Tag Archives: Fiction

Review of Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1981)

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Time Magazine Top 100 Novels

Book 44: Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1981)

This is a series of reflections reading through Time Magazine’s top 100 novels as selected by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo published since 1923 (when Time magazine was founded). For me this is an attempt to broaden my exposure to authors I may not encounter otherwise, especially as a person who was not a liberal arts major in college. Time’s list is alphabetical, so I decided to read through in a random order, and I plan to write a short reflection on each novel.

Marilynne Robinson use of the English language is artful and poetic. I read Gilead several years ago and when I began Housekeeping, I was immediately struck by the beautiful way in which she can write. The novel is told from the perspective of Ruth Stone, normally called Ruthie throughout the book, who is left at a young age with her grandmother, Sylvia Foster, along with her sister Lucille. Ruthie’s mother after leaving her daughters at their grandmother’s house drives into the lake and dies and for several years Sylvia cares for the two girls until her death. When Slyvia dies suddenly, she arranges for her sisters-in-law, Lily and Nona Foster, to come care for the girls but these older women are uneasy with the girls and eventually locate Sylvie Fisher, the girls’ aunt and their mother’s sister, to come to the home in Fingerbone, Idaho where their grandmother was raising them. Sylvie attempts to raise these two girls, but she is ill equipped for this responsibility, and the household slowly devolves into dysfunction from the perspective of the surrounding community.

Although the book never names it there is some type of mental illness that seems to pervade the family and impacts the generations of women who compose this dysfunctional home. From the suicide of Ruthie’s mother to the transient lifestyle of Sylvie and her lack of awareness of the needs of Ruthie and Lucille. In the end Ruthie also begins to exhibit the characteristics that Sylvie possesses. Hearing the innocent perspective of Ruthie, it is apparent that she and her sister live with an absence of attention and provision that children need. Yet Ruthie is also desperate to keep Sylvie close to her since she is the only adult, in age if not maturity, who shows her any attention.  

As mentioned above the use of the English language in this book is beautiful but it also seems at odds with the character who narrates the story. There is a chasm between the dysfunction and mental illness of the characters and their elevated language. As a father I struggled with the neglect and isolation of Ruthie and Lucille, but I also struggled with Ruthie as a believable narrator who speaks like a highly educated literary author but struggles to attend school and reflects on the experience of being a young girl and teenager. There were also times when the language prevented the story from moving, the narration became so struck with their thoughts that they lost track of their place in their story and their world. There was a disorientation to this book that reminded me of Caitlin Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl. Not as severe but reading Housekeeping gave the feeling of looking through the world through eyes and perceptions shrouded in some type of mental distortion.

Review of the Assistant by Bernard Malamud (1957)

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Time Magazine Top 100 Novels

Book 8: The Assistant by Bernard Malamud

This is a series of reflections reading through Time Magazine’s top 100 novels as selected by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo published since 1923 (when Time magazine was founded). For me this is an attempt to broaden my exposure to authors I may not encounter otherwise, especially as a person who was not a liberal arts major in college. Time’s list is alphabetical, so I decided to read through in a random order, and I plan to write a short reflection on each novel.

The Assistant is a story that centers around a struggling grocery store in Brooklyn, its owner Morris Bober, his wife Ida, daughter Helen, and the assistant Frank Aspen. It is a story that reflects upon the Jewish identity of the Bober family in a predominantly non-Jewish neighborhood, an identity that doesn’t involve the practice of the Jewish religion but still maintains a connection to the cultural and ethnic reality of Judaism. In the mind of Morris Bober to be a Jew is to suffer and his view of his life is one of suffering imprisoned in his grocery store and unable to provide for his wife and especially his young adult daughter the way he would like. Frank Aspen enters the story as ‘a hold-upnik’ when he is a part of a robbery of Morris’ grocery store. Frank is a twenty-five-year-old drifter who has recently arrived in Brooklyn and in the aftermath of the robbery begs Morris to let him work in the store for no pay to gain experience. Frank also finds Helen attractive and his presence as a non-Jewish admirer of this Jewish girl is one of Ida Bober’s greatest fears.  

Bernard Malamud gives us four characters whose fears, disappointments, strengths and weaknesses are apparent and believable. It is a story of great wrongs, the search for reconciliation and forgiveness. The story inhabits both a Jewish and non-Jewish world between the Morris family and Frank Aspen and can show appreciation for both. This along with Herzog and Call it Sleep are stories of Jewish existence in the United States in the middle third of the 20th Century, yet this was my favorite of these three novels. The story has an easy flow as Frank enters the orbit of the Bober family and its business occasionally despite the traumatic events that occur in the family. Frank is a flawed person seeking redemption and he comes off as likeable despite his pattern of bad decisions.

