“After she moved to Brooklyn, my mother collected strays — human strays, not animals. every time I went to visit her, there seemed to be another “assistant,” poet, drifter, or just plain charity case living in one of the rooms, and i worried they might take advantage of her, rob her, or even kill her in her sleep.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (MAR 30, 2014)

Harriet “Harry” Burden was an obscurely known artist for much of her life, and also a wife, mother, and scholar. She was criticized for her small architectural works that consisted of too much busyness–cluttered with figures and text that didn’t fit into any schema. Her husband, Felix Lord, was an influential, successful art collector, but who couldn’t help his wife for alleged fear of nepotism. After Felix died, Harriet came back with a vengeance, and under three male artist’s pseudonyms (artists that she sought out), she created a combination art (part performance, if you consider the pseudonyms as part of the process) a trilogy which was successful, and even more lauded posthumously. They were shown individually under the names of “The History of Western Art, ” “The Suffocation Rooms,” and “Beneath.” Later, when unmasked (so to speak), they were identified as Maskings. I am reluctant to reduce and categorize Harriet–although labels such as “feminist” may apply.

Harriet wanted to:

“…uncover the complex workings of human perception and how unconscious ideas about gender, race, and celebrity influence a viewer’s understanding of a given work of art.”

Moreover, it is about unmasking ourselves–which includes the hermaphroditic selves. We are all an amalgam of male and female, or male and female perceptions and the plurality — attributed behaviors. There’s seepage beyond the paradigm.

Again, that may be too reductionist for the complex workings of Harry’s art, and of her psychology and her life. This novel is like an exposé of Harriet’s life, as told via her friends, colleagues, children (including one passage by her son, who suffered from Asperger’s), lover (her significant other after Felix’s death), critics, roommates, and herself. The chapters by Harriet come from her private notebooks/diaries, labeled by letters of the alphabet, and found after her death.

One could call this a presentation novel — a novel that appears more as a collection of writings that make up her life, replete with footnotes. Included are esoteric and big ideas about art, art movements, and philosophy. However, Hustvedt is such a spectacular writer, that it feels very much like a biography, and often an autobiography (sometimes reliable, at other times unreliable — you as reader decide). Hustvedt combines big ideas with story. There are novels, such as written by David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, and others, who are famous for this style. The novelist Nicholas Mosley writes his story and characters as subservient to the big ideas. This alienates some readers. It is purely subjective to taste, but, personally, I love a cleavage of ideas and story/character. In my opinion, Hustvedt did a superb job of integrating the two. The character of Harriet was pervasive, even in the chapters that didn’t belong to her, because of her inimitable voice that saturated all others who populated the story. Harriet habituated these big ideas, so that it was organically composed.

Harry’s emotional and psychological presence was forceful, formidable. We learn that she saw a psychiatrist twice a week for the last eight years of her life, and her best friend was a psychotherapist. She was a dedicated wife to her husband and children, fraught over the secret life of her husband, and protective over the fragility of her son, Ethan. All vectors pointed back to Harriet–the enigma of her, and the magnitude of her vitality. She was ubiquitous in every page of this book.

I was familiar with some of the scholars/academics/artists/philosophers that Harriet mentioned due to other novels and books I had read. Parisian Guy Debord, leader of the Situationist International movement, had a prominent place in Billy Moon. The Situationists advanced the notion of the spectacularized–a mass consumerism where every experience is packaged by the market to be seductive and glamorous, and sooner or later, we experience the copy as an original experience rather than the experience itself — all is commodified. Harriet assimilated this philosophy (and others to demonstrate the conundrum of perception). One of Harriet’s favorite philosophers was the German, Edmund Husserl, who expounded on phenomenology, the study of the structures of experience and consciousness. It all ties into the assemblage of Harriet — like her art, she is made of many miniature selves that together form a whole. Or, perhaps, a panoply of selves.

And, most dear to Harry’s heart — perhaps her heroine — was Margaret Cavendish, a duchess and groundbreaking, prolific writer of science, predated science fiction, and a utopian romance called “A Blazing World,” from which the eponymous title of this novel originates. Cavendish died in obscurity, having published a memoir in which she yearns to one day be recognized. Hundreds of years after her death, her desire is realized. Is this a key to Harriet’s psyche?

One doesn’t have to be a scholar or artist to relate to this book. In fact, it is written in a highly accessible style, with a smoldering, emotional, and psychological expressiveness. In my opinion, this is a subtle meta-fiction — one that draws attention to itself as a work of art, while keys to the truth of Harriet Burden are revealed. As individuals, we all have our perception of quality and merit; therefore, readers will come away with our respective portraits of Harriet, and the thrumming purpose of her story. For fans of Siri Hustvedt, this is highly recommended. It equals the power of What I Loved, while being different in approach. Hustvedt has a nimble way of disclosing the incongruous features of her characters that make them both distinctive and sympathetic. By the end of this book, I could imagine a three-dimensional Harriet Burden walking out of the pages.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Simon & Schuster (March 11, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Siri Hustvedt
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Sorrows of an American

Bibliography:

• The Blindfold (1992)
• The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996)
• What I Loved (2003)
• The Sorrows of an American (2008)
• The Summer Without Men (2011)
• The Blazing World (March 2014)

Essays:

• A Plea for Eros (2005)
• Living, Thinking, Looking (2012)

“I guess you’re wondering why I’m telling you this.”

