→ December 3, 2014
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The Teleportation Accident.

I had never heard of Ned Beauman’s The Teleportation Accident before a conversation with a restaurant hostess in August, where she noticed I had a book with me (The Magic Mountain, which, let me tell you, is just a great book to get the ladies interested) and we started chatting about novels, mostly classics. She raved about Beauman’s book so much that I bought it, and just crushed it over about 72 hours this past weekend because it is totally insane, clever, and hilarious, even though I’m not really sure it’s “about” anything at all.

Winner of the peculiar Encore Award (given to the best second novel of the year) and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize (so top twelve), The Teleportation Accident follows the transparently-named Egon Loeser, a set designer in Berlin in the early 1930s who is obsessed with the 17th-century set designer Adriano Lavicini, whose prop “teleportation device” failed in spectacular fashion, killing over two dozen spectators and the designer himself. Loeser is also obsessed with sex, of which he’s not getting any since his breakup with his most recent girlfriend, only to become infatuated with the unfortunately-named Adele Hitler (no relation), whom he eventually chases to Paris and then Los Angeles, where he gets entangled in a giant conspiracy involving an attempt to make an actual teleportation device at CalTech. Through all of these escapades, mostly occurring between 1931 and the end of World War II, Loeser remains blissfully ignorant of the charged political atmosphere around him, even when it puts him or his friends in immediate danger.

That last bit is part of how Beauman subverts almost everything about the modern historical novel – where any other author would insert his protagonist Zelig-like into the major historical events of the era, Beauman keeps Loeser in the dark, makes only oblique references to the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust, and even mocks the standard practice by using a secondary character, the bizarrely-named Scramsfield, who claims to know all the famous people in Paris (referring to James Joyce as “Jimmy”) but actually knows none of them. You expect Loeser to be pushed or dragged along by the force of history, yet every plot twist comes about due to accident or coincidence. This is Zadie Smith’s hysterical realism grafted on to Isherwood’s Berlin, Pynchon’s grandiose plotting with Vonnegut’s cynicism and Fforde’s wit. It’s madcap absurdity without devolving into the impossible (except for one last masterstroke in the final few pages).

Beauman’s decision to make Loeser’s obsession sexual is really a Macguffin, as his long dry spell is more of a plot convenience to keep him chasing after Adele and to push him into these bizarre conspiracies and a sort of meaningless competition with the fatuous English writer Rackenham. In fact, I’m not sure the book is about anything at all, which is probably why the blurb on the back does such a poor job of describing the story. It’s not about sex, and it’s only slightly about Lavicini or teleportation. It is, however, wildly funny, often in ridiculous ways, such as the wealthy car-polish magnate whose agnosia makes him unable to distinguish a picture from reality, so a glass of ginger ale spilled on a map leads him to shout “Ambulance! Thousands drowned!” – and that’s before it deteriorates further into “ontological agnosia,” which might be the most apt description of the book’s central theme (assuming there is one at all).

Also tucked into this bizarre picaresque are a grotesque murder mystery, a quack doctor who claims to promise eternal youth by sewing monkey glands onto your testicles, a conflict over public transportation in Los Angeles, a scientist whose mind (at least) jumps back and forth in twenty-year intervals, and eventually another attempt to tell Lavicini’s story and build another stage version of a teleportation machine. Beauman masterfully ties up all his loose ends in that concluding passage and the three epilogues, each more bonkers than the previous one, yet never veering so far from the central plot’s threads that he can’t narrow it all down to a singularity in the final few words. It’s one of the best books I’ve read all year, and I can’t wait for his next novel, Glow, to come out here in the U.S. in January.

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→ November 2, 2014
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American Gods.

She smiled at him, looking suddenly, and for the first time, vulnerable. She patted him on the arm. “You’re fucked up, Mister. But you’re cool.”
“I believe that’s what they call the human condition,” said Shadow. “Thanks for the company.”

