“I wondered how the wife I had known when Daniela was first born— the quiet, sunken woman who read the Czech newspapers in the library every morning and then wrote long letters to her mother in Prague,  letters Katka had known would be swallowed by security— could have become this confident voice on the line.”

Book Review:

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

A title such as The UnAmericans begs this question: what is an American? Or more specifically, what is an unAmerican in Molly Antopol’s world?

Molly Antopol’s characters are mostly Jewish or Eastern Europeans and they are mostly alienated – from spouse or kids, from past ideology and beliefs, and often, from their most authentic selves. Each story is a little gem unto itself.

In one story, we meet an American actor of Russian ancestry who has eschewed his Russian past, only to leverage it in order win a part with a leftist film director. Fingered during the McCarthy era, he goes to prison in support of beliefs that aren’t even truly his. Upon release, he spends a weekend with his admiring 10-year-old son and comes face-to-face with his hypocrisy.

In one of my favorites, “A Difficult Phase,” a downsized Israeli journalist –floundering in her life – begins to question her life choices when she meets an attractive widower and his young teenage daughter. “This is what she was good at: being the blank, understanding face across the table; putting people so at ease they revealed the things they didn’t want to share with anyone, the things they wished didn’t exist at all.”

Another story, “The Old World,” focuses on a middle-aged tailor who meets and marries a Ukrainian widow, and travels with her back to her hometown, only to discover that he is a poor substitute for her dead husband. He reflects on his grown daughter who is a “born-again Jew:”

“Maybe in religion, Beth really had discovered a way never to be alone. Maybe I am the lost one, wandering the streets of Kiev, competing with a dead man.”

Other stories are equally well-crafted and psychologically acute: a decorated Israeli solder comes home and suffers a fluke accident, which sets in play some poignant dynamics between him and his brother. A political dissident in Russia discovers that his neglected daughter has written an autobiographical play with himself as a key character. A young American woman and her Israeli husband must face the reality of their marriage, which is “so scary and real it required an entirely different language, new and strange and yet to be invented.”

Psychologically astute, subtlety crafted and haunted, this is a confident and poised debut, which may very well end up on my Top Ten of 2014 list. There is not one mediocre story in this whole remarkable collection. It’s one of the best debut story collections in years.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (February 3, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Molly Antopol
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Foreign Brides by Elena Lappin Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon

Bibliography:

• The UnAmericans (February 2014)

“The park slumbers through the long winter, weighed down by ice and snow, dreaming of spring…..as it drowses beneath its quilt of snow, it dreams of all the people who flocked to its midways: men, women and especially children, the joy the park brought them, the laughter that was like oxygen for the park, which breathed it in as it floated up from the Cyclone, the Funhouse, the Wild Mouse, the Carousel.”

Book Review:

Review by Jana L. Perskie  (JAN 25, 2014)

Palisades Park is no roller coaster ride of a novel, rather it is a well written love letter to a “cherished part of the author’s childhood.” (author’s quote). This is a fascinating historical fiction, written with love to a magical place and era long gone.

Located high atop the New Jersey Palisades’ cliffs, within the boroughs of Cliffside Park and Fort Lee, once stood the home of the famous Cyclone roller coaster, the Tunnel of Love and the world’s largest salt water pool. The place was called Palisades Amusement Park and even today, over thirty years after it closed its gates, the Park is still warmly remembered, with nostalgia, by many, many people. This novel strikes a particular chord with me as I was born and raised in Atlantic City, NJ, (way before the casinos marred the beauty of the town, and the majestic, beautifully designed hotels were torn down to make room for tacky casino architecture). I was a regular at Steel Pier and Million Dollar Pier and would ride the “rides” even when I was in college.

The protagonist of this tale is the Park itself, inhabiting 30 acres across the Hudson River from New York City. The glue holding the storyline together is a carnie family, the Stopkas. Eddie Stopka ran away from home in his teens, during the Great Depression and Prohibition. He rode the rails until he got a job at Palisades Park “sweeping up.” It was here where Eddie meets Adele Worth who works at a root beer concession. He is attracted to her because she is beautiful and he is also amused by her “pitch.” She would call, “Root beer, ice-cold root beer! Only legal beer in the Park! Not as much fun as malt, but just as delicious and twice as foamy! C’mon, lift a glass to Carrie Nation!!”

Adele’s father used to be a well known film director in Fort Lee, NJ. His company was called Worth While Pictures. Eventually the film industry relocates to Hollywood, thus ending his career in the movies. He remains bitter about this change for the rest of his life and drinks heavily as a result. Adele was just 6 months old when she “acted” in her first film, “Babes in Arms.” As a pre-teen she meets big stars like Douglas Fairbanks and silent film actress Blanche Sweet. The lovely Adele is crowned Miss Bergen County. She comes to work at Palisades hoping to be noticed by anyone who can help her get a job in the film industry. And why not? “Everyone” visits Palisades Park! She holds on to her dream of being a movie star all her life.

Eddie and Adele eventually marry and their children Antoinette, a tomboy, fantasizes about being a great diver, like the daredevil she sees at the park who jumps from a 90-foot tower into a water tank six feet deep. She insists, to her mother’s dismay, that she be called Toni and is definitely more into swimming and trying to climb the Palisades than in playing with dolls. Her younger brother Jack has a real knack for drawing and a love of action comic book characters. Eventually, when their parents buy a “joint,” (a carny concession), the children work there. This is their real home, more so than the house where they live in Edgewater, NJ.