I shook my head. I knew why, even then, young as I was and afraid of her. I knew she was telling me because she had to tell me, showing me because she had to show someone. This room was her work as much as it was Alena’s. Alena might have made the room, but Agnes had conserved it—exhaustively, painstakingly—with all the care, patience, attention, exertion at her disposal. It was a task literally without end. Did the room exist if no one saw it? And if it didn’t exist, did Agnes?

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (MAR 6, 2014)

Alena is a novel about the art world and the people who inhabit it. It is said to be an homage to du Maurier’s Rebecca. However, not having read Rebecca in no way took anything away from my love of this novel. This novel stands on its own and I loved it.

The novel gets its name from the first curator of The Nauk, a private museum on the Cape in Massachusetts. For fifteen years, Alena held this position and gained a reputation of being bigger than life. She was headstrong, other-worldly, manipulative, dark, flirtatious, and intently involved in conceptual art, especially art that related to the human body. As time progressed her tastes became darker, leaning more and more towards the bloody, death-glorifying, and often gross renderings of the physical. As the novel opens, Alena has disappeared. She has been gone for two years and is presumed dead though her body has never been found. The prevailing belief is that she drowned by taking a swim in the ocean when the currents were too strong for her.

Bernard Augustin, Chair of the Board of the Nauk, goes to the Venice Biennale as he does every year. He is a well-known collector and figure in the art world. In Venice he hobnobs with the top tier art dealers, gallery owners and collectors. It is in Venice that he meets a young female curator from the midwest who is there with her controlling boss on her first visit abroad. (Interestingly, the name of this young curator is never provided in the book.) She meets Bernard by chance and is in awe of him and a bit in love as well despite the fact that he is gay. They hit it off intellectually and emotionally and on an impulse, Bernard offers her the position of curator at The Nauk. She accepts, not actually knowing what she is getting in to.

Once at the museum, the young curator is met with a staff that is still loyal to Alena and resentful of someone taking her place. Alena had promised the next show to a conceptual artist, a Gulf War veteran and multiple amputee who displays scenes of war with body parts and lots of blood. She, however, wants to decide on her own what the next show will be and she offers it to a ceramic artist who makes porcelain butterflies. The Nauk hasn’t had a show in two years and Bernard tells her that the show must be up in two months, by Labor Day. There is a lot of angst between the employees and the curator, and between the curator and the ceramist.

The ambiance of the novel is gothic and eerie. There are a lot of strange characters and happenings that serve to upset and off put the curator each time she attempts to accomplish something. Bernard is not there most of the time to ease the way in for her as he travels to his homes in New York, Colorado and Europe or else he’s attending art-related business far away.

The information about art is comprehensive. The author, Rachel Pastan, knows her conceptual art very well and her knowledge of art history is impressive. This book hooked me right away and I could not put it down. I resented anything that got in the way of my reading it; it was that good. So I present to you this review from a reader who has not read Rebecca but loves this novel as it stands on its own with no history or homage to any other piece of literature but solely to art.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 26 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (January 23, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rachel Pastan
EXTRAS:	Excerpt and another Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another to try: The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner

Bibliography:

• This Side of Married (2004)
• Lady of the Snakes (2008)
• Alena (January 2014)

“How angry am I? You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (FEB 20, 2014)

The eponymous title of this penetrating and artful novel refers to third-grade schoolteacher and unfulfilled artist Nora Eldridge, who has lived in the Boston area her whole life. It is also the book’s principal motif, surfacing periodically to describe Nora’s various attributes as an uncharacteristically plain woman, a woman who doesn’t rock any boats or shine like a supernova– one who is always nice, mannerly, and unthreatening to others. Essentially, anonymous and invisible. Nora has previously accepted this about herself, living up to the part with emblematic virtuosity.

Unfortunately, this Woman Upstairs quality also tends to create a two-dimensional figure to others, a woman easily dismissed and placed in a mold, or a bin–conventionally boring, predictable, and reliably bland. But, now, at 37, she is haunted by that Marianne Faithful song about Lucy Jordan, “At the age of 37 she realized she would never ride through Paris in a sports car, with the warm wind in her hair... ” (Remember that song from Thelma and Louise? It does make me think of someone on the brink)

Now is “The time at which you have to acknowledge that your life has a horizon… that you will never be president, or a millionaire, and if you’re a childless woman, you will quite possibly remain that way.”

One day, Nora meets Reza Shahid, a student of mixed heritage. His Parisian artist mother, Sirena, is of Italian descent and his Lebanese father, Skandar, is an intellectual and Ethics Historian. They recently moved to the Boston area from Paris. Nora is immediately drawn into their world and attracted to them, as a family and as individuals. Nora is single and childless, and thinks of Reza as she would a son. He is shy and also quite stunning.