I enjoyed The Assistant. It is a character driven story and Bernard Malamud gives us believable characters in a well-articulated world. He allows the reader to get to know the characters through their thoughts and actions and it is an easy read. Frank Aspen as the assistant in the story is the driving character but he is also the outsider to the family, while the Bober family as Jews are outsiders to their surrounding world. Ultimately, the story ends abruptly, and I would have enjoyed hearing a little more about how Frank navigates the world and his relationship to the Bober family after Morris’ death and his conversion to Judaism, but the author leaves the story at this point leaving the reader to wonder about Frank, Helen, and Ida.

Review of The Witcher: Crossroads of Ravens by Andrzej Sapkowski

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Five Star Book Review

Andrzej Sapkowski, The Witcher: Crossroads of Ravens

For me a five-star book is something that either I want to read again or something that is so profound it makes an immediate impact. There are lots of ways that books can be compelling: a unique idea, an interesting set of characters, a complex plot, an artistic use of the English language and more. Reading is also a subjective experience, so what appeals to me as a reader may be very different for you. I read a lot for both pleasure and work, but these short reviews are a way for me to show my appreciation for the work and the craft of the author of the reviewed work.

I came to the Witcher books by Andrzej Sapkowski after playing The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, like many English readers of this beloved Polish series. I was fascinated by the depth of the mythology within the game, and I loved the character of Geralt of Rivia and the dark world shattered by both war and the monsters that lived on the edge of society. I greatly appreciate Andrzej Sapkowski’s books[1] from the short stories through the connected story of Geralt and Ciri, but Crossroads of Ravens which is a story which comes before any of the other books may be my favorite. This is the way to write a backstory which balances developing the young Geralt fresh from his training, his interactions with Preston Holt, an older witcher, and continues to give a window into the previously established world.

Crossroad of Ravens does allow the young Geralt to spend more time developing his skills as a professional monster hunter than most of the other books in the series, but it is also a story where our protagonist finds himself snared in an ongoing struggle. As Nenneke, the priestess of Melitele, can say late in the book, “Revenge only brings joy to vapid and primitive minds.” And perhaps there is something to stories of revenge that appeals to some base part of our need for some fairness in the world, but this is a well-told story of a long-delayed revenge and the things that are more important than revenge. All of Sapkowski’s characters have emotional depth and are willing to sacrifice for what is important. I enjoyed being able to go back in the story to a young and naïve Geralt learning to survive in a world that hates him as a witcher, something other than human, and relies on his skills at the same time. A very quick read for me and it was good to be on the path with the witcher again.

[1] Like most people who read the books I was intensely disappointed by the Netflix adaptation which either fundamentally misunderstood the source material or intentionally chose to rewrite it into something barely recognizable that felt cheap and shallow.

Review of To the Lighthouse (1929) by Virginia Woolf

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Time Magazine Top 100 Novels

Book 92: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1929)

This is a series of reflections reading through Time Magazine’s top 100 novels as selected by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo published since 1923 (when Time magazine was founded). For me this is an attempt to broaden my exposure to authors I may not encounter otherwise, especially as a person who was not a liberal arts major in college. Time’s list is alphabetical, so I decided to read through in a random order, and I plan to write a short reflection on each novel.

To the Lighthouse is like a well painted still life, to utilize an image from the book. More accurately it is two moments in life, each carefully cataloged and described. Virginia Woolf has an artistic flair in her use of the English language as her palette to describe the Ramsay household and the extended number of close guests that occupy the action around the house. This is stream of consciousness writing informed by the sensibilities of a highly educated English family. There is a Freudian Oedipus Complex that emerges between father and son in the story, particularly visible in the second act, and there are times where the language and attitudes of the characters become pretentious to a point that it is distracting. It is a world where communication, especially between men and women, seems nearly impossible and much of the drama of the book is the characters waiting for someone of the opposite sex to intuit what the speaker in that moment of the book needs and relieve the anxiety of the moment.  To utilize another image from the book it looks at the image of a perfectly balanced tray of fruit whose appearance is ruined by someone taking one of the pieces away from the platter. The two visions in the story are separated by the death of several key characters during the ten years that separate the interactions. This dramatically change the balance for each character.

