is convinced is the true source of the problem.

When the college lets him go, Jaynes is immersed in a study of Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. It was not a problem that I did not know this book, though I have looked at it since. In the first chapter that really caught fire for me, Jaynes summarizes the novel, making hilarious fun of its weaknesses, but also deconstructing its codes and showing why it is worth further study. Poe’s protagonist enlists on a whaler out of Nantucket. After surviving imprisonment, mutiny, shipwreck, and cannibalism, he reaches the Antarctic Ocean where he is washed up on an incongruously-sited tropical isle inhabited only by stunted natives so dark that even their teeth are black. The sole survivors of a treacherous ambush by the natives, Pym and his friend, a half-caste named Dirk Peters, set sail once more and reach the Antarctic ice-shelf. “But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men.And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.” These are Poe’s last sentences, whose enigma, with its strong racial overtones, Jaynes finds more interesting than anything else in the book. By sheer luck (by no means the only authorial license in this splendidly tall tale), Jaynes comes across a crumbling manuscript written in a semi-literate hand that purports to be Dirk Peters’s account of the voyage. Realizing that Poe’s story was based upon true accounts, Jaynes enlists the help of a seafaring cousin called Booker and recruits five other black people to accompany him on an expedition to Antarctica in search of Poe’s race of ultra-white giants, dismissed by Booker as “super ice honkies.”

The rest is a fantasy-adventure in the manner of Rider Haggard or Jules Verne (who also wrote his own sequel to the Poe). Jaynes and his crew do encounter this mysterious race, whom they call the Tekelians, living in ice-tunnels underground. What follows is a re-enactment of racial history — cautious trading, capture, enslavement, and eventual escape. The actual story becomes a little tedious during the long sojourn underground, but Johnson’s observation of the changing dynamics among the black characters never palls; some seek accommodation with their captors, others attempt resistance, and still others record events for later media distribution. In a brilliant twist, Jaynes and his best friend eventually escape this world of literal whiteness only to encounter a metaphorical one, a huge bio-dome built by the painter Thomas Karvel (clearly Kincade), landscaped inside to replicate the perfect sunset world of one of his paintings. Welcome to a space the size of a football field filled with fauna and lavender and color, bushes of every hue, and a waterfall with orange carp swimming at its base. And recorded American talk-shows playing continuously at the four corners: “I got Rush over here by the kitchen because he’s the granddaddy. I got Beck going in the southwest corner. Northwest is O’Reilly, southeast is Hannity, I think. Honey, is southeast Hannity?”

But you do not read this book for the plot or even its fantastic environments, so much as for its intelligent and likable protagonist and for the author’s observations. Some of these are comically absurd, as in this woman bent on denying a heritage that is obvious to everybody else: “Honey, I got lots of Indian in me. I got Irish and I got a little French too. I got some German, or so I’m told. I even got a little Chinese in me, on my mother’s side. Matter of fact, I’m sure I got more bloods in me than I knows. But I do knows this. I ain’t got no kind of Africa in these bones.” Some are little wry asides in the footnotes: “I should say here that, in America, every black man has a conspiracy theory. [...] This obsession with conspiracies is most likely due to the fact that our ethnic group is a product of one.” And he even has a few social observations that have nothing to do with race at all: “Americans love that last question, ‘Where are you from?’ They see it as an excuse to go on about their peculiar local identity and tell you everything about themselves as people without really offering anything personal at all.” Ouch!