So, Nora has finally met the contrast to her ordinariness, a worldly, charismatic family of three, which, enigmatically, turns Nora’s quiet desperation to a barely controlled, boiling rage. We don’t know where all this rage is coming from, at first. That is part and parcel of the immaculate pacing and architecture of this novel, a narrative so deftly chilling that I think my head stood up on my hairs!

Throughout the book, Nora attempts to elucidate to the reader her deep love for all members of the Shahid family, and feels inadequate to do so without worrying that she falls into a clichéd description. She is often on the brink of expressing her profound feelings to Sirena and Skandar, which creates a marvelous reader tension as we bide our time, anticipating what Nora will convey, and how she will convey it. But the reader is constantly privy to her feelings:

“Just because something is invisible doesn’t mean it isn’t there. At any given time, there are a host of invisibles floating among us…[W]ho sees the invisible emotions, the unrecorded events? Who is it that sees love, more evanescent than any ghost, let alone catch it?”

Nora and Sirena rent a warehouse together as a space for working on their art. Sirena does installation art, with the names right out of fairy tales and myths. Her current project is Wonderland. To describe Sirena’s art–well, you could write a book about it, it is so florid, philosophical, and full of gimmicks and tricks. For example, she would create a world that appeared to be of lush gardens with visions of paradise, a fantasy for us to interpret. But, up close, you would see it is made of garbage and mottled by filth. Her installations limn the line between fantasy and reality, and are vast, expansive. Sirena is on the precipice of artistic success.

Nora’s art, on the other hand, is miniature, and exacting, and insular. She uses historical facts and pictures to piece together dioramas representing the rooms of famous people like Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson, choosing ripe moments and themes from their lives–such as Woolf’s rocks to commit suicide, and Dickinson’s obsession with death. Only Edie Sedgwick’s room would be designed out of the imagination, the only piece of her art that had a parallel to Sirena’s imaginative art–exemplifying that line between fantasy and reality.

There are numerous other motifs that resonate, such as Nora depicting life like a Fun House–at once zany and terrifying. Not really fun at all. We read excerpts of Nora revisiting her childhood, which will explain some of her covetousness, and reticence. At this time in her life, she hasn’t had a real passion, not for anything or anyone. All was sacrificed or quashed, in favor of becoming…The Woman Upstairs.

The prose is potent, humid, and allusional. And Messud makes it both provocative and claustrophobic, writing with an inflammatory formality that personifies Nora’s rage burning within her meager existence. There’s very little plot, but you will be on the edge of your seat, compelled. I turned the pages feverishly, as I couldn’t wait to know what went down with The Woman Upstairs.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 486 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Reprint edition (February 4, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Claire Messud
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Emperor’s Children

Bibliography:

• When the World Was Steady (1995)
• The Last Life (1999)
• The Hunters (2001)
• The Emperor’s Children (2006)
• The Woman Upstairs (2013)

“I don’t know how you can confuse drawings by Gustav Klimt with drawings by Egon Schiele. Schiele’s line jerks and cuts like a knife being dragged through flesh–his own, I suspect–whereas Klimt has fluid, caressing stroke. Schiele made a lot of interesting sketches of young girls, but wasn’t careful and eventually got himself a couple of weeks in jail. All I know is, if you let them hang around your studio and do whatever they’re forbidden to do at home, like reading a book or eating french fries or whatever, after a while they’ll relax and sprawl this way and that and now you’ve got yourself a spicy little twelve-year-old model, plus a chance at prison time.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (JAN 19, 2014)

Renato the Painter by Eugene Mirabelli is a fictional memoir about a contemporary painter living in the Boston area. The novel starts when Renato is just days old, a foundling, and continues to the present time, when he is in his 70’s. Renato is a man with a fierce pride in his art, unrepentant sexual appetites and strong personal loyalties. He is very dissatisfied with his status in the art world, feeling that the art world has left him behind. He hasn’t had a gallery show in some time and is getting depressed about his prospects. His family life is complicated. He lives in his studio on one side of the Charles River and his wife, Alba, lives in a condo on the other side. Their relationship is passionate, but sometimes combative. Both Renato and Alba appear comfortable living separate lives. Renato has children by Alba, his wife, and by Zoe, a sometimes lover. He sees both women who know and like each other. Renato has numerous friends, mostly other artists who he meets for drinks or coffee and to bemoan the state of the current art world. His best friend died some time ago and he misses him. He’s worried about his prostate and getting old and being forgotten.

Renato is living the life of the macho painter of the 1950’s. His life is filled with exuberant sex and no less exuberant memories. He has as much time as he wants in his studio. His wife, Alba, lives on the other side of the river, available for occasional sex, for good food, thoughtful advice and being a good mother. He regularly sees Zoe, one of his former lovers, with whom he has a child. Alba, Zoe and all their children know each other and are comfortable with the complicated family. Renato, for all his complaints about lack of recognition, appears to have no real financial worries. He gets to paint, to worry to his heart’s content, and to enjoy the love, lust and affection of others. His social life with other male artists is his chance to enjoy complaining about the sorry state of current art affairs.