In 1912, the park added a salt-water swimming pool. It is filled by pumping water from the saline Hudson River, 200 feet below. This pool, 400 by 600 feet in surface area, is billed as the largest salt-water wave pool in the nation. Behind the water falls are huge pontoons that rise up and down as they rotate, creating a one-foot wave in the pool. This pool  eventually plays a big role in Toni’s life.

The carnival “freaks” “Jolly Irene, the Fattest Woman In The World,” “Susi, The Elephant-Skinned Girl,” “Charles Phelan, Strong Man,” “Victor-Victoria – Half Man, Half Woman,” “Hoppe The Frog Boy,” etc., are not freaks to the children or their parents, they are just friends and colleagues on the midway. Here there is an aura of camaraderie. Vendors help each other through fire, sickness, poverty and loss. Annually the Rosenthal brothers, who own the park, add new rides. They also construct a 24-foot high, one million watt marquee advertising Palisades Park.

The park’s reputation and attendance continues to grow throughout the 1950s and 1960s, largely due to saturation advertising and the continued success of the park’s music pavilion and the Caisson bar. In addition, behind the Palisade Park music stage lay the park’s worst-kept secret: a hole in the fence used by local children to sneak into the park without paying admission. Despite the fact that the Rosenthal brothers know all about this breach, it is purposely left unrepaired.

Palisades Park spans several decades, 1922-1971 (the closing of the park). We experience, through the author’s writing and impeccable research, the evolution of the Park. Some of the well-incorporated historical details include: The Great Depression, President Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats, the peacetime draft, big band music, Hitler, Pearl Harbor, Mafia hits, racial discrimination, the Korean War, and the 1960’s, which brought a major change to American culture. The reader also learns about the Park’s history which runs parallel to world history. There were major events here which effected both the families who worked at Palisades and those who came to be entertained. A few devastating fires, the bane of amusement parks everywhere, resulted in extraordinary damage, including terrible injuries and, sometimes, death. The resulting loss of property caused those who owned concessions to rebuild or go to work elsewhere, traveling the carnie circuit.

Alan Brennert magically brings to life a way of life. The character of Palisades Park in all its moods, and the people, especially the engaging Stopkas, are vividly portrayed in this enjoyable novel.

My “however moment,” is this – although this is a very entertaining read, the characters are not complex at all. There is nothing in their life stories which has not been written about before. The novelty is the Park itself and the view of history which the author brings to the story. Yet I found myself satisfied, even through these shortcomings, because of other aspects, written about above, which makes this a hard to put down book.

I think the character of Park owner Irving Rosenthal sums things up when he says,

“A place like this – it’s like a living thing, the way people interact with it, how they think of it. For kids like you who grew up around here, it’s always been a part of your lives – it’s personal. Sell it to someone like Walt Disney, and it’s no longer the same park. I want it to be the same, to go one living after I’m gone. We’re at the top of our game now. Palisades has never been more popular, more famous. What’s wrong with wanting that to go on? Nobody wants summer to end.”

Palisades finally closed its doors on September 12, 1971 to make room for high rise condominiums but the memories live on.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 203 readers
PUBLISHER:	St. Martin’s Griffin (October 29, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jana L. Perskie
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Alan Brennert
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt Wikipedia page on Palisades Amusement Park
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Honolulu Moloka’i And this gator-themed fictional amusement park: Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

Bibliography:

• Kindred Spirits (1984)
• Time and Chance (1990)
• Her Pilgrim Soul and Other Stories (1990)
• Moloka’i (2003)
• Honolulu (2009)
• Palisades Park (April 2013)

“During the final days of the occupation, there was an American woman in Haiti, a photojournalist — blonde, young, infuriating — and she became Thomas Harrington’s obsession.“

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shultman (JAN 3, 2014)

You don’t need to know much about Haitian, Croatian or Turkish politics to fully appreciate The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, but it helps. It also helps to surrender to the journey – a journey that spans over 700 pages – because immediate answers will not be forthcoming.

This is a big book in every sense of the word: big in breadth, in ideas, in audacity. You will lose your heart to it and end up shaking your head in awe and admiration. And along the way, you will learn something about the shadowy world of politics and espionage, the hypocrisy of religion, and the lengths that the players go to keep their sense of identity – their very soul – from fragmenting.

So what IS it about? That’s not an easy question to tackle. The eponymous woman of the title is Dottie Chambers, the hypnotic and damaged daughter of the elite spy Steven Chambers – surely one of the most screwed up characters in contemporary literature. As a young boy, Steven witnessed the atrocities of Tito’s Muslim partisans against his own father, and he came to age with a zeal to right the wrongs…eventually pulling Dottie into his malignant orbit.

That is all I intend to say about the plot, which spans five decades, many countries, and a wide range of themes. The novel consists of five separate books, some short, some long, a catalog-of-sorts of 20th century atrocities and the loss of not only the individual soul, but our collective soul as well. Mr. Shacochis has choreographed a spellbinder, with hints (depending on where you are in the book) of David Mitchell, John Le Carre, Ernest Hemingway, and others…while keeping the narrative distinctly his.

