Category Archives: book reviews

Your Saturday Book Review: Breakfast of Champions

April 6, 2013book reviews, Politics and CultureBreakfast of Champions review. vonnegut breakfast of championsMarion

Since I committed to writing a weekly book review, or at least mini-review, I have not been reading a book a week. I’m currently slogging through Wool – First Shift, Legacy. It’s much slower than the silo stories, but I can’t quite abandon it. There are other things in my Kindle that I’m looking at, but they haven’t grabbed me. It’s not like I’m not reading. Getting through more than 50% of The New Yorker each week is an accomplishment in and of itself.

The book reviews I’ve been writing are for books I’ve read, but maybe not recently. There are a books I love that I probably should re-read, so I could review them properly, Breakfast of Champions fits that category, but since I’m not going to re-read it, I’ll just review it anyway because this is my blog and one of advantage of not being paid is I can do whatever I want.

Breakfast of Champions was the first Vonnegut book I read. My father and sister had both read it and were talking about how fantastic it was. I was a child, or maybe a precocious tween or teen (do the math yourself damn it). In any case, it was a glimpse into the adult world that scared and fascinated me more than any Updike-adultery, or Cheeverian angst. Here was an indication that maybe it doesn’t get better, that ultimately adults were just as powerless as children. Yet, it wasn’t depressing. Why not? Because it was funny, but more than funny, it was funny because it was true.

I learned things. First and foremost, I learned a whole new way of telling a story. Not only could you play with words and language, but you could play with the idea of playing with words and language. There were also many new words and associations. Never before had I heard anything about beavers looking like vaginas. Certainly I had never read the phrase “wide-open beavers.” And here was an author admitting that in America there were “bad chemicals” in our brains, that America was racist – always had been, that there were places in this country where until recently black people hadn’t been allowed to spend the night. This may seem like common knowledge, but when I was 13 it was more stuff I only suspected. What I didn’t suspect or understand was the whole mortality thing. Sure as a neurotic young Jewess I got that death happens, and knew it would happen to me one day, unless I got abducted by the good aliens first or turned into a vampire or they found a cure. But here was a book that made me begin to ponder what it might be like to be 50 and know that youth was over and there was nothing left to look forward to except further decay.

After that I devoured the Vonnegut cannon in a matter of months. I don’t think I could re-read Breakfast of Champions now. Vonnegut’s dead and I’m older than he was when he wrote it. The last line, which I still remember, and won’t repeat as a spoiler here, would kill me. But if you are young, read it. Consider it a cautionary tale.

Your Saturday Book Review: Zeitoun

March 30, 2013book reviewsDave Eggers, New Orleans Katrina, ZeitounMarion

Zeitoun is a terribly sad and terribly uplifting book by Dave Eggers, who is of course famous for writing another terribly sad but uplifting book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

I would first and foremost recommend this to anyone who does not actually live in America, and whose stereotype of Americans is fat yahoos with guns. Off-topic but whenever I’m in say Guatemala (which is more than you might think) I’m always amazed at how much people there don’t hate me because I’m an American, how they really do understand there’s a difference between “the government” and “the people,” and know that it is both prejudice and bad manners to make assumptions about individuals based on their nationality.

Zeitoun is the story of the brave and noble eponymous hero, Abdulrahman Zeitoun and his wife Kathy. Zeitoun chose to stay in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina although his wife and children evacuated. He helped other stragglers until he was rounded up and swept into a nightmare.

The word I’m avoiding here is Kafka-esque, which seems too small somehow. Kafka wrote fantastical fiction. What happened to Zeitoun was completely real, and while rampant Islamophobia no doubt played a part, so did garden variety racism, zenophobia, and bureaucracy. There were many Zeitouns whose stories are less known. There were too many bodies left to rot on flooded streets, too many stranded on rooftops waiting for help that never arrived. It’s still amazing that no government official was ever charged with anything, that W avoided jail and impeachment, that his buddy Heck-of-a-Job-Brownie merely had to resign his job – and then only after a lot of bad press.