Author Lev Grossman (The Magicians) also serves as arts critic for TIME magazine, helping assemble their list of the top 100 novels from 1923 with Richard Lacayo. In early 2011, Grossman also put together a list of the ten best novels from the first ten years of the century, of which I hadn’t read two, Lush Life (which I read in 2012 and loved) and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. This was my first encounter with Gaiman, whose reputation as a fantasy writer seriously undersells both his erudition and his ability as a crafter of plots.

Shadow is just about to get out of jail after serving three years of a sentence for nearly beating two men, who cheated him out of his share of a robbery, to death. He finds out that his wife has been killed in a car crash, and on a much-delayed flight home for the funeral, encounters a strange man who calls himself Wednesday (a nod to G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday) and knows more about Shadow than any stranger should.

Wednesday is no ordinary stranger, though; he’s a small-g god, a modern incarnation of Odin, the Norse god and “all-father” who ruled Asgard. It turns out that immigrants who came to the United States and brought their pagan beliefs and superstitions with them brought their gods with them as well – and those gods are about to go to war with the new gods of America, gods of television and computers and other things we worship today. And Wednesday wants Shadow’s help in preparing for the battle, a story that turns out to be as tangled and complex as any culture’s mythology and that involves gods from numerous pantheons, a dead woman who can’t quite stay dead, a lakeside town in Wisconsin, a tree in Virginia, and Rock City in Tennessee.

Gaiman’s assembly of all of these gods and myths into one coherent story by distilling them each into single human characters is brilliant and imaginative, to the point where the novel felt like nothing I’d read before. It’s not magical realism because it’s almost too realistic for it, aside from the whole gods walking around thing; Gaiman plays it all so straight that it’s easy to accept them as regular people, even when they shapeshift or defy the laws of physics. It’s an ensemble cast, with Shadow at its center but not the central character, as his personality matches his name; the plot revolves around him, but he’s never the most interesting man in the room.

As the plot develops, both sides are fighting for Shadow’s allegiance, which allows Gaiman to move Shadow into various orbits and introduce a widening array of his god-characters without creating multiple plot strands. American Gods is mostly linear, which helped make it a quick read, as did Gaiman’s fluid prose and frequent use of dark humor (especially from the mouth of Wednesday, who turns out to be a bit of a cad).

The denouement is just as imaginative as the rest of the book, defying convention and expectations while deftly tying up the various threads of the novel, without short-changing the novel’s themes of mortality, clashes of culture, and the importance of myth. Gaiman’s prose, imagination, and embrace of these big ideas reminded me in parts of Fforde, Vonnegut, Dick, and García Márquez. Grossman’s list turned out to be a tremendous collection of modern fiction; even the titles I didn’t love were worthwhile reads, and the best books on the list rank among my all-time favorites.

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→ September 13, 2014
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The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break.

This week’s Klawchat transcript is up, as is my newest boardgame review for Paste, on the deckbuilding game Valley of the Kings.

Alton Brown mentioned Steven Sherrill’s novel The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break twice on podcasts I listened to this spring/summer, once on his own and once on the Nerdist podcast, saying it was his all-time favorite novel, one he re-reads regularly. That was good enough for me to check it out – especially once I saw it wasn’t some thousand-page monolith – and it is indeed a fabulous book, clever, compelling, and incredibly warm-hearted, which is funny since the main character is quite literally a monster.

That would the capital-M Minotaur, spawn of Pasiphaë, devourer of virgins, bane of Minos, half-man and half-bull, now five thousand years old and working as a line cook in North Carolina. That’s Sherrill’s one nod to unreality, as everything that comes after that fact of the Minotaur’s existence, the peculiarity of which generates no remark from the non-monster characters in the book. (He does encounter a couple of other immortals – Daphne the Naiad appears briefly toward the end of the book, and we see Medusa in most unfortunate circumstances as well.) With that one given, Sherrill treats the Minotaur as a very human character, at least emotionally, since the guy does have the head of a bull, but other than that and some difficulty speaking, the Minotaur is a protagonist with whom most readers will easily empathize.

