“It was possible to hear a wide range of commotion coming off the meadow in waves: the din of the newly arrived campers—and what a peculiar din at that, the heavy grunts and human squealing, the many slurred and off-timbre voices, the disorder of it all—and beneath these sounds the thud of luggage on the meadow grass and the wet clicks of the cooling bus engines. Soon there were footsteps, a small regiment of them, crunching across the gravel pathway toward the infirmary.”

Book Review:

Review by Terez Rose  (SEP 21, 2011)

The dictionary defines “inverted” as reversed, upturned, and this aptly describes the goings on, again and again in John Dalton’s latest novel, The Inverted Forest, an impressive follow-up to his award winning debut, Heaven Lake. That the two stories are quite diverse in setting and subject serves the reader well, as Heaven Lake, set in Taiwan and China, was one of those wondrous, luminous novels difficult to surpass. The Inverted Forest takes place in 1996 in a rural Missouri summer camp, a sun-dappled, bucolic environment that still manages to impart a sense of subliminal unease.

A grand transgression has just occurred: the counselors-in-training have indulged in an illicit, late-night skinny dipping pool party, to the outrage of conservative-minded camp owner Schuller Kindermann, who fires them all the next day, leaving his staff to scramble for new counselors before the first campers arrive. New counselors are hired, but no time is left to prepare them, inform them, and thus when the first campers arrive, a mere hour behind the counselors, they are stunned to see not kids spilling out of the bus, but adults, severely mentally disabled adults. The disorienting, funhouse sense of inversion has begun.

Among the camp staff are lifeguard Christopher Waterhouse, winsome and personable, Harriet Foster, camp nurse, the first African-American Schuller has ever hired, and twenty-three year old Wyatt Huddy. Born with Apert syndrome, which causes the skull bones fuse together too early, giving the face a distorted appearance, Wyatt has suffered the lifelong burden of looking much like the disabled state hospital campers, but without the intellectual disability. His presence produces confusion and discomfort in people he encounters and never more so while working as a counselor for the state hospital campers.

Dalton is one of those writers, like Ann Patchett and Elizabeth Strout, who has a fluid, assured style that’s compulsively readable, instantly absorbing. A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Dalton was the winner of the Barnes & Noble 2004 Discover Award and currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He knows his craft, and every character who narrates arrives fully fleshed out with a rich backstory that has been distilled into a paragraph or two, usually with a dollop of wry philosophy tossed in. Countless examples exist throughout the story; I’d love nothing more than to quote a half-dozen, but I’ll restrain myself and limit it to a few, like seventy-eight year old Schuller Kindermann, lifelong bachelor, who craves order and prefers to be left alone to work on his hobby, crafting kirigami-style foldout paper creations.

“In his later years he’d come to understand a particular irony at work in the world: what you lack will always be magnified by the people and events that constitute your life. A boy with no appreciation for food will be born into a family of cooks and live above a bakery. A woman who feels no kindness for her children will see, everywhere she goes, mothers and fathers fawning over their babies. So it was with him. He’d gravitated to a career as a summer camp director. All his life he’d been exasperated by other people’s unwise longings.”

And unwise longings, it becomes clear, constitute a great deal of the challenges within the camp during the state hospital patients’ two weeks there. Desires abound, not simply among the young, attractive counselors, but among the severely disabled as well. Dalton, who’s had personal experience as a camp counselor under such circumstances, neither trivializes nor sentimentalizes the behavior of the disabled campers, but instead gives us a candid, clear view.

“And yet there was something outlandish about these state hospital campers. How had the women managed to grow fat in such striking ways? Not just bottom-heavy but with sudden shelflike ridges of fat that jutted out from their hips. They had either no breasts to speak of or hard-looking, conical breasts that looked too high-set and pointy to be real. With the men it was most often the opposite problem: a remarkable thinness, gangly arms, concave chests. A comic gauntness. You saw them from a medium distance and thought of old cartoons, the slouching, cross-eyed idiots with their awful haircuts and shortened trousers, their mouths full of sprawling teeth. But up close you noticed how each man or woman had gone inward and found a perch—unsteady maybe, or tilted, but still a perch—from which to peer out past the spasms and tics and whatever odd shapes their bodies had grown into.”

The story is narrated in turns, initially by Wyatt, Schuller and camp nurse Harriet, a canny, intelligent, single mother. It is she who observes the trouble brewing beneath the surface, problems that arise from the convergence of undertrained, overworked staff and the disabled campers that vastly outnumber them. Harriet’s suspicions over a staff member’s intentions come to a head one night and she enlists help from Wyatt to prevent a crisis, which results in an even greater crisis that carries long-term consequences for all involved.