I label my reading notes with subject tags for easy reference; seldom have I come across a book that touches on so many of them. The books dealing with race are too numerous to mention, but I am thinking especially of the classic I have read most recently, Huckleberry Finn, which Johnson now makes me see as both a statement and a critique of the American Whiteness myth. There are also numerous books with academic settings, those by David Lodge especially, but again I think especially of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, both of which also have ethnic overtones. For other recent satires, I would compare Ian McEwan’s Solar and Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question; the latter (which does for English Jews what Pym does for American Blacks) has the more attractive protagonist, but Johnson’s Chris James beats them both on that score. There would also be entries under Adventure, Fantasy, and Survival. I realize, though, that I need to create a new category to address what seems to have become a major recent trend: the use of existing texts as a jumping-off point to address contemporary concerns. In the last year alone, I have read The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Scott, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd, and — older, but the most significant of the lot — Foe by J. M Coetzee, a reworking of Robison Crusoe from the perspectives of gender and racial equality. Crusoe lies behind Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym also, giving Mat Johnson’s reworking a literary heritage that underscores the basic seriousness of his intent. You may read the book for laughs, read it for its shamelessly non-PC shock tactics, read it for social insights, but what will remain in your mind its ability to frame the dialogue on race in a new and important way.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau; First Edition edition (March 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Mat Johnson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another wild romp: The Big Machine by Victor LaValle

Bibliography:

• Drop (2000)
• Hunting in Harlem (2003)
• Incongegro SC (2008)
• Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story (2010)
• Pym (March 2011)

Nonfiction Novella:

• The Great Negro Plot: A Tale of Conspiracy and Murder in Eighteenth-Century New York (2007)

“Acharya’s keen twinkling eyes surveyed the boy through a comfortable silence that to him was always a form of conversation. Adi turned nervously towards his father and raised his eyebrows. Archarya’s eyes then slowly became lost and distant. “Of all human deformities, he said softly, ‘genius is the most useful.’ ”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JAN 2, 2011)

Manu Joseph’s debut book is seriously good – a wickedly funny, surprisingly warm and stunningly stylish satire that strikes its target over and over again, taking the reader along for a rollicking ride.

The book introduces us to two equally willful men with runaway egos: Arvind Acharya, a bigger-than-life astrophysicist at the prestigious Institute of Theory and Research, a would-be Nobel candidate who is rumored to have been banned from the Vatican for whispering something untoward in the pope’s ear. The other is his personal assistant, Ayyan Mani, a Dalit (or “untouchable”) who is “smarter than the average bear” (in this case, the average Dalit) with an IQ of 148.

Ayyan, his wife Oja, and their rather geeky son Adi live in a large gray tenement teeming with humanity, “born into poverty that no human should have to endure” but Ayyan has his dreams and the wiles to achieve them. He and his half-deaf son play a secret little game: Ayyan feeds Adi some high-level math and physics answers to amaze and astound his teachers. At the same time, he spins flattering stories about his son that he pays a reporter to run. The result: 10-year-old Adi is soon hailed as a boy-genius throughout the community…and indeed, the nation.

Meanwhile, his boss Arvind is engrossed in his own quixotic project: an attempt to prove that extraterrestrial life is raining down on Earth through a “Balloon Project.” By doing so, he sets himself at odds with underlings, jealous scientists who are far more interested in searching for life in outer space with a “Giant Ear.” And to make matters more complicated, an incredibly attractive astrobiologist – the Institute’s first female scientist – has her cap set for the much-older Arvind and is ready, willing and able to betray him.

Both Ayyan and Arvan are involved in high-stake games: Ayyan is embroiled in the “bewitching life of creating a whole myth” with his son to save himself from “the tired face of Oja, the despondence of Adi, the thousand eyes that gaped vacantly in the grey corridors…” At the same time, the egotistical Arvind is aspiring beyond his capabilities with his belief in a souped-up theory.

As these two egos meet – as this “odd couple” becomes more symbiotic – Manu Joseph weaves an amazingly compelling story. We laugh as Ayann Mani writes his daily “quote of the day,” falsified sayings from the likes of Einstein or Newton that tweak the narcissistic Brahmins. Or when Arvind sets himself up against the “Big Bang” theory, which he considers a Western plot because “the Vatican wanted a beginning.”