The themes this author tackles go right to the heart of identity and destiny. “We choose the lies in which we participate and in choosing, define ourselves and our actions for a very long time,” he writes at one point. In other passage, we are first introduced to Steven with these words: {Steven would be} “introduced in the most indelible fashion to his destiny, the spiritual map that guides each person finally to the door of the cage that contains his soul, and in his hand a key that will turn the lock, or the wrong key, or no key at all.”

The questions he asks are universal: how do you change back if your former self no longer interlocks cleanly with the shape you have assumed? What happens when you become an actor in a theater without walls or boundaries or audiences? Where is the thin wall of separation between “patriotism and hatred, love and violence, ideology and facts, judgment and passion, intellect and emotion, duty and zealotry, hope and certainty, confidence and hubris, power and fury…” And when do we have the right to challenge and to reclaim our own souls before it’s too late?

This is an amazing book, a true Magnus opus, a story of who we are and how we came to be that way. Yet at its epicenter, Dottie and the two men who love her – her unhealthy father and the book’s moral core, Green Beret Evelle Burnette – who, in their own way, battle for her very soul.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 63 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press (September 3, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shultman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Bob Shacochis
EXTRAS:	Interview and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob Zoet by David Mitchell

Bibliography:

• Easy in the Islands (1985)
• The Next New World (1990)
• Swimming in the Volcano (1993)
• The Woman Who Lost Her Soul (September 2013)

Nonfiction:

• Drinking, Smoking and Screwing: Great Writers on Good Times (1994)
• Domesticity: A Gastronomic Interpretation of Love (1994;2013)
• The Immaculate Invasion (1999)

“The sunlight didn’t miss its chance, and as we approached the first high point of the ride, it moved in behind a brassy cloud high above the river, and then suddenly, like a very thunderstorm of light, dropped a cascade of brightness the size of Ireland down on the water, so that the river halved into brightness and brilliance, and you would half suspect that there was a more mysterious ticketman somewhere, from the mountains of heaven, pulling heavenly switches.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (SEP 18, 2011)

So here I was yesterday, pounding my treadmill, reading Sebastian Barry’s new novel, alternately sobbing and laughing aloud at the sheer magnificence of it, reveling in the exuberant brilliance of his writing. Admittedly, exertion at the gym calls forth such strong reactions, but the book had touched me quietly already with its first pages upon waking, and would retain its hold through the limpid ambiguity of its final paragraphs, read before going very late to bed. Yes, I finished it in a single day; I could not help myself. But there were many passages that I went back to reread more slowly and then more slowly still, just to savor the magic of Barry’s style.

The paragraph quoted above, coming almost halfway through the book, is the opening of a magnificent set piece, when Irish expatriate Lily Dunne and a fellow servant are taken by an admirer to ride their first-ever big dipper in Luna Park in Cleveland. “We poised, three beating hearts, three souls with all their stories so far in the course of ordinary lives, three mere pilgrims, brilliantly unknown, brilliantly anonymous, above a Cleveland fun park, with the wonderful catastrophe of the sunlight on the river, the capricious engineering of the tracks, the sudden happiness of knowing Joe…”. So begins a two-page paragraph, all in a single sentence, as the poise and the rush and the joy and the terror, laughing and crying all at the same time, becomes the pivot point for an entire life.

As indeed it is. “What is the sound of an eighty-nine-year-old heart breaking?” asks the second sentence in the book. Grief-stricken at the death of her grandson Bill, Lily wants only to write down her own memories, or make her confession as she calls it, before putting a quiet end to her own life too. Each chapter, headed simply “First Day without Bill” and so on, tells us a little bit about her present life and a lot about her past, until eventually the two meet up. She is living in the Hamptons, in a small cottage fixed up for her by her former employer for whom she worked as cook. Her memories take her back to the age of four, in the early years of the last century, when her father was a senior police officer in Dublin. Associated with the wrong side, unfortunately, for in the struggles for Irish independence, Lily and her fiancé are forced to flee to America with a price on their heads. The “Canaan’s Side” of the old hymn, the near bank of the Promised Land after the crossing of the Red Sea, is of course the USA, where Lily and her lover are forced to lead a fringe existence under assumed names. It will be long before she will feel herself truly American — the fun-park ride is a first hint of it — but she ends up surrounded by caring, tactful people who respect and even love her.

Here I get stuck. In revealing that the dead Bill was Lily’s grandson, I already anticipate something that Barry will reveal in his own good time, though only a dozen pages into the book. But his technique of adding facts only when truly important does make it very difficult to say any more about the plot. Suffice it to say that it will take Lily from the bloodshed of the Troubles in Ireland to an America moving from the heady Twenties through the Depression and several wars. All the men in Lily’s life will be touched by war, from the First World War that killed her beloved elder brother Willie to the First Gulf War that so affected her grandson Bill. The assassinations of the Sixties will also play a part, bringing to the surface issues of race that had been a dormant subtext from quite early on. I am not convinced that Barry can quite manage to sustain the story over such a long span; there are some chapters about two-thirds of the way through when the intensity flags somewhat, and a couple of revelations towards the end stretch credulity a little. But his ability to balance the epic with the intimate, as the book jacket rightly claims, is nonetheless amazing.