Fifteen years later the story is inverted. The night’s drama, now history, gets turned on its side and explored from different perspectives. The past lives on in the heart of Marcy Bittman, former lifeguard, a character who allows herself to grow maudlin and sentimentalize. I found this was a brilliant way to add heart and sentiment to a section of the story without too much spilling over to the rest, which might have leached it of its taut hold on the reader. Former counselor Wayne Kesterton also returns, musing about a life that hadn’t turned out quite as he’d planned, the plight of many a dreamy twenty-year old. One afternoon on a city bus, Wayne encounters one of his former campers, the bad-tempered, vitriolic Mr. Stottlemeir, who loved nothing more than to spew obscenities at Wayne that summer (“Don’t touch me, you stinking puddle of piss! God damn you to hell eternal. God damn you, I say.”). This man, however, appears relatively normal. Through further investigation Wayne learns it was indeed his former charge, who’d finally been dosed with the right medication after years of trial and error, allowed to move from a locked-in facility to a retirement home. The unsettling nature of it hits both Wayne and the reader. What constitutes mental disability in the end? The wrong drugs? A low IQ? How low is too low? Should actions triggered by the baser, darker impulses that arise in all of us be judged by how intelligent we are?

Original and compulsively readable, The Inverted Forest challenges the reader to ponder the thorny issues of affliction, loyalty and desire. It’s one of those stories that will keep you thinking long after you’ve read the last page. A highly recommended read, a worthy follow-up to Dalton’s first novel, the equally recommended Heaven Lake.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (July 19, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Terez Rose
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	John Dalton
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Story of a Beautiful Girl by Rachel Simon

Bibliography:

• Heaven Lake (2004)
• The Inverted Forest (July 2011)

“In the old days, you had caste, and you had religion: they taught you how to eat, marry, live and die. But in Bombay, caste and religion had faded away, and what had replaced them, as far as he could tell, was the idea of being respectable and living among similar people. All his adult life Mastejri had done so; but now in the space of just a few days, he had shattered the husk of a respectable life and tasted its bitter kernel.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (SEP 20, 2011)

When does the heartfelt convictions of one solitary man negate the jointly held consensus of the rest of any civic society?

That is the question posed at the center of Aravind Adiga’s audacious new novel, an impressive and propulsive examination of the struggle for a slice of prime Mumbai real estate. It is a worthy follow-up to Adiga’s Booker Prize novel, White Tiger, as he goes back to the well to explore the changing face of a rapidly growing India.

Adiga pits two flawed men against each other.  The first is Dharmen Shah, a burly and self-made real estate mogul who is the “master of things seen and things unseen.” Through his left-hand man, the shady Shananmugham, he offers each resident of the Vishram Co-operative Housing Society the highest price ever paid for a redevelopment project in the suburb of Vakola.

Just about every resident jumps at the chance to sell – the anxious Ibrahim Kudwa, an Internet-store owner and the only observant Muslim in the neighborly society; social worker Georgina Rego who loathes amoral redevelopers but wants to trump her wealthy sister; Sengeeta Puri, who cares for her son afflicted with Down’s Syndrome; Ramesh Ajwani, an ambitious real-estate broker and more.

Only one resident holds out: Masterji, a retired schoolteacher who lives alone after the recent death of his wife and the death of his daughter. Only here, at Vishram, can he cling to his memories and so he refuses to sell, even when the pot is sweetened… even when he is threatened emotionally and physically. Masterji is the one immutable roadblock between Shah and his legacy.

Whether the reader sympathizes with Masterji – who stands in the way of his neighbors’ most audacious dreams, and whose integrity and incorruptibility borders on narcissism – may be equivalent to, say, how each of us felt with the Ralph Nader spoiler in the Bush-Gore election. Was he an honorable man to have taken a stand? Or was he simply an egotist? There is a grudging admiration for Masterji’s stand, mixed with an impatience and frustration at how this high-principled man stubbornly torpedoes the will of the majority.

Shah is ruthless but also fair-minded: his price is more than fair. Masterji is principled but tin-eared to his neighbors’ pleas as the deadline to accept the offer looms. And as the developer – and his one-time friends – become more and more desperate, the novel cranks up to almost unbearable suspense, with a hint of a Lord of the Flies scenario. Like Piggy in that novel, Masterji is seen as less and less human as the conflict endures.

The background to this tension-filled plot is Mumbia itself, where countless workers commute on nightmarishly overstuffed trains, where they all emerge: “fish, birds, the leopards of Borivali, even the starlets and super-models of Bandra, out of the prismatic dreams of Mother Garbage. Here, fetid slums, the most luxurious high-rises of the future, and the temples of old co-exist within a fragile and all-too-often corrupt democracy.

