Ecco – MostlyFiction Book Reviews We Love to Read! Sat, 28 Oct 2017 19:51:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.18 CARTHAGE by Joyce Carol Oates /2014/carthage-by-joyce-carol-oates/ Fri, 28 Feb 2014 13:42:44 +0000 /?p=25639 Book Quote:

“Shouting himself hoarse, sweat-soaked and exhausted— ‘Cressida! Honey! Can you hear me? Where are you?’

He’d been a hiker, once. He’d been a man who’d needed to get away into the solitude of the mountains that had seemed to him once a place of refuge, consolation. But not for a long time now. And not now.

In this hot humid insect-breeding midsummer of 2005 in which Zeno Mayfield’s younger daughter vanished into the Nautauga State Forest Preserve with the seeming ease of a snake writhing out of its desiccated and torn outer skin. “

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (FEB 28, 2014)

Carthage is quintessential Oates. It is stylistically similar to many of her other books with the utilization of parentheses, repetitions and italics to make the reader take note of what is important and remind us of what has transpired previously. The book is good but it is not Oates’ best.

As the novel opens, the Mayfield family resides in Carthage, New York in the Adirondacks. Zeno Mayfield, once mayor of Carthage, and a political bigwig in a smallish town is the head of the family. His wife, Arlette, along with his two daughters, form the whole. Juliet, 22 years old is the “beautiful” daughter and Cressida, 19 years old is the “smart” one. Juliet is still living at home and she is an obeisant and sweet child, a devout Christian. She is engaged to marry Brett Kincaid, an Iraqi war hero who has been seriously injured in battle. He has suffered head injuries and walks with a cane. His face is badly scarred and he suffers from myriad problems requiring many psychotropic medications. However, Juliet’s love for him has never faltered. She drives him to rehab and stands by his side in all ways.

Cressida is the “difficult” child, always a loner and finds it difficult to look others in the eyes. Her parents have wondered at times if there is something wrong with her. She finds solace in drawing pictures reminiscent of M.C. Escher. She does not like people and is witty but sarcastic, cruel at times. She wears primarily black, avoids colors, and does not smile for the camera; for one day, she says, her photo will be her obituary photograph. She is an impulsive student in high school, doing very well in some classes and poorly in others because she thought the teachers did not like or respect her. She ends up going to St. Lawrence University where she lives mostly inside her head, continuing to be a loner, an “intellectual.”

In the book’s beginning pages there is an allusion to Brett’s temper and the fact that he has hit Juliet. She, however, has covered up for him by stating that she bumped her face.

Brett breaks his engagement to Juliet who is heart-broken. Secretly, Cressida is in love with him and one night she goes to a bar to see Brett who is not happy to see Cressida at all. He is drunk and Cressida gets drunk as well. He offers to drive her home but she never gets there. There is evidence of a struggle in the car – blood on the windshield and some witnesses who saw them arguing outside the car. What happened to Cressida? There is a huge search and eventually Brett confesses to having killed her despite the fact that Cressida’s body is never found even after a comprehensive and ongoing search.

Oates does a remarkable job of examining the fallout of Cressida’s death/disappearance on her family and the community of Carthage. Zeno never gives up hope that his daughter is still alive. Arlette becomes more involved in her church and volunteer activities, working on forgiveness and moving on with her life. Juliet is never the same due to the circumstances surrounding Cressida’s disappearance. Additionally, the reader is privy to the horrors of the Iraqi war including subsequent injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder that soldiers incur. Brett Kinkaid’s life is explored in depth before and after his deployment.

Thus we have the foundation for the novel. On another level, it is not likely a coincidence that Ms. Oates chose the characters’ names at random. Zeno is a famous pre-Socratic philosopher who is known for his paradox of never reaching one’s destination. If you are going somewhere and divide your destination by half, half of the distance will always remain. There is quite a bit about Plato, Sophocles and the early Greeks in this book. Juliet, of course, is the star-crossed lover in Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet. Cressida is also a character in a play by Shakespeare. However, “Cressida has most often been depicted by writers as ‘false Cressida,’ a paragon of female inconstancy,” according to Wikipedia.

The novel has some fascinating turns but, ultimately, it did not ring true to me. I can’t go into specifics without giving spoilers so I will leave it at that.

I try to read as much Oates as I can but she seems to write faster than I can read. She an an amazing and prolific writer. Even when she is not at her best, she is extraordinarily good.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 75 readers
PUBLISHER: Ecco (January 21, 2014)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Joyce Carol Oates
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read reviews of more Joyce Carol Oates books:

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]]> THE SON by Philipp Meyer /2013/the-son-by-philipp-meyer/ Mon, 23 Dec 2013 13:44:51 +0000 /?p=23619 Book Quote:

“Nearly pointed out that we are the wetbacks, having swum our horses across the Nueces a century after the Garcias first settled here. But of course I said nothing. He clapped me on the back— his butcher’s hands— and went in to eat more free beef.