All Barry’s books begin, at least in back-story, at roughly the same place, with the agonized birth of the Irish state; he seems to extend the story further in time and place with each one. A Long Way (about Lily’s brother) addresses the paradox of Irish soldiers fighting for their country in Flanders only to be treated as traitors at home (a point which Barry gently parallels to the plight of Vietnam veterans here). The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty and The Secret Scripture follow the legacy of those conflicted loyalties deeper into the twentieth century, as does Annie Dunne, about Lily’s sister in the Fifties. On Canaan’s Side extends the story across the Atlantic, though it turns out to be more about America than Ireland, except in the marvelous poetry of the Irish voice. The Secret Scripture showed Barry’s remarkable ability to get into the mind of a very old woman, and that is one of the true joys of this book too. For what might have turned into a despairing wail of grief becomes instead a tapestry of light and wonder. I will let Lily have the final word:

“And I notice again in the writing of this confession that there is nothing called long-ago after all. When things are summoned up, it is all present time, pure and simple. So that, much to my surprise, people I have loved are allowed to live again. What it is that allows them I don’t know. I have been happy now and then in the last two weeks, the special happiness that is offered from the hand of sorrow.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 68 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking Adult (September 8, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Sebastian Barry
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Netherland by Joseph O’Neill

Bibliography:

• Mackers Garden (1982)
• The Engine of Owl-Light (1987)
• The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998)
• Annie Dunn (2002)
• A Long Long Way (2005)
• The Secret Scripture (2008)
• On Canaan’s Side (2011)
• The Temporary Gentleman (May 2014)

“He was standing on a cliff…into a kind of arena enclosing…Spruce Lake…and now he looked down on it hundreds of feet below him, its flat surface as still and black as obsidian, engulfed in the shadow of surrounding cliffs, ringed with a double ring of evergreens and reflected evergreens.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  AUG 30, 2011)

Denis Johnson won an O. Henry prize for this novella of the old American West in 2003. It originally appeared in the Paris Review but is now reissued and bound in hardback with an apt cover art—a painting by Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton called “The Race.” If you contemplate the painting for a while, you may feel the ghost of the book’s protagonist, Robert Grainier, as he, too, felt the ghosts and spirits of the dead.

Robert Grainier is a man without a known beginning —- at least, he didn’t know his parents, and neither did he know where he was from originally. Some cousin suspected Canada, and said that he spoke only French when he was left off in Fry, Idaho, circa 1893, arriving there on the Great Northern Railroad as a young lad. His aunt and uncle were his parents, and he grew up in the panhandle by the Kootenai River with the loggers, the Indians, the Chinese, and the trains.

As the book opens in the summer of 1917, Grainier is helping his railroad crew of the Spokane International Railway (in the Idaho panhandle) hold a struggling Chinese laborer accused of stealing. They meant to throw him from the trestle, sixty feet above the rapids at the gorge, but the man, cursing and speaking in tongues, broke free and went hand-over-hand from beam to beam, until he disappeared.

“The Chinaman, he was sure, had cursed them powerfully…and any bad thing might come of it.”

And that was the signal incident that curses, spirits, and demons would inhabit the landscape of Grainier’s dreams. Often, in the background, is heard the melancholic whistle of the trains.

Johnson’s story is a portrait of early 20th-century America as witnessed through the itinerant Grainier, a scrupulous, dignified man whose wife and infant daughter were consumed in a fire in their cabin while he was miles away working on the railroad or in the forest as a logger. Grainier’s long life is seen through snapshots juxtaposed in a deliberately disjointed style, submerging our thoughts deep into the great Northwest, as forests are cleared and the trains tracks are laid that connect one land to the next.

Grainier came back and rebuilt on the burnt lot, the grief of his loss now a thing in his soul, a muted or massive thing, depending on his memories or his dreams. The dead spirit of his daughter appears in abstract or animal form to haunt him, and the wolves enter his soul.

“…when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth…It flushed out something heavy that tended to collect in his heart…”

Love, loss, death, and lust are wound into this short but powerful story, a story of a time that is receding from the collective American memories. Denis Johnson’s ode is an evocative and sublime remembrance of things past—of railroads built, of people buried, and of souls lost and wandering. Johnson awakens them, and puts them to rest.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Denis Johnson
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Nobody Move Tree of Smoke

Bibliography:

• Angels (1983)
• Fiskadoro (1985)
• The Stars at Noon (1986)
• Rescitation of a Hanged Man (1991)
• Jesus’s Son: Stories (1992)
• Already Dead: A California Gothic (1997)
• The Name of the World (2000)
• Tree of Smoke (2007)
• Nobody Move (2009)
• Train Dreams (August 2011)

Other:

• The Icongnito Lounge: Poems (1992)
• The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems (1995)
• Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond (nonfiction) (2001)
• Shoppers: Two Plays (2002)

Movies from Books:

• Jesus’ Son (2003)

“Father watched the prow of the scaly broad-beamed vessel splash in the sea. Her decks were packed with people. Thousands of male heads in derbies. Thousands of female heads covered with shawls. It was a rag ship with a million dark eyes staring at him. Father, a normally resolute person, suddenly foundered in his soul. A weird despair seized him. The wind came up, the sky turned overcast, and the great ocean began to tumble and break upon itself as if made of slabs of granite and sliding terraces of slate. He watched the ship till he could see it no longer. Yet aboard her were only more customers, for the immigrant population set great store by the American flag.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (JUL 24, 2011)

