→ August 4, 2010
→ By

Legend of a Suicide.

David Vann’s story collection Legend of a Suicide has won a slew of literary awards and plaudits, including the Grace Paley Prize and appearances on 25 “best books of the year” lists, as well as becoming a critical and commercial success in, of all places, France. It’s a highly autobiographical book built around the suicide of Vann’s father when the author was just 13.

Legend is built around a central, two-part novella, “Sukkwan Island,” with three very short stories before it and two after; those five stories tie together closely, but the novella shifts two major plot details in a way that prevents reading the set as a single, linear story that would probably qualify as a novel. The five stories are well-written and useful for setting the scene, but I found the shift in “Sukkwan Island” jarring not just for its shock value but because the three stories that preceded that one had set me up for a different path.

In the early short stories, Vann’s alter ego, Roy, watches his father’s demise into depression and bad life choices from something of a distance, but in the alternate reality of “Sukkwan Island,” Roy chooses to spend a year in Alaska with his father, living survivalist-style in the woods on a remote island, only to witness Jim’s downward spiral up close. (In real life, and in the two stories that end the book, Roy/David declined to go to Alaska, after which Jim killed himself.) Roy dies in Alaska, and Jim’s depression and anxiety after his son’s death take on more corporeal form as he tries to survive, to cover up what happened, and to escape responsibility. Even Roy’s death could be a metaphor for the death of Vann’s relationship with his father – sensing that his father was headed for an inevitable tragedy and fearing the darkness and mood changes of crippling depression, perhaps David pulled away from his dad, convincing him to decline the invitation to spend a (miserable) year in the wildnerness with an unstable parent. Jim’s eventual death in “Sukkwan Island” is simultaneously a form of revenge on his father and a form of forgiveness, a glimmer of understanding that despite the inherent selfishness of suicide*, someone in the grip of that type of depression isn’t fully in control of his actions.

*Yes, I’ve lost a close relative to suicide, as has my wife. I speak from some experience, although nothing comparable to Vann’s.

Jim’s descent, fueled by despair, grief, fear, and self-doubt, is gripping and difficult to read; by putting Jim in the position of a father whose son has died and who bears at least some responsibility, Vann gives the reader more reason to empathize with the character, perhaps even to pity him, and thus makes his late father more than just a personal mess who screwed up his life and then screwed up his son’s by killing himself.

In the concluding stories, Roy – very much alive – goes to Alaska and attempts to piece together a little of his father’s legacy, only to find that the world there has changed so much during his own emotional stasis:

Memories are infinitely richer than their origins, I discovered; to travel back can only estrange one even from memory itself. And because memory is often all that a life or a self is built on, returning home can take away exactly that.

He remains emotionally paralyzed by his father’s suicide, and while that’s probably realistic, it doesn’t make for much of a story. I was looking for some kind of conclusion – not a happy ending, not even closure necessarily, but some sort of event to guide me out of the book. Roy goes to visit one of his father’s mistresses, only to find himself unable to ask her anything about his dad, a perfect vignette in a larger book but very unsatisfying as the basis for a short story.

Vann’s prose is easy and earnest, so much so that it’s uncomfortable at times to see through a window that clear, but a book about depression and suicide can’t be anything but brutally honest – if a novel or story on the subject doesn’t make the reader at least a little uncomfortable, it failed in its mission. If anything, Vann could have delved more deeply and continued any of the stories, or expanded “Sukkwan Island” into a longer novel, and found more material to mine in the complex, broken personality of his father and his own complex, even warped relationship with him, and the material would have remained compelling because he writes so well about these stark emotions. The first half of “Sukkwan” is the strongest material in Legend because that honesty is blended with the child’s view of his father breaking down, a mixture of confusion, fear, and stop-and-go sympathy from a boy in a position that would be difficult for an adult to handle. The second half of the story does suffer slightly from Roy’s absence.