Renato is in his 70’s, and the time is supposed to be now, but he graduated at 17 from High School in 1948, so he would be 82 or 83 today. His voice reminds me of artists I have met who would be in their 80’s today. The voice of his youth fits with the 1930’s. The novel captures that period well, and pretty accurately captures the voice of artists I knew in 2000, when they were then in their 70’s. His voice recalls the romantic machismo of the Beats, the abstract expressionists and their artistic progeny. There is an authentic ring to how he speaks about art and life, but it is somewhat anachronistic.

I found the book very enjoyable, although the last part rambles a bit. Renato is someone I would have liked to meet. I hear his voice loud and clear, but I can’t quite see the paintings. I understand Renato’s fears of ageing and dying unknown; his glorification of sexuality; and his artistic idealism. Peaceful coexistence within the complicated family is a bit implausible, but consistent with the myth of the bohemian artist.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	McPherson (May 14, 2012)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Eugene Mirabelli
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More on painters / artists: The Painter of Battles by Arturo Perez-Reverte Orchard by Larry Watson

Bibliography:

• The Burning Air (1959)
• The Way In (1968)
• No Resting Place (1972)
• The World at Noon (1994)
• The Language Nobody Speaks (1999)
• The Passion of Terri Heart (2004)
• The Goddess in Love with a Horse (2008)
• Renato The Painter (2012)

“Telling Sandro these things collapsed the layers between me as woman and me as child. Sandro saw both, loved both. He understood they were not the same. It was not the case that one thing morphed into another, child into woman. You remained the person you were before things happened to you.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JAN 1, 2014)

There isn’t much plot in this novel, but it is a hell of story/Bildungsroman of a young woman known as just Reno, an art studies graduate in 1977 who dared to race her Moto Valera motorcycle at high-speed velocities to create land art. Land art was a “traceless art” created from leaving an almost invisible line in the road from surging speeds at over 110 mph. “Racing was drawing in time.” Literally and figuratively.

This era generated a seminal movement in New York where artistic expression in the subversive sect was animate, inflamed, ephemeral, breathing — a mix of temporal and performance art and the avant-garde/punk scene. This was also an age of conceptual art, which grew out of minimalism and stressed the artist’s concept rather than the object itself. Time was the concept of Reno’s art, something to be acted upon.

“You have time. Meaning, don’t use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Don’t rush to meet it. Be a conduit…I felt this to be true. Some people might consider this passivity but I did not. I considered it living.”

The novel, narrated by Reno, is all about her observation and experiences as she comes of age in a revolutionary time. She lives in a shabby, run-down hole in the wall in New York–“blank and empty as my new life, with its layers upon layers of white paint like a plaster death mask over the two rooms, giving them an ancient urban feeling.”

As she gets caught up with the underground movement in the East Village, called Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers, and later with the Red Brigades of Rome, Reno is herself a conduit for the people she meets and gets involved with, such as her older, rebellious boyfriend, Sandro Valera, son of the Fascist-friendly mogul of Valera motorbikes.

Reno came to New York by way of Nevada, eager to demonstrate her art through photography and motorbikes. She’s “shopping for experience.” Sometime after a particularly moving one-night stand, and attempting to navigate her life and bridge her isolation and loneliness, she meets sculptor Sandro Valera and his friends, a group of radicals and artists who offer her exposure to working-class insurrection in this “mecca of individual points, longings, all merging into one great light-pulsing mesh, and you simply found your pulse, your place.”

Reno was looking for a sense of identity, and she wanted enchantment.

“Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren’t going to get it.”

The bridge between life and art, and Reno’s invigorating speed of 148 mph on the Bonneville Salt Flats, (where she went with her new friends to make land art), demonstrates the crossover between gestures and reality, and a liberating energy that was “an acute case of the present tense. Nothing mattered but the milliseconds of life at that speed.”

On the one hand, Reno seeks self-sovereignty, but on the other hand, she inhabits a male-dominated and often misogynistic landscape where men exploit women for artistic and political gain. When she visits Sandro’s family in Italy, she is subjected to derision by Sandro’s misanthropic brother and his sneering mother.

In another scene, a male photographer asks women to punch themselves in the face until they are battered, and then pose for him. Reno narrates this with an unemotional but subtle raillery, noting the incongruity of women on a pretense of independence. She acutely observes that “certain acts, even as they are real, are also merely gestures.” And, in Rome, the question of feminine mystique versus male dominance is addressed by a Red Brigade revolutionary radio broadcaster, when he states to women that “Men connect you to the world, but not with your own self.”

Are women “meant to speed past, just a blur” as Reno speculates? And the more I think about that line, the more paradox it evokes.

Artists, dreamers, terrorists, comrades, iconoclasts, all populate this novel, replete with iconic images and fallen debris in a swirl of electrical momentum. New York and Rome aren’t just scenic backdrops; they come alive as provocateurs– firebrand cities with flame-throwing agitators.

Kushner is a heavyweight writer, a dense, volatile and sensuous portraitist of the iconographic and the obscure. Arch and decisive moments throughout the novel heighten the ominous tension that rumbles below the surface, and the reader wholly inhabits the spaces of Reno’s consciousness, and those of the people she meets.

