“My poor family was in shambles.

It had not always been thus. Ten years before, we’d been a solid unit, dollhouse style, mother, father, boy, and girl.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (AUG 1, 2011)

The Astral, by Kate Christensen, gets its title by way of its namesake, the Astral building in Brooklyn, New York. This building houses the protagonist of this book, an aging poet named Harry Quirk. His last name befits him and his family. They are interestingly dysfunctional in many ways.

Harry was once a somewhat well-known poet, teaching poetry workshops and writing his lyrical poems in rhyming and sonnet style. His publisher and mentor has moved to Europe and his style is now out of favor in the United States. His wife, Luz, decides after thirty years of marriage that Harry is having an affair with his best friend, Marion. Despite Harry’s pleading innocence – and he is innocent – Luz does not believe him and she kicks him out of their apartment in the Astral. It is true that Harry did have an affair twelve years ago with a young poetry student, but since that time he has been true to Luz.

Now homeless and without a job, Harry gets a room in a local flophouse and spends his days drinking at a local watering hole named Maureen’s. He finally lands a job at a Hasidic lumber yard through his crack-smoking Hasidic musician friend, Yanti. Here Harry works in accounts payable and is able to rent a one room apartment in the Astral. He figures that if he lives in the Astral, he’ll be closer to Luz and better able to keep an eye on her comings and goings. He is unable to accept that things are over with Luz and he is determined to win her back.

Harry’s daughter, Karina, is a freegan – she believes in getting all of her possessions for free. She gathers discarded things from the curbside, dumpster dives and goes to supermarket and restaurant trash bins to pick up food. She is very clear that the food she picks up consists only of tossed items with expired dates or unused edibles.

Harry’s son, Hector, is living on a commune and mired in a cult called Children of Hashem. They believe that the Messiah will be coming soon or is already here. Hector is being groomed as the new messiah and also is preparing to marry Christa, the cult’s leader. Karina and Harry want to do an intervention, hoping to get Hector out of the cult.

This is, in its way, a parody of today’s life and also a mirror of what is going on within a certain group of people. These people all live in a little area in Brooklyn and have been friends since the 1970’s. Despite Brooklyn being in New York City, this neighborhood is its own little enclave with everyone gossiping about everyone else. The friends are all interconnected, to the point of all of them seeing the same therapist. The novel makes a big deal of this and the unethical practice of Helen, the therapist they share.

The novel reminded me of what Zoe Heller does so well in her writing and what Christensen tries hard to accomplish but doesn’t quite succeed in pulling off. The parody comes off as stilted and without subtlety. For good parody to work, the reader must be able to see him or herself, or someone they can identify with, in the characters or culture. This doesn’t happen here. The characters are very black and white without hues of gray. For instance, Harry is a complete atheist and Hector and Luz are absolute believers. Things are described as either right or wrong. Luz is a moralistic bully while Harry is a moderate and giving guy. There is a lot of repetition of subject matter as if the author is not sure that the reader remembers what has transpired earlier.

Despite its flaws, Christensen can draw a good description and give frailty to the characters she creates. There is pathos, narcissism, stupidity, and a distinct humor to some of the characters and their situations. Though the book didn’t work for me as well as I’d have hoped, I think that a lot of readers would appreciate it more than I did.

I am a fan of Christensen’s and loved Trouble and The Epicure’s Lament. I continue to look forward to her writings.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 26 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday (June 14, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kate Christensen
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read a review of: Trouble The Great Man

Bibliography:

• In the Drink (1999)
• Jeremy Thrane (2001)
• The Epicure’s Lament (2004)
• The Great Man (2007)
• Trouble (2009)
• The Astral (2011)

Nonfiction:

• Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites (July 2013)

“You thought you couldn’t stand not to know a thing until you knew it, wasn’t that right? Who had said that, the Chief? Some poet from the Library Boat, maybe.

Knowledge at last, Kiwi’s mind recited dutifully. The fish’s living eye glass.