Every book is not for every reader, and when a story fails for me, I often wonder what it is that makes me not the best reader of the book, particularly a book other intelligent readers have enjoyed. I appreciate Virginia Woolf’s utilization of the English language and the flow of her words on the page. Stream of consciousness writing has always been a struggle for me. To utilize the image above of a well painted still life, I can admire the artistry the artist puts into the individual brushstrokes but I only want to look at it for so long. Reading is a subjective experience and both the subject matter and the lack of movement of any type of plot made this a less enjoyable read for me. There have been several novels on the Time Magazine Top 100 novels that are set within a highly educated or very well off-English household in the early 20th Century and this time-period seems a sterile environment for both relationships and life with so much effort being placed into maintaining appearances. I can appreciate the artistry of the book and why so many people consider it one of the great English language novels but maybe I am just not a patient enough reader for the stream of consciousness novels that were popular among the elite of the early 20th Century.

Review of Project Hail Mary by Andy Wier

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Five Star Book Review: Project Hail Mary by Andy Wier

For me a five-star book is something that either I want to read again or something that is so profound it makes an immediate impact. There are lots of ways that books can be compelling: a unique idea, an interesting set of characters, a complex plot, an artistic use of the English language and more. Reading is also a subjective experience, so what appeals to me as a reader may be very different for you. I read a lot for both pleasure and work, but these short reviews are a way for me to show my appreciation for the work and the craft of the author of the reviewed work.

Project Hail Mary was a delightful journey with Dr. Ryland Grace on a last chance mission to save humanity from a failing sun caused by a previously unknown species. The story cleverly combines Dr. Grace’s experiences in the Tau Seti system as the sole survivor of the ship named Hail Mary and flashbacks to his role in the discovery of the problem, the conception of a solution and his surprising inclusion on the interstellar mission. This is a novel that is science fiction, heavy on science, but in a delightfully geeky way that allows a non-scientist to enjoy with the scientific main character. Both the portions that take place on earth as well as the portions that occur in space tell a very human story of fear, loneliness, the joy of discovery, and hope. Without providing spoilers, the book is full of unexpected discoveries and friendships, and Ryland Grace is a character who is easy to enjoy as you experience the discoveries, both scientific and personal, through his eyes.

Andy Wier does a great job of creating a book that is a joy to read. He strikes a great balance between science and storytelling. His curiosity expresses itself through his characters and he does a miraculous job of making the scientific experimentation that the story depends upon both accessible and interesting. I listened to the audio version of Project Hail Mary and there are some added benefits to this version of the book which I can’t adequately express without providing some spoilers. One of my sisters gave me this book as a gift after she had enjoyed it, and I thoroughly enjoyed it as well. Great characters caught in an epic journey who are unapologetic in their curiosity about their world. A very human story of space, discovery, curiosity, and hope.

A Review of Call it Sleep by Henry Roth (1934)

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Time Magazine Top 100 Novels

Book 18: Call it Sleep by Henry Roth

This is a series of reflections reading through Time Magazine’s top 100 novels as selected by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo published since 1923 (when Time magazine was founded). For me this is an attempt to broaden my exposure to authors I may not encounter otherwise, especially as a person who was not a liberal arts major in college. Time’s list is alphabetical, so I decided to read through in a random order, and I plan to write a short reflection on each novel.

Call it Sleep follows a young Jewish boy, David Schearl who immigrates to the United States with his mother Genya. Upon arriving he is introduced to his emotionally unstable and unloving father Albert Schearl. Young David struggles to engage with other children and adults and Henry Roth does a good job of writing a story from the perspective of an early elementary age boy. David is an innocent in a rough world, and he fears both the world outside and of his violent father. The place of an innocent in a fallen and rough world seems to animate the narration as David continually finds himself in situations he is unprepared for. From a neighbor girl who wants to play ‘bad’ to an older Gentile boy who takes advantage of David’s desire for attention to put himself in a position to take advantage of one of David’s cousins. Central to the story is a secret his mother tells her sister, which David overhears, about being in love with a Christian organ player to the disgrace of her family. The one place where David fits in is in chedar, a one room Hebrew school for young boys. David has a talent for Hebrew recitation and it also curious about the little bit of insight into God he receives from Reb Pankower, but this is also where David allows his interpretation of his mother’s secret to slip out to disastrous effects. When a rabbi who hears David’s confession brings it to his mother and father it creates an explosive crisis in the home.