Working in the kitchen for a traditional American restaurant, the Minotaur is a diligent and precise worker, getting along with most of his co-workers, mostly because he has the patience of a creature who’s lived five thousand years and seen all manner of unkindness from the humans with whom he’s interacted. He lives in a trailer park, apparently the latest in an endless string of short-term residences, and is an expert at diagnosing and repairing problems with car engines, a skill he trades to his landlord in place of rent. He has a crush on one co-worker, Kelly, but flirts with Cecie, is one of the few who respects the gay expediter David, and tolerates (to a point) the juvenile behavior of Mike and Shane. But he has a pervasive sense of unease that a change for the worse is coming, and eventually his habit of going along to get along lands him in a situation where he has to choose between being proactive and letting history continue to drag him along for the ride.

Sherrill builds his story around largely mundane events. He has great feel for the rhythm of a restaurant kitchen and the repetitive tasks that go into preparing hundreds of identical meals over the course of a few hours, a tedium that the Minotaur actually enjoys. He goes into similar levels of detail on the workings of combustion engines, which I’ll assume is all accurate because I know little more than that you turn the key to start the motor. The twin emphases on specific aspects of these endeavors and on telling the story of the Minotaur’s quotidian life without requiring any Big Events to move the plot will make you forget that the main character is a mythical beast. And he infuses the Minotaur with profound understanding of human behavior and emotions – not supernaturally so, just enough that he becomes the ideal lens through which to watch the actions of the people around him, many of them screwed up in one way or another, the remainder busy screwing themselves up as fast as they can.

The Minotaur barely speaks, finding it difficult to articulate clearly given his bull’s tongue and a clear bout of self-consciousness because of this, so much of his dialogue comes out as grunts that his coworkers all understand – which also puts them in the position of doing most of the talking. That puts the Minotaur roughly into the everyman/observer archetype, sort of a bull-headed Nick Jenkins, someone who watches the action for us but isn’t completely neutral or uninvolved. (The bull-headed bit is a dash of irony on Sherrill’s part, as the Minotaur is neither stubborn nor decisive, but is quite thoughtful and even aware of his habit of sometimes making bad decisions.) He’s the title character, and ultimately it’s his decision and his choices that shape the conclusion of the novel, but the real interest here is the diverse side characters, who are eccentric and flawed and whose real natures are reflected in their interactions with the hero. He’s deeply empathetic toward them, the result of his complex origins and five thousand years of watching humans be human, and most of them are similarly empathetic towards him.

Grub, the amusingly-named owner of the restaurant where the Minotaur – called “M.” by all his friends and colleagues – works, hires a new waitress named Kelly, who is revealed to be an epileptic when she has a grand mal seizure during a shift. The Minotaur’s affection for her seems to go beyond a mere physical attraction; he sees in her some kind of kindred spirit, another lonely soul wandering through life without a clear destination and with too much awareness of her own differences. The story ends with an unexpected sequence of events that force M. to finally be proactive and make a real choice to shape his own destiny, but he needs a little help from an unexpected deus ex machina and a lot of understanding to get to the point, where Sherrill leaves the reader in ambiguity, but with the possibility of hope, which seems to be all the Minotaur is asking the world to give him.

Next up: John Williams’ western Butcher’s Crossing.

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→ August 6, 2014
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The Casual Vacancy.

My Tuesday column this week covered the Javier Baez promotion, and I held my weekly Klawchat yesterday too.

J.K. Rowling’s first book for adults, The Casual Vacancy, met with huge commercial success (of course) and mixed reviews, many glowing but many disappointed, although I wonder if they were just hoping for more Horcruxes. I waited for the furor(e) to die down and for the book to come out in paperback, reading her wonderful detective novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, first, so my expectations for Vacancy may have been different than those of reviewers encountering it fresh off the last Harry Potter book. (Witness the savage takedown of the book offered by the New York Times‘ Michiko Katukani.)