A Dickensian quality pervades this ambitious novel, which fearlessly tackles electrifying themes: what price growth? Will good people risk their humanity when faced with a chance to score a big payday? When does the will of a man who foregoes monetary gain resemble selfishness as opposed to virtue? And who can we trust to stand by us when we take a lone stance? This book of contrasts – between a man of finance and a man of virtue (although, of course, it is not as simple as that)… between wealth and squalor… between the old and the new is a tour de force. And it is certain to add to Aravind Adiga’s already sterling reputation.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 94 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (September 20, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Aravind Adiga
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The White Tiger

Bibliography:

• The White Tiger (2008) 
• Between the Assassinations (2009)
• Last Man in the Tower  (2011)

“Usually he finds flights relaxing. Once you are up there in the nothingness you can plunge deep into your own thoughts. But tonight he is troubled. […] The cabin lights are dimmed and he’s now sitting all alone in a bright cone directed from the overhead lamp towards his table. The light seems to suggest that he is under interrogation. It’s at these moments he knows that he is not really cut out to be a financial mogul.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JUN 1, 2011)

This is Julian Trevelyan-Tubal, CEO of Tubals’, the last family-owned bank in London, founded by his ancestor Moses Tubal over three centuries before. He stands uneasily in the titanic shadow of his father, Sir Harry Trevelyan-Tubal, still the titular head of the bank, but long since removed from day-to-day affairs. Sir Harry lives in luxury in his villa in Antibes, his mind damaged by a stroke, dictating daily letters to his son which only his secretary Estelle understands and even reads. He is unaware of changes at the bank since his days in the office. Adventures in the hedge fund and derivatives markets have caused much the same damage to Tubals’ as to other banks, and now Julian must fly to Liechtenstein to divert £250,000,000 illegally from the family trust to contain the damage long enough for him to sell the bank and get out, keeping this a secret from the financial world and even his own relatives.

For tradition and the appearance of probity are everything in banking. Moses Tubal’s descendants have long since been assimilated into the establishment, generations of English gentlemen produced by “years of evolution, fostered by rugby, cold showers, beating, poor food and study of the classics,” as Justin Cartwright wittily remarks. The guest-list for Sir Harry’s memorial service, with which the book opens in a leap-ahead prologue, is virtually the cream of British society, including such wonderful titles as “the Earl and Countess of Wendover, the Macallan of that Ilk and Lady Macallan, the Malcolm, Lord of the Western Isles,” and so on for two pages. When Sir Harry, a patron of the arts (and of its female practitioners), chose beautiful but only moderately talented actress Fleur MacCleod as his second wife, a quarterly payment was arranged for her first husband, a down-at-heel theater director called Artair, to keep him out of the way. In handling the transition following Sir Harry’s death, it is important that the irreproachable facade be maintained.

However, as the family regroup after the funeral, stresses begin to appear. Julian’s elder brother Simon returns from abroad and wants a part in things. Fleur is having an affair which may not easily be hushed up and the others regard her as a loose cannon. Estelle has an agenda of her own, and knows things that the others would not want told. But the most dangerous threat of all is almost trivial: when the bank cuts off the allowance paid to Fleur’s first husband Artair, a young reporter at the local newspaper named Melissa wants to know the reason why. The scenes set in Cornwall, the seagirt province where Artair recycles productions of “The Wind in the Willows” and “Thomas the Tank Engine” while writing a movie script that he fondly believes will be taken up by no less than Daniel Day-Lewis, make a break from the doings of the plutocracy, though they also seem less solid.

This may not be what is called “literary fiction,” but it is certainly literate — consistently well-written and with mostly believable characters. Think Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga for a new century; think Jeffrey Archer, only better; think Alan Hollingsworth’s The Line of Beauty without the gay sex. As a financial thriller, it is slow to get going and does not quite deliver at the end, but it does something more valuable. Quite remarkably, virtually all the characters are sympathetic, and most of them develop in depth as the financial and family pressures are released; this is especially true of Fleur, who starts as a stereotypical trophy wife and becomes more and more admirable and real. Even though Julian passes through a period where he begins to look like the villain of the piece, he too ends up rounder and warmer. Cartwright does not seem to have decided whether Artair is a caricature or a true artist, but either way he is fun. I confess to being disappointed by the curiously abrupt ending which is not entirely redeemed by an epilogue tying up all the loose threads one paragraph at a time. But that is a minor flaw; there is much here to enjoy.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bloomsbury USA (April 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Justin Cartwright
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett Human Capital by Steve Amidon

Bibliography:

• Deep Six (1972)
• Fighting Men (1977)
• Horse of Darius (1980)
• Freedom for the Wolves (1983)
• Interior (1988)
• Look at it This Way (1990)
• Masai Dreaming (1993)
• In Every Face I Meet (1995)
• Leading the Cheers (1998) 
• Half in Love (2001)
• White Lightning (2002)
• The Promise of Happiness (2005)
• The Song Before it is Sung (2007)
• To Heaven by Water (2009)
• Other People’s Money (April 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Not Yet Home (1997)
• This Secret Garden (2008)
• Oxford Revisited (2009)

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

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (APR 12, 2011)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography:

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

“From the parts of the document written in English, they learned that the money had been the first of three payments for the construction of a large civilian airfield in the Ghazni Province. Given the fact that (it) was over 120 kilometers away, the only thing that made sense was that the Afghan they‘d killed had been a corrupt contractor who was trying to make a quick getaway to Pakistan.”