Every book is not for every reader, and when a story fails for me, I often wonder what it is that makes me not the best reader of the book, particularly a book other intelligent readers have enjoyed. Part of my struggle was the language of dialogue between the young people in the narrative in broken English which made it more difficult to follow. The lines spoken in Yiddish are translated into easily read English, but Henry Roth attempts to copy the slang and accent of English spoken in the Jewish ghettos of the early 1900s. I can also appreciate Henry Roth’s ability to convey the mental state of a young boy, but young David is an unreliable interpreter of the world around him. I can understand why young David is fearful, and I appreciate the way his perspective sheds light on the immigrant experience, but it also made for a dull read. Call it Sleep was ultimately a book I could appreciate but not one I enjoyed.

Review of Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin (1953)

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Time Magazine Top 100 Novels

Book 35: Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin (1953)

This is a series of reflections reading through Time Magazine’s top 100 novels as selected by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo published since 1923 (when Time magazine was founded). For me this is an attempt to broaden my exposure to authors I may not encounter otherwise, especially as a person who was not a liberal arts major in college. Time’s list is alphabetical, so I decided to read through in a random order, and I plan to write a short reflection on each novel.

Go Tell It On The Mountain starts on the birthday of John Grimes who is the central character in this book of religion and hypocrisy, love desired and rarely returned, a family of secrets and hurt, and the first arousals of sexuality in a young man who realizes he is attracted to other men. Gabriel, his father but not his biological father, Elizabeth, John’s mother, and Florence, John’s aunt and Gabriel’s sister, all contribute to the tension in this household as well as the younger son Roy, biological son of Gabriel, and the unclaimed memory of Royal, an out of wedlock son of Gabriel who died before this moment in the story. The event of John’s birthday, which his mother belatedly remembers, is pushed into the background when his belligerent younger brother storms out of the house only to return wounded by a knife. Even though it is his birthday and he had taken his mother’s belated gift of a little money to the theater, his father lashes out at him, his mother, and his aunt in exasperation about Roy’s wild ways. John eventually escapes to the storefront church where his father is a deacon and the theme of sexuality emerges as he wrestles with Elisha, an older boy in the church, as they set up for evening services.

The remainder of the book occurs in flashbacks and visions during the evening church service where first his aunt Florence remembers her life and reluctantly surrenders to prayer. Then his father’s life is revealed in his wild teenage years, his marriage, his affair which produces Royal who he never claims and eventually dies a violent death, and his marriage to Elizabeth, John’s mother. Then Elizabeth has her own vision of her weak mother and the father who she loved. After her mother’s death who she was taken from by her father by her aunt because of the work her father does. She grows up in a loveless childhood but finds love in a young man named Richard. Before she can tell Richard about her pregnancy he commits suicide after a wrongful arrest by the police. Finally, is John’s dark night of the soul before his vision and acceptance of Christ.

The book does a good job of showing both the brokenness and the strength of faith. The Pentecostal tradition has a strong emphasis on holiness and yet the book is open about the hypocrisy and closely held secrets of the men who lead the church. It is a story of several intertwined people who never experienced the love they desired from the fathers, mothers, and siblings in their lives and who continue to hand on their broken lives to the next generation. The visions in part two do a good job of telling the backstory of the characters but even among the revelations of the visions the brokenness between the family members remains entrenched to the end. Even as there should be celebration over the salvation of John, his father Gabriel remains closed off from him. The shattered relationship between Gabriel and Florence over Gabriel’s wild past and his unforgiving nature is never resolved even though Florence feels she is near the end of her life, and she holds a letter with the secret of Gabriel’s out of wedlock child which she threatens to release to the congregation. Apparently, the story is semi-autobiographical, and I can appreciate the way the author works through his broken home and broken heart through the pages of the book.

Review of Light in August by William Faulkner

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Time Magazine Top 100 Novels

Book 49: Light in August by William Faulkner

This is a series of reflections reading through Time Magazine’s top 100 novels as selected by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo published since 1923 (when Time magazine was founded). For me this is an attempt to broaden my exposure to authors I may not encounter otherwise, especially as a person who was not a liberal arts major in college. Time’s list is alphabetical, so I decided to read through in a random order, and I plan to write a short reflection on each novel.