People continued to arrive at the house, bringing cakes, roasts, and regrets that they had not been able to reach us in time to help— how brave we were to assault the Mexicans with such a small force.  By that they mean seventy-three against ten. Fifteen if you count the women. Nineteen if you count the children.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shultman  (DEC 23, 2013)

There is nothing small about the state of Texas nor is there anything small about this epic masterpiece of a novel, which will surely catapult Philipp Meyer into the ranks of the finest American novelists.

What he has accomplished is sheer magic: he has turned the American dream on its ear and revealed it for what it really is: “soil to sand, fertile to barren, fruit to thorns.” The most astounding thing is, you don’t know how good it really is until you close the last page and step back and absorb what you have just experienced.

There are three key characters in this book: Colonel Eli McCullough, kidnapped by the Comanche tribe at an early age and forced to navigate the shaky ground between his life as a white settler and his life as a respected adoptee-turned-Comanche warrior…his son, Peter, the moral compass of the story who resorts to self-hatred after the massacre of his Mexican neighbors…and Peter’s granddaughter Jeanne, a savvy oil woman who has profited mightily from the land.

In ways, the three represent a wholeness of the Texas story: the id, the ego, and the superego of history. Philipp Meyer weaves back and forth among their stories and each one is compelling in its own way. Eli’s is sheer adrenalin, a boy-man who is only slightly bothered by the constraints of society or conscience. Jeanne is a girl-woman with a head for the family business in a time and place where women are considered secondary to men.

And Peter, ah, Peter. He is “The Son,” the diarist who sees the moral shadings, who realizes that not all life is a matter of economics, that the strong should not be encouraged while the weak perish, and that we do have choices in our actions. He notes “that the entire history of humanity is marked by a single inexorable movement – from animal instinct toward rational thought, from inbred behavior toward learned behavior and acquired knowledge.” He is the heart and soul of Texas.

This American epic focuses on many themes. One is generational change and the progression from an agrarian and cattle-based economy to an oil-based economy. Take these lines:

“Of course there is no doubt that the Indian lives closer to the earth and the natural gods…Unfortunately, there is no more room or that kind of living, Eli. You and my ancestors departed from it the moment they buried a seed in the ground and ceased to wander like other creatures.”

Another is man’s inhumanity to man: the brutal land grab and the dehumanization of those who are considered “not belonging” by every single segment: the Comanches, the Mexicans, and above all, the whites who fight tooth and nail to take more of what’s theirs.

And lastly, and most importantly, it is about the blood that runs through human history with Texas as a microcosm. Mr. Meyer writes, “The land was thirsty. Something primitive still in it, the land and people both; the only place like it she’d ever seen was Africa: savannah, perpetual heat and sun, thorns and blinding heat. A place without mercy. The birthplace of humanity.”  This book should be widely-read and talked-about.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 718 readers
PUBLISHER: Ecco (May 28, 2013)
REVIEWER: Jill I. Shultman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Philipp Meyer
EXTRAS: Interview and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

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]]> A PERMANENT MEMBER OF THE FAMILY by Russell Banks /2013/a-permanent-member-of-the-family-by-russell-banks/ Thu, 19 Dec 2013 12:55:13 +0000 /?p=22430 Book Quote:

“After lying in bed awake for an hour, Connie finally pushes back the blankets and gets up. It’s still dark. He’s barefoot and shivering in his boxers and T-shirt and a little hungover from one beer too many at 20 Main last night. He snaps the bedside  lamp on and resets the thermostat from fifty-five to sixty-five. The burner makes a huffing sound and the fan kicks in, and the smell of kerosene drifts through the trailer. He pats his new hearing aids into place and peers out the bedroom window. Snow is falling across a pale splash of lamplight on the lawn. It’s a week into April and it ought to be rain, but Connie is glad it’s snow. He removes his .45-caliber Colt service pistol from the drawer of the bedside table, checks to be sure it’s loaded and lays it on the dresser.”

from A Permanent Member of the Family

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (DEC 19, 2013)

I have long been an admirer or Russell Banks’ work. This collection of short stories is excellent and many of them kept me riveted for the duration. The collection consists of twelve stories, most of them about the families we have and the families we make. Others are about the figments of truth that make up our experiences while we decide what is worth believing and what is not. The stories take place in different geographic settings from Florida to upstate New York to Portland, Oregon.

There are a few that are my favorites and will stay with me for a long while. One of the ones I loved was Former Marine. Connie is a former Marine who raised his three sons by himself after his wife deserted the family. He is now without work. “Let go. Like he was a helium-filled balloon on a string, he tells people.” What he always wanted was to be able to take care of himself and his family “because you’re never an ex-father, any more than you’re an ex-Marine.” Desperate times require desperate measures.

In Permanent Family, a family dog holds the memory of permanence and stability intact after a divorce. She was “the last remaining link to our pre-separation… to a time of relative innocence, when all of us, but especially the girls, still believed in the permanence of our family unit, our pack.”