“All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment…And when we feel pessimism crouching on our shoulder like a stinking vulture…we banish it, we smother it with optimism. We want, and our want kills doom. That is how we’ll take the future and occupy it like an empty warehouse. It’s an act of love, pure love. It isn’t prophecy. It’s hope.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 194 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (April 2, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rachel Kushner
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt Interview with Rachel Kushner On writing Flamethrowers
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Hard to find anything similar, but will mention this one anyway: My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru

Bibliography:

• Telex from Cuba (2008)
• The Flamethrowers (2013)

“I am imprinting this upon my memory,” she said. “The southern exposure of a winter morning light, the sounds of thaw, water dripping off the eaves, the squirrels…Sometimes I seem to know, in the split of a second of a moment, that it will be a moment I’ll want to keep.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster  (SEP 12, 2011)

This is a beautiful book. If you want to read something that has the same effect as gazing at a vast and perfect ink-wash painting, calming and yet utterly absorbing, reach for this. Like the tiniest haze of seeping ink will be skillful enough to convey a distant village nestling in the hills, or the flight of a crane; there is not a word misplaced in this small and lovely work. Its theme is poetry, and indeed the exquisite style does full justice to the subject.

The plot follows the lives of a handful of graduate poetry students and their teacher. The initial focus is on their interactions and early relationships during university years, but as the story progresses the camera lens zooms with painful precision on subsequent pinpoints of time.

The technique of the writing is such that it leaves one with an impression of overlapping layers rather than a well-woven tapestry, the latter of which is the more usual impression in a well-plotted novel. Life depicted here is more a palimpsest than a continuous narrative. There’s an almost fatalistic crystallisation of the view of the past seeping into the present (or the ongoing) that’s highly peculiar, and entirely seductive.

It’s even more astonishing to find such alluring excellence in a book that is essentially about writing. Generally, tomes ranting away about the torment of literary endeavours and the social inadequacies of their perpetrators are best put out of their misery immediately by means of a swift bonfire. But rather than wallow first-hand in the self-absorption and uncertainty as so many of these efforts tend to, Chang depicts a view onto these same themes that’s as unnervingly detached as a high-resolution spy satellite picture: taken from space, but accurate enough to read the print on a newspaper. The style is formal, bordering on the stilted, the tone even and quiet.

Two of the central characters are the poetry student friends Roman and Bernard. Roman is driven, moderately gifted, insistently handsome and, eventually, inordinately successful. Bernard is his counterpart, with caricature-like introversion, religious torment and more than a hint of obsessive compulsive disorder born out in poverty, and the novel makes no bones about his role in the narrative as the “traditional” poet.

These extreme stereotypes should be flat shadows by rights. Instead they’re almost luminous, depicted by refraction, like a painter using the space that is not to denote the presence of an object. These two characters vie with each other, in their peculiar way, for the attentions of their teacher Miranda Sturgis, the acclaimed and established poet. Their differing approaches, viewpoints and degree of success in gaining her approval and attention are at the core of the novel.

Along with the much-debated question of “why write poetry,” the novel explores facets of the role of the teacher (or mentor), the relationship of the mentor with the recipient, and the progression of the student in turn becoming mentor. The development here is linked structurally and thematically to the ageing process, which gives the novel as a whole a feeling of natural evolution; something organic and inevitable. Perhaps this is why I can’t remember reading anything with so little a sense of contrivance. Despite, or perhaps because of, the meticulous precision with which it’s put together.

The character reveal is also atypical. It’s not so much a reader discovering an already-formed entity but the entity and the reader making the discovery together. Again, the sense of extreme detachment fused with extreme intimacy is slightly dizzying.

If you read action thrillers exclusively, then I suppose this book is not for you. Apart from that I’d recommend it to anybody. You don’t need to know about writing or poetry, just be ready to think about why art is necessary for life. And read a jolly good story in the meantime, complete with romance, betrayal, suspense and verve. It’s quiet, but it’s a page-turner.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 15 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (September 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Lan Samantha Change
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another book on poetry: The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

Bibliography:

• Hunger: A Novella (1998)
• Inheritance (2004)
• All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost (September 2010)

Annie held him tightly and said, “They fucked us up, Buster.”
“They didn’t mean to,” he replied.
“But they did,” she said.

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (SEP 5, 2011)

Perhaps it’s entirely appropriate that their last name is Fang. For Caleb and Camille are truly parasites—sucking the blood out of their children, while using them primarily in the service of their art. “Kids kill art,” the elder Fangs’ mentor once told them. Determined to prove him wrong, Caleb and Camille incorporate Annie and Buster, their two children, into their art—even referring to them as Child A and Child B, mere props in the various performance art sketches they carry out.

The resultant harm Caleb and Camille inflict on their children is venomous and destructive and the amazing thing about this debut novel is that the full extent of it all creeps up on the reader insidiously.