If you don’t mind a bleak read, one where endings are few and never happy, but one that’s unsparing in its look at a fairly common mental illness that went untreated and ended in tragedy, Legend of a Suicide does an outstanding job of handling the subject. It’s uneven but introduces a talented writer who’s able to write about tough emotions, and I’m hopeful that in his upcoming novel, Caribou Island (due out in January), he’ll make the adjustments to tell a more complete story without compromising his emotional honesty.

Next up: Mary Murphy’s Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird. I received complimentary review copies of both that book and Legend from the publisher.

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→ July 30, 2010
→ By

The Patron Saint of Liars & The Whore’s Child.

Ann Patchett’s debut novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, showcases the kind of insightful, compassionate writing that helped make her magnum opus, Bel Canto, such a critical and commercial success, although Liars lacks the same degree of storycraft found in Bel Canto or in The Magician’s Assistant. It is, however, one of the best sad books I have ever read, as the story of a woman who is hopelessly broken inside and yet can’t help but damage the people close to her through her inability to deal with her own fears and insecurities.

The primary liar in the book is Rose, who flees a comfortable marriage in California when she discovers she’s pregnant and “realizes” – or decides? – that she isn’t actually in love with her husband. She ends up at a Catholic home for pregnant girls who want to have their babies and give them up for adoption, but Rose ends up staying on well past her ninth month – and keeps her daughter as well, only to find herself unable to be a mother to her child or even much of a wife to her second husband. Patchett gives us a window into Rose’s sadness but never much of an explanation for it beyond the death of her father in a car accident when Rose was three. Her own daughter, Cecilia, reaches her early teens before her mother leaves the picture, but Rose is unable to mother her and Cecilia ends up forming bonds both with the nuns who run the facility and the girls who come in for six or seven or eight months and then mostly disappear from her life.

The book comprises three sections, and though Rose is the central character in the book, she only narrates the first third, and her motives for lying and leaving were never fully clear to me. Son, the groundskeeper she meets and marries at St. Elizabeth’s, narrates the second part, and Cecilia handles the third, and both were more compelling, deeply drawn characters with the ability to process and communicate their own complex emotions in ways that Rose’s character cannot. And Sister Evangeline, a sort of grandmother-figure/mystic in the group of otherwise grey, dour nuns is a scene-stealer whenever she appears.

The Patron Saint of Liars is a sad book, but not a bleak one. Rose is clearly depressed and her lack of progress or recognition is heartbreaking, especially as it threatens the lives of those closest to her. But there are streaks of hope not for Rose but for Son and especially Cecilia, who wants her mother to be a mother but has also has the strength to find that nurturing from others and is, at the book’s end, developing into a healthier, fuller person than her mother ever was. It is imperfect, from Rose’s scant motives to her ambiguous fate in what becomes Son’s and Cecilia’s story, but Patchett writes about emotions so clearly and empathetically that I moved through the book’s pages as I might through a novel of action.

—

Richard Russo’s first short story collection, The Whore’s Child and Other Stories, feels almost like a collection of rarities and B-sides, with a few outstanding entries that, in total, wouldn’t be enough for a full volume, so the publisher stuck in a first draft and a few throwaways to provide some bulk, although the hardcover edition still barely reaches 200 pages even with generous line spacing. The highlights are vintage Russo, though, and it’s worth going through the collection to find those stories and moments.

The main thrust of these stories seems to be failure, especially confronting failure of the past with the uncertainty of the future among his mostly middle-aged protagonists, many of whom are professors, writers, or other sorts of artists. The title story is told by a creative writing professor who has an unusual student auditing his class, one who becomes the star of the show for her brutally honest writing that turns out to be an exploration of her own sad childhood. Several stories revolve around failed marriages – I found “Monhegan Light,” in which a successful cinematographer chooses to meet the man who cuckolded him, only to find himself the loser in the confrontation, very disturbing – and “The Farther You Go” is the ancestor of his novel Straight Man, condensing the story of the narrator’s daughter throwing her husband out of the house.