Big Dog is about Erik’s winning a MacArthur genius award for his giant art installations of kitchens and bathrooms. He is told not to tell anyone about the award until it is formally announced. However, at a dinner party that night with close friends, he spills the news. What occurs is far from what he expected.

Blue is my favorite story in the collection. Ventana Robertson has saved up $3,500 to buy a used car. She arrives at the car lot at 6 p.m. They close at 6:30. Forgetting Ventana is still in the lot, the salesmen lock up the fenced yard. Ventana finds herself locked in with a vicious pit bull on her scent. She scrambles on top of a car to get away from him. What happens that night is heart-stopping.

I also loved Searching for Veronica, a story that takes place in a bar in the Portland Airport. Russell sits down in the airport bar and Dorothy, a woman he doesn’t know, proceeds to tell him the story of Veronica, a drug-addicted young woman who once lived with her and her daughter Helene many years ago. Dorothy had to kick Veronica out because of her drug use and now thinks that she is dead. Consequently, she visits the morgue every time an unidentified female body shows up. Is the story true or is it something that’s been manufactured by an addled mind?

Several of the stories deal with the obtuse meanings of truth and what exactly is happening. There are narratives that come out of addiction, some that are about starting a new life, and others that result from finding oneself a witness to a horrific deed. All of these push the meaning of truth to the limit. Additionally, there is almost always a picture of family, of one sort or another, that governs these tales.

Banks has a wonderful way with words and the stories, which can be dark, are often balanced with humor or questioning. I found this book one of the best short story collections I have read this year. I highly recommend it.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 13 readers
PUBLISHER: Ecco (November 12, 2013)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Russell Banks
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

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]]> LOST MEMORY OF SKIN by Russell Banks /2011/lost-memory-of-skin-by-russell-banks/ Tue, 27 Sep 2011 13:05:44 +0000 /?p=21235 Book Quote:

“The Kid reminds the Professor of Huckleberry Finn somehow. Here he is now, long after he lit out for the Territory, grown older and as deep into the Territory as you can go…and there’s no farther place he can run to. The Professor wants to know what happened to the ignorant, abused, honest American boy between the end of the book and now…[H]ow did he come years later to having ‘no money, no job, no legal squat’? In twenty-first-century America.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (SEP 27, 2011)

The main character of Banks’ new novel, a twenty-two-year-old registered sex offender in South Florida known only as “the Kid,” may initially repel readers. The Kid is recently out of jail and on ten-year probation in fictional Calusa County, and is required to wear a GPS after soliciting sex from an underage girl. Ironically, he is still a virgin.

The Kid cannot leave the county, but he also cannot reside within 2,500 feet from any place children would congregate. That leaves three options—the swamplands, the airport area, or the Causeway. He chooses the Causeway and meets other sex offenders, a seriously motley crew, who consciously isolate from each other as a group. He befriends one old man, the Rabbit, but sticks to his tent, his bicycle, and his alligator-size pet iguana, Iggy. Later, he procures a Bible.

These disenfranchised convicts are enough to make readers squirm. Moreover, in the back of the reader’s mind is the question of whether authorial intrusion will be employed in an attempt to manipulate the reader into sympathizing with these outcasts. It takes a master storyteller, one who can circumnavigate the ick factor, or, rather, subsume it into a morally complex and irresistible reading experience, to lure the wary, veteran reader.

Banks’ artful narrative eases us in slowly and deftly breaks down resistance, piercing the wall of repugnance. It infiltrates bias, reinforced by social bias, and allows you to eclipse antipathy and enter the sphere of the damned. A willing reader ultimately discovers a captivating story, and reaches a crest of understanding for one young man without needing to accept him.

An illegal police raid on the Causeway, provoked by hatred and politics, disrupts the Kid’s relatively peaceful life early on, and now he has nowhere to turn. Subsequently, a hurricane wipes out the makeshift homes of the inhabitants. The kid becomes a migrant, shuffling within the legal radius of permitted locales. At about this time, he meets the Professor, who the Kid calls “Haystack,” an obese sociologist at the local university who is the size and intellect of a mountain, an enigmatic man with a past of shady government work and espionage. He is conducting a study of homelessness and particularly the homeless, convicted sex offender population.

The Professor offers the Kid financial and practical assistance in exchange for a series of taped interviews. He aims to help the Kid gain control and understanding over his life, to empower him to move beyond his pedophilia. They form a partnership of sorts, but the Kid remains leery of the Professor and his agenda. The Professor’s opaque past, his admitted secrets and lies, marks him as an unreliable narrator. Or does it? Later, perilous developments radically alter their relationship, a fitting move on the author’s part that provides sharp contrasts and deeper characterization.

Sex offenders are the criminal group most collectivized into one category of “monsters.” Banks takes a monster and probes below the surface of reflexive response. There is no attempt to defend the Kid’s crime or apologize for it. We see a lot of the events through his eyes, and decide whether he is reliable or not. He acquires an undernourished, skulking yellow dog and a crusty old grey parrot with clipped wings and a salty tongue. His relationship with these animals is rendered without a lick of sentimentality, but it bestows the most resonant and powerful feelings in the reader compared to anywhere else in the book. The care and feeding of dependents bring out the Kid’s protective instincts and help keep him focused.