Performance art typically is art of an unconventional kind—not like the traditional staged plays, which follow a script. Instead performance artists create an atmosphere ripe for drama to happen; the unwitting audience is as much a part of the art as the artists themselves. In one such art piece, the elder Fangs print out fake coupons for a free chicken sandwich at a local mall. They then try to pass these coupons to mall customers and have the restaurant’s reaction recorded on camera. That the restaurant owners (nor the customers) don’t respond the way Caleb and Camille had hoped they would, is beside the point. The point is the Fangs have crafted a free-flowing drama to be recorded and savored forever.

Here is the big problem: Caleb and Camille are superb artists. They are so good at these spontaneous productions and worse, so prolific at it, that it is hard for Annie and Buster to tell the difference between real life and art. After all, adults, especially those who stage the art, can easily tell what’s going on. But what about kids? Annie and Buster can never tell when what they’re experiencing is simply life or yet another art project. Years later, when Buster is grown, his date tells him: “It’s like your family trained you to react to the world in a way that was so specific to their art that you don’t know how to interact with people in the real world. You act like every conversation is a buildup to something awful.” Predictably, he walks out on her.

Even worse, the kids’ feelings and emotions always come in second to the art. It doesn’t matter if Annie and Buster don’t want to participate in any of the Fangs’ elaborate pieces—they simply must. Wilson does a superb job of working the parent-child relationship in these pages. At various times, one wonders if the elder Fangs are just completely oblivious of the harm they are wreaking on their children or if they simply don’t care.

The Family Fang has chapters that alternate between the present where Buster and Annie are grown and their childhood past which is glimpsed through a series of performance art pieces.

In the present, Annie is a moderately successful actress who even won an Oscar nomination for one of her early roles. At the very beginning of the book though she comes undone when a producer asks her to go topless. Her childhood forever spent in pleasing her parents, Annie doesn’t quite know how to say “No” when presented with a situation she doesn’t want to agree to. Her parents having dismissed her newfound vocation as lowly and not even art, Annie is plagued with self-doubt. “Her worst fears,” Wilson writes, “what she’d convinced herself was not at all true, that being a Fang, the conduit for her parents’ vision, was perhaps the only worthwhile thing she had ever accomplished.”

Buster’s life is not much better—if anything, it’s worse. At least Annie has a bit of money. Buster takes to writing fiction initially. While his debut novel is moderately successful, his subsequent work gets bad reviews so he just gives up and instead takes on freelance writing gigs that barely keep him afloat.

Through an interesting set of circumstances Annie and Buster eventually again end up home at their parents’ house and Caleb and Camille are thrilled at the prospect of creating one last huge performance art piece together. Ultimately it remains to be seen whether kids indeed do kill art of if the reverse holds true -— if it is art that kills kids.

The Family Fang is Wilson’s debut novel and it is spectacular. The writing is so breezy and witty (it’s easy to mistake this novel for a comedy) that the dark undercurrents that work their way so subtly in this dazzling novel, stand out ever more sharply because of it.

In one of many brilliantly realized scenes in the book, Caleb and Camille convince Buster, much against his will, to participate in a beauty contest for girls. He is to wear a dress, impress the judges and win the crown. When understandably the little boy suggests Annie as a substitute, his parents tell him: “Annie winning a beauty pageant is not a commentary on gender and objectification and masculine influences on beauty. Annie winning a beauty pageant is a foregone conclusion, the status quo.” Fine. He does it: Buster wears the dress and wins the crown, which he then refuses to give up. Camille is outraged. “This is what we rebel against, this idea of worth based on nothing more than appearance. This is the superficial kind of symbol that we actively work against,” she reminds him. “It. Is. My. Crown.” Buster reminds her. It is a moment—one of many -— that will absolutely take your breath away. For an adult a beauty crown might represent the worst kind of “superficial symbol” but for a child who has just won it, it is simply a coveted prize—nothing more, nothing less. As Buster reminds us in this telling moment, not every moment in life need be a grand theatrical gesture or high art. Because if you look only for those, you can easily miss the mundane, everyday moments that bring us as much joy as well… art.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 150 readers
PUBLISHER:	Ecco (August 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kevin Wilson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another family business: Swamplandia by Karen Russell

Bibliography:

• Tunneling to the Center of the Earth : Stories (2009)
• The Family Fang (August 2011)

“The Chief believed if you sift through evil, at the very bottom you’ll find good. He believed that evil has its limits. Beauvoir didn’t. He believed that if you sift through good, you’ll find evil. Without borders, without brakes, without limit.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  SEP 02, 2011)

Three Pines is a village near Montréal that is so small it does not appear on any map. For its size, this town has had an inordinate number of murders; solving them is the job of Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté de Quebec and his team of detectives. This time, the victim is a woman, Lillian Dyson, whose art criticism years ago was so caustic that she was responsible for putting an end to budding careers. Louise Penny’s A Trick of the Light is all about artists—their insecurities, craving for recognition, pettiness, resentment, and jealousy.