Book Review:

Review by Katherine Petersen  (DEC 30, 2010)

Author Elliott Sawyer earned a Bronze Star while serving tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as a captain in the 101st Airborne Division. His intimate knowledge of military operations enables the actions scenes to come alive and lend credibility to his characters. Jake Roberts has a not-so-pretty past, and his punishment is to lead a platoon of misfits with past drug, alcohol and assault charges. The battalion commander sends the Kodiak Platoon on the “dirty” missions that no one else wants. During one of these night details, the platoon stumbles across a cache of funds, stolen by a corrupt contractor. Jake and his men opt to smuggle the cash back to the U.S. when they’re discharged rather than turn it over to the authorities. They call it their severance pay.

But things don’t turn out to be that easy. Someone else finds out about the severance money. It could be the nurse Jake has been seeing, someone in the platoon or an unknown. Whoever it is, they’re not afraid to kill. The story grows in intensity as it becomes less and less clear if Jake and his platoon will manage to keep either the severance money or their lives.

Sawyer does a nice job of weaving particulars into the plot action without bogging the story down with unnecessary details. He gives us a glimpse of why some of the members are in the platoon, but doesn’t overwhelm the reader with minutiae. The platoon is comprised of alcoholics, drug addicts, thieves and other miscreants, but when we meet them, they’re sympathetic characters, and it’s hard not to like most of them. The story jumps a bit in places, so readers must pay attention. Sawyer’s character and plot ring true, and he doesn’t glaze over sticky situations: a soldier’s homosexuality, infidelity and foul language have their place in this novel, and, at least in my opinion, they fit. I mention this only as the book might not be appropriate for all age levels.

This story will appeal to mystery fans in general but also to fans of books with military action. While it may not have the nonstop action of a Tom Clancy novel, the scenes are remarkably well written, and in combination with a tightly-woven plot and intriguing characters, it’s a a good debut. I hope Jake Roberts and his men make another appearance soon.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bridge Works (November 16, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Katherine Petersen
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Elliott Sawyer
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer

Bibliography:

• The Severance (November 2010)

“By their last night [in London], Adam was saying to Cynthia that they ought to just buy the flat they were staying in so they could come and go as they pleased. “I had a good year,” he said. She looked at him as if he were a little mad, but then she caught something exciting in his eyes and threw up her hands and said, “Why not?” That was it: everything was open to them. What was life’s object if not that?”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (DEC 1, 2010)

Jonathan Dee’s latest, The Privileges, is a psychologically astute exploration of the toll privilege exacts on two generations – the self-made and the born-elite– of the Morey family. Cynthia and Adam Morey are easy to hate: they’re beautiful, socially adept, and madly in love – and unapologetic about it. As Adam’s brother says in his speech at their wedding (which opens the book), “They are a charmed couple. No one who knows them can doubt that they are destined to spend a long, happy, extraordinary life together.” At the worldly age of 22, the bride and groom don’t doubt it either and they traipse through their wedding day with the breeziness and ease of people certain of their impending prosperity. From here, life only gets better.

The curious thing is: neither Adam nor Cynthia were born into privilege. Adam’s working-class parents seem a bit stunned (and cowed) by their obviously meant-for-greatness son and while Cynthia’s mother remarried money, her feckless father abandoned them to financial insecurity. Rather, their sense of entitlement seems to come from their whole-hearted faith in the abilities of each other, in their unique specialness in the world. They casually shrug off their histories– to the later non-comprehension of their children – because nothing about their pasts conforms to their conception of themselves. The past is limiting, and Cynthia and Adam have “a shared talent for leaving all their baggage behind.”

But for the first few years of their marriage, Adam wonders how much of that faith was justified. Sure, he’s worked hard and enjoyed modest success at Morgan Stanley, but without his MBA (and unwilling to step off the fast track to get one with a wife and two kids to support) Adam finds himself smacking his head against a ceiling of sorts while the unworthy scrabble up the ladder around him. Unable to achieve the success he knows he deserves at Morgan Stanley, Adam leaves to join a small private equity firm, Perini Capital. Perini is small enough for Adam to forge an identity for himself and before long he’s indispensable to the CEO, Barry Sanford.

Unable to find a suitable nanny, Cynthia has long since stopped working to take care of April and Jonas. But as the kids get older, and school and extracurricular activities take over their time, Cynthia’s psychological stagnancy becomes too much for her. When she tells Adam she wants to start seeing a psychiatrist, he panics: she has always been the one to ground him. Without her stability – her faith in their wondrous future – he doubts his ability to stay on course, and while he knows her happiness is his responsibility, he doesn’t know what to do.

That is, until a chance meeting becomes an opportunity to give Cynthia the kind of life he knows she wants. Before long, Adam’s sharing privileged information with a small group of traders that he controls. Adam is little concerned with legalities of insider trading, for everything “was about a moment’s potential; and what you did with it. Unrealized potential was a tragic thing.” His choice eventually makes them billionaires.