The book is divided into five parts. Along the way, Banks dips into rhetorical digressions on sex, pornography, geography, and human nature, slowing down the momentum and disengaging the tension. These intervals are formal and stiff, although they are eventually braided into the story at large. However, despite these static flourishes, the story progresses with confidence and strength.

Most characters, whether stand-up citizens or sex offenders, have a moniker, which deliberately mechanizes them, but between the author and reader, humanization occurs between the pages. There’s Shyster, the pedophilic, disbarred lawyer and ex-Senator; Otis, the Rabbit, an elderly, disabled member of the tribe; and a Hemingway-esque character, the Writer, who incidentally resembles Banks himself; and others who personify their names.

Overall, the languid pace of the novel requires steadfast patience, but commitment to it has a fine payoff. Readers are rewarded with a thrilling denouement and a pensive but provocative ending. It inspires contemplation and dynamic discussion, and makes you think utterly outside the box.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 112 readers
PUBLISHER: Ecco (September 27, 2011)
REVIEWER: Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Russell Banks
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

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]]> THE FAMILY FANG by Kevin Wilson /2011/the-family-fang-by-kevin-wilson/ Mon, 05 Sep 2011 13:23:36 +0000 /?p=20767 Book Quote:

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:

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]]> TEN THOUSAND SAINTS by Eleanor Henderson /2011/ten-thousand-saints-by-eleanor-henderson/ Wed, 08 Jun 2011 13:41:53 +0000 /?p=18424 Book Quote:

“There was no induction ceremony, no melding of spit and blood. Those who tattooed themselves did it with no pressure from Jude or anyone else. The only thing they had to give was their word – no drinking, no drugs. Extra credit for no fucking or flesh eating.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (JUN 08, 2011)

It’s 1987 and New York’s lower east side and alphabet city are places for the homeless, vagrants, the impoverished, hippies, some immigrants who have held out through the next generation and some younger folks who call themselves “straight edge.” Straight edge refers to teenagers who like hard rock and punk but live a straight and clean lifestyle – no meat, no sex, no booze and no drugs. Many shave their heads and are into tattoos. That’s what Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson is about – a group of straight edge teens and their parents trying to understand themselves and one another as they venture through life, a lot of it in alphabet city in Manhattan.

The book opens up in Vermont in a city that sounds a lot like Burlington. Two teenagers who live there, Jude and Teddy, are way into drugs. They smoke weed, huff, drink , do mushrooms and basically try to stay high as often and for as long as they can. They also hate school and cut out as often as they can get away with it.

Jude has been adopted by parents who are now divorced, both semi-hippies. His mother blows glass for making bongs and his father, who lives in New York, sells weed for a living. Since his parents’ divorce, Jude’s father, Les, has been living in Manhattan and has been seeing a self-absorbed ballerina named Di. Di has a daughter named Eliza who plans to visit Vermont and wants to meet Jude. Eliza is a rich girl who has been kicked out of several boarding schools for drugs and truancy.

Teddy’s mother is an alcoholic who splits town on New Year’s Eve, the day of Teddy’s sixteenth birthday and the day that this book opens. Teddy has no idea who his father is. He has an older brother named Johnny who lives in New York and is into the straight edge lifestyle.

Jude and Teddy feel like outcasts in Vermont. They hang out with each other but basically don’t have other friends. They like to hang out at a record store and play music together. They’re teased a lot and just don’t fit in.

Eliza arrives in Vermont and parties with Teddy, sharing cocaine with him after he’s already huffed freon, and gasoline, smoked weed and drank. They also have sex. The next morning, Eliza is on her way back to Manhattan and Teddy is dead by OD. Jude is in the hospital with hypothermia and getting detoxed from all the substances he’s used. It was a close call for Jude but he makes it. When Jude gets out of the hospital, he decides to go live with his father in New York.

In New York, Eliza, Jude and Johnny become like a family of three. This is intensified when Eliza finds out that she is pregnant with Teddy’s baby from their one night together. Because Teddy is dead, Johnny really wants Eliza to have this baby to honor Teddy’s memory. Eliza is into this idea as well. She is also into Johnny who does not appear to be into girls.

Eliza and Jude embrace the straight edge lifestyle which is portrayed as a hair’s width from a cult. It embraces Hare Krishna and many Hindu concepts. Johnny is called Mr. Clean because of his devotion to Straight Edge and his fanatic adherence to its principles. It becomes ironic then when he says he is the father of Eliza’s child. In their minds, the parents are more likely to let them keep the baby if the father is alive.

