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

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  SEP 13, 2011)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography:

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

“There isn’t much call for deep thinking in my current job in Cloisters, New Jersey. We don’t do a lot of chatting about philosophical issues or natural phenomena in the casino. I tried to talk about National Geographic one night, and Jason gave me a look like I was insulting him, so I moved on to a safer subject: which of the girls have implants.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (SEP 9, 2011)

Eoin Colfer? He writes those kid’s books, Artemis Fowl, doesn’t he? What’s someone who writes really popular children’s books doing writing a crime novel? Well according to the dedication, Irish author Eoin Colfer says the book is “For Ken Bruen who made me do it.” So we have Bruen to thank for this first book in what promises to be an entertaining series.

The protagonist and narrator of Plugged is 40-something Irishman Daniel McEvoy, an ex-British army soldier with two horrendous tours in Lebanon under his belt. Plugged finds McEvoy, unable to adjust to civilian life, in Cloisters, New Jersey working nights as a bouncer in a seedy, low-rent strip club called Slotz:

“A formica bar, low lighting that’s more cheap than fashionable. A roulette wheel that bucks with every spin, two worn baize card tables and half a dozen slots. Slotz.”

Hardly a stellar career move, but then McEvoy isn’t so much into appearances–except when it comes to his bald head. When the book begins McEvoy is getting hair plugs from an unlicensed doctor named Zeb who operates a fly-by-night office, and it’s this relationship combined with the murder of a Slotz hostess that takes McEvoy out of his role of neighbourhood bouncer to amateur investigator. McEvoy soon finds himself partnered-up with a prickly female detective, and on the unfriendly end of the local crime boss.

The book’s narrative has an almost chatty, humorous, and casual approach which belies the violence that frequently and suddenly explodes on the page. McEvoy confides in his reader and enhances the narrative with flashes of Lebanese hell and memories of therapy sessions with his permanently hungover, trendy therapist Simon Moriarty–a man who in his absence has assumed the role of mentor and advisor. McEvoy is a likeable character whose seemingly-loser role in life covers independence and a well-honed philosophy:

“The great Stephen King once wrote don’t sweat the small stuff, which I mulled over for long enough to realize that I don’t entirely agree with it. I get what he means: we all have enough major sorrow in our lives without freaking out over the day-to-day hangnails and such, but sometimes sweating the small stuff helps you make it through the big stuff. Take me, for example; I have had enough earth-shattering events happen to me, beside me and underneath me to have most people dribbling in a psych ward, but what I do is try not to think about it. Let it fester inside, that’s my philosophy. It’s gotta be healthy, right? Focus on the everyday non-lethal bullshit to take your mind off the landmark psychological blows that are standing in line to grind you down.”

If you like that quote, then chances are you’re the sort of reader who will enjoy Plugged. It’s a light, fresh crime novel with an engaging protagonist whose lively sense of humour and unflinching eye deliver an entertaining read. Some of the humour gravitates around McEvoy’s Irishness and still more erupts from the well-drawn characters who range from McEvoy’s nutty neighbour–Mrs Delano: a woman who’s “beautiful-ish in a psycho kind of way” to the bitchy retired stripper, Brandi who’s “been angry at the world for about a year, since she had to hang up her stripper’s g-string and downgrade to a hostess job” at age 30.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	Overlook Hardcover (September 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Eoin Colfer
EXTRAS:	Audio Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Max by Ken Bruen and Jason Star

Partial Bibliography:

• The Wish List (2000)
• The Supernaturalist (2004)
• Half Moon Investigations (2006)
• Airman (2008)
• And Another Thing…(Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) (2009)

Artemis Fowl series:

• Artemis Fowl (2001)
• Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident (2002)
• Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code (2003)
• Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception (2005)
• Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony (2006)
• Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox (2008)
• Artemis Fowl: The Atlantis Complex (2010)
• Artemis Fowl: The Last Guardian (2012)

Not a kid’s book:

• Plugged (September 2011)

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

Bibliography:

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

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

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (AUG 19, 2011)

Special –> interview with MAX BARRY!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography:

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

“I was a young man. Strong. Tight. White. And ready to love.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  AUG 11, 2011)