E.L. Doctorow’s 1974 masterpiece, Ragtime, takes its name from the a style of music, the melodious offspring of blackface cakewalks and patriotic marches, that perfectly captures the optimism and energy of the America in the early 1900s. It’s aptly titled too, for Doctorow manages to capture the energy of the era, a time of hitherto unheard of growth and prosperity, a time when coal miners took on the capitalists for safer work conditions and fair pay, and won; a time when a single, socially- minded photographer, documenting immigrant ghettos, took pictures powerful enough to move a president and serve as evidence of the necessity of improved housing conditions for the poor; a time when American entrepreneurs amassed more wealth than some European monarchy, through little more than hard work and talent. However, it was also the era of Jim Crow legislation and the venomous prejudice that made it impossible for a black man to materially enjoy his success, say, by driving a shiny new Model T Ford – but more on that later.

Although too many people, unprotected by social safety nets or workplace regulations, lived and worked in squalor, the first decade and a half of the twentieth century brought with it a general sense of hope and optimism, and it’s the paradoxes of this period, the progressive enlightenment and conservative barbarism, the frosty rationality and fuzzy superstition, the fervent patriotism and homicidal anarchy, that E.L. Doctorow builds Ragtime around.

Set in New Rochelle, NY and New York City, the book centers on an upper-class family known only by their roles in relation to a young male observer: Mother, Father, Mother’s Younger Brother, Grandfather. And while they could stand-in for any of a certain type of family – well-off, white, entrepreneurial – they are remarkable, in all their anonymity, for the ways in which they burst out of type, in spite of themselves: Father, a manufacturer of patriotic paraphernalia, tags along with his flags on Arctic expeditions, something of a hobbyist explorer; Mother, radically progressive without knowing it, befriends Sarah, the black mother of the illegitimate baby Mother finds buried in the garden, and ends up raising the black child as her own; Younger Brother builds bombs to aid a series of rebels after his heart is broken by the infamous Evelyn Nesbit, wife of the morphine-addicted sadist and millionaire, Harry Thaw. In what was billed as “The Crime of the Century,” Thaw famously blew off the face of Nesbit’s long-time lover, the architect, Stanford White, in the roof-top garden at Madison Square Gardens.

In fact, throughout the book, the whole family, not just Younger Brother, have connections of varying importance with historical figures: Mother serves Harry Houdini lemonade when his car breaks down in front of their house; a heartbroken Younger Brother takes to following Emma Goldman and her revolutionaries around; Father helps to end a standoff in J. Pierpont Morgan’s house. And while this anonymous family plays its bit role in history, cultural trends bring the major players together: J. Pierpont Morgan tries to interest Henry Ford in joining his secret society founded on Egyptian-flavoured occultism; Harry Houdini impresses a mistaken Archduke Franz Ferdinand as the inventor of a flying machine; Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung happen upon Evelyn Nesbit at a street art stall devoted to silhouette art.

However, for all the optimism of the early 20th century, these were far from perfect times: racism was still rampant and institutionalized. Coalhouse Walker is a black musician doomed by his well-groomed confidence and articulate manner and the father of the baby Mother found in the garden. When Mother and Father take Sarah and the baby into their home, Coalhouse drives out from Harlem, every Sunday, his shiny red Model T Ford glinting through the streets of New Rochelle like a flickering flame. This is too much for the men of the Emerald Isle Engine, a volunteer fire brigade, and when Coalhouse fails to show them the deference they feel due, they destroy his car. After Sarah is killed in her misguided attempt to appeal to the federal government for help, Coalhouse’s sets out for revenge, bringing New Rochelle to its knees in terror.

Meticulously researched, this book alludes heavily to historical facts, however, Doctorow’s deft hand keeps the narrative from sagging under the weight of it all, and just as no historical account can ever be free of interpretation, Doctorow’s prose, however deceptively declarative, is steeped in judgment. For example:

“At palaces in New York and Chicago people gave poverty balls. Guests came dressed in rags and ate from tin plates and drank from chipped mugs. Ballrooms were decorated to look like mines with beams, iron tracks and miner’s lamps. Theatrical scenery firms were hired to make outdoor gardens look like dirt farms and dining rooms like cotton mills. Guests smoked cigar butts offered to them on silver trays. Minstrels performed in blackface. One hostess invited everyone to a stockyard ball. Guests were wrapped in long aprons and their heads covered with white caps. They dined and danced while hanging carcasses of bloody beef trailed around the walls on moving pulleys. Entrails spilled on the floor. The proceeds were for charity.”