Eliza runs away with Johnny so that she can have the baby. Her mother wants her to have an abortion but she won’t hear of this. The parents are portrayed as distant, absent or stoned. There is not one parent who is really present and attuned to their child’s life. Ironically, at one point in Jude’s childhood, his doctor thinks he may have fetal alcohol syndrome because of his dyslexia, facial structure and hyperactivity with ADD. Despite this possible diagnosis, Jude emerges as a real hero in the novel, a good guy with empathy and strong emotions. He may not have the best judgment but he turns himself into a leader who is respected.

They form a music band and Jude becomes a natural born leader of the group. They travel back to Vermont several times during the novel and recruit others for the band and for the straight edge lifestyle. The band travels up and down the coast and is even interviewed by different zines for their lyrics and overall music.

It is interesting to imagine the Tompkins Square Park of their day – filled with homeless, empty crack vials, condoms, and violence. Now, the same park is filled with nannies and babies and surrounded by million dollar condos. The book is careful to stay true to the New York of the late 1980’s and the gen X’ers who are looking for a place to fit in and make their mark. Ms. Henderson is not judgmental about straight edge but this reader felt that it became another sort of addiction for many of its followers.

The book was fascinating. At times it was repetitive and went off on some rabbit trails. It could have been about fifty pages shorter and been stronger for that editing. However, even with the length it stands at now – 383 pages – it is a fascinating book. I’ve never read a book that caught the gen X’ers so vividly and so perspicaciously. This accomplished novel does not read like a debut novel, which it is. Ms. Henderson is a writer with a rare talent.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 10 readers
PUBLISHER: Ecco (June 7, 2011)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Eleanor Henderson and her website
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

The Bewildered by Peter Rock

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]]> A WIDOW’S STORY by Joyce Carol Oates /2011/a-widows-story-by-joyce-carol-oates/ Tue, 15 Feb 2011 16:35:35 +0000 /?p=16107 Book Quote:

“I think with horror of the future, in which Ray will not exist.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (FEB 15, 2011)

This is perhaps the bravest book I’ve ever read. It is searingly personal, raw and and stark. It portrays its creator, the author, in a relief, almost without exception, that is equally painful and tragic. There is no turning away, no place the writer hides–and consequently little relief afforded the reader. There she is, the new widow, Joyce Carol Smith–the persona behind the writer Joyce Carol Oates–struggling to stay alive amidst blinding grief, as revealed in a journey the destination of which is unsure. We know of her because the widely acclaimed writer, Joyce Carol Oates, tell us of her. (I will set aside, for the moment, the alter-ego artifact that is the dualistic structure of this book.) We cannot divert our eyes. A book that is brave, like A Widow’s Story is brave, is in my scheme of things, worthy. It is worthy simply because whenever truth is revealed so unapologetically, without reservation–hence bravely composed–one must simply recognize it as such and deem it of consequence. It simply has, consequently, an intrinsic worth. What would we make of existence if it were otherwise? If art is, in any manner a reflection of experience, then we must salute it when it is created without deference to the consequences–no matter how uncomfortable it might make us feel.

Joyce Carol Smith lost her husband Ray Smith on February 18, 2008. The cause of death: cardiopulmonary arrest–pneumonia. The time of death: 12:50 a.m. His wife of 48 years had left the hospital, gone home to rest, her husband seemingly on the mend. “Ray is said to be improving,” Oates wrote a friend the night before his death. But twenty-four hours later, at 12:38 a.m. (details permeate the narrative) the call comes–”a phone ringing at the wrong time.” It is the call the author has “been dreading since the nightmare vigil began–informing me that ‘your husband’–‘Raymond Smith’–is in ‘critical condition’–his blood pressure has ‘plummeted’–his heartbeat has ‘accelerated’–the voice is asking if I want ‘extraordinary measures’ in the event that my husband’s heart stops–I am crying, ‘Yes!…Save him! Do anything you can!”

I quote at length because in this one passage the reader can sense the shock, the terror, the frustration and panic that infuses almost every page of the book. Raymond dies before Joyce returns to him at the hospital. Leaving his side is the first of what she deems to be her many missteps–missteps that will haunt her throughout the ensuing weeks and months. It is the first instance of what she will reflect upon to torture herself. She will likewise resolve that she should have taken him into Manhattan, where his care might have been of a higher order, rather than Princeton where they live; that she should have been home and not out of town when he presumably caught the chill that presaged the illness; that she should have long-ago challenged her husband’s general practitioner and his casual prescriptions for antibiotics over the years. Surely they weakened Raymond’s immune system. And so on.

The Smiths are a couple, who, without children and sharing complementary careers–she the writer, he an editor and publisher–wove their lives together into a tight and resilient singular fabric. Ms. Oates relates that the number of nights spent apart in the decades of marriage can be counted on a couple of hands. So, when the separation of death is made manifest, a vacuum of seemingly horrid proportions descends. “I am thinking that never have I been alone so much,” she writes a couple weeks following the death. “…so starkly unmitigatedly alone , as I have been since Ray has died….There is a terror in aloneness. Beyond even loneliness.”