But that is where Adam and Cynthia differ from their children; their life has a purpose, however shallow: wealth accumulation. The children, on the other hand, struggle to find meaning in an existence where nothing is denied them. Their discontent is evident in childhood. Cynthia’s enthusiasm for Jonas’ collections – coins, Duplo toys, books – completing them in one fell swoop with the swipe of a credit card, drives him to start a secret stash of found objects, a collection no one can derive the logic of and complete for him. April tries to make sense of her feelings of rootlessness by inventing a fictional family history at school.

Unfortunately, their childhood ill-prepares them for the tragedy each will come within a hair’s breadth of later in life – April as an aimless party girl; Jonas as an art history student in Chicago. But as brother and sister figure life out, the only choice they’re left to make– to accept and make the most of their privilege – can feel like a punch in the gut. Isn’t this listless, lost generation in some way meant to right the wrongs of their parents?

But that’d be too easy and what makes this book so good – besides Dee’s uncanny sense for gesture and dialogue – is precisely that he refrains from judging the Moreys. It’s too easy to judge Adam’s insider trading as unethical. Is there no merit to be had in creating wealth where there wasn’t any before? In taking risks to please the woman you love? It’s too easy to criticize Cynthia’s materialism or her ennui. It’s too easy to say: get a job; get a hobby; get off your ass and do something to better the world. That’s exactly what she wants to do, but “without some framework, some resources, even your secret aspirations just curdled into sentimental bullshit.” And so while the Moreys’ lifestyle can be lavish – chauffeured cars, a private jet, an anniversary gala at the New York Public Library –their wealth is precisely what allows them to do good in the world. And creating wealth to be redirected to those that need it via the Morey Foundation should be worth something on the karma market. Shouldn’t it?

Unless of course, their charitable deeds are motivated by an eye to legacy. Resisting the facile, Dee allows the Moreys the space to be both. As Adam explains to April, they had to try to “make the world a better place” because one “can’t just do nothing. Otherwise it’s like you were never here.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 75 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House Trade Paperbacks (October 5, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	THE MILLIONS interview with Jonathan Dee
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	A complimentary read: Union Atlantic by Adam Haslett

Bibliography:

• The Lover of History (1990)
• The Liberty Campaign (1994)
• St. Famous (1995)
• Palladio (2002)
• The Privileges (October 2010)

“From Havering to Holland Park, from Forest Hill to Ferrers End, from Upminster to Parsons Green, the individuals would shortly leave their flats and houses, fragrant and hopeful, bang the doors, and go like invisible cells into the bloodstream of the city…”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (JUL 4, 2010)

Sebastian Faulks is nothing if not ambitious. In his latest book, a sweeping and piercing satire about contemporary London, Mr. Faulks takes on everything from the financial meltdown and the profusion of silly book awards to shockingly offensive reality TV, cyber porn, London football, and, for good measure, Islamic radicalism. The good news is, for the most part, he succeeds admirably.

Within these pages, we meet a fascinating cast of characters: a hedge fund manager who plots and schemes to become filthy rich from the crash of a well-known bank. His skunk-addicted son who is obsessed with a new reality show called It’s Madness, which pits schizophrenics, bipolars, and other mentally challenged contestants against each other to win a free year of treatment. A Pakistani businessman who introduces lime pickles to London and has been nominated for an OBE from the Palace along with his teenage son, a would-be terrorist who dreams of converting the world to pure Islam. And a disgruntled literary critic – R. Tranter – who envies and savages a rising literary star in a most unpleasant way.

At first glance, this disparate cast has little in common; however, each of them, in his or her own way, is escaping from something that one character calls “true life.” We’ve come a long way, Mr. Faulks seems to suggest, from a sense of value and purpose. Our modern life has become dumbed-down and turned us into anesthetized robots, tethered to our cell phones and laptops. One character shuts out the world with a genetically-mutated drug (“skunk”); another with an alternate-reality game called Parallax; yet another with extremist religious beliefs; still another with a retreat into the 19th century of literature where things were simpler. And perhaps the boldest reality-alterer of all, the financier John Veals, builds his fortune on the illusion of market stability.

The satire is often delicious, like reading a Tom Wolfe novel (think: Bonfire of the Vanities). Some of it is laugh-out-loud hilarious, such as a scene in which the would-be suicide bomber explains to his handler that he may be tardy to his mission because he is being forced to accompany his father to Buckingham Palace to receive his OBE. Or this scene: the Pakistani Farroq al-Rashid hires R. Tranter to give him a crash course in literature so he can “chat up” the Queen, only to have his entire list summarily dismissed (“OT – Oirish Twaddle,” “poor man’s Somerset Maugham,” or “the man who put the ‘anal’ into ‘banality’).” Or this gem about the latest irrelevant book prize: “The Pizza Palace Book of the Year prize, somewhat controversially, was awarded to either a children’s story, a travel book, or a biography. Excluding all fiction was a bold thing to do, but it was felt that novelists already had enough prizes of their own…”