As I read Ragtime an American flag billowed in the periphery of my mind’s eye like an animated icon, as if all the threads of the story were woven together to create one of Father’s flags. However, this wonderful exploration of early 20th-century America will appeal not only to history buffs, but to anyone interested in great fiction.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 140 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House Trade Paperbacks (May 8, 2007)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	E. L. Doctorow
EXTRAS:	Wikipedia on Ragtime
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  All the Time in the World Homer and Langley The March

Bibliography:

• Welcome to Hard Times (1960)
• Big As Life (1966)
• The Book of Daniel (1971)
• Ragtime (1974) 
• Loon Lake (1980)
• World’s Fair (1985)
• Billy Bathgate (1989) / 
• The Waterworks (1994)
• City of God (February 2000)
• Sweet and Stories (May 2004)
• The March (September 2005)
• Homer & Langley (September 2009)
• All the Time in the World: New and Selected Stories (March 2011)

Movies from books:

• Ragtime (1981)
• Billy Bathgate

“They love one another with an atavistic ferocity, though, it occurs to Babe sitting in the sunporch, these days perhaps they do not like one another. But she is asking too much of them. Friendship, like marriage, is not all of a piece.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JUL 28, 2011)

“War…next to love, has captured the world’s imagination,” said the British lexicographer Eric Partridge in 1914. And indeed it has. in English classes, we rapidly become acquainted with The Naked and the Dead, All Quiet on the Western Front, For Whom The Bell Tolls, From Here to Eternity, Catch 22, Slaughterhouse Five…the list goes on and on.

But here’s what we don’t read about: the personal battles that are fought on the home front. We don’t get an upfront-and-personal look at the women behind the men and what war means to them…and to the children they create together.

Next To Love starts out very strong. We meet three childhood friends in Massachusetts – Babe, Millie, and Grace – whose men are on the cusp of going off to World War II. Ms. Feldman deftly juggles their stories and breathes life into their characters. Grace is the beauty who is married to the heir of one of the town’s most illustrious citizens and has a young daughter; Millie is married to Pete, the pharmacist’s son; and Babe is the feisty wrong-side-of-the-tracks gal who is in a committed relationship with an upstanding man who wants to become a teacher.

The period details are handled beautifully. Ellen Feldman summons up an age where instant communication (cell phones, Internet, etc.) did not exist and when lovers wrote their heart out in letters. It’s an age where women were divided into “nice girls” and “tramps” and men kept a stiff upper lip and talked about “honor” and “duty.” And it’s an age when the telegram is feared and one town can suddenly lose several of its beloved American boys overnight.

It’s also a time when there’s a clear divide between men and women. “The husbands speak the language of drills, marches, and officers who don’t know which end is up; the wives speak the dialect of carping landladies, dirty bathrooms and no hot water to wash their hair, and endless spirit-killing games of bridge. Since there is no common tongue between them, they communicate in sex,” writes Ms. Feldman. In this aspect, the book calls to mind another excellent one: Siobhan Fallon’s You Know When The Men Are Gone.

Profound change comes after the war. The novel takes on a lot in a scant 300 pages and the characters I had come to love in the first half begin to feel a little bit like stand-ins as the forces of history flow past. Yet Ms. Feldman’s riveting style keeps the reader in a “what’s next?” mode.

We are at their side as they try to understand the men who have been forever changed by the horrors of war; one of them has what would be called post-traumatic stress disorder today. We see the toll it takes on their young children who can only fantasize about the fathers they have never met. And we are on the sidelines of what is now familiar milestones: the way that black veterans are shuffled aside after the war, unable to participate in the new prosperity; the treatment of women as frivolous things, not worthy of jobs or deep thoughts; the bigotry against Jews, ironically, after a war where six million of them were callously murdered.

Ultimately, the book is focused on female friendship – at turns, courageous, poignant, and fragile. The friendships are not idealized, but rather portrayed to be sustaining, enduring, and nurturing. At its core, it is about survival through life, love, children, war, grief, and resurgence, delivered with just the right amount of drama and intensity.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 88 readers
PUBLISHER:	Spiegel & Grau (July 26, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ellen Feldman
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	As mentioned above: You Know When The Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon Read our review of Ellen Feldman’s: Scottsboro Rearview Mirror

Bibliography:

• AKA Katherine Walden (1982)
• Conjugal Rites (1986)
• Looking for Love (1990)
• Too Close For Comfort (1994)
• Rearview Mirror (1996)
• God Bless the Child (1998)
• Lucy: A Novel (2003)
• The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank (2005)
• Scottsboro (2008)
• Next to Love (July 2011)

“He wanted to work when other people worked, go out to dinner at restaurants that proclaimed their names in fancy gold script above the entrance and used starched white tablecloths and heavy silverware; he wanted to go to the theater and he wanted to ride in cabs as a passenger.   Most of all he wanted to go to bed when it was actually dark outside, and make love to a beautiful woman, more than one even, who wouldn’t put up with a man that arrived at seven in the morning and slept until one.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JUL 14, 2011)

Family sagas have long been a staple among American best-sellers; the examples are wide and vast. The very predictability of the family saga genre promises an absorbing yet familiar reading experience: the once-poor yet highly attractive and charismatic main character who overcomes all kinds of adversities, goes through heartbreak and scandal, and then emerges older, wiser, and in most cases, wealthier than before (or at the very least, with enough knowledge to become wealthier).

Sharon Pomerantz mines this territory once more with Rich Boy, a novel infused with a heavy dose of melodrama combined with the realism of growing up American and Jewish in the pivotal years of the 60s through the 80s.

Robert Vishniak is a character on the rise. We meet him when he is a pre-teen, pickpocketing his rich relative’s wallet so that his father will not have to experience the shame of losing at a card game. The stage is set: we know he is resourceful and will do whatever it takes to succeed.