The exploration of “a terror in aloneness” is relentless–and exhausting. To Ms. Oates suicide becomes a option worthy of consideration. She hoards pills, and considers methods. Indeed, this book is equal parts grief and survival. Her grief transports her into a world where the continuation of (her) existence becomes a matter of objective consideration. Mid-way through the book, Ms. Oates experiences a hallucination, a metaphor for suicide, in a “reptile-thing–the basilisk” which haunts and dogs her, intoning words of existential doubt: “You know you can end this at any time. Your ridiculous trash-soul. Why should you outlive your husband? If you love him as you claim…Outliving your husband is a low vile vulgar thing and you do not deserve to live an hour longer…” The basilisk, a mythic creature, who according to Pliny the Elder will render dead on the spot anyone who beholds its eyes, chases Ms. Oates through the latter half of the book. We obviously know the outcome, that she survives, lives to write the book, but we are left with the impression that she does not master the beast. It would be a delightful literary nuance, the beast’s survival, if the implication were not so tragic.

Like a finely constructed novel, a theme is developed mid-book which shines a light into the corners of the narration. It is, in these dark corners, revealed that despite the longing, the horror of loss, the basilisk’s threats, something has not settled properly in the reflection of this long marriage. We got a hint of this earlier. “In our marriage it was our practice not to share anything that was upsetting, depressing, demoralizing, tedious–unless it was unavoidable.” It is a phrase that will catch the eye of anyone who has experienced a long and successful marriage. “For what,” she concludes, “is the purpose of sharing your misery with another person, except to make that person miserable, too?” Given that all long marriages are possibly successful for reasons particular to each, we can look past this polite practice of insulating the troublesome aspects of experience from loved ones. But there is more: Her husband did not read her work. “In this way, I walled off from my husband the part of my life that is ‘Joyce Carol Oates’–which is to say, my writing career.” There are secrets here too. There is Raymond’s sister whom she has never met–and the in-laws she hardly knows. (“Where Ray became very fond of my parents…I scarcely knew Ray’s parents.”) And his experience in seminary? “Exactly what happened at the seminary, I don’t know–Ray didn’t speak of it except generally, obliquely–Things didn’t work out. I dropped out after a few months.”

This theme, that of the gaps in the marriage, runs parallel to those of grief and existential doubt. It is a deeper current and we must dive down to it. And that is precisely what Ms. Oates does. She is a master story teller and even here, here in this most brave of narrations, she controls the pace, she works and develops a theme, exercising her considerable talent and rendering (her) experience into a fashion of art. The marriage gaps are best symbolized in the discovery of a novel, long-ago set aside and abandoned by Raymond. She knew of it’s existence previously, but had not read it. Like other things in the marriage, it had been respected by the other as off-limits. She had not asked to read it, had not inquired about it. “As a wife, I had never wanted to upset my husband. I had never wanted to quarrel, to disagree or to be disagreeable. To be not loved seemed to me the risk, if a wife confronted her husband against his wishes.” She reads the novel–but the mysteries between them only seem to deepen.

I mentioned above the dual nature of this searingly self-reflective memoir. There is the writer, Ms. Oates, writing about the widow, Mrs. Smith, who dons the cloak of Ms. Oates, transforming herself into a master of the literary arts, who turns back and writes about Mrs. Smith. It is a curious “meta” relationship. It is too, obviously, the method the widow must employ to protect herself, to survive the terror of aloneness. Mrs. Smith is, in other words, the subject matter of Ms. Oates, the observer and scribe. Curiously, the grief of Mrs. Smith is the rough marble by which Ms. Oates chisels her craft into art. The book is plainly a success on this level, but as a memoir one almost wonders, oddly, if Mrs. Smith, the widow, is not being exploited by Ms. Oates the artist? That question alone brings a prism of complexity to the book that, in my experience, the typical memoir typically lacks. Ultimately the reader experiences a fashion of classic Aristotelian catharsis, pain transcended through art, through this literary device. We hope the widow to be as fortunate.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 173 readers
PUBLISHER: Ecco (February 15, 2011)
REVIEWER: Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Joyce Carol Oates
EXTRAS:
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read reviews of more Joyce Carol Oates books:

Bibliography:

Tales:

Stories:

Written as Lauren Kelly:

Written as Rosamond Smith:

Younger Readers:

Nonfiction:

]]> THE FATES WILL FIND THEIR WAY by Hannah Pittard /2011/the-fates-will-find-their-way-by-hannah-pittard/ Wed, 26 Jan 2011 17:17:33 +0000 /?p=15760 Book Quote:

“We imagined her with us, more beautiful than our wives, more aloof, more tender, more kind. We imagined her future and our own. We closed our eyes and fell asleep to Nora Lindell, alive and happy. In the morning, we advanced to adulthood, relieved at last of childhood fantasies.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JAN 26, 2011)

Lately, there have been a number of books about missing girls and what they signify for those left behind. The forthcoming The Sweet Relief of Missing Children by Sara Braunstein and last summer’s paperback release of Songs for the Missing by Stewart O’Nan spring instantly to mind.