It is likely that the reader will relate to some characters over others; for this reader, it was sometimes hard to follow the marginally-legal high-stakes financial deals, done behind the backs of the regulators. Sebastian Faulks particularly skewers those who are “not just wealthy, but insanely, ineffably, immeasurably rich.” Still, A Week In December deserves big kudos for tackling greed and the dehumanizing effects of the electronic age and doing it so darn well.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 60 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday; 1 edition (March 9, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Sebastian Faulks
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Engleby

Bibliography:

• A Trick of the Light (1984)
• The Girl at the Lion D’Or (1989)
• A Fool’s Alphabet (1992)
• Birdsong (1993)
• Charlotte Gray (1998)
• On Green Dolphin Street (2001)
• Human Traces (2005)
• Engleby (2007)
• A Week in December (2010)
• A Possible Life: A Novel in Five Parts (December 2012)

Officially sanctioned James Bond Novel:

• Devil May Care (May 2008)

Other:

• The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives (1996)
• Pistache (2006)

P.G. Wodehouse novels:

• Jeeves and the Wedding Bells (November 2013)

Movies from Books:

• Charlotte Gray (2002)

“He looked up and saw, in the candlelight, the photographs on the walls. Photographs out of magazines that Maia had put up to brighten the room, advertisements showing women in tropical paradises, with beaches and isolated atolls in the background, half-crumpled photographs, some of them damp from being picked up out of the garbage on the streets. You almost wanted to throw up with the pity of it.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (MAY 10, 2010)

Europa Editions, a New York based publisher founded in 2005, first came to my attention a few years ago through one of their noir titles. I really enjoy Europa’s Italian crime novels written by Massimo Carlotto, Jean Claude Izzo, and Carlo Lucarelli. There’s a predictable level of quality here that makes me return to Europa and peruse their titles regularly. My attitude towards publishers is similar to my attitude towards film directors–experience has taught me that some directors and some publishers consistently produce work that I’m interested in.

And this brings me to Zulu, from French crime writer, Caryl Férey, a novel in Europa’s World Noir series. The novel concerns Ali Neuman, a middle aged police detective who’s the head of Cape Town’s Crime Unit. As a child, Neuman witnessed the vicious murders of his father and brother, and he’s haunted by memories of their hideous deaths. Now damaged but not brutalized–an important distinction–Neuman sees the detritus of crime every day–homicides, rapes, kidnappings, and then there are the country’s social problems: a catastrophic explosion of AIDS and the vast, still unbreachable chasms between the rich and the poor. The pressure is on to “clean up” Cape Town’s image for the forthcoming 2010 World Cup in order to meet the world’s scrutiny:

“The potential economic gains were enormous—there was talk of creating 125,000 jobs, if the homicide rate could be reduced by fifty per cent—and the country, which at a time of globalization was experiencing the biggest growth in its history, needed foreign investors. Especially now, when South Africa was getting ready for the biggest media event on earth, the World Cup, due to take place in 2010—four billion viewers for the final matches, a million supporters who had to be kept safe, all the TV coverage, the interviews. The whole world would be watching, and South Africa simply could not afford the terrible image it had. Who wanted to invest in a country branded the world’s most dangerous place? The financial backers had to be reassured at all costs.”

Crime becomes personal to Neuman when his elderly, blind mother is attacked. She lives in Khayelitsha, Cape Town’s largest township. Overcrowded with squatters and the homeless, Khayelitsha “had become a buffer between Cape Town, ‘the most beautiful city in the world,’ and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.” Khayelitsha is overrun with crime, gangs, AIDS, and the Nigerian Mafia who “control the main drug networks:”

“It wasn’t the poor who attacked security guards with bazookas, it wasn’t the unemployed who had killed the director of Business Against Crime the previous year. They were dealing with a wave of organized crime, gangs small or large, linked to Mafias, gangs with sophisticated infrastructure similar to those of the Mob in the USA in the thirties. The police were corrupt, or even in collusion with the criminals, the justice system was ineffective, the government was doing nothing.”

Labouring under a sense of obligation, Neuman becomes involved in tracking down the boy who mugged his mother, but he’s sidetracked when the body of a brutally beaten young white woman is found. Neuman finds himself investigating both crimes: the high profile murder of a rich white girl who was recreation slumming in a world she didn’t understand, and the relatively unimportant mugging of Neuman’s mother, a helpless, poor black woman. Neuman traverses both the slums and the guarded, gated communities of the rich–both worlds are fraught with their own dangers. In the world of the affluent white businessman, Neuman faces prejudice and politics. In the case of the slums, where “the luckiest live in containers,” Neuman has to decipher his own Zulu traditions.

