Review: A Friend of the Family (Lauren Grodstein)

I will try my best not to lapse into hyperbole. To say I liked this book, that this book is good, is not sufficient.

This books tricks you. You think it's about a young woman who seduces the son of a middle-aged Jewish doctor living in New Jersey. She's troubled, Dad disapproves, conflict ensues. And on the surface it is but Grodstein gives us so much more than that. She gives us a novel of obsessive parental love, in particular the love of Peter Dizinoff (the aforementioned doctor) for his son Alec. The primary problem is Peter's refusal to see his son as an adult. He orchestrates every major decision in his son's life and the twenty-one year old Alec is, understandably, resistant to this.

It's a slow build from reasonably concerned father to completely control freak. Peter is sympathetic and his evolution (devolution) is believable. The story is tense and subtle, Grodstein's prose is carefully crafted and precise. It was, in almost every way, one of the most satisfying and enjoyable novels I've read in years.

My only issue with Grodstein's novel is the weirdly hands-off presence of Elaine Dizinoff, Alec's mother and Peter's wife. She is, at times, a strong influence in her family but when her husband and son start to rip each other apart she stands back and observes. It doesn't feel natural. Writing Elaine this way may have been convenient for the narrative but it rings false.

Clearly the Elaine Issue was small enough to overlook because the first thing I did after finishing the book... I downloaded her first novel ("Reproduction is the Flaw of Love"). Review soon to come.

Review: Sin (Josephine Hart)

Josephine Hart's "Sin" was the most inconsistent and frustrating book I've read in a long time. Brilliantly spare and concise, Hart's prose was (at times) surprisingly good. She drops these perfect little phrases throughout the text but she won't let them lie! For lack of a better term, she doesn't "leave the power with the punch." I found myself wanting to smack her and yell "WHY?! Why did you keep going? Leave it alone. If was perfect the way it was." The text becomes an aggravating pattern of tiny explosive phrases intermixed with these purple prose-y unnecessary expository crap.

But while the writer-me was gritting my teeth through page after frustrating page, the therapist-me was wiggling with excitement at the best literary depiction of antisocial personality disorder I have ever read. In Ruth, Hart has created character that is both relatable and completely alien. The reader identifies with her jealousy, her rage, her desire to destroy the epitome of what she is not and can not have. But her nearly complete lack of empathy and feeling towards her "family" is disturbing and, to most people, hopelessly depressing.

From a clinical point of view Hart's novel is nearly perfect. From a literary point of view (and one must necessarily judge all fiction from this point of view) Hart's novel fails. Not miserably but it still fails.

It's not successful.

At all.

[Yeah, I did that on purpose.]

Review: In the Land of the Long White Cloud (Sarah Lark, trans. DW Lovett)

I did not expect to like this book. It's a 700 page "sweeping epic" [said with the requisite eye roll] promising small-r romance and more than you'd ever want to know about sheep farming in late 1800s New Zealand. In other words, over 700 reasons for me not to read this book. But I have a fascination with New Zealand (the impact of colonialism on native cultures, in particular) and I'm a sucker for any kind of Big Adventure. Strong female characters + Adventure = why not?!

The good: the novel starts strong, the characters are interesting and (for the most part) realistic, and the plot is compelling. While the writing is, at times, clunky and a bit overblown but this may be the fault of the translator. I was more than willing to overlook a few linguistic inconsistencies and head-scratchers because the meat of the story was strong.

The bad: they're in rural New Zealand in the 1880s on a sheep farm but never a single mention of the bug bites, the mud, the shit? For the sake of small-r romance (no one wants to get it on in a barn that is swarming with flies and smells like dung... not sexy), Lark unintentionally traipsed into the land of capital-R Romantic literature and this is where she lost me. Like bad Romantic literature, everything in this novel was too clean. The farms, the houses, the children, the story. Even the "war" between Maori and the colonists is a bloodless short-lived thing. Lark wraps everything up too neatly and it's all a bit too coincidental: the deaths, the marriages, the births, all of it.

All that said, I don't know if I'd be thrilled to spend another 700 pages in Lark's New Zealand but I could see myself trying out other of her work should translations become available.

Review: Fatal Vision (Joe McGinniss)

Maybe I'm setting myself for disappointment but ever since reading Truman Capote's In Cold Blood I've been looking for its modern-day equal. Midnight in  The Garden of Good and Evil came close but slightly missed the mark. I was cautiously optimistic when I read a description of Fatal Vision describing it as "a true-crime classic." It became clear very quickly that I was in for another disappointment.

The journalistic ideal of remaining objective and keeping the writer out of the story is necessary in short form and hard news reporting but in longer works it creates an unnatural distance between the reader and the story and a linguistic frigidity that leaves the prose feeling awkward and clunky. In Fatal Vision the absence of the writer-voice is noticeable to the point of being unsettling.

Furthermore McGinniss, like many true-crime writers, relies far too heavily on investigative and court transcripts leaving large sections of the text unedited, dull, and stylistically incongruent. The reader never connects with the killer, the victims, or the investigators. The story feels like it's being told by a dispassionate omnipotent narrator, the proverbial god who doesn't care. And if the writer can't be bothered to care, why should the reader?

Before In Cold Blood I had written off true-crime as drugstore counter trash. Surely no good prose could be wrapped in glossy salacious packaging with raised bubbles promising "26 Pages of Crimes Scene Photos!" And unfortunately Joe McGinniss does nothing to change this perception.

Review: The Voice of Our Shadow ( Jonathan Carroll)

This didn't work for me. In fact, it just doesn't work at all. Ghost story, love story, bildungsroman... it is unclear what Carroll was trying to accomplish but he was not successful on any of those levels. It worked on only one level and I will get to that briefly. 

My main complaint is the clunky, wooden, ridiculous dialogue. No one talks like this, no one has ever talked like this. No one has ever called their illicit lover "Sporty" or "Champ." At times the dialogue actually harms the story due to its wild inappropriateness in context. An example: our protagonist interrupts a violent sexually motivated assault and manages to extract a (previously unknown) female character from the situation. Her response? "Gee, what part of heaven did you say you came from?" She then insists he spend the night in her apartment... because it is a well-known fact that women who have just been sexually assaulted feel safer with strange men sleeping in their homes. Yeah...

The novel changes tone about two-thirds of the way through which makes the ending feel forced and completely implausible (even more so than the aforementioned scene). The author's intent for the ending is clear albeit somewhat obvious, but he executes so poorly the reader is left rolling their eyes and muttering "that's it?!"  

However, I said this novel works on one level and it does: as an extended love letter to Vienna. The city becomes the most intriguing and well-developed aspect of the story and feels more like an authentic character than any sentient (or non-sentient) being. Carroll's descriptions of the city are thoughtful and original and one is left with a better understanding of Vienna, and Austria in general. 

If Carroll could put that amount of care and attention into his dialogue and storytelling, he'd be onto something. 

[Review on Goodreads]