In Hannah Pittard’s absorbing The Fates Will Find Their Way, this territory is mined again, and quite convincingly. Sixteen-year-old Nora vanishes one day and no one knows quite what happened. What’s left is a series of rumors, imaginings, suspicions, and what-ifs from teenage boys whose lives she touched.

Ms. Pittard makes a risky choice in using the first person plural for narration – the “we” tense. It’s a hard tense to pull off, but she does it quite well. For instance, as the boys grow to men, she writes, “We owned homes, had wives. Some of us had more than one child by then. In many ways, we were kings. Everything was ahead of us…”

But is it? As the fates dictate that the boys settle down into preordained future roles, something is lost in each of them. At one point, the narrator looks back to a time when the future was more limitless: “Our only limitation was our imagination, and that school year – and every school year after – our imagination seemed to grow, to outdo, what we’d ever believed possible. We outran our wildest fantasies. That is, until Nora Lindell went missing…”

Nora is the fixed mark in time of all that might have been. Her life remains limitless, at least in the imaginings of her now-adult classmates; she took off to Arizona, she became pregnant, she married a much-older man, and so on. Their lives, however, are constrained by the realities of life, the wives and the babies and jobs and the homes as they sleepwalk forward. Ms. Pittard writes, “Certain outcomes are unavoidable, invariable, absolutely unaffectable, and yet completely unpredictable. Certain outcomes are that way. But maybe not Nora’s. Maybe she was the only one who escaped…”

This haunting and minimalistic book has but one flaw in my opinion: Nora is consistently a symbol and never acquires that real-life mystique and fascination that would cause these teenage boys to remain starry-eyed and reverent way into adulthood. The conceit overpowers the reality of the story.

That aside, there is some mighty fine writing from a debut author and some deep psychological insights that keeps the reader turning pages. The Fates Will Find Their Way is a lovely little gem.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 14 readers
PUBLISHER: Ecco (January 25, 2011)
REVIEWER: Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Hannah Pittard
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Other missing girl stories:

Fragile by Lisa Unger

The Vanishing of Katharina Linden by Helen Grant

The False Friend by Myla Goldberg

Eve Green by Susan Fletcher

And one of the best missing child stories:

The Disapparation of James by Anne

Bibliography:

]]> JUST KIDS by Patti Smith /2011/just-kids-by-patti-smith/ Mon, 03 Jan 2011 15:06:03 +0000 /?p=14902 Book Quote:

“Dear Robert,
Often as I lie awake I wonder if you are also lying awake. Are you in pain or feeling alone? You drew me from the darkest period of my young life, sharing with me the sacred mystery of what it is to be an artist…”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (JAN 3, 2011)

There are a handful of writers who haunt me. That is, as I’m reading their books they come to me in my dreams, usually with sharp elbows and voices clamoring for attention. Cormac McCarthy effects me this way. So does, not surprisingly perhaps, Friedrich Nietzsche. No writers whisper to me in my dreams. It was the second night of reading Just Kids that I discovered here too a voice so strong and compelling so as to ring in my ears after the book is closed, the eyes shut and the brain turned off. Like caffeine, if consumed after a certain late hour, you know you’re in for a ride. Patti Smith is an original. She is a poet with the heart of a rock star and the drive of an Olympic athlete. She comes at you hard and fast and won’t let go, even in a dream state. She is that mesmerizingly good.

I was unsure what to expect with Just Kids. It won the National Book Award, so I knew it was deemed good, but I didn’t know why. Nor did I know much about the lives it depicted, principally the lives of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. I knew of them, but little else. As a photographer I was certainly familiar with Mapplethorpe’s work, much of it brutal and stark, but the life behind the work was a simple ghost. Of Patti, my slate was almost clean.

It didn’t matter. I didn’t have to know anything. I was in deep from the first paragraph and who what and where were abstract concepts. “I was asleep when he died,” begins the foreword. “I had called the hospital to say one more good night, but he had gone under, beneath layers of morphine. I held the receiver and listened to his labored breathing through the phone, knowing I would never hear him again.”

What follows is the story of two young kids, Patti and Robert, both born in 1946, who discover each other, their art and the world, amongst the bohemians of New York. Each is a springboard-muse to the other. They are lovers, adventurers, soul mates, room mates and, perhaps most importantly, friends in the truest sense of the word. “We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad.” She continues: “Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark.”

Patti’s world ranged from poetry to visual art to music–a blending of disciplines. Here she traces her effort to find her voice, struggling to release the artist within. As a bookstore clerk, she finds herself in a bar sitting among Janis Joplin, Grace Slick and Jimi Hendrix. She writes that she found an “inexplicable sense of kinship with these people.” Her’s is a story of innocence, of trying on a voice like an article of clothing, to see how it fits. In her slight modesty, she lacks the ambition that Mapplethorpe wears like a battlefield suit of armor. It is 1969 and the world is roiling with ambition, with change and excitement.