Crude and hilarious, Ladies’ Man from American author and screenwriter, Richard Price is a week in the life of Kenny Becker, a thirty-year-old college dropout who works as door-to-door salesman selling crappy cheap gadgets. It’s the 1970s, and Kenny lives in New York with his girlfriend, “bank clerk would-be singer” La Donna, a good-looking, marginally talented girl whose big night revolves around a cheesy talent contest at a hole- in-the-wall club called Fantasia. Kenny has a series of failed relationships in his past, and when the book begins, La Donna’s singing lessons, according to Kenny, appear to be placing a strain on the couple. On one hand, Kenny understands he’s supposed to support La Donna, but he also resents the time she is devoting to her singing lessons. Their sex life isn’t as hot and wild as it used to be and with Kenny’s rampant libido largely unsatisfied, he tends to blame the singing lessons for turning La Donna’s head. He sees her night at Fantasia as a potential disaster, but he feels unable to confront his doubts. For one thing, discussing La Donna’s singing is like handling dynamite, and for another, Kenny knows that keeping the peace is the surest way of getting laid:

“I wasn’t going to say dick. I couldn’t. In the beginning we could say anything to each other, but now it was too dangerous; if we started cracking on each other with truths at this point we would inevitably get to the bottom truth, which was that we had no damn right being together anymore, and I for one was scared to death of the alternatives. So I settled for the bullshit low-key rage of two people going through the motions of a relationship, a life; and I couldn’t let her humiliate herself at Fantasia in the name of not rocking the boat even though the boat was capsizing fast, and I would even have the stones to call it being supportive.”

While Kenny, who’s the glib narrator here, argues that he’s trying to protect La Donna from humiliation and a greedy, lying voice coach (a woman he insists on calling Madame Bossanova), it’s clear to the reader that Kenny’s “protectiveness” is rooted in other things. His own insecurities, fears, and possessiveness all play a role in his begrudging, resentful attempts to support La Donna’s Big Night at Fantasia. Kenny is the classic unreliable narrator; we see his world through his eyes, and Kenny, a self-styled ladies’ man, isn’t quite honest about his relationship problems:

“I must have lived with four La Donnas in the last six years and sometimes I thought I was destined to have twice as many in the next six. I seemed to float from one bad, heavy relationship to another, like a trapeze artist swinging from one suspended bar to the next with no net below.”

As Kenny’s week unfolds, the narrative vacillates back and forth between Kenny’s personal and professional life. His mornings begin in a diner with his fellow Bluecastle House salesmen–men who are older than Kenny–older, heavier, and not as handsome, so it’s easy for Kenny to reassure himself that he’s better than them and that the sales job is temporary–just until something better comes along. But Kenny’s at the age when it is becoming harder and harder to kid himself that he’s going somewhere.

Kenny’s relationship with La Donna inevitably implodes, and when he becomes “Kenny Solo,” his desperation grows as he pursues a series of meaningless sexual encounters–each one more degrading than the one before. With a flagging self image, an obsession about his abs, and with his life spiraling out of control, Kenny seeks meaning in his life through sex. While he stalks the neon bars, greasy, sordid whorehouses, and stroke booths of New York, it becomes obvious that Kenny is terrified of being alone, and that his attempts to fill the holes in his life conversely only serve to expose the hollowness of his existence. Author Richard Price establishes one incredibly-staged scene after another–the humiliation of meeting a high school loser who’s now affluent and happy, a late night talk show that draws frantic, lonely losers, the desperation of a singles bar, and the stroke booth where girls hype men into masturbation.

As an unreliable narrator, Kenny is at times the last person to “get it,” and that also means that we aren’t supposed to take his view of life without some skepticism. Kenny may think he’s special, but he’s just as desperate as the guy in the next stroke booth. Here’s Kenny in a singles bar:

“For the next hour I sat at the bar, drinking rum and pretending to watch a basketball game which had orange guys against green guys. People started piling in. I was having a hard time getting rolling so I continued watching the tube. A lot of guys watched the tube, leaning against the bar or the room divider, their drinks tucked under their armpits like footballs. There was no sound on, but we all watched that fucking game with a burning intensity like we were politicos and the screen was flashing election results. I didn’t even know who the hell were playing. My elation was taking a bath. Around me guys swamped girls like pigeons after croutons, blurting out lines so transparent and tacky that even I was offended. No wonder nobody ever got laid. I watched. I listened. I was an observer. A girl nearby, the brittle remains of an almost-melted ice cube floating on top of her half-hour-old drink, listened politely.”