I thought it was fantastic, melding the classic British literary formula of centering a wide cast of characters in a single English town with the modern, wry realism of small-town novels like those of Richard Russo. The Guardian review, also slightly negative, jokingly referred to the book as “Mugglemarch,” although I’m not clear why that would be a bad thing. George Eliot’s magnum opus has to be the model for countless novels of this order, just as Ann Patchett says half-seriously that each of her novels is her own attempt to recreate Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. What it lacks, if anything, is a truly sympathetic central character; Harry Potter, who lost his parents at age one, sustained a miserable childhood, and even at Hogwarts was hounded by death threats from without and spiteful classmates from within, was never pathetic. He was a clear hero, flawed and complete, the Boy You Could Root For. There are many characters within A Casual Vacancy for whom you will feel great pity, and there are probably a few in whom you’ll recognize friends, family members, or perhaps bits of yourself, but there are no heroes, and no one behaves heroically, not until it’s a little too late.

The small English town of Pagford is rocked by the sudden death, due to a cerebral aneurysm, of beloved town council member and father of four Barry Fairbrother, which creates the “casual vacancy” of the title and leads to much political jockeying to fill his open seat. Pagford is split down the middle on the subject of The Fields, a low-income housing community that puts a financial drain on the town and is home to some petty criminals and lower-status residents, including the Weedon family, with teenager Krystal, destitute because of her mother’s chronic drug addiction. The pro-Fields council members, which include Dr. Jawanda and included Barry, want to keep the Fields under Pagford’s budget, while the anti-Fields contingent, led by the fatuous Howard Mollison, wants to dump them on neighboring Yarvil. Mollison views himself as the town’s de facto mayor and leading citizen, thanks in part to his successful market and the opening of a new cafe that employs a trio of the adult characters’ teenaged children.

The political intrigue increases when those children of these various “grown-ups” – and I use the term only the biological sense here – begin posting revelations anonymously on the town council’s badly-managed website. Those attacks form the bridge between the town council storyline and the various goings-on of the kids, from sex to drugs to rape to self-mutilation, which form the second layer of subplots. The idea that the Kids Are Not All Right and that their parents really have little idea, along with the kids generally knowing more of what the parents are up to than the adults think, is a common trope in modern literature and television (Dawson’s Creek would not have existed without it), but Rowling deploys it well by at least making the kids flawed in their own ways. They’re still kids, not wise beyond their years, just bearing the split of wisdom and ignorance that all teenagers carry (and many of us carried into our 20s … and 30s…), so they make huge mistakes too, ones that carry consequences for themselves and their parents. Posting the anonymous attacks to try to slow down their parents’ political ambitions have consequences an adult would foresee but an angry son or daughter might not – outing an affair, revealing a theft, divulging a secret attraction, these are words that cannot be borne and one by one they slow or derail their parents’ plans.

Rowling takes a grim view of the provincial provincials who populate her novel, and she blankets the book in coarse language to describe their selfish and self-destructive doings, some of which made me wince and wonder if she was perhaps overdoing it to shed the children’s-author label. (I hope not; Rowling’s prose has never bothered me as it has many readers, but in particular I’ve always appreciated her willingness to deploy her advanced vocabulary.) Her greatest gift in storycraft has always been her ability to weave unconnected subplots together into a unified conclusion – in the Harry Potter stories, every detail mattered, even across multiple books – and she’s able to do that here, but with far more morbid results. The council subplot comes to a head just as Krystal Weedon’s fractured family falls apart in the Fields, and the novel concludes with a funeral,
One character of the whole panoply emerges as a half-hero, the one truly courageous act of anyone in the whole novel coming from perhaps the least courageous character of them all, and one of the only ones to receive a full fleshing-out – perhaps why she’s the closest thing to a sympathetic protagonist in the book.

As for the common criticism that the book is “boring,” that’s always in the mind of the reader, and I can only say I was never bored – I tore through it as if it was a thriller, but I’ve always enjoyed Rowling’s prose more than most readers because I find her highly descriptive style creates clear imagery in my mind as I read. The novel has very little “action” in the traditional sense, but I thought that was in many ways an homage to classic Brit lit, to which I found countless allusions in the Harry Potter series too.

If you’ve read the book, regardless of whether you enjoyed it, you’ll probably get a laugh from the Guardian‘s “digested read,” which summarizes and satirizes the book in a few hundred words.