Mapplethorpe is rendered here with a quiet, yet graceful, painfulness–his need for fame and personal release is so powerful. His artist soul is struggling for expression, his homoerotic self is breaking its bonds. Heartbreakingly, we hear of Patti alone in their Chelsea hotel while Mapplethorpe walks the streets fueled by the excitement of random male encounters. “I begged him not to go,” she writes, “but he was determined to try. My tears did not stop him, so I sat and watched him dress for the night ahead. I imagined him standing on a corner, flushed with excitement, offering himself to a stranger, to make money for us.” Artistically, she watches him break into Warhol’s inner circle, an individual Patti viewed with suspicion. The grace with which she renders the transitions in their relationship, of which there are many, is evidence to the unquestioning bond between them. Later, she would say of Mapplethorpe’s images, “His pursuits were too hard core for me and he often did work that shocked me….I admired him for it, but I could not comprehend the brutality.”

Just Kids has a tone of the elegiac about it. It stops short of heightened fame, of notoriety, of sadness. Instead it sings of a time of innocence when the world was being created anew and artists lead in the struggle. It was a time when a couple of young kids from parts unknown could–and did–create themselves from whole cloth and step into the world with nothing of claim except a nascent vision. Only later would it come to be understood that such stark expression was a tipping balance between life and death. But we are spared that here. This is a hymn to the hopeful brilliance of youth.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 267 readers
PUBLISHER: Ecco; Reprint edition (November 2, 2010)
REVIEWER: Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Patti Smith
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: The Fiction 2010 National Book Award Winner:The Lord of Misrule by Jaime Gordon

Bibliography:

Discography:

]]> SOURLAND by Joyce Carol Oates /2010/sourland-by-joyce-carol-oates/ Thu, 14 Oct 2010 15:18:11 +0000 /?p=12913 Book Quote:

“It was a bitch. The summer was jinxed. Her father died on her birthday which was July 1. Then, things got worse.” (Bitch)

Book Review:

Review by Maggie Hill  (OCT 14, 2010)

Here’s how I ended up reading one of these stories: Standing up – stepping away from it, yelling (sort of) at JCO for being a freak, wishing I was half as good a freak, sputtering inside my head, “Oh yes, this must be exactly what a four-year-old child feels/thinks/is afraid of!” Then, just, oh. She did not. She did that in the end? No way. She did do that. If she was here right now, I’d … let her tell me a thing or two.

Is there anyone literate in the United States of America who has not read a little Joyce Carol Oates? She’s a Master. She’s living. Read her. End of report.

In Sourland, the latest collection of stories by this venerable writer, Oates has fully slipped into her imagination’s dark night of the soul. This is a writer who nails down the floorboards, inside the cloud, of the dream/nightmare she creates. She’s like James Cagney, smashing a piece of grapefruit in our faces as she makes us know what she’s talking about. I wonder, does her wisdom, her analogies, her knowing – thrillingly accurate, eerie, sublime – arrive naturally in her head?

“Nothing is more evident to a child of even ordinary curiosity and canniness than a family secret…” (The Story of a Stabbing)

“His mood was mercurial – as if he’d been hurt, in the midst of having been roused to indignation. (Pumpkin-Head)

“For the world is “pitiless” to aging women, even former Vogue models. (Bonobo Momma)

“When you die every fact of your body can be exposed.” (Bounty Hunter)

And, is there anyone who consistently conveys a character’s particularity in less than 20 words?

“A coarse sort of angel….with stubby nicotine-stained fingers and a smile just this side of insolent.” (Uranus)

“The cry that came from me was brute, animal. I had never heard such a cry before and would not have believed that it had issued from me.” (The Beating)

“Sonny’s lips parted in a slow smile that seemed about to reverse itself at any moment.” (Honor Code)

Joyce Carol Oates doesn’t sneak up on you in the middle of a story, then startle you with a loud, Boo! No, she looks right at you, says, “You comin’, or what?” as she stands, alone, looking out into the void. What she sees, she shares with you. But she’s not going to hold your hand. You knew something awe-ful might happen, that’s why you’re here. Oates takes a simple and generic phrase like, “…the party was in full swing…” and uses it to send us, sea-sick, into the story “Uranus.” I’m not even going to hint at what “Donor Organs” is about; figure it out. “Pumpkin-Head” is a goofy title for a story that says, arguably, more about education, immigration, widowhood, violence, dislocation, and powerlessness than War and Peace – in 21 pages. In other words, every story in this collection – are they collections merely because they’re set together under one binding? – lures you into a complex, rich, lots-of-ideas-going-on co-habitation with infinite suspense.

I love Joyce Carol Oates. But, be warned. Every one of these stories is dangerous. Don’t operate heavy machinery while reading them.

AMAZON READER RATING: from 21 readers
PUBLISHER: Ecco (September 14, 2010)
REVIEWER: Maggie Hill
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Joyce Carol Oates
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read reviews of more Joyce Carol Oates books:

Bibliography:

Tales:

Stories:

Written as Lauren Kelly:

Written as Rosamond Smith:

Younger Readers:

Nonfiction:

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