My main problem with the novel is that the inherently brief nature of the short story limits Russo’s ability to introduce the local color of side characters and the comic relief of subplots and running gags. Instead, we’re left with a sort of stark, gloomy fatalism about lives lived wrong without hope of a turnaround or just a temporary uptick. Only the final story, “The Mysteries of Linwood Hart,” brought that mix of humor and sadness in a sort of of coming-of-age story with a number of baseball-related scenes, but the attempts to decipher a complicated adult relationship through the eyes of the ten-year-old title character felt blurry.

I’ve enjoyed the five Russo novels I’ve read, especially Empire Falls and The Risk Pool, but I’d recommend The Whore’s Child for completists (like me) only, as the title story alone isn’t enough to justify buying the whole book.

–

I received a review copy of a new short story collection by Justin Taylor called Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, but the collection doesn’t live up to the title. I found the stories crude and immature, with the young writer’s obsession with sex (and with using sex as the primarily vehicle for meaning in the lives of his characters) and an evident lack of life experience. The characters were uninteresting, sometimes two-dimensional and largely self-absorbed, and their actions struck me as forced.

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→ July 2, 2010
→ By

Woman in the Dark and The Wicked Pavilion.

Dashiell Hammett only wrote five novels during his lifetime – I’ve read four and have the fifth, The Dain Curse, on my shelf now – as well as 80 short stories, most of which involved either Sam Spade or The Continental Op as the detective. One of the most unusual works in his bibliography is the novella Woman in the Dark, a suspense story originally published in three parts in Liberty magazine in 1933.

Unfortunately, I’d have to say this is my least favorite Hammett work, and not just because it’s not a detective story. The plot revolves around the titular Woman, Luise Fischer, a kept woman who has fled her abusive boyfriend (Robson) and lands at the house of a man named Brazil who has some criminal activity in his past. A fight scene puts the two on the lam and eventually in hiding with another ex-con that Brazil knows while Robson manipulates the law to try to put Brazil and jail and force Luise to return to him. The conclusion required a last-minute twist and a bit of guesswork on Luise’s part, and I didn’t feel the story went anywhere. That said, bad Hammett beats good work by a lot of authors, and it features his usual crisp prose, noir settings, and characters in various degrees of corruption. It’s just more for completists; if you’re new to Hammett I’d suggest you start with his most famous work, The Maltese Falcon.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he conceded graciously. “Childhood is the happiest time, after all, so why shouldn’t she want to spend her last years in a return to that happy state?”
“I never found anything happy in childhood and neither did you,” Elsie stated pugnaciously. “I don’t think I ever saw a smile on your face till the day you were allowed to clip your own coupons.”

Dawn Powell’s The Wicked Pavilion is an ensemble novel, a rare style because it’s so difficult to pull off, but when done well – as here, or in Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto – it creates an immersive atmosphere and increases the odds that the reader will identify with one or more characters or subplots.

The Wicked Pavilion revolves around the fictional New York restaurant Cafe Julien, a gathering place for the city’s artists, writers, men-about-town, and various hangers-on. Dalzell is a painter dancing around the poverty line, pining for his halcyon days with his friend Marius, another painter who found tremendous success by dying suddenly in an accident in Mexico. Elsie is the domineering dowager who tries to run the life of her young female friend Jerry, who realizes that Elsie is doing more harm than good – and might be a touch unhinged. Rick and Ellenora are the star-crossed lovers who met in Cafe Julien, and continue to meet there after long periods apart … but this time, Rick has returned from abroad and Ellenora is nowhere to be found. Everyone, to borrow a line from White Christmas, has an angle, even the side characters who populate the book’s fringes, and many of the characters only seem to be pretending to be artists or society women or intellectuals, and Powell never lets on whether her characters are ever happy or merely putting on the good face:

Rick Prescott had been leaning against the park fence watching them for a long time, thinking ruefully that of all the happy workers in the world wreckers were undoubtedly the most enthusiastic.

Rick’s observation seems to set him outside the world of happy workers, while Dalzell’s observations on other artists lay before him how much he’s sold out his art – which may not have been anything special in the first place – while Jerry ends up in the wrong bar at the wrong time and finds herself in a special prison ward for prostitutes, forcing her to contemplate her symbiotic (and destructive) relationship with Elsie.