Zulu certainly isn’t going to do much for South African tourism. In fact, if you had plans to go, you might find yourself canceling your tickets. Férey’s nightmarish vision of South African crime creates a whole new kind of hell. The stark contrasts between the fetid, corrugated iron lean-to shacks in shanty towns and the coastal mega-mansions of Cape Town accessible only through toll roads scream that this world cannot last. I read a lot of crime and noir, but Zulu, while an intense gripping read is relentlessly bleak in its presentation of all sorts of sick new ways of murdering people. Given the territory–the backdrop of South Africa’s bloody history, this is to be expected. I tend to prefer my crimes to be off-page or at least “clean,” and by that I mean no torture. Some of these scenes are detailed, so be warned.

(Translated from French by Howard Curtis.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (April 27, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Caryl Férey and author page in French
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt (none found!)
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Forgive Me by Amanda Eyre Ward Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux

Translated Bibliography:

• Zulu (2008; April 2010 in US)

“The pieces of this case, maybe two or three cases, held together by the thinnest of wires: circumstance and an educated guess. The rest floated and turned in the darkness, offering themselves up as a piece of the puzzle, with no real clue as to how or why.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (APR 22, 2010)

The Windy City is the setting for Michael Harvey’s fast-paced thriller, The Third Rail. Private investigator Michael Kelly is part of a task force that includes a detective named Vince Rodriguez and a no-nonsense FBI agent, Katherine Lawson. Their goal is to find a sadistic sniper who shot several passengers riding Chicago’s public transit system. Someone in the know contacts Kelly, and the conversation leads the ex-cop to believe that the key to this puzzling case may lie in the distant past.

Unwilling to be a helpless pawn in a psychotic individual’s twisted game, Kelly launches his own investigation with the help of Hubert Russell, a “twenty-something cyber hacker.” Kelly also consults a retired policeman named Jimmy Doherty in order to gather information and gain a fresh perspective. Michael scours his memory, as he tries to figure out what happened long ago that could have driven someone to commit such vicious crimes. He soon suspects that the shooter may have an accomplice who is nursing a long-standing grudge.

Not everything in this novel is gloom and doom. Kelly has a soft spot for his year-old spaniel, Maggie, and a high regard for a beautiful judge named Rachel Swenson. Although Rachel is uncomfortable with Michael’s penchant for getting into trouble, she cares enough about him to keep him in her life. However, as events heat up, Rachel may very well run out of patience with her boyfriend’s tendency to track down felons on his own.

Harvey has a spare and straightforward writing style, enhanced by brief, staccato sentences and crisp dialogue. Dramatic descriptive passages add to the tension-filled atmosphere. After the perpetrator picks his first victim, “He pulled the trigger, and the woman dropped straight down. Like a puppet with strings cut, she was all here and there, arms, legs, and a smear of lipstick across her lips and down her chin.” This is not a prettified Chicago. There are rats the size of cats, seamy alleys filled with dumpsters, and “the last remnants of the city’s Cabrini-Green housing complex project” provide a haven for gangs and other miscreants. In the high-rise, which is now little more than a shell, “metal mailboxes scored with bullet holes ran along one wall, and the linoleum floor was covered with broken glass and a handful of syringes.” Even Chicago’s blunt mayor, John J. Wilson, is a profane and arrogant boor who bullies people into doing his bidding.

This gritty police procedural keeps us engrossed until it wanders off track during the overly cluttered conclusion. Harvey throws everything but the kitchen sink into the mix (terrorism, abduction, corruption, violence, cover-ups, you name it), and not all of the myriad twists and turns work well. However, The Third Rail is, for the most part, a suspenseful and entertaining novel that is as unpredictable and rough-edged as the most rundown areas of Chicago’s South Side.

Editor’s note: A portion of this book’s proceeds will be donated to The Cambodian Children’s Fund.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 51 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf; 1 edition (April 20, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Michael Harvey
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: We All Fall Down The Fifth Floor

Bibliography:

• The Chicago Way (August 2007)
• The Fifth Floor (August 2008)
• Third Rail (April 2010)
• We All Fall Down (July 2011)

“This matter has to move beyond virtue. Virtue is too passive, too narrow. Virtue can motivate individuals, but for groups, societies, a whole civilization, it’s a weak force. Nations are never virtuous, though they might sometimes think they are. For humanity en masse, greed triumphs virtue. So we have to welcome into our solutions the ordinary compulsions of self-interest, and also celebrate novelty, the thrill of invention, the pleasures of ingenuity and cooperation, the satisfaction of profit. ”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (MAR 30, 2010)

Reading Solar, Ian McEwan’s entertaining and clever new novel, reminded me of an appearance by Al Gore on the Daily Show. Jon Stewart, it seemed, had grown increasingly tired of all the talk and dire warnings about global warming. He asked Gore if the former vice president was at all concerned that the urgency with which the warnings were declared, took some of the attention away from the solutions. In other words, was there a disconnect between the message and the solutions, which seemed so abstract? Stewart wanted tangible solutions—something we could all sink our teeth into.