Sometimes you would prefer a mystery to remain red-gilled and buried inside you, Kiwi decided, alive and alive inside you.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (FEB 02, 2011)

In her hotly-anticipated debut novel, Swamplandia!, Karen Russell returns to the mosquito-droves and muggy-haze of the Florida Everglades and the gator-themed amusement park featured in her short story, “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” that opened her widely-praised 2006 collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. It was that collection, with its exuberant mix of satire and fabulism, that secured Russell’s reputation as one of the most exciting up-and-comers around and earned her a coveted spot on The New Yorker’s much buzzed about “20 under 40” list last fall. With her energetic prose, quirky settings, and fantastical plots, Russell is a writer’s whose style forces you to sit up and take notice, sometimes at the cost of emotional involvement with her work. However, Swamplandia!, with all its flashing-neon prose is an insightful (and surprisingly funny) exploration of the loss of innocence that inevitably follows the death of a parent.

In the year following her mother’s death, 13-year-old Ava Bigtree quickly learns how “one tragedy can beget another and another.” Since birth, their family-owned, 100-acre island attraction, Swamplandia!, has been Ava’s home. Its 98 alligators (all named after their original gator, Seth, because as Chief Bigtree likes to say “Tradition is as important as promotional materials are expensive.”), Reptile Walk, Live Chicken Thursday feeding shows, and lone mammal, a balding, rhythmless bear named Judy Garland, have all helped Swamplandia! hold its position as the “Number One Gator-Themed Park and Swamp Café” in southwestern Florida. That, and Ava’s mother’s gator-swim routine. However, when Hilola Bigtree dies of ovarian cancer, Chief Bigtree, lost in his own fog of grief, fails to amend the promotional materials and tourists continue to file off the Mainland-Swamplandia! ferry eager to watch the “Swamp Centaur” swim through a gator pit “planked with great grey and black bodies.” Initially, the disappointed mainlanders are understanding –- after all, a family has lost its mother – but, their hijacked sympathy soon swings to money-back-demanding indignation, until a new corporate theme park, the World of Darkness, opens just off the highway, and the tourists stop coming altogether.

With the tourists gone and their father increasingly preoccupied, Ava and her dreamy older sister, Osceola, (white-haired and violet-eyed, Ossie resembles “the doomed sibling you see in those Wild West daguerreotypes, the one who makes you think Oh God take the picture quick; this one isn’t long for this world”) are left alone with empty days to fill. The girls take to hanging out on the abandoned library boat with their studious brother, Kiwi. Kiwi is the kind of guy who gives himself report cards and studies for his SATs long before he’s even stepped foot inside a high school, and so he scoffs when he learns that Ava and Osceola plan to contact their mother with Ossie’s newly acquired occult powers and their homemade Ouija board.

Their unsuccessful séances crush Ava, but when Ossie starts using the Ouija board on her own to meet other ghosts –strange men! – Ava tattles to their father: her sister is dating men, dead ones. Burdened by the park’s mounting debt and his own mismanaged grief, Chief Bigtree isn’t up to dealing with his lonely and disturbed 16-year old daughter.

Or anything else, for that matter.

Angry at his father’s inability to face their increasingly precarious financial situation, Kiwi runs away to the mainland to save his family from destitution and is initiated into the realities of minimum-wage labor as a peon at the World of Darkness. And so, when the Chief disappears to the mainland on mysterious business, Ava and Osceola are left to fend for themselves in the swamp. However, as Osceola’s romance with the ghost of a ill-fated, Depression-era dredgeman, Louis Thanksgiving, intensifies, Ava is left increasingly alone. When Ossie runs off to the Underworld to elope with Louis Thanksgiving, a mysterious stranger, the Bird Man, offers to be Ava’s guide in her quest to retrieve her sister

Forget Dante’s rings or Homer’s River Styx; this is mangrove swamp as the Underworld! With its fecundity and “blue lozenge” water ways, Ava frets that the swamp doesn’t look much like the underworld she’s read about in books, but with its “leafy catacombs,” ravenous mosquitoes, and “rotten-egg smell [that] rose off the pools of water that collected beneath the mangrove’s stilted roots,” but I can’t think of a milieu more likely to harbor ghosts.

