A Few PW Reviews...

A Few PW Reviews...

These reviews will typically have been slightly edited in their PW print or Amazon.com incarnations

Fiction Reviews:

Author's note: I get asked sometimes why I only post the "good" reviews here. I already have enough folks who hate my guts, that's why. Beyond that, I post things that make me happy, or at least, that don't leave me with an unshakable sense of consternation, as so much writing tends to.

"It was a cold grey day in late November. The weather had changed overnight, when a backing wind brouht a granite sky and a mizzling rain with it, and although it was now only a little after two o'clock in the afternoon the pallour of a winter evening seemed to have closed upon the hills, cloaking them in mist. It would be dark by four."

Daphne du Maurier

Visitation

by Jenny Erpenbeck, New Directions $14.95 (192p)

ISBN 978-0-8112-1835-1

Publishers Weekly

In this highly original and evocative novel of place, Jenny Erpenbeck (The Book of Words) sets out to chart the history of a property in the Brandenburg hills through snippets—temporarily opened windows offering a brief, imperfect glimpse of complete strangers—which then shut with a harsh, unrelenting finality. There is Doris, a Jewish girl murdered after being freighted to the Warsaw ghetto during the Holocaut, a disillusioned communist activist who leaves Nazi Germany and then returns following WW2, an architect who collaborated with Albert Speers on the Germania Project, two hard-partying structural engineering students who try to escape to the West, and so on. Amidst all these protagonists, there is the recurring figure of “The Gardener," who silently and stoically goes about the bucolic business of maintaining the grounds and the property with unwavering application. How all these lives actually mesh, beyond their shared connection to the political upheavals that marked 20^th Century Germany, is never obvious. The author’s elliptical style, rife with naturalistic descriptions of the landscape and geology around this Bavarian redoubt, is better at delving into bodily processes than describing the emotional life of her characters, but it brilliantly renders her basic point—that people are part of the same continuum as the trees and glaciers that come and go over eons, and that “eternal life already exists during a human lifetime.” Sep 2010

Vestments

by John Reimringer, Milkweed Editions, $25 (432p)

ISBN 978-1-57131-080-4

Publishers Weekly

In this potent debut about a wayward yet devout young priest who struggles to reconcile his faith with the pervasive longings of the flesh, John Reimringer has crafted a suspenseful, illuminating and highly readable saga. James Dressler, a Catholic working-class kid from Saint Paul with a brutish, roughneck father who is fond of igniting barroom brawls and a mother who’s a “piece of work,” sees the holy Roman Church as both his salvation and his moral compass. Following his ordination, James gets assigned to Pretty Prairie Parish, next to his friend and fellow priest Mick, a cynical, ambitious skirt-chaser. James joins an old boy’s club, a poker group run by fellow priests, and the internecine conflicts and accommodations within the clergy are artfully depicted, as are James’ efforts to square his earthly cravings with his priestly station—he’s basically a regular guy who loves sports, drinking, and yearns for female companionship. Soon enough, James ends up in trouble with the Chancery, and goes back to Saint Paul to reassess his life, where an old flame awaits. Reimringer excels, most notably, at revealing how the sensual delectations of Catholic ritual and the forbidden delights of the flesh are really part of the same continuum—sin and repentance feeding inexorably off each other. Sep 10

The Bigness of the World
by Lori Ostlund, The University of Georgia Press, $24.95 (214p)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-3409-7

(starred review)

Publishers Weekly

This remarkable debut collection by veteran short-story writer Lori Ostlund deftly navigates the shoals of decaying relationships in which the protagonists generally escape to faraway lands in order to find themselves, or, at the very least, their elusive partners. The quest is always fruitless, and the intricate dance of emotions along with the self-conscious analysis which occasionally saddles these lovers is ever so pitilessly rendered. Fate, for a globe-trotting teacher-entrepreneur, takes the form of an untimely bird dropping. In Bed Death, it is a Malay waitress who casually takes a sip of orange juice from the narrator’s glass. Ostlund’s artful prose is both playful and casually illuminating, evocative and unsentimental. When Felicity, a cat judge, returns from Japan mysteriously bald, her girlfriend remarks: “the chilly desert air seemed to startle her as though, in that moment, she realized that there was a price to be paid for having no hair, and while I still said nothing, I was happy to see her suffer just a bit.” Ostlund’s protagonists do share a pervasive, somewhat anachronistic tendency to militate for good English usage, but even those repeated grammatical forays are never forced; rather the habit informs the action in unexpected ways. Like Paul Bowles, who uses exotic locales to map an intimate archipelago of desperation and loss, Ostlund’s territories, and her (usually same-sex) couples are universal, as are the decomposing relationships she describes slipping inexorably into an abyss of failed expectations. A relentless disenchantment inhabits all these stories, even the ones focused on childhood, but it is only the disenchantment of the uncompromising romantic who must compose with the evaporative nature of love, which despite all remains a sustaining force, a crumbling but resilient barrier against the subsuming steamroller of convention. Oct 15, 2009