Next up: Oh, I’m a few books behind here, but since finishing this one, I’ve read Anne Enright’s dismal Man Booker Prize-winner The Gathering>The Gathering, Caroline Blackwood’s autobiographical novella Great Granny Webster, and Walter Scott’s Waverly novel The Heart of Midlothian.

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→ May 2, 2014
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The Cuckoo’s Calling.

J.K. Rowling published her first detective novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, apparently to see what kind of response she would get to a novel that didn’t have her name attached to it. The book received strong reviews, but barely sold anything until word leaked – or “leaked” – that Rowling was the true author, at which point it became a global best-seller, along the lines of the more modestly-reviewed The Casual Vacancy. It turns out that Rowling has quite a knack for the detective genre, crafting a legitimate hard-boiled detective story, complete with a compelling main character, along the lines of the field’s masters, just updated to a modern setting, and populated with characters and red-herring subplots you might find in a classic mystery novel too.

The detective at the heart of The Cuckoo’s Calling, Cormoran Strike, is indeed hard-boiled, a very down-on-his-luck detective, discharged from the British armed services after losing part of one leg to an IED in Afghanistan, and momentarily living in his office after breaking up with his longtime, faithless girlfriend Charlotte. Strike receives two unexpected visitors to start the novel: A new client, the brother of one of his old school chums (who died when riding his bike into a local quarry as a teenager), asking Strike to investigate the alleged suicide of his adoptive sister; and a temporary secretary, Robin, whom Strike wasn’t expecting and probably can’t afford to keep, but who takes to the work far more than either she or Strike anticipated.

The suicide in question is that of Lula Landry, a supermodel and star of newspaper gossip columns who appears to have jumped to her death from her new luxury apartment, a building also occupied by a famous film producer and his coke-addict wife, as well as an American rapper who has written several songs about Lula. Her brother, John, doesn’t believe the official verdict of suicide, and wants Strike to find the truth, suspecting two hooded black men spotted fleeing from the area of her building on CCTV footage.

The Cuckoo’s Calling brought me back to the first Hercule Poirot novel, Death on the Nile, one of Agatha Christie’s finest works because of the broad set of characters she introduced and heavy use of red-herrings, where nearly every character who didn’t commit the murder at the heart of the novel has some other secret Poirot eventually sniffs out. Rowling has also populated her book with peculiar secondary characters and suspicious suspects, most of whom have something going on they’d rather you not know about, even if it had nothing to do with Lula’s murder. (Spoiler: She didn’t kill herself. Sorry.) While I understand Rowling’s prose has always provoked oppobrium from critics, I appreciate her highly evocative style of writing, long on descriptions to allow the reader to see the action in his/her mind – which suits how I read fiction.

I’m currently re-reading the Harry Potter series for the third time by reading a chapter a night aloud to my daughter – we’re on The Goblet of Fire and I’m running short of accents already – and, because I know the plots so well, I’m picking up all of the clues Rowling left along the way to point the perceptive reader to the ultimate reveal at the end of each book. She uses the same tactic in The Cuckoo’s Calling: Everything you need to know to figure out who did it is there in the book, but she blends these details into the dialogue so well that they didn’t stand out (to me, at least) as obvious clues.

The pleasure in detective novels isn’t so much about the whodunit as it is about the central detective character, whether it’s a hard-boiled shamus like the Continental Cop or an erudite eccentric like Nero Wolfe. Rowling appears to have studied the genre well, as Strike has plenty of aspects of the hard-boiled detective, but with modern flourishes, including what I might call his unusual parentage, and enough of an intellectual streak to call to mind Wolfe or Lord Peter Wimsey – which also means Rowling doesn’t have to have Strike fight his way out of most of his confrontations with suspects. His interactions with Robin, his less-interesting assistant who remains endearing for her innocent eagerness to participate in the detecting side of the job (perhaps an alter ego for the reader), also break type, as Rowling seems to have made it clear that the two aren’t going to shack up, a direction I hope she maintains in future books. It’s a promising beginning to a new series, especially if you liked Rowling’s detail-oriented writing style and the humor she always worked into the Harry Potter novels, and would like to see that brought to the hard-boiled detective arena, a genre where sparse prose is the usual rule. The next Cormoran Strike novel, The Silkworm, comes out on June 19th.

