“Looking back on it, theirs is not a house of dramatic battles; it is a house of forced retreats across mountains and down through bitterly cold rivers. Ever retreating, ever glancing over your shoulder for the invisible enemy, who is a ghost. The war long ended; there is no front to fight on. The cause of the unholy conflict – the death of a child, a son, a brother – is unmentionable history.”

Book Review:

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

Over 12 years ago, John Burnham Schwartz introduced us to two ordinary families facing an extraordinary crisis – the inadvertent death of a young boy, Josh Lerner, by a hit-and-run driver, a small-town lawyer named Dwight Arno. The book was Reservation Road, a wrenching psychological study about how a single moment in time can shatter an orderly world into tiny little shards.

Now, in a poignantly written sequel, Mr. Schwartz revisits the two families – the Arnos and the Lerners – years later, at the cusp of yet another crisis. But this time, Dwight Arno has served his time, moved from Connecticut to Santa Barbara in an attempt to redefine his life until his estranged son, Sam, shows up. And this time, it is Sam who is in trouble and struggling to come to grips with his anger and his pain.

I’m glad to report that Northwest Corner is every bit as good as Reservation Road, if not better. It sings with love and pain and pathos and the beat of the human heart as it strives for connection. Told in multiple viewpoints from both male and female perspectives – including a first-person rendition by Dwight – this book is as powerful as it is moving.

In clear, detailed images, John Burnham Schwartz defines the emotional state of his characters in just a few taut sentences. Take Dwight’s musings, for example: “We think we are solid and durable, only to find that, placed under a cruel and unexpected light, we are the opposite: only our thin, permeable skin holds us intact. Hemophiliacs walking through a forest of thorns.” Is that perfect or what?

Early on in the book, Dwight and Sam come together for the first time in many years, Dwight is working for an ambitious “family man” in a sports shop. Sam is on the run from college after an impulsive deed that threatens to uproot his life. He has been living with his mother, Ruth, who remains in Connecticut, at a crossroads in her own life. And the other family? The Lerners are fragmented, searching, still unable to break away from the emptiness and reach out to each other for healing. The unbearable pain has been replaced by a type of functionality in each of them. But the hole in the center of their lives remain.

The plot is woven slowly and deliberately, with just enough suspense to keep the reader turning pages but make no mistake: this is, at its core, a psychological novel and the “action” is mostly internal. The growth – the so-called “arc” – is an interior one, more than an external one. And therein lies the beauty of Northwest Corner.

Is there a shot at redemption? As Dwight Arno reflects, “Wait too long to speak up and you might just miss your shot. You may do your time, but you will never really get out.” Redemption, the author suggests, is difficult and elusive, but possible with enough effort.

And the title reinforces this fact. These families have traveled beyond the road where an accident cruelly transformed their lives to a wider territory with others. They may not have taken their places in the world quite yet, but they’re moving forward. In the end, this is a story of the emotional journeys that these families – and indeed, most of us — must eventually take to reach a point of self-salvation and completion. It helps to read Reservation Road first, but this book stands proudly on its own.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 19 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House (July 26, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	John Burnham Schwartz
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Commoner More “two families”  novels: Red Hook Road by Ayelet Waldman On Beauty by Zadie Smith

Bibliography:

• Bicycle Days (1989)
• Reservation Road (1998)
• Claire Marvel (2002)
• The Commoner (2008)
• Northwest Corner (July 2011)

Movies from books:

• Reservation Road (2008)

“Bodecker lifted his flashlight. Animals in various states of decay hung all around them, some in the branches and others from tall wooden crosses. A dead dog with a leather collar around its neck was nailed up high to one of the crosses like some kind of hideous sacrifice. The head of a deer lay at the foot of another. Bodecker fumbled with his gun. ‘Goddamn it, boy, what the hell is this?’ he said, turning the light back on Arvin just as a white, squirming maggot dropped onto the boy’s shoulder. He brushed it off as casually as someone would a leaf or a seed. Bodecker waved his revolver around as he started to back away.

‘It’s a prayer log,’ Arvin said, his voice barely a whisper now.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (JUL 12, 2011)

I read Donald Ray Pollock’s collection of short stories, Knockemstiff, in 2009 when it first came out. It amazed me with its brilliance at the same time that it wrenched my guts. His new book, The Devil All the Time is just as brilliant but feels more like a kick in the guts. It’s heavy, horrific, beautifully written and filled with studies of people one hopes never to meet. There were times when I felt like a voyeur, watching something that was meant to be private and not shared but I read on anyway, fascinated and sometimes disgusted, but always riveted and totally impressed with the quality of the writing. The tenor, weight and tension of the novel never lets up.