Two artists, Clara Morrow and her husband, Peter, live in Three Pines, and Peter has been moderately successful. However, it is Clara who is having a private solo exhibition, a vernissage, at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Montréal. For years she toiled in relative obscurity, receiving nothing but “silence from a baffled and even bemused art world.” Now that Clara has come into her own, Peter has mixed feelings about his wife’s long overdue fame.

This novel deals with relationships and emotions. Gamache is still barely on speaking terms with Olivier Brulé, who bears a grudge against him. Moreover, Gamache still has nightmares about a bloody raid he conducted that went terribly wrong, nearly taking his life and that of his second-in-command, Jean Guy Beauvior. Jean Guy is a wreck, who relies on pain pills to get through the day and is planning to end his miserable marriage (“all the petty sordid squabbles, the tiny slights, the scarring and scabbing”).

Louise Penny understands what makes people tick. She knows that they often show one face to their family, friends, and neighbors, while they bury their true feelings under a façade of amiability. A Trick of the Light exposes the soul-destroying anger, the disappointments, and the bitter rancor that can eat a person up from within. She specifically examines the mind-set of alcoholics, who are capable of doing extensive damage before they are ready to admit that they desperately need help.

As a murder mystery, this is a fairly routine effort. There is little suspense (the list of people who had motive, means, and opportunity to kill Lillian is not particularly large) and most readers will not be shocked when Gamache unmasks the culprit. Penny is a stand-out for other reasons: her eloquent use of language, analysis of people’s psychological foibles, and her beautiful and sometimes humorous description of life in a place so tiny that everyone is intimately acquainted with everyone else. Ruth, an old drunk who insults people with wild abandon, Olivier and his beloved partner, Gabri, and Armand’s lovely wife, Reine-Marie, are all on hand, along with an assortment of art dealers, gallery owners, associates of the homicide victim, and the detectives who are under Gamache’s command. Penny explores what makes art memorable and also what it is like to struggle creatively. This alone makes A Trick of the Light both fascinating and, at times, poetic.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 287 readers
PUBLISHER:	Minotaur Books (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Louise Penny
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Missing Persons by Claire O’Donohue

Bibliography:

Chief Inspector Gamache novels:

• Still Life (2006)  /  
• Fatal Grace (2007) 
• The Cruelest Month (2008) 
• A Rule Against Murder (2009)
• The Brutal Telling (2009) 
• Bury Your Dead (2010)
• A Trick of the Light (2011) 
• The Beautiful Mystery (2012)
• How the Light Gets In (August 2013)

“Odd thoughts were entering my head again. And like before I had no idea where they were coming from. Odd, crazy thoughts: another job just about done, after running stupidly about for weeks, all the tracking, waiting, time spent and wasted, and what do you get but another dead body, then on to the next hit, another city, another bastard to track, another doomed man, to be taken out by me or someone else, it really made no difference, dead is dead. The same story, the same routine. You pull the trigger, the man falls. But what if you didn’t pull the trigger? That would be different. That might even be exciting. That would change everything.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  SEP 1, 2011)

Calling Mr. King by Ronald De Feo is an exhilarating read. It is poignant, funny, serious and sad. It grabs the reader from the beginning and we go on a short but rich journey with Mr. King, a hit-man, an employee of The Firm, as he transforms himself from a killer to a would-be intellectual and lover of art and architecture.

Mr. King is one of The Firm’s best marksmen and, as the novel opens, he is in Paris to do a hit. Something about the job starts getting to him and he postpones his hit repeatedly. He puts off an easy mark day after day. When he finally does his hit, it is with a bit of trepidation, anger and regret, wishing that he had something better to do.

This “something better” begins to take shape in his life as an appreciation for art, especially the Georgian architecture of his adopted city, London. He gets excited, going from bookstore to bookstore and collecting books on architecture and works of art by John Constable, the artist. His employer, however, is not happy with him. They are upset about the amount of time it took for him to do his job in Paris and they decide to send him to New York on a vacation. Mr. King feels he is long due for a vacation so this is not the worst thing in the world for him.

In New York, he devours the bookstores and museums, daily increasing his knowledge and excitement about art and architecture, expanding his interests and horizons in this area. He becomes interested in Regency style and art nouveau. He goes to see the Constable show at the Frick Museum after a clerk at Rizzoli’s bookstore recommends this to him. He also becomes interested in John Turner and artists who paint the English countryside.

He was known as Peter Chilton in London and he uses this alias to its full advantage in New York, acting like a rich and well-appointed Englishman. It is hard to tell where Mr. King ends and Mr. Chilton begins. He dreams of living in a Georgian home of his own some day. He takes on an English accent and his identity becomes obscured. He is now Peter Chilton, the art aficionado on vacation from his manor in England. He decides to dress the part and purchases a $215 shirt. This is his entry into the world of fashion as well as art. The shirt represents the possibility of something more, of his presenting himself as the real Peter Chilton, a man to whom fashion is paramount.

One day while resting in his New York hotel, the phone rings and it’s a call for Mr. King. This is the code name for The Firm calling him when they want a hit to be done. He is quite put out about being disturbed on his vacation but he leaves the hotel to return the call from a pay phone which is The Firm’s way of doing things. He is going to have to do a hit in New York. He is sick of The Firm. He finds his bosses stupid, “onions,” not up to his caliber. He does his hit within four hours in the hope that he’ll be able to rest and continue his vacation. However, he is transferred to Barcelona.