Ladies’ Man is slated to become an American classic. This is a study of one man’s search for meaning and fulfillment through the neon lights of an emotionally barren landscape, and in Kenny’s case, he arrives at his destination with a new uncomfortable knowledge of his weaknesses and his limitations.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 10 readers
PUBLISHER:	Picador; First Edition edition (June 21, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Richard Price
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Lush Life

Bibliography:

• The Wanderers (1974)
• Bloodbrothers (1976)
• Ladies’ Man (1978; June 2011)
• The Breaks (1983)
• Clockers (1992)
• Freedomland (1998)
• Samaritan (2003)
• Lush Life (March 2008)

Movies from books:

• The Wanderers (1979)
• Clockers (1995)

“Yes, Mr. Fuckwizard, we want that fully spunkloaded meatloaf of a ham steak of a dick.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn AUG 9, 2011)

Nicholson Baker has proven that he can make the familiar very strange. Consider his first novel, The Mezzanine, where a man is on a lunch hour hunt for shoelaces. All the odds and ends, the digressions and pop-up thoughts that can enter a desultory mind, are playfully and artfully presented in a readable and engaging manner. In Vox, a lonely man and woman hook up on the phone. They are able to talk about everyday matters and lure the reader into their idle chatter, so that the sexual banter is fluid instead of gratuitous. In his last novel, The Anthologist, Baker uses stream-of-consciousness to wax poetic and edify the reader on verse. His non-fiction Human Smoke, my personal favorite, is an exquisite tome that shifts the kaleidoscope on history’s sacred cows.

Baker chose a small concept idea for his latest, House of Holes, a cheeky plunge into lust and vulgarity so steep and rank, so exhaustive and consummate, that it is recommended to be read in small doses. That’s easy, as each surreal chapter is its own short carnal experience. Although some characters appear in several chapters, they are not immersed into a tight, ongoing storyline, except for Shandee, who finds a male arm, which is detached from its owner (Dave), and seeks to find the rest of his body. The eponymous House of Holes is the main character, and everyone else is a fornicating subject. People come to the House of Holes to make their prurient dreams come true.

Somewhere or anywhere/everywhere are circles that are potential portals—the end of a straw, the putting tee of the seventh green, the fourth dryer from the left at the laundromat at the corner of 18th Street and Grover Avenue–that will suck up (or down) and send the willing concupiscent to the House of Holes. There are no limits to what you can do with your anatomy at HOH, and Baker will provide infinite LMAO and OMG moments as you read.

I don’t think any author has come up with so many creative terms for the most sexual parts of our body: meatstick, truncheon, peeny wanger, musclemeat, length of badness, bulldog, cockpoles, hamsteak, thundertube, peckerdickcock, beast, frilly doilies of labial flesh, slobbering kitty, bungee hole, purple cometwat, slippery salope—well, you get the point.

Highbrow and lowbrow blend together, and it is evident that Baker is a scholar with a wanton repertoire of ideas. Some chapters are more “fulfilling” than others, also. For example, a woman nose-dives into a portal and ends up inside her friend’s penis. Getting out was quite the liberating experience for both of them.

In another chapter, a woman, Zilka, gets her clitoris stolen at an airport security check, by someone known as the Pearloiner.

“…we’ve determined that your clitoris is not a carry-on item…It’s swollen and oversized and over the weight limit, and I’m going to have to remove it now.”

Zilka sees it going into a clear plastic baggie with a numbered label on it. She seeks help from the House of Holes to get it back, as the Pearloiner is known to loiter there.

Crotchal transfers, temporary scrotal removal, sex with headless men, Penis Washes, Hall of the Armless Men Who Still Want to Fuck Twat—this is just a fraction of the dizzying booty in this book, just an ampule of the sex blasts of comic and twisted derangement provided between these sticky pages. Rather than read it solo, this would make a humorously lewd parlor game between trusted friends at a dinner party (make that AFTER dinner). You could truth or dare it—read a chapter on a dare—but I wouldn’t advise trying any of these tricks yourself, or with each other!

Take a ride on this “Pornsucker” ship or gaze at the 12-screen Porndecahedron of licentious delights. This review comes with a warning, however, something that Erica Jong once said:

“My reaction to porno films is as follows; After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw, after the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 11 readers
PUBLISHER:	Simon & Schuster (August 9, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Nicholson Baker
EXTRAS:	No excerpt on this one.. we’d have to card you before you could read it!
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Anthologist

Bibliography:

• The Mezzanine (1988)
• Room Temperature (1990)
• Vox 1992)
• The Fermata (1994)
• The Everlasting Story of Nory (1998)
• A Box of Matches (2003)
• Checkpoint (2004)
• The Anthologist by Ncholas Baker (2009)
• House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (August 2011)

Nonfiction

• U and I: A True Story (1991)
• The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber (1996)
• Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001)
• Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (2008)

Written his wife:

• The World on Sunday : Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer’s Newspaper (2005)

“If you could be anyone for a day, who would you be?
Me: Mata Hari
Tinker: Natty Bumppo
Eve: Darryl Zanuck”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JUL 27, 2011)

If a novel could win an award for best cinematography, this would take home the gold. Amor Towles’s sophisticated retro-era novel of manners captures Manhattan 1938 with immaculate lucidity and a silvery focus on the gin and the jazz, the nightclubs and the streets, the pursuit of sensuality, and the arc of the self-made woman.