Part of successfully navigating the swamps of adolescence involves knowing which beliefs to cling to tenaciously, and which to modify, if not altogether discard. Although the inevitable loss of innocence that follows is heart-breaking, as the Bigtree children learn that life on the mainland is just as imperfect as life on the swamp, that loving a ghost, if possible, comes with a steep cost, that mothers, once dead, stay gone, Russell never lets us lose our sense of humor. Moreover, as Ava oscillates between her girlish beliefs and her adult awakening, Russell maintains expert control over the narrative. So much so, in fact, that the reader, like Ava, is unsure of exactly what to believe. That is, until disaster strikes, and the reader is left sharing Ava’s sentiment: we should have seen it coming all along.

Ava and Osceola’s story is about loneliness, loss and sisterly love, but Kiwi’s sudden emersion in the ways of the contemporary teen helps to lighten some of that darkness. Fascinated by the alien customs around him, Kiwi takes to writing down his observations while his colleagues take to calling him Margaret Mead. His education into mainland life is perceptive, and often hilarious.

Swamplandia! is a quirky, but well-crafted read, and Russell’s prose is dynamite. While the ending might be too pat for some, I was so impressed by Russell’s knack for description and laughed far too many times (really!) to hold it against the book. Karen Russell has been likened to writers as wide ranging as Amy Hempel, George Saunders, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kelly Link and Judy Blume, and while her energetic prose might be too exhausting for some, if her writing is anything, it’s this: original.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 462 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	MacArthur Foundation page on Karen Russell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another Southern Florida story: Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen

Bibliography:

• St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006)
• Swamplandia! (2011)
• Vampires in the Lemon Grove ( 2013)
• Sleep Donation: A Novella (March 2014)

“He wants it each way. Both ways. All the ways. He wants his marriage solved, and he wants to be on the road with Rena, one of the undersea creatures strapped to the luggage rack, Yul Brynner with his head out the window, licking the air. He wants the Beanbags to smile, shake their heads, look at Hendrick’s charts and tell them ‘We’ve never seen anything like this. It’s a long road in front of you, but his chances for a normal life are. He may now be able to. We’d like to present this case at the.’ He wants to feel less lost.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill Shtulman (JUL 11, 2010)

Jack Lang is not great at being in the world. At the start of this quirky and original book, he has impulsively purchased a second ranch house – right across the street from his original house – at an auction. His wife Beth, a teacher at a local college, has just left him for his good friend Terry Canavan. Terry’s long-time girlfriend, Rena, may or may not be coming on to him.

To really complicate things, he is left in charge of his autistic savant son Hendrick, who has a penchant for memorizing the Weather Channel and mimicking advertising (in its entirety) and sloganeering verbatim.

And that’s just the start of things.

We never know exactly why Beth left Jack except for she’s just fed up. “You can’t just let everything happen to you,” Beth tells him at one point. “You can’t always just wait.” But Jack is out of control; his plans and ideas exceed his abilities to execute them. “Sometimes he thinks of his life like everything that’s happened to him has been something he’s at least half-fallen into.” That includes his mulch-and-garden business at Patriot Mulch & Tree, which is authentically described but if truth be known, is a little too heavy on the details (at least for this reader).

The novel takes place in an abbreviated time period and meanders along as Jack falls into one situation after another. For instance, he impulsively buys a huge fiberglass catfish from a defunct miniature golf course as decoration for a concrete tricycle path at the back of his new home. The point is made: Jack is unconventional and whimsical and Beth is solid and controlling. Still “he knows he needs Beth to save him from his crazier angels, or try to, and he knows, too, or hopes, that she needs him to try to save her from his plainer ones.”