Powell’s transitions across the three main subplots, often intertwining them by having Rick connect with Jerry at Cafe Julien or Dalzell end up with a patroness of the arts who ends up invited to a party thrown by Elsie, are smooth, and if you’re okay with insightful inner monologues, all three move along well. It’s rich, complex, satirical, witty, and rewarding. I would still suggest anyone new to Powell start with the more linear A Time to Be Born, but The Wicked Pavilion would be a great follow-up.

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→ June 21, 2010
→ By

Fer-de-Lance.

I’m back from a week of vacation in St. Kitts with my phone completely off and no access to email. Add to that a copious supply of rum and it might have been the greatest week of my life. I will get to a post running through the places where we ate as well as general thoughts on the island later in the week.

I also went through seven books in seven days, mostly detective stories, starting with my first exposure to Nero Wolfe in print form with Rex Stout’s first Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance. I’ve heard several of the classic radio programs starring Sidney Greenstreet as the corpulent, eccentric genius who solves crimes without leaving his office/apartment and raises and breeds orchids when he’s not playing detective. The real leg work falls to his employee and occasional verbal sparring partner Archie Goodwin, who also handles some of the orchid-management duties and often finds himself frustrated in the face of Wolfe’s ability to draw correct conclusions from limited data.

Fer-de-Lance is the first of the 33 novels Stout wrote, although he didn’t write it as an introductory novel, making references to (nonexistent) prior cases and character histories so that the novel’s beginning isn’t bogged down in lengthy details or dull tangents. The case involves an Italian immigrant who goes missing and turns up dead and a college President who drops dead suddenly on a golf course, with Wolfe and Goodwin making the connection and Wolfe figuring out how the core murder was committed but not knowing for certain who committed it until later in the book. The climax, where Wolfe reveals the killer’s identity to the police, is a bit over the top but certainly enjoyable.

Two major facets of Fer-de-Lance propelled the book forward for me. One is the two fascinating characters of Wolfe and Goodwin. Wolfe is a maddening (but not mad) genius, exacting, arrogant, but brilliant and logical, relying on the psychology of suspects much as Hercule Poirot typically does. Goodwin chafes under his boss’s condescension but ultimately must bow to Wolfe’s superior powers of deduction; he’s too much of a dandy to be hard-boiled but does fill the role of the hard-boiled detective who pounds the pavement, threatening and being threatened, while Wolfe sits in the comfort of his office. Stout sets up a number of avenues of friction between the two for subsequent books.

The other was Stout’s approach to revealing the crime to the reader, which deviated from the standard formula where the author saves the final details for the last chapter or two of the book. In many detective or mystery novels, that’s almost a requirement, as the reader’s curiosity provides velocity to the text that is lacking in pedestrian writing, but Stout’s characterization and simple and witty prose are strong enough to drive the reader forward even after Wolfe and Goodwin have settled on the killer’s identity and instead work backwards to prove that Wolfe’s answer is correct, rather than following clues to a conclusion that ends the book.

I enjoyed Fer-de-Lance but wouldn’t class it with Christie’s intricate, subtle plotting, or Chandler’s terse, literary prose; it’s faster and easier but without the same depth, definitely worth the time if you’re familiar with any of the Wolfe adaptations and want to see the character in his original form, or if you’re looking for a quick, fun, yet still intelligent detective novel.

Next up: There’s not too much new to say on the 20th Wodehouse novel I’ve read, Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, other than that it’s vintage Wooster, so I’ll skip ahead to Pierre Magnan’s Death in the Truffle Wood for the next writeup. I’m currently reading Trevor Corson’s The Story of Sushi (also published as The Zen of Fish).

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→ June 11, 2010
→ By

Olive Kitteridge.