Yet throughout, Ayyan, Arvan and the others who inhabit the world of Serious Men are not treated merely with humor, but with compassion – from status-crazy youngsters to pushy nuns, from May-December romances to predictable bureaucrats. The result is a pitch-perfect look at two evenly-matched compatriots who define their lives on their own terms and play for the highest stakes. If this is Mr. Joseph’s debut, I can only imagine how fabulous his next book will be.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 18 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (August 2, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Manu Joseph
EXTRAS:	ExcerptHindu Best Fiction Award 2010
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another satire from the region that we enjoyed: A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif

Bibliography:

• Serious Men (August 2010)

“Oh, here we go, here we go. Any Jew who isn’t your kind of Jew is an anti-Semite. It’s a nonsense, Libor, to talk of Jewish anti-Semites. It’s more than a nonsense, it’s a wickedness.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (DEC 23, 2010)

Nevertheless, Howard Jacobson does talk about it, together with gentile anti-Semitism and that philo-Semitism that may well be anti-Semitism in disguise. This brilliant novel, at once comedic and penetrating, is nothing less than a study of Jewish identity, at least as reflected by a group of middle-class Jews in contemporary London. This is satire, but equal-opportunity satire; there is nobody who may not be offended by it at one point or another, yet nobody who will not recognize the wisdom of Jacobson’s insights, as loving and humane as they are witty.

Libor Sevcik is an aging Czech emigré, a cosmopolitan Jew of the old school. After achieving fame as a Hollywood gossip columnist, he finds himself teaching in a London grammar school, where two of his pupils are Sam Finkler and Julian Treslove, a connection that he has maintained even as the younger men are nearing fifty. Finkler studied philosophy at Oxford, and has parlayed this into a career in print and television, processing the great philosophers in the cause of self-improvement, publishing best-sellers such as “Descartes and Dating” and “The Socratic Flirt: How to Reason Your Way into a Better Sex Life.” Treslove, however, had been “a modular, bits-and-pieces man at university, not studying anything recognizable as a subject, but fitting components of different art related disciplines, not to say indisciplines, together like Lego pieces. Archaeology, Concrete Poetry, Media and Communications, Festival and Theatre Administration, Comparative Religion, Stage Set and Design, the Russian Short Story, Politics and Gender.” He now hires himself out as a handsome near-lookalike to any one of a number of famous figures.

Perhaps as a product of their schoolday rivalry, Treslove, who is a gentile, is fascinated by the mystery of Jews (whom he thinks of collectively as Finklers), members of an exclusive club that he can never join. But a random mugging near the start of the book (which he takes to be a misdirected hate crime) sets him on the path to becoming a Jew himself. After one misconceived attempt to plumb “the deep damp dark mysteriousness of a Finkler woman,” he eventually finds a genuinely Jewish partner in Libor’s zaftig niece Hephzibah, learning Yiddish phrases in order to woo her, then reading Maimonides under her direction. Finkler, meanwhile, moves in the opposite direction. Using a guest appearance on “Desert Island Discs” as a career-booster, he gratuitously proclaims that he is ashamed of Israel’s policies in Palestine, and finds himself almost overnight the spokesman for a group of anti-Zionists in the arts and academe that he calls ASH, for ASHamed Jews. “They’ll soon realize their mistake,” his wife had prophesied; “with a greedy bastard like you around they’ll soon discover how hard it is to get their own share of shame.”

Increased anti-Semitic attacks at home and Israeli actions in Gaza and the Occupied Territories abroad take the action of the second part of the book well beyond passing comedy. Most importantly, Jacobson’s characters grow on us as people, giving their lives as much heartbreak as humor. I was reminded of Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, which treats similar issues of Jewish identity in a comic vision of American academe, but Howard Jacobson is richer as a novelist, wearing his smartness more lightly. I also thought of Ian McEwan’s recent Solar, another London-based satire of contemporary issues, but while McEwan seemed to be slightly out of his comfort zone, Jacobson is very much in his; this is satire that never sacrifices character to humor, and says something profound at the same time. And my goodness, the man can write:

“The London dawn bled slowly into sight, a thin line of red blood leaking out between the rooftops, appearing at the windows of the buildings it had infiltrated, one at a time, as though in a soundless military coup. On some mornings it was as though a sea of blood rose from the city floor. Higher up, the sky would be mauled with rough blooms of deep blues and burgundies like bruising. Pummelled into light, the hostage day began.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 60 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA (October 12, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Yes!  Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	British Council on Howard Jacobson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Indignation by Philip Roth Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