One thing I love about Zeitoun is that it’s a story of the America I know. Not only is it an America of immigrants, but one that tolerates difference. Zeitoun isn’t simply about a man caught up in a moment of history, it’s about character. It’s about choosing again and again to do the right thing even when it isn’t the easy thing. It’s a book that makes clear that a sense of community is not incompatible with the desire to carve out your own piece of the dream. In fact, they are both as American as apple pie.

This is a book that your book club should be talking about, your high school should require, and everyone should read.

(Update: 5/7/13 – Despite being something of a news junky, when I wrote this review back in March, I had completely missed all the stories regarding Zeitoun’s arrest for assaulting his now ex-wife in July, as well as other allegations against him and questions.)

Your Saturday Book Review — Call It Sleep

March 23, 2013book reviewsCall It Sleep, Call It Sleep novel, Call It Sleep review, Classic New York novels, Henry Roth, Novels set in the Lower East SideMarion

I’m not sure how well-known Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep is outside of the United States. Then again I’m not sure how well-known it is within the United States.

In researching the book’s history, I found though it was greeted with critical acclaim when it was published in 1934, it didn’t sell well, and went out of print quickly. It was reprinted with some fanfare in 1964 when it became the first paperback to receive a front page review in The New York Times Sunday Book Review.

The 1964 paperback edition is the one I own, culled in my adolescence from my parent’s basement. Despite being a voracious reader, even of books written for adults, I found it a tough slog at first, but my father saw me with it and said, “That’s a great book.” The way he said “great” I knew he meant more than merely a good read, and I knew if I didn’t finish it, he would have been disappointed. Soon I found myself immersed in the world of the very young protagonist, six-year old David Schearl.

It’s quite a technical feat to write a novel in the close-third person point of view that manages to convey a world through a child’s eyes, while allowing the reader to see what he’s missing, what he can’t yet figure out. We’re in his head, but our perspective is always bigger than his. Continue reading Your Saturday Book Review — Call It Sleep →

Your Saturday Book Review — Next By James Hynes

March 9, 2013book reviewsgreat contemporary literary fiction, James Hynes fiction, Next James Hynes, Next novel, novels about academiaMarion

Once I was playing some forum game on a “writers’ site.” The topic was well-known books that could never have been published as first novels. I’d put James Hynes’ Next on top of such a list.

First off it is dark. And I mean really dark, and I can’t begin to tell you how dark without hinting at a spoiler. Let’s just say that second – it doesn’t exactly end on an up note. Third, the protagonist, Kevin Quinn is bound to be disliked – especially by a large proportion of those readers who have vaginas. The point of view is third person, but the view is directly inside of Kevin’s sad little mind. At fifty, he is sliding from middle age into old. He is bitter. Like many of Hynes’ characters, he toils in the lower rungs of academia. In his case a steady, but dull job at a university publishing house that eats away at him a bit more each passing day. He has a younger girlfriend, who he should be grateful for as he sounds like no prize, but he’s thinking of ditching. In fact he’s flown for the day from Michigan to Austin for a job interview he hasn’t told her about. You get the idea.

But if you are of a certain age (over forty, under sixty) and from the United States, or familiar with its popular culture, you’ll get all of Kevin’s cultural references – The Partridge Family, Joni Mitchell, Whole Foods. You’ll find some of his musings and observations funny, and many true. And you’ll get that weird place where he is, and maybe, even if you have a vagina, you’ll forgive his jerkiness, and come to the realization that he is, not simply an “everyman,” but us. None of us would look good if our true-selves were revealed so honestly. If you believe as Joyce Carol Oates does, that the “art” of writing is the exploration of consciousness, and like Neruda that “we are all guilty,” you will forget yourself and simply see the day through Kevin’s eyes. Lose yourself in him.

I won’t say more, and I don’t recommend you read many reviews. Better to make discoveries for yourself, and if you have any fiction-writing aspirations of your own, read this book and consider it a master-class in fearlessness.

(If you are interested in reading a sample, or buying anything on Amazon within the next twenty-four hours, please click the title on the widget above, so I will get a few shekels. Thank you much.)