The novel’s preface opens in 1966, with a happily married couple attending a Walker Evans photography exhibition. An unlikely, chance encounter stuns the woman, Katey—a picture of a man staring across a canyon of three decades, a photograph of an old friend. Thus begins the flashback story of Katey’s roaring twenties in the glittering 30’s.

Katey Kontent (Katya) is the moral center of the story, an unapologetic working girl—more a bluestocking than a blue blood– born in Brighton Beach of Russian immigrant parents. She’s an ambitious and determined statuesque beauty à la Gene Tierney or Lauren Bacall who seeks success in the publishing industry. She works as hard by day as she plays at night. Her best friend, Eve (Evelyn) Ross, is a Midwest-born Ginger Rogers /Garbo character mix, with jazz cat spirit and a fearless, cryptic glamor. She refuses daddy’s money and embraces her free spirit:

“I’m willing to be under anything…as long as it isn’t somebody’s thumb.”

Katey and Eve flirt with shameless savoir-faire, and are quick with the clever repartees. They will kiss a man once that they’ll never kiss twice, and glide with effortless élan among all the social classes of New York. Moreover, they can make a few dollars stretch through many a martini, charming gratis drinks from fashionable men. With their nerve and gaiety, the friends would be at equal repose at Vanity Fair or the Algonquin Round Table, or in a seedy bar on the Lower East Side.

Eve and Katey meet the sphinx-like Tinker Grey on New Year’s Eve, 1937, at the Hotspot, a jazz bar in Greenwich Village. Tinker’s métier is Gatsby-esque–an inscrutable, ruggedly handsome man in cashmere, a mysterious lone figure with an enigmatic mystique. The three become fast friends, but as with many triangulating relationships, a hairline rivalry sets in. Then a cataclysmic tragedy shatters the cool grace of their bond, and their solidarity is ruptured.

Towles is spectacular at description and atmosphere, keeping a keen camera’s eye on the city with a polished caliber of writing that is rare in a debut novel. A smoky haze envelopes the streets and clubs and buildings, which the reader can’t help surveying in all the rich colors of vintage black and white. The writing is dense, yet fluid and ambient, rich as a contralto, and cool as a saxophone. Tendrils of Edith Wharton flow through, as well as Fitzgerald, and echoes of Capote’s Holly Golightly.

At times, the lush descriptions threaten to eclipse the story and the characters become remote. This is a book of manners, so the action resides in the conflict between individual ambitions and desires and the acceptable social codes of behavior between classes. However, the middle section stagnates, as one character hogs most of the narrative in repetitive days and nights, the psychological complexities dimming. It loses some steam as the story closes, and the taut thrill of the first half wanes.

Still, the beauty of the novel endures, and the sensuality of the prose lingers. The reader is also edified on the origin of the title, and the author folds it in neatly to the story. The characters are crisp and contoured, delightful and satisfying, even if one left the stage a bit too soon. This is one male writer who finesses his female characters with impressive agility and assurance.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking Adult (July 26, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Amor Towles
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  The Jazz Bird by Craig Holden Bandbox by Thomas Mallon And another novel of manners: A Gentlemen’s Guide to Good Living by Michael Dahlie

Bibliography:

• The Rules of Civility (July 2011)

“The whole area wasn’t exactly what you’d call a great place to hang out. You did, there was a chance they’d find you the next morning in a ditch with your throat cut, your pockets turned inside out, and sperm in your ass, or perhaps a sharp instrument. It was the kind of place where the mice belonged to gangs.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (APR 24, 2011)

Fans of author Joe Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard series will not be disappointed in the latest novel, Devil Red. For those unfamiliar with the series (and it’s not necessary to read them in sequence in order to understand what’s going on), Hap and Leonard are two East Texas, tough working-class men who make a dubious living through various odds jobs. Hap, the narrator of the tales is white, and his sidekick Leonard is gay and black. Their friendship is firmly deep-rooted, and yet they often approach problems from different angles. Basically these are “buddy” books set against the backdrop of dark crime which is alleviated by outrageous humor. If Hap and Leonard ever tried their hand at show biz, they’d make great stand-up comics.