Bibliography:

• Coming from Behind (1978)
• Peeping Tom (1984)
• Redback (1986)
• The Very Model of a Man (1992)
• No More Mister Nice Guy (1998)
• The Mighty Walzer (1999)
• Who’s Sorry Now (2002)
• The Making of Henry (2004)
• Kalooki Nights (2006)
• The Act of Love (2008)
• Howard Jacobson (2010)

Nonfiction:

• In the Land of Oz (1987)
• Roots Schmoots: Journeys Among Jews (1993)
• Seriously Funny: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime (1997)
• The Finkler Question

“If I hear you say once more that the women’s prison is too small and that more women, especially the middle-aged and the elderly should be locked up—I’ll—never mind what I’ll do.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (DEC 5, 2010)

Nothing prepared me for Elizabeth Jolley’s novel Foxybaby. What was I expecting? Well a gentle novel, a comedy of manners, perhaps? Instead Foxybaby is packed with quirky characters whose attendance at a private summer course unleashes a range of odd behaviours.

The novel begins with an exchange of letters between novelist, Alma Porch and Josephine Peycroft, the principal of Trinity College. Alma, who’s also a teacher at a girls’ school agrees to teach a drama course at Trinity College’s summer programme for overweight adults: “Better Body Through the Arts.” The opening exchange of letters sets the stage for the novel’s tone as Alma and Miss Peycroft attempt to work out their artistic differences.

The increasingly testy tone of the letters should set off alarm bells for Alma (they did for this reader), but perhaps Alma’s enthusiasm blinds her to the knowledge that all is not well at Trinity College. She sails off into the Australian outback in her “battered Volkswagen” with her head packed full of ideas for her drama course:

“Enjoying the delightful feeling of escape she sang tunelessly, something operatic, and nodded her head in time to her own aria. She was on her way to Cheathem East. Occasionally she stopped singing to listen, from habit, with some anxiety to the rattle of her engine. This noise being sustained as usual she let her mind race ahead. She hoped Trinity College would live up to her expectations. She thought about sunflowers. Sunflowers with heads as big as dinner plates, golden sunflowers in the corners of old buildings and by crumbling walls. She hoped they would be growing in Cheatham East.”

Alma’s rosy illusions about Trinity College are about to be shattered. The first warning of what’s in store occurs when she ploughs her Volkswagen into the back of a bus parked in the middle of a curved road. While this at first appears to be an accident, this is just one of many scams perpetrated by the lecherous Miles, whose nebulous position at the school is strangely tolerated by Miss Peycroft. When Miles isn’t ripping off the students and teachers with his various schemes, he hangs out in a room in which “everything [that was] there seemed to be for sale.” In the creation of Miss Peycroft and Miles, there are shades of Miss Fritton and Flash Harry from the marvellous British St Trinian’s films.

Alma’s accident–her strange introduction to the school–is but a hint of what’s in store. Two of the teachers don’t speak English, and Trinity College is a dump. The students are there ostensibly to loose weight, so the food is meager (if it appears at all). Alma’s room is soon invaded by Mrs. Castle, a student who can’t stop hammering on about her grandchildren and Siamese cats. But there are stranger things afoot; orgies and assignations are commonplace, and Miss Peycroft, “reputed to be a one time prioress, till she jumped off a wall,” may be the inamorata of another female teacher. Any normal person would run from Trinity College and its collection of nuts. Alma, however is determined to put on her play, She’s so wrapped up with its creation that she chooses to ignore a great deal, and when her mind does absorb the strangeness surrounding her, she simply becomes sleepy.