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→ November 4, 2009
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Tree of Smoke.

I know the site’s been flaky today. The server is fine but WordPress is hanging up and I’ve had to have hosting company restart it twice.

I’ll be on Mike & Mike in the Morning on Wednesday at 7:40 am EST, after which, I’m going on vacation for a week, so this will probably be the last post here till Veterans’ Day. And – in case that wasn’t clear enough – there will be no Klawchat this week.

So, Tree of Smoke … 614 pages, read the whole damn thing, still have no idea what the point was, why I care about any of the characters or who the main character even was, what any of the threads had to do with each other, and why author Denis Johnson’s prose was so disjointed, mixing florid descriptions with poorly used profanity. (In fact, given that most of the novel is set in Vietnam during the war, I actually expected more profanity.) There’s no plot. Stories don’t start and end; we get the middle, sort of, and then somebody dies, and it’s over. The novel is full of allusions to the Bible, and a few references to other religions, but none of them made any sense to me on their own or in clarifying the point of the book. I thought I caught a few continuity issues in some of the subplots, but it’s possible that I was too bored to remember what was going on.

I could probably do a better job of taking this novel apart, but by the time I finished last night I wanted nothing more to do with it, and besides, this review from the Atlantic does a much, much better job than I could have hoped to do, even if I’d started the book with the intention of verbally lighting it on fire.

Anyway, I actually just finished the audiobook version of SuperFreakonomics, which was fantastic, but that review will have to wait till after the vacation. I will say that the brouhaha over the global warming chapter seems misplaced, and I’m guessing the critics haven’t read the entire chapter.

The reading list for the vacation – I probably won’t read all of these, but I have a minor phobia of running out of books – includes The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Remains of the Day, The Case of the Missing Books, Cold Comfort Farm, and And a Bottle of Rum.

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→ September 8, 2009
→ By

Under the Net.

I was originally going to call Iris Murdoch’s* Under the Net the poor man’s Lucky Jim, but by the time I finished, I changed my view. It’s more of the homeless man’s Lucky Jim – a similar modern picaresque around a hapless central character who can’t get out of his own way, but maybe 25% as funny as Amis’ novel with an ending that made no sense to me at all. It appears on both the TIME 100 and the Modern Library 100 (at #95).

*If Murdoch’s name rings a bell for you but the book doesn’t, the 2001 film Iris was about her, with Jim Broadbent winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Murdoch’s husband.

I admit, however, that the novel’s foundation in philosophy was probably lost on me, since I’ve never taken a philosophy course or had any interest in the subject. Murdoch herself was a philosopher, writing five nonfiction books on the subject, and philosophy is a running theme through Under the Net, with references to specific philosophers and discussions of the subject both through dialogue and through the plot. I didn’t appreciate any of the references and the dialogue tended toward the boring, while the narration … well, you tell me:

The roadway was glowing with light. One one side the Arc du Carrousel stood like an imagined archway, removed from space by its faultless proportions; and behind it the enormous sweep of the Louvre enclosed the scene, fiercely illuminated and ablaze with detail. On the other side began the unnatural garden, with its metallic green grass under the yellow lamps, and its flowers self-conscious with colour and quiet as dream flowers which can unfold and be still at the same moment. A little distance beyond the railings the garden ran into trees, and beyond the trees an explosion of light announced the Place de la Concorde, above and beyond which was raised upon its hill the floodlit Arc de Triomphe standing against a backdrop of darkness, with an enormous tricolore which reached the whole height of the archway fluttering inside the central arch.

That paragraph includes 143 words of descriptive text … in the middle of a pursuit scene. Just when I thought we were getting somewhere with the plot, Murdoch decides to stop and smell the roses.

Next up: Something a little more fun – Walter Moers’ City of Dreaming Books.

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→ August 7, 2009
→ By

The Magicians.