The last novel, Vanilla Ride found our two hapless heroes trying to do a “good deed” and getting mixed up in the business of the Dixie Mafia. This leads to hell unleashed by a legendary hit-woman known as Vanilla Ride. Although Hap and Leonard survive, it’s a deeply unsettling encounter for Hap.

Devil Red finds Hap and Leonard now somewhat steadily employed as investigators. Ex-cop Marvin Hanson has opened a PI agency, and naturally that means that Hap and Leonard will do the dirty work. The dirty work involves poking around in a cold murder case in a young man named Ted Christopher and his girlfriend, Mini were shot and their bodies dumped on a hiking trail. There are no suspects and very few clues. It seems to be a random killing, but then Hap and Leonard connect Mini to a horrific murder committed by the repulsive Evil Lynn–a delusional, now imprisoned psycho who thinks she is a vampire. Evil Lynn and her friends formed a cult known as The Children of the Night, but the group disbanded after her arrest for murder. Hoping for a connection to the murders of Ted Christopher and Mini, Hap and Leonard begin digging around into the so-called vampire murder Evil Lynn committed, and they uncover a trail of death….

There are new characters of course, along with a few familiar characters who resurface in this tale. To give names would spoil some of the fun for readers, so let’s just say there’s a putrid pile of scumbags floating to the top of Hap and Leonard’s world in the form of both old and new enemies. As usual, the tale is peppered with Hap and Leonard’s crude humor, so if you prefer your books tame and profanity-free, keep walking. But if you’re like me, you’ll find Hap and Leonard’s potty mouths refreshing and even inspiring. In other books in the series, the humor alleviated the violence, but in Devil Red, I’d say the violence wins. As usual, Lansdale has a mean eye when it comes to character description. Here’s Hap and Leonard visiting a newspaper office:

“There were reporters around, but fewer than I had imagined. There was also an advertising department. One of the women who worked there was overweight and frumpy with piss-blonde hair that looked to have been made by electricity and a sense of humor. She was wearing a too-short top that showed a lot of belly and a silver belly ring. She had on shorts that showed way too much ass and on the ass was a tattoo that looked like something an arthritic chicken had scratched in the dirt while dying.

My take is you can dress any way you want, but my amendment to that is that you have to have mirrors at your house, and you have to use them, and you must not lie to yourself about what they show.”

In Vanilla Ride, Hap struggles with his conscience in the aftermath of the violence he commits, and that theme returns with a vengeance in Devil Red. To Leonard, the choices he makes are simple, but Hap’s conscience, stoked by his growing nesting instinct with long-term girlfriend, Brett, keeps him awake at nights. One of the core themes of Lansdale’s East Texas Noir series is that conventional morality doesn’t apply to the situations Hap and Leonard face. There are systems (such as the Dixie Mafia, for example) that operate outside the law, and the law that is supposed in rein in the bad guys is so penetrated with corruption, the good guys are forced to take matters into their own hands. For Hap and Leonard, it comes down to a matter of the ends justify the means. Leonard has no problem with that while Hap still lingers on the morality of his actions.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 10 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf; First Edition edition (March 15, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Joe R. Lansdale
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Hap & Leonard Series: Savage Season and Mucho Mojo Bad Chili and Captains Outrageous Vanilla Ride and INTERVIEW Others: The Bottoms Sunset and Sawdust Leather Maiden

Bibliography:

Hap Collins / Leonard Pine Series:

• Act of Love: a thriller (1980)
• The Nightrunners: a dark suspense novel (1983)
• Texas Night Riders: a western novel (written as Ray Slater) (1983)
• Dead in the West: a horror novel (1986)
• The Magic Wagon: a western novel with fantastic elements (1986)
• The Drive-In: a horror novel (1988)
• Cold in July: a dark suspense novel (1989)
• The Drive-In II: a horror novel (1989)
• Waltz of Shadows: suspense (1991)
• Batman: Captured by the Engines: a suspense novel (1991)
• Batman in Terror on the High Skies: a juvenile suspense novel (1992)
• The Drive-In: A Double Feature Ominbus (1997)
• The Boar: a period drama (1998)
• Freezer Burn: a suspense novel (1999)
• The Bottoms (2000)
• Zeppelins West (June 2001) *
• A Fine Dark Line (January 2003)
• Bubba Ho-Tep (October 2003)
• Sunset and Sawdust (March 2004)
• The Boar : young adult (April 2005)
• Joe R. Lansdale’s The Drive-In (November 2005)
• Flaming London (January 2006) *
• Lost Echoes (February 2007)
• The Shadows Kith and Kin (April 2007)
• Leather Maiden (August 2008)
• Deadman’s Road: Stories (October 2010)
• Crucified Dreams: Stories (February 2011)