She understood that Simon was a disappointed man if he needed, at this age, to tell her he had pitied her for years. She understood that as he drove his car back down the coast toward Boston, toward his wife with whom he had raised three children, that something in him would be satisfied to have witnessed her the way he had tonight, and she understood that this form of comfort was true for many people, as it made Malcolm feel better to call Walter Dalton a pathetic fairy; but it was thin milk, this form of nourishment; it could not change that you had wanted o be a concert pianist and ended up a real estate lawyer, that you had married a woman and stayed married to her for thirty years, when she did not ever find you lovely in bed.

Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge , winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is a novel of short stories, all connected by their setting and the presence of the title character, the crotchety, depressed, and often cruel retired schoolteacher whose role varies from episode to episode. In several stories, she sits at the center, sometimes with her long-suffering husband Henry, sometimes with her semi-estranged son Christopher (whose life appears to be the long process of recovery from having Olive as a mother), and at the end, in “River,” as the star.

Along the way we meet many other residents of the small town Crosby, Maine, the suicides and would-be suicides, the drunks, the faithless spouses, the grieving widow, the older couple looking for safety in each other, almost nobody happy and nearly everyone dealing in some way with depression. That makes for compelling reading, as Strout’s understanding not so much of the human psyche but of the why and how we become depressed is so deep that she can paint these characters with a delicate hand, but it also makes for a complete freaking downer of a book. It is great literature, with prose reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson’s, and Olive is a riveting and fully realized character, but she’s also unlikeable for her coldness and her refusal – or inability – to take responsibility for her actions and their effects on those around her.

The short story novel concept is a new one to me – whether this even qualifies as a novel is a matter of opinion, but the presence of Olive in every episode and the overarching story arc of this later period of life does tie everything together with a clear direction from start to finish – and reading it gave me the feeling of watching a season of a TV series, each episode self-contained, introducing a new cast around the central character. The downside is that we merely get glimpses into each side character, such as Angie, the alcoholic piano player whose role as the other woman is contributing to her malaise, or Julie, the overdramatic woman jilted on her wedding day by a fiance who wants to be with her but not to marry her, and whose conclusion is open-ended and unsatisfying. But I don’t think Strout’s goal was to satisfy but to, as the blurb on the back cover says (in a rare instance of one of such text proving accurate), “offer profound insights into the human condition.” And I’d say on that front, she succeeded. I just wouldn’t call her if I had a case of the blues.

Next up: Vacation, with at least nine books in tow, starting with Rex Stout’s Fer-de-Lance and Pierre Magnan’s Death in the Truffle Wood. And since this is a real vacation, involving planes and such, I’ll be offline all of next week, including, most blissfully of all, email.

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→ June 10, 2010
→ By

The Magician’s Assistant, etc.

I loved Ann Patchett’s breakout novel, Bel Canto, in every way imaginable – for its plot, for its prose, and for its rich, wide array of compelling, well-drawn characters*, but found her follow-up, Run, to be a thin, hackneyed love letter to then-candidate Barack Obama disguised as a novel.

*The Q&A with Patchett at the back of her last novel had an enlightening line from her about how, to her, all her novels are alike, because each is her attempt to rewrite Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I got about 40 pages into that book and bailed, because the prose was maddening, but knowing the general plot I can see the correlation between it and Bel Canto. So, nice work, Ann – I think you rewrote it in a way that people are more likely to finish it.

The Magician’s Assistant precedes Bel Canto in Patchett’s bibliography and shares its theme of people from different worlds thrown together by fate, although its cast is smaller and there are some elements of magical realism that weren’t in either of her two later novels. The novel opens as Sabine, the assistant of the title, finds herself suddenly widowed after the magician she assisted for twenty years suffered an aneurysm. But it turns out that the magician, Parsifal, was gay, and their marriage was one of convenience, with Sabine’s love for her boss-turned-husband unrequited, and Parsifal’s partner, Phan, died not long before Parsifal did. And after Parsifal’s death, Sabine finds out the family he claimed died in a car accident is, in fact, alive in Nebraska, and when they learn of her existence, they fly to Los Angeles to meet her, which results in a trip for Sabine to Nebraska to explore her late husband’s past.