Foxybaby is primarily a humorous novel of eccentricity with its characters moving from their own bizarre lives and social relationships into the dreadful play, Foxybaby. The novel is reminiscent of a Shirley Jackson tale in which a normal person strays into some horrific environment and is trapped. Foxybaby isn’t horrific, however, although incidents that in other circumstances would be horrific take place (the staged car accident, for example). There’s no threat of danger–except to one’s sanity–in Jolley’s novel. Here’s Miss Peycroft discussing a course called Basic Self Expression:

“That’s Mrs. Viggars,” Miss Peycroft said, “the one sitting in the cardboard-box, rather a squeeze but she managed it ultimately. Luckily Miles found something big enough, a console television carton or was it a double-door refrigerator…”

“Whatever is that on her head?” Miss Porch in her curiosity, forgot good manners and interrupted Miss Peycroft, who did not seem to mind.

“Oh that. That’s a cushion,” she said. “It was hilarious. They all wore cushions on their heads and rocked across the courtyard in the boxes. Great fun!”

Just think of a scenario in which the patients take over the asylum. Make that asylum Trinity College and you get the picture. What’s so curious here is that Alma doesn’t seem to even notice the nuttiness that surrounds her. She’s dotty and giddy, and when she’s exposed to some really awful behaviour, her reactions to the Trinity College crowd create an even stranger situation. This darkly comic tale will appeal to those who love novels of eccentricity and the many foibles of human nature.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Persea (November 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Elizabeth Jolley
EXTRAS:	Elizabeth Jolley Research Collection
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Vera Wright Trilogy Sugar Mother

Bibliography:

• Five Acre Virgin and Other Stories (1976)
• Palomino (1980)
• The Newspaper of Claremont Street (1983)
• Mr Scobie’s Riddle (1983)
• Woman in a Lampshade (1983)
• Milk and Honey (1984)
• Foxbaby (1985; November 2010)
• The Well (1986)
• The Sugar Mother (1988; November 2010)
• My Father’s Moon (1989) *
• Cabin Fever (1990) *
• The Georges’ Wife (1993) *
• The Orchard Thieves (1995)
• Lovesong (1997)
• Fellow Passengers: Collected Stories (1997)
• An Accommodating Spouse (1999)
• An Innocent Gentleman (2001)
• The Vera Wright Trilogy: My Father’s Moon / Cabin Fever / The Georges’ Wife (April 2010) *

Non-fiction:

• Central Mischief: Elizabeth Jolley on Writing, Her Past and Herself (1992)
• Diary of a Weekend Farmer (1993)
• Learning to Dance: Elizabeth Jolley: Her Life and Work (2006)

“I want interviews, features, you name it,” Bosco went on. “Fill up my life with that shit. Let’s document every fucking humiliation. That is reality, right? You don’t look good anymore twenty years later, especially when you’ve had half your guts removed. Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression?”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (NOV 03, 2010)

In Jennifer’s Egan’s lively and inventive novel – A Visit From The Goon Squad – each of its characters feels his or her mortality. Each is a in a tenuous danse-a-deux with “the goon.”

Every chapter is told from a different character’s point of view and it is no accident that the novel starts with Sasha – the assistant of music producer Bennie Salazar, one of the key focal points. Sasha has sticky fingers and is constantly pirating away meaningless objects to compose “the warped core of her life.” These objects serve as talismans, placing her at arm’s length from the love she wants.

And Bennie? A one-time band member and arrogant indie genius, he is now one step removed from the action, adding flakes of gold to his coffee to enhance his libido and bemoaning the state of digital technology. Like Sasha, he’s at arm’s length from a direct connection with love and life in general.

Bennie and Sasha will never know much about each other – even though they’ve worked together for decades – but the reader comes to know them through various stories. We get to know Lou, Bennie’s charismatic, misbehaving, skirt-chasing mentor during a harrowing African safari; Dolly, the PR mogul who places her own daughter in harm’s way; Jules, the ex-con journalist whose lunch with a Hollywood grade B actress goes terribly wrong; Ted Hollander, Sasha’s art-loving uncle, who travels to Naples to find her. Each will add a little something to the puzzle.