In my opinion, this book is as much a collection of interconnected short stories as it is a novel. It is not that different from Olive Kitteridge or The Imperfectionists in that sense. Many of the chapters can stand on their own and the novel brings the reader full circle from beginning to end.

The characters are like no others I have ever come across in literature. The closest I can think of are the two killers in Capote’s In Cold Blood and some of the works of Cormac McCarthy or early Stephen King. Pollock, however, stands alone. His writing is unique and powerful. The violence of his novel is riveting in its power, and is an icon to this writer’s magnificent ability to create characters and situations that have not been seen in literature previously.

The people in this novel form the milieu of the country hollers of Ohio and West Virginia. There are the two married killers, Sandy and Carl. They go trolling the highways looking for “models” who they photograph and kill in different states of sexual play with Sandy. Carl considers himself a photographer but his only claim to fame are the dozens of rolls of film he’s taken of his models in their death throes. Sandy appears, at least on the surface, to be more of a follower and less into the whole killing spree than Carl but underneath it all she enjoys the attention she gets as she grooms the models for what is coming. Pollock leaves a lot to the imagination and this makes situations even more scary, not that unlike a Hitchcock movie.

The book starts off with a family that is poor but loving. Willard is married to Charlotte who, at thirty years old, is diagnosed with terminal cancer. They have a ten-year-old son, Arvin. Willard can’t accept the fact that Charlotte will die and he gradually begins to lose his grip on reality. He builds a prayer log near their home and this log, along with the sacrifices he makes, is supposed to keep Charlotte alive. Willard and Arvin pray through the night, screaming their prayers so loud as to wake the town. When this doesn’t work, Willard starts to kill animals and tie them to the crosses he’s built that surround the prayer log. One of the sacrifices is even human. A cur wanders to their door and Arvin bonds to it, only to discover it bled to death and tied to a cross that evening as one of his father’s sacrifices.

After Charlotte dies, Willard commits suicide and Arvin is sent to live with his aunt Emma. He is a good boy, by and large, but he does have a streak of violence in him. He remembers his father telling him not to put up with bullies and to fight back. He is told that there is always a right time to get someone. His sister is sexually abused by a minister in their church and Arvin looks for the right time to take things into his own hands.

We meet Roy and Theodore, two cousins who are lay preachers in the hollers near Knockemstiff. Roy preaches while Theodore plays the guitar. Theodore is in a wheel chair because he drank too much strychnine in order to show the lord his love for him. Roy takes his greatest fears and uses these on the pulpit. He collects jugs of spiders and pours them over his body even though he is terrified of spiders. He tries to show the congregation that fears must be met head on. When Theodore goads Willard into killing someone so that he can test his powers by bringing them back to life, things quickly go south. They leave town and end up working for a traveling circus.

The novel traverses the 1940’s to the 1960’s. The environment is usually the hollers of Ohio, often Knockemstiff, where Pollock’s previous book takes place. While there is a lot of violence, there is much talk of redemption. God, redemption and prayer have a large role in this novel. Unfortunately, those who need redemption the most are sometimes the least likely to seek it.

There is never a dull moment in the novel. The world, from Donald Ray Pollock’s eyes, is a dangerous and formidable place. It’s a place “where the sun popped out like a big, festering sore in the sky,” where bodies rot, and blood spurts out of ripe wounds. It’s a place of poverty and god forsakenness. Perhaps that’s why so many people are seeking god. However, as the title says, it’s “The Devil All the Time.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 42 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday (July 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Donald Ray Pollock
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read another review of:  The Devil All the Time

Bibliography:

• Knockenstiff (2007)
• The Devil All the Time (July 2011)

“Boone wakes before dawn and can’t get back to sleep. He tosses and turns for an hour or so, his mind swirling with thoughts of Oscar Rosales. The kid was no saint, but by all accounts he was trying to do the right thing by Maribel and the baby, trying to get his life on track. So how, then, did he wind up being mauled, and who frightened him so badly that he refused to seek treatment for the wounds? Exactly what kind of craziness did he run into out there in the desert?”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (DEC 18, 2010)