The depiction of Hendrick, the autistic savant, is delightful, especially when he emerges from his shell to spout off Spanish or participates with Rena in a karaoke night; it’s hard not to fall in love with this child. The father-son interactions sparkle.

There is much wild black humor, despite the over-the-top, sometimes marginally successful characterizations. And there are fresh insights into what keeps couples together when by all natural instincts, they should fall apart. Drew Perry has a fresh and audacious imagination that shines through…again and again.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 20 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking Adult (April 1, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Drew Perry
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another quirky neighbor: A Kind of Intimacy by Jenn Ashworth And another guy who doesn’t know what he wants: Next by James Hynes

Bibliography:

• This is Exactly Like You (2010)
• Kids These Days (January 2014)

“It made her think about that Radiohead song ‘Fake Plastic Trees,’ with its fake Chinese rubber plant in plastic earth in a town full of other rubber plants. It made her think about her parents, too. How was it that they just kept at it day after day, living a sort of plastic life in a plastic house in a plastic suburb?”

Book Review:

Review by Mike Fredette (JUN 27, 2010)

Those who enjoyed Susan Coll’s last novel will be pleased to know that she has successfully recycled a different aspect of the same material in her newest, bitingly witty satire, Beach Week. While Acceptance took aim at the upper middle class suburban hysteria surrounding the college application process, Beach Week is much edgier, a novel whose focus is the post-graduation tradition of high school seniors in the wealthy DC suburbs. During the summer before college, mobs of college-bound spoiled eighteen-year-olds rent, with the sanction and cosignatures of parents, beach houses along the Delaware shore where they engage in a week of bad decisions and biblical-like immorality.

Coll’s story focuses mostly on the Adler family, recent transplants from the Midwest whose transition to the east coast has been less than smooth. Besides the financial troubles still haunting them back in Nebraska, Charles and Leah are suffering from marital boredom. Since moving to the DC suburb of Verona, Jordan, their daughter, has suffered a massive head injury on the soccer field, turning Leah into an overprotective, neurotic mother. At the center of this domestic turmoil is beach week, which Leah surprisingly encourages Jordan to attend since she is actually more worried about her apathy towards Verona than her safety. Not surprisingly, the novel ends with teenage drug use, a burning beach house, a number of police officers, and some runaway lobsters (you’ll have to read it to find out). Along the way, however, Coll introduces us to an array of quirky characters. She takes what could easily be the book version of American Pie and infuses it with a profoundly funny exploration of the angst and turmoil at the heart of America’s suburban experience.

What strikes the reader first about Coll’s new novel is the cover art. It suggests, without even having to read the first page, that this book is not really about the kids. A person’s foot hangs threateningly posed overhead a pristinely constructed sand castle on the beach. In the distant background, waves crash that, once the tide comes in, will eventually wash the castle away. For those who already know the basic premise of this story, it is easy to dismiss this picture as just a clever way of foreshadowing a week-long high school beach party turning into something reckless and self-destructive. However, the reader who gazes long enough will see that the sand castle represents not just the beach houses where these youth reside during beach week. It also suggests a domestic, familial space whose very existence is threatened by an onslaught of destructive, external forces. As Leah thinks to herself, the onslaught might just be one overlong episode with a whole lot of chapters, not unlike when you moved across the country and lost your center somehow, and then your husband’s job hit a wall, and your daughter, already unhappy about the move, suffered a concussion and became moody and secretive, and then money problems worsened and your marriage began to fray, and your mother-in-law’s dementia intensified, and then your husband and daughter wound up in prison.

Leah is arguably one of the best characters, illustrating that middle age women often suffer from the same existential anxiety as men. Much to the dismay of her also angst-ridden husband, she offers to host the initial parent meeting concerning Beach Week at her home because “she wanted to go to Beach Week herself.” She would “dare say that in some private corner of her mind she longed for the bad stuff that Beach Week was known for, too.” Add to this feelings inadequacy in the face of peers who are all aggressive parents, high-powered lawyers, and ambitious Washington types, and you have all the fixings for a bona fide midlife crisis. She and Charles “were cultured, educated people. They listened to NPR and saw foreign films,…so why was it she felt she didn’t belong in this town?” She realizes these feelings are “pathetically cliché,” but as she approaches a soon-to-be empty house with just Charles, she cannot help but fantasize about the risky youth she never had or worry that she does not meet the social criteria of her new environment.