In the years ahead, Robert will show his resourcefulness in many ways: with his well-heeled college roommate who harbors a “shameful” (in some eyes) secret, with his unprecedented rise in his chosen law firm, with his choice of stunning women (all of whom are inevitably drop-dead gorgeous, sexually aggressive, and somewhat manipulative). He will also experience adversity with his first true love – Gwendolyn, an extremely fragile, socially conscious, vulnerable, and yes, gorgeous and doomed young woman.

Sharon Pomerantz is at her best when she delves into an exploration of Jewish-American life in the 1960s-1980s: the one-time outsiders assimilating and taking their deserved place within the social hierarchy. The clash between the impoverished and frugal world that Robert shares with his birth family and the opportunities that are opening themselves for him is crisply done. Here is Robert, reflecting on the privileged life he shares with his moneyed wife and their young daughter:

“Why now, when his daughter never needed to step inside a subway, and every major possession they owned came with insurance and an alarm, why now did he feel so nervous, as if he had woken up in the wrong life – a life lived from car windows and behind locked doors?”

The paranoia of the Nixon and Vietnam years, the real estate and commodities boom and bust, the drug culture and over-the-top parties of the affluent, the wheeling-dealing of law firms – all this is handled with aplomb. Less successfully done is the focus on his Robert’s many relationships. The women are mostly caricatures: the self-destructive and forever-remembered first love, the cold and moneyed wife, the young-and-genuine actress on the cusp of discovery…as readers, we’ve met these women before.

Still, this is a particularly American story – a Jewish-American story – of the class divides between rich and poor, rich and obscenely rich. It’s a story of  “a family built for the 1970s.” Those who like straightforward, old-fashioned, rags-to-riches sagas will likely enjoy Rich Boy a great deal.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 45 readers
PUBLISHER:	Twelve (July 13, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Sharon Pomerantz
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud

Bibliography:

• Rich Boy (August 2010)

“So, without precise coordinates, deprived of places and dates, I began to exist. The imprecision extended to my name; and to keep from boring the reader again with the narrative cliché of identity problems, the facile what’s-in-a-name, I’ll simply say that I was baptized — yes, with a splash of holy water and everything: my mother might be a convinced iconoclast, but she didn’t want her only son ending up in limbo on her account — as José Beckman, son of the crazy Gringo who killed himself out of homesickness before the arrival of his descendant.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JUN 18, 2011)

When Joseph Conrad was working on Nostromo in the early 1900s, and setting it in the fictional Latin American country of Costaguana, he found that his first-hand knowledge of the region, based on a couple of brief shore visits a quarter-century earlier, was insufficient. He therefore consulted friends who had spent greater time in northern South America and constructed a setting that is entirely believable, not only in its composite geography but also in its way of life and political turmoil. Now Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez imagines that Conrad might have had one further contact, José Altamirano, born in Colombia but recently arrived in London as an exile from Panama, following the province’s secession from Colombia in the revolution of 1903. Writing now in 1924, the year of Conrad’s death, Altamirano believes that the novelist has stolen his life story and that of his country to make a fiction of his own, utterly obliterating him in the process.

Altamirano writes in a voice that is immediately attractive. Witty, knowing, speaking directly to his readers, and making hay with narrative and historical conventions, he is an engaging travel companion and tour guide to the past century of Colombian history. Kudos to the translator Anne McLean for maintaining especially the humor of this voice, as when General Rafael Uribe Uribe dies “with an ax embedded in his skull and the weight of several civil wars on his shoulders,” or a group of envious conspirators break in on Simón Bolívar in bed with his mistress, “determined that this coitus shall be interruptus.” Altamirano’s story begins with the birth of his father in 1820, a Renaissance man who is simultaneously a lawyer, a doctor, and a writer, until exiled from the capital as a liberal and unbeliever. José himself is born in 1855, and remains in ignorance of his father until his late teens, when he goes off to Panama — at this time still a Colombian province — to find him. Coincidentally, a young seaman named Józef Konrad Korzeniowski makes his one visit to Panama at about the same time, gun-running with a French ship. The two do not meet.

It is probably going to be difficult for a foreign reader to keep up with the changing political situation in Colombia itself, but it would be worth Googling the history of Panama, especially the difficult building of the railway across the isthmus, the failed French plan to cut a sea-level canal between the Atlantic and the Pacific, the horrendous loss of life to yellow fever and loss of capital to fraudulent speculation, and the American involvement in securing a sovereign zone in a newly-independent country where the canal would ultimately be built. All these form the background to Altamirano’s personal story, which has more than its share of danger, love, and loss. Vásquez loses none of his narrative virtuosity, but halfway through his book begins to pall, partly because the mixture of personal and political no longer seems to gel, and partly because he also begins to tell the parallel story of Conrad in Europe and Africa. Though interesting enough in itself, the parallels seem forced and both stories get diluted. For that matter, the similarities between Altamirano’s story and Nostromo are not really that close at all, and good though Vásquez’ sense of place may be, Conrad’s is even better. The moral climax of the book depends entirely upon which side one backs in the Panamanian revolution, and while Altamirano clearly feels deeply, it is difficult for a Gringo to have any horse in that race at all, making it hard to sympathize with the author’s crippling guilt.