Light in August deploys a combination of poetic and banal language to tell an ugly story with a series of characters who for their own reasons are unable to exist within the confines of their society. There is something that reminds me of the writing of Flannery O’Connor in the way Faulkner uses beautiful language combined with the simple speech of the characters in his stories that is authentic to their education and station. There are many times where the language and the assumptions of the American South in the 1930s, when the novel is written and set, are jarring to the ears of a modern hearer, but the novel is historically situated in a time where the views on race, sex, religion, and society are very different from our current era. At times I could fall into Faulkner’s poetic use of prose, and he is truly gifted as a wielder of the English language, but each of the characters is unlovable in their own ways. Whether it is the indomitable Lena who refuses to give up her search for Lucas Burch/Joe Brown who is the father to the child she carries, Joe Christmas whose birth and life seems to be overshadowed by a questionable birth and lineage and a grandfather who views his divine calling as bringing about the destruction of his grandson, or Gail Hightower the disgraced minister who lives in the shadow of his grandfather who died in the Civil War.

Light in August is a work of art but like all art its reception is subjective. The world of the 1930s American South at times seems like an alien world for its strangeness and prejudices. There are times where the work seems dystopian and none of the characters, except perhaps Byron Burch, attempt to be heroic. For me the prose is gifted but the story is plodding and the characters seem to fit into a deterministic pattern based upon their inherited flaws. I can appreciate it as a classic but it was hard to hear the speech of the 1930s South, especially towards Black Americans, and not cringe at the way the derogatory terms for Black Americans continued to echo in my head even after putting the book aside. Perhaps it, like Flannery O’Connor’s work, present an uncomfortable mirror to the world of my grandparents whose prejudices echo in both spoken and unspoken ways in our own.

Review of Herzog by Saul Bellow

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Time Magazine Top 100 Novels

Book 43: Herzog by Saul Bellow

This is a series of reflections reading through Time Magazine’s top 100 novels as selected by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo published since 1923 (when Time magazine was founded). For me this is an attempt to broaden my exposure to authors I may not encounter otherwise, especially as a person who was not a liberal arts major in college. Time’s list is alphabetical, so I decided to read through in a random order, and I plan to write a short reflection on each novel.

Herzog is named for the main character Moses Herzog a Jewish former professor whose mind seems to be unraveling in the aftermath of his second divorce. The story is told from a first-person perspective and the reader is invited into the rambling reflections of an intelligent but cluttered mind. Moses Herzog begins by stating, “If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me.” We encounter in Moses’ thinking, speaking, and especially in his incessant drive to write notes to a diverse group of recipients from former friends and relations to President Dwight Eisenhower a mind balancing on the precipice of sanity. There are times when the erratic and non-chronological reflections full of non-sequiturs do feel like a descent into some type of madness of this man driven by compulsions he doesn’t understand.

The mind of Moses Herzog is the entirety of the novel and entering into that mind is to encounter the contradictions and confusions of a person who struggles to comprehend the world around him and the feelings and motivations of other individuals. His divorce caused, in his view, by the manipulation by his wife and best friend shatter him. A combination of the situation and the makeup of Moses as an individual leave him caught in an egocentric loop where the world revolves around his experience of it. He is not a rational actor at this point in his life and he often sabotages himself by making impulsive decisions on a whim which cause him trouble. For the majority of the book, he is not in his right mind. At the end his intelligent mind finally comes to rest and appears to let go of its compulsions.

Herzog is a strange book. I can understand why it is considered a masterwork and the comparison to James Joyce’s Ulysses is apt since both share a stream of consciousness manner of narration. Due to the erratic nature of Herzog’s mind the story is often slow moving and then it can jump suddenly when his mind seizes on another compulsion. I struggled to find Herzog a likeable character since he is so enmeshed in his own ego and madness. Reading a novel in first person forces the reader to see the character through their own eyes and Herzog seemed to have an inflated opinion of his abilities while still not liking the person he had become. Perhaps the genius of the work is seeing through the eyes of madness. I can appreciate it as an experiment in literature but as a novel it is not one that I will probably return to. All experiences of fiction are subjective and there are many readers throughout the last sixty years who have made this a classic.

 

Three Metaphors at a Closing of a Story: Part 1 Diverging Paths

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The story ends, as all stories eventually do
A door closes, a world comes to its conclusion
And I stand watching as the words that conjured it
Sink slowly into the deep sea of memories.
Its characters who became my companions on the road.
I have known their names, I have shared their dreams
I supped at their table and walked their winding way
But they now recede with their world as my path diverges
Their story ends and mine continues forward
And I have been changed on this journey through their world
Rarely do I walk out of a story unaltered by its magic
I’ve seen another world and talked with its denizens
Yet, other worlds beckon from the shelves invitingly
There is a beautiful, tearful, strange magic in these words
Which invoke such vivid reactions in my mind
It’s time to close the book, maybe someday I’ll return
To share this journey once again, to rekindle friendships lost
And rediscover the people and place in these pages.