Jimmy Boone is a certain kind of maverick – out of the box and not quite a civilian. After serving his time in the Marines, Boone becomes a partner in a security firm. He works as a bodyguard for the rich and famous. He spends his time in Hollywood, Hawaii, Aspen or wherever those with money gather. It is his job to protect and defend them. However, one of his jobs goes awry. Jimmy believes that his client is sexually molesting his daughter and beats him to within an inch of his life. Jimmy later finds out he was set up by the man’s wife as part of a mean divorce. The man he almost killed may have been innocent. Jimmy goes to jail and, when This Wicked World opens, Jimmy is out on probation. He is bartending by night and acting as super of an apartment complex.

Robo, the bouncer at his bar has a side job for him. Robo has been contacted by the father of Oscar Rosales, a Guatemalan refugee who has died as a result of infected dog bites all over his body. Nobody knows what happened to Oscar. Oscar’s father offers Robo three hundred dollars to find out how Oscar died. Robo asks Jimmy along to meet with Oscar’s father and Jimmy agrees to go with him.

Jimmy is a moral man but he doesn’t believe in living his life by the rules. You might think of him as someone who likes to go outside the lines when he colors because the pictures are prettier that way and it makes for better art. Jimmy is his own man, a moral outlaw. He may not go by the rules, but he has a strong sense of ethics and knows right from wrong. He wants to do right but not because he is forced to by some bureaucracy or by the law. He has to see the point of things.

After meeting with Oscar’s father and meeting Oscar’s wife and child, Jimmy becomes obsessed with finding out the truth about how Oscar was killed. He sees this as personal salvation, a way to make up for almost killing a man.  Jimmy also hopes that his pursuit for the truth will right another  wrong; the security firm he was a partner in has been having a very hard time as a result of  his nearly killing that man on the job.  The firm no longer can attract the same rich and famous clientele that they had in the past. Jimmy wants to redeem himself as the owner is his friend.

Jimmy’s search for the truth leads him to the desert east of Los Angeles where dog fights are held, involves him with criminals who are way past the line of redemption, and puts him in the line of fire where his own life is at risk.

One of the author’s gifts is his ability to delve out the personality of every character. Even the criminals garner some empathy or pity. The reader sees the frailty, damage, and trauma behind the bad guys’ thinking. We don’t want to like them but we can offer them the gift of belief and vulnerability.

This is Richard Lange’s first novel and it is a good one. I was especially impressed by the characterizations and sense of place that he evoked. I felt like I was in L.A. and that I knew why good girls went bad or why bad men stayed bad. I had a sense of who everyone in the book was – – really was – – a skill that many authors are not able to deliver. Usually mysteries don’t stay with me too long. This one will stick around.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	Back Bay Books; Reprint edition (May 17, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Richard Lange
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Lange’s writing style has been compared to this one: Lush Life by Richard Price

Bibliography:

• Dead Boys: Stories (August 2007)
• This Wicked World (June 2009)

“…the dead take with them not only what we love in them but also what they love in us…”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (OCT 26, 2010)

Andrew Winer has written a potboiler that is also literary. Writing about such a serious subject as the Holocaust sometimes constricts a novelist into a more conventional form of storytelling/historical fiction. But as we have seen with such books as Frederick Reiken’s Day for Night and Nicole Krauss’s more postmodern Great House, as well as Death as a narrator in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, the only unwritten rules are to grip the reader in a credible story and to edify through words. Winer has done both, and he puts his unique stamp on it with his fluid, page-turning, thriller style blended with his out-of-the-box imagination and mellifluous prose. Like Plath did so craftily with The Bell Jar, Winer will reach a wider audience by his hewing of the elevated with the pedestrian. Saul Bellow meets Stephen King. I applaud his ambitious style, which he succeeded with on many levels. Two stories parallel and merge, reaching forward in one, backward in the other, fusing in a transmigration of redemption.

Two separate storylines eventually merge together. One starts in 1928 Vienna, a time when the Jews, once so integral to the art and intellectual community, are being persecuted. Some Jews, such as the novel’s Pick family, have converted to Catholicism in order to assimilate (which I say with irony, as assimilation in this case was more like betrayal to one’s faith) and garner financial success without oppression. Young Josef Pick, the son of converts, visits his Jewish grandfather Pommeranz in the very poor Jewish district and begins his career as a ketubah artist, or “marriage artist.”