The book’s next best character has to be Noah, the man whose dilapidated house the girls end up renting during Beach Week. Recently divorced from his wife Clara, this MIT graduate now sells salt water taffy on the boardwalk of Chelsea Beach. Unfortunately for him, the rest of the world thinks he’s a perverted peeping tom because of a best-selling book his ex-wife published soon after their divorce. As he tries to explain, however, the reason he fell from the tree in his yard and injured his head was not because he was leering at the neighbor but because “he was trying to prevent a murder and write up a report.” Eventually, the reader discovers that Noah is innocent enough, probably suffering from some type of congenital brain defect that skews his interpretation of the world and its events. Predictably, he ends up being the one character to whom Jordan can relate, the novel’s only other character with a severe head injury. A truly unique character, Noah’s chapters are hysterical. How can the reader not laugh out loud at a character who, when watching his house burn with lobsters running across his yard, thinks “of that graphing program on the computer at work and [tries] to visualize some kind of theory of lobster outcomes?”

Coll possesses the perfect literary voice for satire, with spot-on, well-timed wit. She moves effortlessly between the interiorities of men and women, adults and adolescents, exposing all their quirky foibles while making all her main characters likeable and endearing. Whereas Acceptance truly focused on the college application process and the neuroses of high school seniors, Beach Week is a more imaginative effort in terms of characters and subplots. The beach week activity itself is secondary, more a vehicle to explore the regrets, resentments, and dissatisfactions of middle-aged suburban Americans in a very humorous way. Adult readers will definitely appreciate Beach Week far more than Acceptance because, let’s face it, adults don’t really care anymore about getting into college, acing the SATs, or guzzling beer and having risky sex at a week-long, unchaperoned high school blowout. Or if they’re like Leah, maybe they still do.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (May 25, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Mike Frechette
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Susan Coll
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More satire: Perfect Life by Jessica Shattuck and more humor: Beginner’s Greek by James Collins

Bibliography:

• Karlmarx.com (2001)
• Rockville Pike/a> (2004)
• Acceptance (2007)
• Beach Week (May 2010)

Movies from books:

• Acceptance (2009)

“You’ve got a dark side hidden away in there somewhere, haven’t you?”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (JUN 18, 2010)

Special –> interview with Jenn Ashworth

Imagine, for a moment, that you live in a nice quiet little middle-class street policed by the local volunteer neighbourhood watch. All the gardens are tidy and well-kept. The neighbours know one other, and nothing much ever happens here. And then imagine that a madwoman moves in next door.

Ok, now switch scenarios and imagine yourself as that madwoman, and that you’ve moved into that nice little neighbourhood. You’ve not only moved there, but you want to belong, you want to mingle, you want to make friends….

If you have an image forming in your mind, then you have arrived at the wickedly funny novel, A Kind of Intimacy by British novelist Jenn Ashworth. Politico compares the novel’s unreliable narrator, anti-heroine Annie Fairhurst to Stephen King’s Annie Wilkes from Misery. If you need any other analogies before buying this wonderful book then consider that for its savage, quirky humour, A Kind of Intimacy is likely to appeal to fans of Muriel Spark. Social identity is the fabric of this tale, and Annie’s refreshingly subversive, warped world view clashes with her tireless attempts to conform into conventional roles.