The novel is filled with people, nearly all women, in various stages of broken, with Sabine perhaps at the top of the list. She’s confused by Parsifal’s refusal to confide the details of his past in her, and grieves in part through dreams or visions of Phan and eventually Parsifal in some sort of afterlife. While she’s looking for direction, the women in Nebraska – Parsifal’s mother and two sisters – are each looking for something different, closure for the mother, an escape (or simply an answer) for the older sister, a connection to a lost brother for the younger one. It’s not devoid of action, although some of the most active scenes are told through flashbacks, but the book is driven by the emotions of the central characters, and other than a sentimental (but, I confess, moving) ending, these emotions felt very real throughout the novel.

Patchett was still rounding into form in this novel, and the book suffers from its lack of a decent male character – decent in the sense of well-formed but also as a comment on their behavior. Sabine’s father is wonderful, but a cipher in the context of the book. The two best male characters to get any screen time are both dead. Parsifal’s father, brother-in-law, and younger sister’s fiance are all two-dimensional and either jerks or wallflowers. Bel Canto had far better developed male characters as part of its amazing menagerie of hostages and terrorists, each drawn clearly and fully in ways that the men of Magician’s Assistant are not. It’s worth reading, but only after you’ve read Bel Canto.

—

I mentioned starting Walter Moers’ Rumo and His Miraculous Adventures, but quit after 150 pages because the book wasn’t going anywhere and I had 500+ pages to go. I loved Moers’ The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear and liked The City of Dreaming Books, but he repeated himself in Rumo and the latter book didn’t have the whimsy or character development of the other two novels.

—

Next up: I’ve got about 50 pages to go in Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Olive Kitteridge, which for some unknown reason is only $6 on amazon.com.

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→ May 31, 2010
→ By

Angels on Toast.

I’ve got a new first-round projection up on ESPN.com, and am headed to the studio shortly to appear on ESPNEWS at 2:40 pm EDT today.

—

After reading and loving Dawn Powell’s A Time to Be Born, I loaded up my swaptree want list with her other titles and ended up with at least four of them. Angels on Toast is the first I’ve read so far, and it has the same dry, sardonic style as Time, but unlike the likeable scoundrels at the heart of that novel, Angels‘ lead characters all seem to be rotten at their cores.

The main conceit of Angels on Toast is that everyone is on the make, whether for a business deal or a romantic liaison, and if you’re not looking to take someone or something you’ll end up getting taken. Lou and Jay are businessmen and friends who enjoy a drink and a run about town; Lou was happily married but has grown bored with his wife and her snobby relatives, while Jay makes no bones about having a long-term affair as a reprieve fro his battleaxe wife. The two end up covering for each other, using their shared interest in a crazy hotel get-rich-quick scheme as part of their stories to their wives, with both of their wives reacting differently to their husbands’ infidelities. Meanwhile, Lou’s paramour is herself stringing along another guy, and then adds another to the list, all while demanding that Lou divorce his wife and marry her – probably so she can get U.S. Citizenship. And Lou’s first wife – of whose existence his current wife is unaware – saunters back in the picture to soak Lou for a little pity money.

Powell mined humor more from her observational prose than from comic situations, such as this chapter opening on Lou’s wife, the mousy Mary, when she begins to realize that her husband is cheating on her:

Lately Mary ahd thought more and more about going to a psychoanalyst. Something was going queer in her mind, but the trouble was she was not having hallucinations, she was having facts. What could the doctors do about that? Well, doctor, she would say if she went to one of Them – (she always thought of the psychoanalysts as Them) I was perfectly normal for the first twenty-nine years of my life, I lived on a normal diet of hallucinations; an unusally intelligent and cultured upbringing enabled me to conduct my life decently blindfolded, but lately my mind seems to be shaking. Doctor, I think I’m going sane. Then the doctor, of course, would say, Nonsense, Mrs. Donovan, you can’t tell me that an intelligent woman like you is beginning to doubt your insanity. Why, Mrs. Donovan, he would say, smiling indulgently, I assure you on my word of honor as a medical man you are as insane as anybody in this room.