Yet none of their stories is told in chronological order, or even through flashbacks. Rather, time is revealed like the grooves of a record album, jumping from track to track in what appears to be no particular order. As each character takes his or her own moment in the spotlight, he or she is desperate for a second chance and to hold off the approaching goon. At one point, Dolly reflects, “Her deeper error had preceded all that: she’s overlooked a seismic shift…Now and then (she) finds herself wondering what sort of event or convergence would define the new world in which she found herself, as Capote’s party had, or Woodstock, or Malcolm Forbes’s seventieth birthday, or the party for Talk Magazine. She had no idea.”

The rich, lush, adventurous life that these characters once lived is being replaced by PowerPoints (one young character reveals her story through a 40-page PowerPoint presentation), paid “parrots” who create social media buzz, truncated emails, and digital technology. As Egan’s characters “strut and fret” their last hours on the broader stage, the world of technology is making them increasingly irrelevant. When Alex – Sasha’s would be beau whom we meet in the first chapter – tells Bennie, “I don’t know what happened to me,” Bennie’s answer is, “You grew up, Alex…just like the rest of us.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 257 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (June 8, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jennifer Egan
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another genre bending new school novel: Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

Bibliography:

• Emerald City and Other Stories (1996)
• The Invisible Circus (1997)
• Look At Me (2001)
• The Keep (2007)
• A Visit from the Goon Squad (June 2010) /

Movies from Books:

• The Invisible Circle (2001)

“I will be sorry to leave this life, as soon I must. It is so full of wonder, as well as horror. A surprise around every corner and the pace is hotting up.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (OCT 15, 2010)

Two things about British novelist Fay Weldon: she will always be controversial and she will always be relevant. Known primarily as an author of female-centered books, Weldon –who just turned 79, by the way, worked in advertising at one point in her career, and she also wrote the screenplay for the 1980 version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. In 1998, Weldon, called a feminist novelist for decades, came under fire for her comments on the subject of rape. In 2001 Weldon once again became the subject of controversy with her novel The Bulgari Connection when it was revealed that she’d been paid 18,000 pounds to quote the jeweler at least 12 times. How’s that for product placement? After some initial waffling came Weldon’s great get stuffed response: “Well they never give me the Booker Prize anyway.”

Chalcot Crescent--Weldon’s 29th novel (her 30th if you count Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen) is a bit of a change of pace. Weldon’s characters are predominantly females struggling to survive in a male dominated society, and while these women should, of course band together to form a cohesive, formidable alliance, they more often than not devolve into rivalry and squabbling as they battle over men–the so-called spoils. In Chalcot Crescent, Weldon’s world of 2013 offers a tableau of a slightly different sort. Yes men still rule, but it’s the faceless sinister monolithic government–the true enemy–and the ultimate patriarchal society–in charge of a world that’s gone horribly and believably awry. Is this science fiction? Perhaps–although I think the world of Chalcot Crescent is too close to the truth for that. Instead it’s the sort of Weldon-dabbling we see in the futuristic The Cloning of Joanna May (1989) and the alternative realities of Mantrapped (2004).

Weldon tells the reader that this book is the story of her lost sister “set in an alternative universe that mirrors our own.” With Weldon’s characteristic humour, the novel’s protagonist, Frances now aged 80, is a once-successful, now-penniless writer living in Chalcot Crescent while her loser sister, Fay–a writer of cookbooks has hightailed it to back to New Zealand. Holed up in her Chalcot Crescent home, surrounded by foreclosures, Frances hides from the bailiffs who are about to turf her out of her house and presumably onto the street. Trapped inside her home, she describes a world that’s gone to hell:

“Then came the Labour Government of 1997 and the Consumer Decade–as it is now called–and by 2007 the house next door to me sold for £1.85 million. Then came the Shock of 2008, the Crunch of 2009-11–when house prices plummeted and still no-one was buying–then the brief recovery of 2012, when at least properties began to change hands again, though our friendly European neighbours became less friendly, the US embraced protectionism and the rest of the world had no choice but to follow. And then came the Bite, which is now, and with it a coalition and thoroughly dirigiste government which keeps its motives and actions very much to itself. And though a few major figures in the financial world went to prison, the nomenklatura still ride the middle lanes, have their mortgages paid for them and do very well, thank you. The rest of us are presumably moving to the outskirts: fifty years on and we are back to where we began. I reckon I had the best of it.”