A Kind of Intimacy is told through the eyes of obese twenty-something Annie, and when the novel begins, it’s moving day. Annie loads up her cat, Mr. Tips, kicks the settee one last time, and says goodbye to her old life and nine long miserable years spent with her husband, Will. Full of optimism and determined to reinvent herself into some sort of suburbanite diva, Annie moves into her new home. When she propositions the milkman the very next day, it’s clear that Annie has serious problems, and that she’s going to make quite a splash in this small bland corner of suburbia:

He looked closely at me, and I made sure he could see a fold of pale, damp-seeming cleavage as I modestly tucked in the gown. He gave me another wink and tucked his clipboard under his arm.

“That’s the best offer I’ve had in about two days,” he said. “But I’ve got three more streets to do before I’m due home and if the wife doesn’t get her cup of tea in bed in,” he made a show of looking at his watch, “ooh, an hour and a half’s time, my life’s not worth living.”

I nodded, and tucked my hair behind my ears, not bothering about the gown flapping open now. Nothing ventured, and all that. I’d learned not to take it personally. I’m not to everyone’s taste. A friend of mine, Boris, told me I was a minority interest, like collecting Stilton jars or learning to fold birds.

Armed with self-help books borrowed from the library, Annie soaks up helpful hints she thinks will ignite her reinvention process. Reading titles such as: Loving Yourself: Tips for the Single Woman, Controlling Your Anger, Freeing Yourself, and Weekend Fixes for a Broken Heart, Annie hordes tips on social etiquette which she keeps in a cross-referenced notebook. While she thinks all this reading will bring dramatic changes to her life, instead it leads to a series of social disasters, and any social life Annie hoped to make in the neighbourhood is undermined by her petty vandalism. After eavesdropping on her neighbours Neil and Lucy, Annie decides to hold a house warming party as an ice-breaking event. The party draws a total of 4 guests–the drunk, newly-single Raymond, Neil and Lucy, and Dr. and Mrs. Choudhry. While Annie is convinced that Raymond casts lust-filled looks her way, her attention is solidly on Neil, a man she’s sure she’s met before.

At the party, Annie serves “six bottles of wine, a cheese and pickled onion hedgehog, a bowl of twiglets and a plate of fairy cakes.” It’s an awkward event, with the Choudrys radiating the complacent self-satisfied smugness of a happily married couple while valiantly pretending everything is normal. Lucy and Annie square off over the absence of olives, and the evening ends in disaster. This major disappointment heralds a self-destructive eating binge for Annie:

“My memories of the next few days are hazy. Someone called me on the telephone about an unpaid credit card, and I remember sitting at the bottom of the stairs in my nightdress singing all the verses to ‘Found a Peanut’. In my mind’s eye I can see myself very clearly, stamping my bare feet on the carpet and conducting myself through the chorus with an unlit cigarette. I can only presume I attempted to take up smoking, a habit, I’m pleased to confirm, that didn’t stick longer than my celebrations of those few days. I made frequent trips to the corner shop for tins of condensed milk, more wine, more cat food, and managed to spend a frightening amount of money there. I also remember a brief conversation with Lucy about local by-laws regarding noise levels in residential areas between the hours of eleven at night and seven in the morning.”

As the plot develops, Annie parcels out memories from her past–a childhood coloured by a father who can’t wait to get rid of her, a sexual experience that leaves a lasting impression, and a miserable marriage to a parsimonious man who seems to select Annie for her child-bearing abilities. In spite of the fact that she’s deranged, Annie, the most admirable character in the novel is an endearing anti-heroine–a mad woman who tries to survive in an insane world. Annie’s narrative is direct, funny and also rather disarming. Her world view and peculiar social identity is laced with a quirky sense of primness which mingles with her frankly unapologetic aberrant asocial behaviour; the result is a deliriously unique literary cocktail.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (May 25, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jenn Ashworth
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt Guy Savage’s interview with Jenn Ashworth
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another interesting female from Europa Editions: Queen of the Tambourine by Jane Gardam We don’t have a review of this one yet, but also check out: The Wife’s Tale by Lori Lansens

Bibliography:

• A Kind of Intimacy (May 2010) Betty Trask Prize
• Cold Light (October 2012)