First blog post from the Area Code games is up on the Draft Blog. Second one is filed and should appear on Friday morning. I’ll also be on the telecast of the Under Armour Game on ESPNU on Saturday, making a few short appearances from the stands or the dugout if we can work out the logistics.

Friend of the dish Lev Grossman came to my attention because of his work (with Richard Lacayo) on the TIME 100, and when I asked them to do a Q&A for the dish about that ranking, Lev asked if I’d be interested in reading his upcoming book, The Magicians, which comes out in hardcover on Tuesday. I knocked off the book on my flight to California on Tuesday – all but 20 pages, to be exact, although I finished the book before I got to my rental car – and absolutely recommend it. (And no, I wouldn’t recommend it solely because Lev’s a Friend of the dish. It’s legitimately awesome.)

The Magicians will inevitably be called a grown-up rejoinder to Harry Potter, and Grossman does borrow from Rowling’s works while alluding to other giants of the fantasy genre, from Narnia to Middle Earth to Faerûn. The central character, Quentin, is a young, very bright, heartsick loner in present-day Brooklyn who dreams of a world like that in his favorite series of books, about a magical world called Fillory which is accessed through a grandfather clock in the house of a British family. Quentin is a skilled magician in the real-world sense of card tricks and disappearing nickels, but eventually discovers that the magic of spells and incantations is real and enrolls at a college for magicians that bears a few resemblances to Hogwarts. Unlike the innocent teenagers of Harry Potter’s world, however, Quentin and his classmates drink, smoke, swear, and screw, although I think they do more drinking than the other three things combined, and eventually embark on a sort of kill-the-big-foozle quest that defies their (and the reader’s) expectations.

Grossman manages to straddle the line between straight storycraft and outright parody brilliantly. One can read The Magicians as a retelling of the Potter myth with older kids, greater tragedies, and more complex interactions between characters, as well as several cliche-mocking twists in the final hundred-odd pages that skewer not just Rowling’s work but the standard plot devices of fantasy and science fiction. (There’s also a great shot across Rowling’s bow in defense of American magic.) Yet never does the book descend to the superficial, sneering tone that pure parody often has, as The Magicians‘ story stands strongly on its own, built around a complex, brooding central character, and an accelerating plot that grows from school-aged dramas involving crushes and difficult exams to life-and-death struggles in another world. He adds depth to two of the main characters with glimpses into their dysfunctional family lives, and ties up just about every loose plot strand or seemingly incongruous event as the novel speeds to a too-early finish – and the final two pages seemed word-perfect to me both as I read them and as I replayed them for hours after reading.

I do have minor quibbles with the book – there’s a “why do bad things happen to good people” discussion that seemed cursory and labored, and the way Quentin discovers a friend of his is gay was a little out of place and didn’t end up tying into anything else in the book. There is also one major event near the novel’s end that was like a slug to the chest to read, although I could see it as a counterpoint to Rowling, who largely skipped that sort of tragedy in Deathly Hallows (justifiably, given her audience). Grossman is also a big fan of the sentence fragment – “But still.” appeared at least twice – although I think that will only annoy the sliver of you who are as hardcore about grammar as I am.

Where The Magicians succeeds most is in Grossman’s creation of an immersive world within his book, and then a world within that world for his characters. Fforde, Rowling, and Murakami all have that ability to draw me into the pages of a book so that finishing the work is akin to waking from a pleasant dream. Grossman has achieved that same feat here.

Next up: Why not follow this with another book from the TIME 100? Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart.

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→ August 3, 2009
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Then We Came to the End.

Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End starts out as a modern-day Catch-22, the hell of the cubicle-farm replacing the hell of war, but two abrupt changes in direction turn it into a more serious work, resulting in an often hilarious but uneven, disjointed novel that, despite the odd construction and mood shifts, I still enjoyed and would recommend.