Professor Michael Beard, the protagonist of McEwan’s novel, is well equipped to understand both sides of that argument. As the novel opens, we find him to be in his early 50s, a man who is resting on past laurels (Beard won the Nobel Prize in his youth for some essential work on quantum physics) and “lent his title, Professor Beard, Nobel Laureate, to letterheads and institutes.” He now serves as titular head of a new government environmental policy agency and weekly makes the train commute from his home in Paddington in England to the agency’s headquarters in Reading.

Even if publicly the center is working on an important project—the Wind Turbine for Urban Domestic Use—Beard doesn’t appreciate the dire tone in which much of the warnings about global warming is relayed. “There was an Old Testament ring to the forewarnings, an air of plague-of-boils and deluge-of-frogs, that suggested a deep and constant inclination, enacted over the centuries, to believe that one was always living at the end of days, that one’s own demise was urgently bound up with the end of the world and therefore made sense, or was just a little less irrelevant,” Beard believes. Still he plods along on the project because it affords him a steady paycheck and lets him pay attention to his real love—womanizing.

Back home, Beard’s fifth wife, Patrice, is having an affair with a construction worker, using Beard’s various infidelities against him. Trying hard to get a grip around this fact and to the thought that he is headed for divorce yet again, Beard jumps at an invitation to attend a conference on global warming way in Spitsbergen in the Arctic. This particular segment of the book really captures the freezing cold very effectively particularly through one over-the-top segment where Beard desperately tries to pee after tackling layers and layers of clothing.

Once he returns home, a sudden unforeseen event has Beard acting in his established selfish and self-serving mode and this act totally changes the direction of the novel. In the second part of the book, Beard is now working on a project involving artificial photosynthesis and is getting ready to throw the switch on a big project way across the world in the deserts of New Mexico. But, as they say, what goes around comes around and it remains to be seen whether the past will eventually catch up with the obnoxious Beard.

There are segments in the book that are funny but overall Solar is no comedy. It has ample doses of cynicism for sure—for example, Beard’s project at the Reading institute, the wind turbine, is labeled as a “single eye-catching project that would be comprehensible to the taxpayer and the media.” McEwan can be snide when he wants to be. This is the case when the conference attendees in the Arctic offset “the guilty discharge of carbon dioxide from twenty return flights and snowmobile rides and sixty hot meals a day served in polar conditions” by “planting three thousand trees in Venezuela as soon as a site could be identified and local officials bribed.”

You can tell that McEwan has done a lot of research for the novel. And even the arguments he makes in science are convincing. In the Arctic expedition, there is a mudroom that gets more and more disorganized as the days go by and towards the end there is a mad scramble for the few warm clothes that are left. The novel makes an extremely fluent analogy between the chaos of this room and our larger lives in general. McEwan shows us that rules and more important, enforcement, are necessary for things to work. “Science of course was fine, and who knew, art was too, but perhaps self-knowledge was beside the point,” he writes, “Boot rooms needed good systems so that flawed creatures could use them properly. Leave nothing, Beard decided, to science or art, or to idealism. Only good laws would save the boot room. And citizens who respected the law.”

Beard is a despicable character and readers will find little to appreciate in him. This is a problem for the book—it is hard to root for a character you despise. Yet Solar succeeds in part because of McEwan’s absolutely spectacular writing. Every sentence is worth cherishing and reading slowly. When McEwan describes even an airplane trolley in the most precise terms—Beard had “an overdeveloped awareness of the precise location in the aisle of the drinks trolley, of that muffled clinking sound and its asymptomatic approach,”—you know exactly what he means.

As the book progresses to its spirited ending, you realize that under the guise of a comedy, Solar is a much more insightful book. One begins to wonder if Beard, in his excesses, is supposed to signify us—all of humanity. If that were indeed the case, we need those “tangible solutions” to global warming sooner rather than later. What irony it is then, to realize that these solutions will likely be served to us by someone like Beard.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 184 readers
PUBLISHER:	Nan A. Talese (March 30, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ian McEwan
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:Saturday Atonement Another climate change novel: State of Fear by Michael Crichton

Bibliography:

• First Love, Last Rites: Stories (1975)
• In Between the Sheets and Other Stories (1978)
• The Cement Garden (1978)
• The Comfort of Strangers (1981)
• The Child in Time (1987)
• The Innocent (1989)
• Black Dogs (1992)
• Enduring Love (1997)
• Amsterdam (1998)
• Atonement (2001; 2002 in US)
• Saturday (2005)
• On Chesil Beach (2007)
• Solar (2010)
• Sweet Tooth (November 2012)

Children’s Books:

• The Daydreamer (1994)

Screenplays:

• The Imitation Game (1981)
• Or Shall We Die (1983)
• The Ploughman’s Lunch (1985)
• Soursweet (1989)
• The Good Son (1993)

Movies from books:

• The Comfort of Strangers (1991)
• The Cement Garden (1994)
• The Innocent (1995)
• Atonement (2007)