Review: After Life (Rhian Ellis)

Rhian Ellis's "After Life" is the first novel I've read from Nancy Pearl's "Rediscoveries" series, a collection of previously out-of-print books Librarian of the Gods and NPR Morning Edition regular Pearl identified as unread and/or under praised gems of the 20th century.  Hand-picked by Pearl, these novels have been republished and given a second chance (helped along with a heavy dose of publicity and buzz by Pearl herself).

I trust Nancy Pearl. She has an infectious passion for books and while I don't always agree with her opinions on certain books and authors (don't get me started on John Irving or Ann Patchett) I trust anyone who dedicates their life to books. Not just writing, but books, and getting people excited about reading.

"After Life" is full of mediums, spiritualists, and New Age tarot-reading psychics. Not usually something I'd go in for, but Ellis's novel is surprisingly down-to-earth and relatable. She presents spiritualism in a solid, respectful, meticulously well-researched way that gives the reader a better understanding of its history and evolution.

Ellis's novel is also a novel of a dysfunctional mother/daughter relationship novel. Except where other novelists paint their characters as grotesquely unhealthy and abusive, Ellis's women are realistic and live in the real world, specifically the world in which mothers and daughters destroy and rebuild each other with everyday slights and gestures. It's subtle, something sadly lacking in most books that exploit the modern domestic relationship trope.
And then there's murder. It's not a whodunit, you know the who from the first page. But it asks the much more interesting and relevant question: why. This question ("why") kept me reading and I was not disappointed.

My only complaint is pacing, something I've become all but obsessed with lately. It drags in parts and moves far too quickly in others. However, this is mainly an issue of editing and I would have liked to see what could have been done with this novel under the hand of an expert editor.

An exceptionally brief mid-life crisis

It's a horrible cliche: middle-age woman in her second marriage and third career decides to pursue a particular path - an adult path, an "appropriate" path, certainly not the path she wanted but one she can "live with" - and she commits to said path.

And then everything breaks down. She overreacts to normal office politics and administrative ass-fuckery, she becomes withdrawn and uncommunicative, and in an impressive example of psychosomatic resistance she comes down with a stomach flu and ends up in bed for four days. She's not unhappy; she's miserable. She's trapped and depressed and starts to isolate and she thinks her life is a giant out-of-control lie. 

Now here's where it starts to get... if not good, then at least better, more specific. Husband #2, being frighteningly adept at reading her sometimes mercurial moods, though she tries her best to hide these things, says to her "something feels off, I think we need to get the hell outta Dodge for a while." They plan a weekend trip. Several destinations are discussed but they decide on- correction: she decides on the town in which she felt most like herself, the last place she felt completely whole and (though she cringes at the term) "fully realized."

When they get there she is reminded of all of this, of how she felt the first time she spent any significant length of time in a community of like-minded people. Back then she felt, if not happy, then the absence of an overwhelming sadness that she had not noticed until it was missing. In the absence of this sadness she realized that she could never go back to it. She scrapped her old life and started a new one, a better one, a happier and more complete one. It was hard but it was good.

And now, in the present, she walks with Husband #2 to all the places she remembers herself. She goes to the locations of (unironic) Major Life-Changing Decisions. She sees signs of her past self, her real self, everywhere. Literal signs. It's awful and heavy-handed and part of her rolls her eyes at how obvious it all is. She is sad and desperate and wants to change her name and run from The Wrong Path. She falls apart. Husband #2, who calls her on her shit better than anyone she has ever known, who is not afraid of her anger or her tendency to withdraw, who tells her to knock that shit off because he's on to her and knows what's she's trying to do and she's not fooling him... tells her to start being honest with herself and him. So she is. And the world starts to feel right again.

She's not good at being honest with herself but she's much worse at trying to live a life that doesn't feel right. She is, quite frankly, awful at being an appropriate adult and doing appropriate adult things and would much rather spend her days thinking and writing about books and writing. She has always been this way; she prefers books to people. She prefers books to sleep, food, sex, drugs, children, husbands, breathing. She prefers books.

And now she feels like Bartleby and will call The Arbiters of The Wrong Path and tell them she'd rather not continue on that path but rather to pursue The Right Path. The Only Path. And she realizes, at last, that there was never really any question, the choice had already been made years ago. This is her One True Thing and she has grown tired of trying to make it be something else.

And while she feels foolish that she again tried to deny what is obvious to herself and to everyone else, she does take some small pleasure in the fact that hers was, perhaps, the most succinct and efficient midlife crisis in history. This small pleasure is of course diluted by the sudden bitter realization that she likely could have successfully angled for some kind of murdered-out souped-up V12 Hemi-powered muscle car in the process.

Fuck. Maybe I should try that again.

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]