The story, told almost entirely in the first-person plural, revolves around a bunch of employees in the creative area of a Chicago advertising firm that is slowly dying during the end of the dot-com bubble, with the group’s ranks diminishing by one or two with each round of layoffs. Lightening workloads mean more time for gossip, pranks, and the silly office games that seem to take place in every company that looks even a little bit like this. (The best gag in the book, about an office chair, reminded me of my favorite mousepad, one I bought through a site I’ll call F’dCompany, that reads: “you can have my aeron when you pry it off my cold dead ass.”) The first half of the book is frequently hilarious and offers a great blend of realism and absurdity – nothing in the book is impossible or even improbable, but everything is dialed up to be a little funnier or a little more ridiculous. The second half of the novel becomes more serious as one of the colleagues gets a serious medical diagnosis and a couple of the laid-off workers start to get a little weirder; although Ferris starts to give the reader a clichéd ending, it turns out to be a parody of the cliché rather than what would have been a colossal letdown in the plot.

The main problem I had with the novel is that right about at the halfway point, Ferris inserted a short story about the character who gets sick written in a different voice with a completely different tone. If I had to guess, I’d wager that Ferris had originally written this short story but found no outlet for it or was unable to expand it into a novel, so he inserted it into this novel and built the character into the novel’s story and made her subplot the primary plot of the novel’s second half. It has a disconnected feel similar to that of the end of Ender’s Game, where Orson Scott Card stuck a separate short story he’d written on to the end of what was otherwise a fun if somewhat simple sci-fi adventure/coming-of-age novel. That story and its integration felt forced, and the jarring shift in narration in Ferris’ novel was similar.

The other issue with the book is that there’s no central character with whom the reader is likely to connect – even the character in the short story isn’t terribly sympathetic, and we don’t get much insight into any other characters besides her. Ferris is working with an ensemble of interesting, quirky characters who are well defined but who by and large don’t develop and spend the entire novel at arm’s length from the reader.

Despite those two issues, Then We Came to the End is a funny and quick book that still manages to hit some serious themes, especially about work-life balance and how work has become life in different ways for many people in the workforce today.

Next up: The Magicians, the upcoming novel from Friend of the dish Lev Grossman.

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→ June 27, 2009
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Ghost.

I have a new post up with some notes on non-Bryce-Harper players I saw at the Tournament of Stars this week.

River Ave Blues looked at the final mock drafts of the major draft analysts, and they ranked mine as the most accurate.

I’m holding the review of Word Freak for now, as Stefan agreed to a brief Q&A about the book and his current Scrabble habits and I’m waiting for the response.

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Alan Lightman’s slim, quick-reading 2007 novel Ghost revolves around a very ordinary man, David Kurzweil, whose life is turned upside down when he sees something out of the corner of his eye that he can’t identify or explain. He ends up at the center of a public controversy over the existence of the supernatural, turning his life upside down as he struggles to decide what exactly he saw, and what it might mean.

The ostensible subject of the book is that battle between faith and skepticism, and Lightman – the first professor to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities at MIT – limits the phony dialogue and extended narrative digressions that can easily ruin a book like this, instead creating a raft of secondary characters to represent many different views on the subject. (Oddly enough, the one role he omits is the traditionalist – at no point does David seek counsel from clergy of any faith.) Lightman also cleverly confounds any attempt by his characters to provide a clear resolution to the question, as proving or disproving the existence of the supernatural is not his aim.

I think the book’s ultimate theme – or perhaps moral – is that, in the small view, it doesn’t matter whether David’s experience represented a genuine contact with the supernatural, but whether he fully believes in it himself. David doesn’t see any meaning in life, so he lives a life without meaning. He has a job that, at the time he takes it and even at the time that he sees whatever he sees, is just a job. His love life is in shambles, with a divorce that he hasn’t emotionally accepted after eight years and a girlfriend to whom he can’t fully connect. As he finds himself forced to defend what he saw from skeptics and from co-opters, his personality begins to emerge from a hibernation that may have started when his father died when David was still a child. He has shied away from real relationships for at least the eight years since the divorce, and perhaps for longer (the marriage did fail, after all), and suddenly is forced to deal with people and to define himself along the way. Whether the supernatural exists is not Lightman’s question; he’s exploring what would happen to an ordinary man placed into an extraordinary situation that has the potential to change his life in either direction.

Next up: One of those books that people can’t believe I haven’t read previously – Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea.

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