The second storyline is the one that opens the novel in modern times. A highly acclaimed native American (Blackfoot) artist, Benjamin Wind, has plunged to his death with the wife of an esteemed art critic, Daniel Lichtmann, whose glorious accolades to Wind made the sculptor famous. Aleksandra Lichtmann, a beautiful, seductive survivor of Russian anti-semitism, was a beautiful woman of rare charm and dauntless courage, a woman who spoke her mind resolutely and with artless candor. Her husband, Daniel, is heartbroken and suffused with guilt for falling into an emotional detachment with her (for reasons I won’t go into—readers will want to see the details revealed on their own). This is further complicated by the fact that their marriage is a second marriage for both of them.

In Jewish tradition, a ketubah is a document, one that is fundamental to the traditional Jewish marriage and is a form of Jewish ceremonial art. It outlines the responsibilities of the groom to the bride and is written in Aramaic, the vernacular of Talmudic times. (I strongly recommend that readers google ketubah images in order to see the stunning, detailed artwork involved.) The ketubah is also fundamental to the themes and storylines of this novel. Josef Pick, at age ten, becomes immediately arrested by the poignancy and beauty of ketubot art and, with a mythical and mystical spirit, is imbued with an aesthetic grace that permeates him and allows him to create a ketubah, largely influenced by his childhood desire for his feuding parents to fall back in love. He eclipses his grandfather’s talent and is soon mentored by him. Pommeranz, who earns few schillings blessing fowl and meat, becomes a Jewish star with his grandson. The storyline with Josef continues into adulthood, highlighting his relationship with his lifelong friend, Max Weiner, and Josef’s wife, Hannah, a complex and triangulating trio of passion and suffering. This story takes us into the terror of the Holocaust.

Daniel is determined to uncover the seeds of this tragedy. Were Aleksandra and Benjamin having an affair? Were they unhappy, filled with guilt, or did someone push them? The police haven’t found any clues to a crime, and Daniel commences to investigate on his own. This leads him into his own crimes of the heart as well as important details of his wife’s history and the provenance of Benjamin’s ethnic roots. Wind’s artwork is explored with exquisite sympathy and philosophical mien and woven into a deep abyss of pain and expression. This storyline also leads back into the marrow of the Holocaust, which gives the novel its quintessence. Two artists from two generations bifurcate and meld. The reader is pulled into an intricate labyrinth of lies and love, horror and shame, betrayal and faithfulness.

Winer’s prose is masterful, with a restrained floridity that anoints the story with poetic lyricism. It compels me to allude to Flaubert’s mot juste, the ability to find the exact right word or expression. His metaphors and imagery are scintillating and prolific, and I will dare to say orgasmic.

“She laughed at him with an unbearable harshness. The laughter spread across her features like a fast-moving storm front, until it was all darkness.”

In describing a created ketubah:

“…first as blooming yellow florets in a tussock of dandelions and then as gossamer ball angels raised by the wind to the impure geometry of the living…the sky is a fabric of seraphic, thickly flowered souls whispering advice at its edges.”

There are flaws. Winer tends to telegraph events, but he is one of the few authors I know who can make exposition emotional, stirring. Some plot turns are too quick and convenient, preventing the reader from forming his or her own conclusions, or to find the spaces between the words. When Winer is describing art, he is exalting, and does allow the reader to interpret and have a go at personal translation within his own. But with the plot, he too intermittently spells out too much information, and truncates some elements of the story. And some components (which feed the potboiler aspect) are a bit contrived and overwrought, and I had to wince, especially the emergence of another, later romance in the book that felt inorganic.

In a lesser author, these blemishes would have decreased my overall satisfaction. But, despite this criticism, there is something about the whole here transcending the sum of its parts, (and I am not condescending in this observation) and the parts interlocking in a resonant and finally delicate and ecstatic way that moved me to accept the warts and come away with my heart on fire and my senses roused to tears. This is a highly engaging, memorable, exuberant, and yes, even boisterous and entertaining Holocaust and modern tragedy tale.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 20 readers
PUBLISHER:	Henry Holt and Co. (October 26, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Andrew Winer
EXTRAS:	Excerpt Behind the Book
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of the above mentioned books: Day for Night by Frederick Reiken Great House by Nicole Krauss The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Bibliography:

• The Color Midnight Made (2002)
• The Marriage Artist (2010)