With the economy in a permanent state of emergency, the NUG (National Unity Government) is running the country. Rules, regulations, and rationing control everything–from an intermittent water supply to CCTV. Everyone is supposed to eat a rather suspicious manufactured substance called National Meat Loaf, vegetarianism is ridiculed, and home grown-produce is taxed by Neighbourhood Watch programmes. People who’ve lost their homes in the economic downturn disappear and are relocated to the nether regions of the “outskirts.”

Frances goes back and forth in her descriptions of the past and the present, and as she types her story into the computer (hoping to sell a book if there’s enough paper), she plays with the idea that some of what she’s writing is fiction. She details her major relationships and the lives of her rather disappointing children as she rode the wave of economic affluence to its disappointing conclusion. With numerous marriages, second spouses, lovers and stepchildren, it’s all very complicated. For Weldon fans, reading Chalcot Crescent is very much a pathway through the author’s life and work–the incidents, the loves and the hardships; it’s all here, or at least the parts that Weldon wants us to know about are here, and all treated with her characteristic humour. But apart from the witty and wicked exploration of Frances’s past, there’s also Frances’s present; Amos, Frances’s favourite grandson, a member of the radical breakaway group Redpeace is part of a guerilla composed of members of Frances’s family. While Redpeace plots direct action against the government, Frances is relegated to dotty-old-lady status by her monkey-wrenching grandchildren.

Chalcot Crescent may read like a science-fiction fantasy, and depending just how you feel about the state of the world, reading the novel may be an uncomfortable experience at times. Weldon’s world is not so far removed from reality. Most of us have seen the gutting of the American and British economies, and the subsequent beginnings of a new peasant class. The novel also dabbles with notions of agent provocateurs and Redpeace–a supposedly radical group that’s allowed to exist in plain sight. Again there’s that idea of Weldon’s relevance. Even as I confess to a certain disappointment in the novel’s ending, I suspect that Weldon is much cannier than her critics acknowledge. I was rather hoping for a Shrapnel Academy style ending, but instead as Guy Debord would say, even the most radical gesture will eventually be Recuperated.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions; Reprint edition (September 28, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia Page on Fay Weldon British Council biography of Fay Weldon
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Contemporary women authors: Margaret Atwood Joyce Carol Oates

Bibliography:

• The Fat Woman’s Joke (1967)
• Down Among the Women (1971)
• Female Friends (1975)
• Remember Me (1976)
• Little Sisters (1977)
• Praxis (1978)
• Puffball (1980)
• Watching Me, Watching You: Stories (1981)
• The President’s Child (1982)
• The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983)
• Letters to Alice: On First Reading Jane Austen (1984)
• Polaris and Other Stories (1985)
• The Shrapnel Academy (1986)
• The Heart of the Country (1987)
• The Hearts and Lives of Men (1987)
• Leader of the Band (1988)
• The Cloning of Janna May (1989)
• Darcy’s Utopia (1990)
• Growing Rich (1992)
• Life Force (1992)
• Affliction (1994)
• Splitting (1995)
• Worst Fears (1996)
• Big Girls Don’t Cry (1997) (a.k.a. Big Women in UK
• Hard Time to Be a Father : Stories (1998)
• Rhode Island Blues (2000)
• The Bulgari Connection (2001)
• Nothing to Wear and Nowhere to Hide : Stories (2002)
• Mantrapped (2004)
• She May Not Leave (2006)
• The Spa Decameron (2007)
• The Stepmother’s Diary (2008)
• Chalcot Crescent (September 2010)
• Kehua!: A Ghost Story (August 2010 in UK)

Nonfiction:

• Rebecca West (1985)
• Godless in Eden: A Book of Essays (1999)
• Auto da Fay: A Memoir (2002)
• What Makes Women Happy (2006)