Once in Barcelona, Mr. King becomes so immersed in the architecture of Gaudi and the city’s art nouveau décor that he is overwhelmed. He knows that he has an important hit to do but by this time his bag of books is much, much heavier than his clothing and accoutrements. He is a man possessed by learning and potential.

We learn a bit about his early life. His father was a rage-ridden gun-crazy man, teaching Mr. King how to shoot animals – not how to play games or sports. His mother paid more attention to cleaning the house and taking care of her flowers than she did to Mr. King. When Mr. King left his home in a small suburb of New York when he was about twenty, it was in a traumatic way, and he was never to return except for his father’s funeral.

Mr. King often wonders what his life would have been like had he been exposed to things besides guns and hunting. He is excellent at what he does but could he have been something else, something of the mind? The reader wonders this along with him because he is caught up in a life he can never leave alive. A life with The Firm is a life forever with The Firm. No matter how much art and architecture he sees or yearns for it can never be enough. And when will his time run out?

Mr. King goes through existential angst with nods to Camus and Sartre as he feels like a stranger and has an overwhelming sense of nausea about his identity and his place in the world. He is alone and a loner, someone who has never thought of himself as one with the world. Since childhood, he’s been an outcast and finally, through his intellectual endeavors he is finding himself. The irony of this is that the closer he comes to finding himself, the further he travels from his required path.

This is a first novel by Mr. De Feo and it is an excellent piece of writing, one that had me devouring this book quickly. Mr. King made me laugh and feel deeply saddened. I was with him on every step of his journey and loved every minute of it. I hope that Mr. De Feo continues with his writing as he has quite an understanding of human nature.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 17 readers
PUBLISHER:	Other Press (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ronald De Feo
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More hit men: For the Dogs by Kevin Wignall Hit and Run by Lawrence Block

Bibliography:

• Calling Mr. King (August 2011)

“Homeland security is a myth…. It’s a bedtime story we tell our people to make them feel safe at night. Despite all our best efforts and all our billions spent, the United States is largely indefensible.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (JUL 25, 2011)

As Daniel Silva’s Portrait of a Spy opens, art restorer and master spy Gabriel Allon and his wife, Chiara, are living quietly in a cottage by the sea. Silva sets the stage with a series of events that are eerily familiar: Countries all over the world are “teetering on the brink of fiscal and monetary disaster;” Europe is having difficulty absorbing “an endless tide of Muslim immigrants;” and Bin Laden is dead, but others are scrambling to take his place. Government leaders in America and on the Continent are desperate to identify and thwart the new masterminds of terror.

All of this should not be Gabriel Allon’s problem, since he is no longer an agent of Israeli intelligence. However, Gabriel happens to be in London when he learns that two suicide bombers have struck, one in Paris and the other in Copenhagen. Later, Gabriel is strolling through Covent Garden when he spots a man who arouses his suspicions. Should he alert the police or take out this individual on his own? A series of unexpected events ensue that will bring Gabriel’s brief retirement to an abrupt end. He becomes a key player in a complex plot–involving high finance, a valuable painting, and a beautiful heiress–to destroy the new Bin Laden and his bloodthirsty cohorts. Allon will clash not just with his natural enemies but also with certain American politicians and their subordinates whose short-sighted and self-serving attitudes he finds repugnant.

Portrait of a Spy is an intricate, powerful, well-researched, and engrossing tale of deception, betrayal, and self-sacrifice. The most memorable character is thirty-three year old Nadia al-Bakari, a savvy businesswoman who is highly intelligent, secretive, and one of the richest women in the world. Her late father was a known supporter of terror networks. Will she follow in his footsteps or choose a different path? Silva brings back many of Allon’s comrades, including the amusing Julian Isherwood, an aging but still sharp-tongued Ari Shamron, and art curator/CIA operative, Sarah Bancroft.

The author choreographs his story perfectly and manages an extremely large cast with consummate skill. The sharp and clever dialogue, meaningful themes (including a description of how women are demeaned and manual laborers are exploited in Saudi Arabia and Dubai), as well as the nicely staged action sequences all combine to make this one of the most entertaining espionage thrillers of the year.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 446 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper; First Edition edition (July 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Daniel Silva
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Rembrandt Affair Moscow Rules The Prince of Fire A Death in Vienna

Bibliography:

• The Unlikely Spy (1996)

Michael Osbourne series:

• The Mark of the Assassin (1998)
• The Marching Season (1999)

Gabriel Allon series:

• The Kill Artist (2000)
• The English Assassin (2002)
• The Confessor (2003)
• A Death in Vienna (2004)
• Prince of Fire (2005)
• The Messenger (2006)
• The Secret Servant (2007)
• Moscow Rules (2008)
• The Defector (2009)
• The Rembrandt Affair (2010)
• Portrait of a Spy (2011)
• The Fallen Angel (2012)
• The English Girl (July 2013)