One of Powell’s specialties was the character who came to the big city – usually New York – and whipped up a life for himself through a combination of his wits, half-truths, and fabrications, but those characters live more on the fringes of this novel, like the hustler T.V. Truesdale, who disappears for several chapters after a strong introduction that depicts him as an opportunist of the highest order, with the camera lens focusing instead on Lou’s jumbled personal life. It makes for an amusing novel that could have been something more, funnier or deeper, had the camera panned back to show more of the picture. A Time to Be Born had that depth, along with the ingenue-heroine to grab the reader’s empathy.

Next up: Walter Moers’ Rumo: And His Miraculous Adventures.

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→ May 9, 2010
→ By

Young Lonigan.

Blogging here will be light for probably the next month as I work overtime on draft content.

WGBH is auctioning off a “Scout with Keith Law” package, where the winner gets to tag along with me to a game somewhere in New England this summer, either a minor league contest or one on the Cape. We did this last year and ended up with two winners, raising over $1800 for the local public television station, which is also a major producer of quality children’s programming. I’m happy to be able to support them with my time.

—

James T. Farrell’s Young Lonigan, the first book of the Studs Lonigan trilogy (#29 on the Modern Library 100), is a gritty, unflinching portrayal of urban life in the 1910s as viewed through the eyes of the city’s teenagers, complete with prejudice, petty theft, casual sex (more discussed than enacted), and worship of violence. Farrell’s emphasis on depicting the city of his youth does come at the expense of a coherent storyline, although that seems to be coming in the two subsequent books.

“Studs” Lonigan is a teenager just out of a Catholic middle school who straddles the line between wannabe and tough, striking poses, getting into street fights (and winning them), grappling with romantic feelings that to him undermine his toughness, and aspiring to gradually greater depths of antisocial behavior. He admires fighters and gangsters and flouts his parents’ authority not as much for a desire for freedom as out of a need to play the part – the older kids he seeks to emulate do the same, so he reenacts the same conversations at home, yet over more trivial matters and with less dramatic results.

Young Lonigan doesn’t have a clear linear plot or a compelling quest for its title character, and Farrell seems as happy to set the scene as he does to create some action:

About the street there seemed to be a supervening beauty of reflected life. The dust, the scraps of paper, the piled-up store windows, the first electric lights sizzling into brightness. Sammie Schmaltz, the paper man, yelling his final box-score editions, a boy’s broken hoop left forgotten against the elevated girder, the people hurrying out of the elevated station and others walking lazily about, all bespoke the life of a community, the tang and sorrow and joy of a people that lived, worked, suffered, procreated, aspired, filled out their little days, and died.

The book was controversial when first published because of its depiction of casual sex among teenagers, including the girl, Iris, who favors many of the boys with “gang shags,” but those passages – tame and almost self-censored by today’s standards – serve to highlight the disaffection of its central characters. Farrell saves his minimal action-oriented writing for a couple of fight scenes, including one where Studs Lonigan thinks he’s making his bones but finds the resulting increase in street cred only slightly and temporarily satisfying.

Next up: Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood.

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→ April 23, 2010
→ By

Mohawk.

We’re having major work done on our house, so we’re living out of a nearby hotel this week (frequent-guest and -flyer points are one of the few compensations for a high-travel job), which has cut down on blogging time, which is a long way of saying I’m sorry for the long gap between posts. I did chat yesterday on ESPN.com, and my top 100 ranking for the upcoming draft is already with my editors, so I’m hopeful we’ll see that on the site later today.

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Richard Russo’s first novel, Mohawk, has most of the elements that made his next four novels (The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool, Straight Man, and Empire Falls) so good, but in many ways it’s obvious that it’s his rookie effort, since the well-drawn characters are existing rather than traveling through a coherent plot, and the humor isn’t as easy as it is in his later books.