Hap Collins / Leonard Pine series:

• Savage Season (1990)
• Mucho Mojo (1994)
• The Two-Bear Mambo (1995)
• Bad Chili (1997)
• Rumble Tumble (1998)
• Captain Outrageous (September 2001)
• Vanilla Ride (June 2009)
• Hyena (February 2011)
• Devil Red (March 2011)

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

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (APR 12, 2011)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography:

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

“A formidable wind seemed to have flown in through the half-inch of open window, but had then immediately found its way under the duvet…”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (APR 5, 2011)

Once upon a time…no. On a dark and stormy night…wait–there was no storm. Long ago and far away…but, it was only a few years ago, and not far if you live in suburban New Jersey. So, one dark and December night in the safe and tidy suburb of Stellar Plains, New Jersey, an arctic chill seeped under doors, a frigid blast blew through windows, and a glacial nipping swirled between the sheets of spouses and lovers. And, just as suddenly, the woman turned from their men, and stopped having sex.

A spell had been cast, unbeknownst to the enchanted. Married woman turned in disgust from their husbands, and teen girls recoiled from their pimply boyfriends. The town was in chaos, but nobody was talking.

At the start of the new school year, the new bohemian and canny drama teacher, Fran Heller, had come to teach at Eleanor Roosevelt High School (Elro), where much of the action takes place. She was staging a production of Lysistrata, the ancient Greek play written by Aristophanes. And, in case you aren’t familiar with it, it is about an entire city of woman that resolves to stop having sex with their men in order to end the Peloponnesian War. That includes their favorite position—The Lioness on The Cheese Grater. Yeah, think about it! This extraordinary mission inflames the battle between the sexes in Athens, just as the suburban spell provokes a war between the mates in Stellar Plains.

Dory and Robby Lang, the central couple of the book, are spirited English teachers at Elro with a high approval rating with students. Until this spell, the Langs had a youthful vigor and robust sex life. Their sophomore daughter Willa, who Dory has deemed “conventional” (average), had found first love with Eli, the drama teacher’s son. But things are now frigid in the soundless fury of their house. Only their old lazy dog lingers to lick himself clean.

The Nordic, big-boned gym teacher, Ruth, had a largely healthy sex life with her sculptor husband—as active as one can expect with twin toddlers and an infant—all boys. She was not immune from the “enchantment,” either. Then there is Bev, a stout and menopausal woman with her hedge fund husband, Ed, who had said some cruel things to her not long ago. The spell has her in its grip, and she is fighting back frisky.

Does Leanne Bannerjee, the hot school psychologist, go on an icy sex strike when the wind chill factor blows her way? She has three boyfriends and a love life that rivals her students.

Wolitzer’s prose is gusty and cinematic, immaculate from start to finish, with well-considered, write-‘em-down one-liners and irrepressible, lucid characters. The voice and style are similar to Tom Perotta, but with a more whimsical moral thrust. The spell’s chaos must reach some conclusion, and this is where the reader enjoys sliding into the ice.

This is a domestic comedy/drama with some acid moments, some poignant insights, and a sprinkling of the psychology of love, coupling, and married life. To enjoy this book, it helps to be flexible about a few unrealistic elements present in a contemporary, earth-bound setting.

This is warm Wolitzer on ice, with a few Mazurkas and a double lutz finale. She did employ a risky contrivance, but it was an active choice, not a slack trick of the pen. Along the way, she demonstrates fine regard to our tech-savvy, digitally addicted society. A delicious sorbet book, this is sly chick-lit that pricks—and puts a spell on you.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 21 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (April 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Meg Wolitzer
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Little Children by Tom Perrota

Bibliography:

• Sleepwalking (1982)
• Hidden Pictures (1986)
• This Is Your Life (1988)
• Friends for Life (1994)
• Surrender, Dorothy (1998)
• The Wife (2003)
• The Position (2005)
• The Ten-Year Nap (2008)
• The Uncoupling (April 2011)

Movies from books:

• This is My Life (1992)
• Surrender, Dorothy (2006)