So other than an entertaining and swashbuckling yarn, what is the novel about? Any light it casts on Conrad and his Nostromo is relatively trivial; this does not even have the relevance that, say, Jean Rhys’ High Wind in Jamaica has to Jane Eyre. But in a less specific sense, it is a fascinating exploration of history and fiction. When Altamirano complains to Conrad “It’s not the story of my country,” the novelist replies: “Of course not. It’s the story of MY country. It’s the story of Costaguana.” Fact has become fiction. But the whole book is about the reshaping of fact. As each regime takes over from the other, it’s justifies its aims in the reframing of history and the writing of bad but patriotic poetry. The senior Altamirano practices a form of “refractive journalism” in Panama, bending the truth, and is paid by the Canal Company to write copy that will keep investors coming up with the money. His son uses every narrative trick at his disposal to present or conceal facts as he sees fit. And even the author plays the game by including among his solemn list of works cited an entirely fictitious history written by a fictitious character invented by Conrad for his Nostromo!

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (June 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Guardian article on Juan Gabriel Vásquez
EXTRAS:	Wikipedia page on Nostromo
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Bibliography:

• Los Amantes de Todos Los Santos (2001)
• The Informers (2004)
• The Secret History of Costaguana (2007; 2011 in US)
• The Sound of Things Falling (August 2013)

“And I think it will be a good thing if I write everything down, because I’m an unusual person. I don’t mean a diary – that’s ridiculous for a trendy girl like me. But I want to write like a movie, because my life is like that and it’s going to become even more so. ”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (JUN 14, 2011)

There is nothing fake or “artificial” about the heroine of this surprising work of fiction. First published in 1932 in Germany, it was followed very quickly by its English translation in 1933. It was an immediate hit for a young author’s second novel; praised for its pointed sense of humour as well as the underlying critique of society. The story, written in the form of the central character’s musings and diary, blends a young woman’s daily struggles to make ends meet with, an at times sarcastic, yet always, witty commentary on daily life among the working classes during the dying days of the Weimar Republic.

Irmgard Keun cleverly uses her memorable character – Doris – who is as naïve as she is shrewd – to convey her own astute observations and critique of social and economic conditions of the time. While many aspects of the impending political disaster could not be predicted, Keun conveys her presentiments through Doris’s experiences. Despite the less than rosy picture it draws for Doris, the story is written in a deceptively light-hearted style, using the regional and working class colloquial language of her character with some Berliner phraseology and idioms thrown in. Keun’s vivid imagery and metaphors are often unexpected as they are hilarious. Kathie van Ankum’s new English translation captures Doris’s voice vividly and with great skill, even though Keun’s peculiar language with its grammatical mistakes and local idioms is close to impossible to transpose into another language.

Running out of options to subsidize her meagre income as a less than competent typist, Doris dreams of making it big in the movies. “I want to be a shine” (Ich will ein Glanz sein) is her ambition. She has the looks for it and her choice of boyfriends is aimed at having them provide the necessary accessories for her status as a glamour girl. Options appear to open when she lands a one-line action part against stiff competition. Unfortunately she gets carried away with her brief moment of “Glanz,” and walks off with a fur coat that “wants me and I want it – and now we have each other.”Sensuality is prominent when Doris describes fabric, often linking it to smell, objects and the people she meets.

Her closeness and loyalty to her former colleague and friend Therese is touching, relying on her as much as wanting to support her in turn. To escape being discovered with the fur coat, she leaves her mid-size town for Berlin, the centre of fashion, the arts and the movie business. Her luck goes up and down, depending on the circumstances and generosity of the current boyfriend. All the while she pines for her first and only love, Hubert. As soon as she feels settled into an almost “normal” life of some luxury with one partner, events force her to leave quietly or secretly. Yet, unflinchingly, she pursues her dream and the search for a Mister Right. Will she find him? As we follow Doris through a year’s seasons, we realize that we take in much more: Keun’s rich and detailed portrayal of Berlin and brilliant characterization of some of its multi-faceted people, always seen, of course, from Doris’s perspective.

Not surprisingly, given Keun’s topics and social critique, Keun’s books were blacklisted and all available copies confiscated in 1933. No longer able to publish Keun went into exile to Holland, where she continued to enjoy great popularity among other German exile friends. When Holland was invaded in 1940 she had to flee again. Reports of her suicide enabled her to return under cover to Germany, where she survived until the end of the war. Unfortunately, Keun could not rekindle the public’s interest in her writing; she died in 1982, lonely and poor. Her books were rediscovered decades later and have also benefited from recent re-translations. Reading it today, The Artificial Silk Girl (Das kunstseidene Mädchen) has lost nothing of its charm and relevance as a portrait of a working girl’s life in Berlin of 1932. It is a rare glimpse into a society on the brink of dramatic change, seen through the eyes of a working class young woman. (Translated by Kathie von Ankum.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Other Press (June 14, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Irmgard Keun
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More books brought back to life: Death of the Adversary by Hans Keilson Esther’s Inheritance by Sandor Marai

Translated Bibliography:

• Gilgi – One of Us (1931)
• The Artificial Silk Girl (1932; June 2011)
• Grown-ups Don’t Understand (1936)
• After Midnight (1937; May 2011)
• Child of All Nations (1938; March 2010)
• If We Were all Good: Stories (1950)