There’s no single central character in Mohawk, although the ex-spouses Dallas and Anne and their son Randall are fairly close to the center of the book, involved in much of what goes on even though Dallas is more actor than active emotional participant. Anne has to be one of Russo’s best female characters, a middle-aged woman who is still paying for a mistake of teenaged rebellion while pining for a man she knows she can never have and feuding with her mother, a passive-aggressive shrew who would drive the Dalai Lama to drink. Russo fills Mohawk with many of the usual cast of blue-collar characters, including the greasy-spoon owner, the bookie, and the dirty cop, each of whom finds himself woved into one of the various plot strands when he’s not there for comic relief.

While it’s a fun and quick read, like the other four Russo novels, Mohawk doesn’t offer the strong, compelling story of those books, as it’s more a slice of life in a dying northeastern industrial town with the sort of folks Russo has since shown he loves to create. It’s worth reading for Russo fans, especially because it’s a look at a great writer in a formative period, but I wouldn’t recommend this as a starting point to readers just starting out with his work.

Next up: Still slogging through Junichiro Tanazaki’s The Makioka Sisters, kind of a dense, slow period piece. Best part so far is the footnote defining the word “sushi.”

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→ April 10, 2010
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Firefly Rain.

Richard Dansky has been a reader of mine since not long after I joined ESPN and started the dish, even interviewing me about two years ago on his own web site. He’s one of the premier writers for videogames, writing for Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy Splinter Cell games while also dabbling in horror and fantasy; you can read more about his work on his official site. In addition to a shared love of baseball, Richard and I have a reasonable overlap in our reading interests, including hard-boiled detective novels, so he sent me a copy of his first novel, recently out in paperback, Firefly Rain.

The novel centers on Jacob Logan, the prodigal son of North Carolina parents who returns home after their deaths to deal with the mundane details around the family house, now his, in the tiny town of Maryfield. The community is populated with your standard assortment of local characters, although Dansky keeps their number manageable and all are well drawn, especially Carl, the cantankerous neighbor who’s been keeping an eye on the house for Jacob for several years, and Reverend Trotter, the laid-back clergyman who dispenses common-sense advice without florid phrasing or excessive sermonizing.

Not long after Jacob arrives, however, weird things begin happening – his car disappears, items move around the house on their own, windows won’t close until they’re damn good and ready, and the phenomenon of fireflies refusing to fly on to the Logan property. When the weirdness escalates to a blackout, an attack by an insane dog, and worse, Jacob summons help in the form of a friend from Boston to try and help him piece together whether this is a series of crimes or a full-on haunting.

Richard described the novel to me up front as a ghost story, but I think that undersells the book. A ghost story, to me, revolves around the ghosts – you read to be scared or spooked or maybe even freaked – whereas Firefly Rain has a good story that may or may not involve ghosts. I’d compare it to Agatha Christie’s novels – yes, her Poirot and Miss Marple books were mysteries, but they’re compelling stories that you can read and enjoy on their own merits without trying to solve the puzzle (which is good, since I never get those right anyway). And Richard’s book does have an element of mystery to it, with a few clues left lying around if you care to try to decipher it, although I preferred in this case to let the story carry me along.

The best aspect of the novel is that Jacob makes few bad choices – the way he loses his cell phone might be the only one you could call “truly dumb” – and as the narrator Jacob dissects his own thinking, you can buy into some of his questionable moves, rather than seeing them as plot conveniences to keep the story moving. Even the lost cell phone ended up of marginal importance at best. I did find some of the folksier dialogue a little dissonant, but I’ve spent no time in rural North or South Carolina and can’t credibly discuss its authenticity or lack thereof. I also thought the cover text didn’t sell the book that well – it concentrates on the ghost aspect instead of the story aspect, which explores a pretty basic theme about the responsibilities of a child to his parents, both in life and after their deaths. I’ll cheerfully admit to bias here, as I’ve always enjoyed chatting with Richard, but I wouldn’t recommend a book I didn’t like just because I knew the author (in fact, I’d just pretend I’d never read it), and Firefly Rain is worth your time.

Next up: I’ve finished Michael Davis’ marvelous Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street and am now working through an early collection of Dame Christie’s stories, published under the title Poirot Investigates, after which I’ve got Richard Russo’s Mohawk lined up.

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