The End
by Salvatore Scibona Graywolf

Publishers Weekly

(Starred review)

The Italian immigrants in this exceptional debut collide and collapse in a polyphonic narrative that is part novel, part epic prose poem spanning the first half of the 20th century. Costanza Marini, a Cleveland widow who performs abortions of such a high grade that clinicians come take stock of her methods, has decided, among other aspirations, to save Lina, her young seamstress protégée and heiress, from spinsterhood. Intersecting sporadically with the machinations of Mrs. Marini during the sweltering feast of the Assumption is Rocco, the baker of the Italian community of Elephant Park, who is poised to leave his parochial Midwestern enclave for the first time to seek out his lost family. In doing so, he must face America and eventually ends up adrift near the Canadian border while looking for “the New Jersey.” Rocco, whose fate, regrettably, is never explicated, inhabits (and narrates) the novel’s radiant beginning and is emblematic of both Scibona’s calibrated precision and the story’s potent humanity. This ravenous prose offers its share of challenges, but Scibona’s portrayal of the lost world of Elephant Park is a literary tour de force. (May 08)

Will

by Christopher Rush. Overlook

Publishers Weekly

Part literary genesis, part historical thriller, the latest from Rush (A Twelvemonth and a Day, etc.) is an ambitious fresco brimming with bawdy luridness and graphic violence. Rush channels the first-person voice of the world's greatest writer, as a bedridden Will Shakespeare dictates his actual will to a gluttonous lawyer, recounting barbarous Renaissance times—from the plague-ridden streets of “sweltering Stratford” to gory slaughterhouse days before landing his first job at the Rose Theatre, through to the “Bloody Mary burnings” and tortures of the Counter-Reformation (“Ignore the nipples crisped and torn off with white-hot pincers. Ignore the tender tongue, sensitive as a snail, quivering in the vice, while long needles go savagely to work”). Rush doesn’t hesitate to tackle contentious areas of the Bard's enigmatic life, including his unrelenting anticlericalism, the connection to assassinated rival Christopher Marlowe, and the reasons for a master dramatist's turn to sonneteering. Rush singes the senses with descriptions of burning heretics, treacherously butchered bovines (“murder most foul”) and detailed descriptions of intimate body parts. More Rabelaisian in some of its ribald descriptions than Shakespearian (who tended to write less literally, in a somewhat more allegorical vein), the novel occasionally becomes decidedly didactic in parts, as when Will dissects his own Twelth Night. Nevertheless, this voracious soliloquy isn’t merely a highly researched feat of scholarly imagination, it is fairly bursting with life. (Sep 08)

CITY OF REFUGE
by Tom Piazza, HarperCollins

Publishers Weekly

City of Refuge is a dithyrambic ode to the Big Easy, that “cracked bowl,” which adopted son Craig Donaldson abandons following Hurricane Katrina, along with his home and his stoic, colorful friends, to settle in Chicago with his family. Craig regularly finds himself “almost choking with grief and fury,” a state which seems to alternate with an overpowering self-loathing. The main narrator’s sanguine, temperamental personality—he is “breathless with anger,” or else fighting back tears—is somewhat distracting, clouding an otherwise splendid story of dislocation and transformation. The novel’s other central protagonist, SJ, a black Vietnam veteran and widower from the Lower Ninth Ward, is one of the most compelling literary characters to emerge from the Katrina disaster. Unlike Craig, SJ suffers irremediable losses, material and otherwise, as a result of the Hurricane. In a particularly haunting passage, he hears a plaintive lament in the night but can do nothing, trapped in his own home by the darkness and by rising waters. And when, after relocating to Houston with his sister and nephew, he finally accepts the advances of another woman after years of dogged celibacy, their first physical encounter is a glowing achievement. The supremely moving chronicle of SJ, in fact, would probably suffice to make this an instant American classic. Even though the passages involving the Donaldsons don’t have the same potency, and occasionally read like transcripts from marital therapy sessions, with Tom Piazza, Katrina evacuees have finally found their bard. (Sep 08)

Non-Fiction Reviews:

The of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence
by Martin Meredith. Public Affairs

Publishers Weekly

(starred review)

The value of Meredith's towering history of modern Africa rests not so much in its incisive analysis, or its original insights; it is the sheer readability of the project, combined with a notable lack of pedantry, that makes it one of the decade's most important works on Africa. Spanning the entire continent, and covering the major upheavals more or less chronologically—from the promising era of independence to the most recent spate of infamies (Rwanda, Darfur, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Sierra Leone)—Meredith (In the Name of Apartheid) brings us on a journey that is as illuminating as it is grueling. The best chapters, not surprisingly, deal with the countries that Meredith knows intimately: South Africa and Zimbabwe; he is less convincing when discussing the francophone West African states. Nowhere is Meredith more effective than when he gives free rein to his biographer's instincts, carefully building up the heroic foundations of national monuments like Nasser, Nkrumah, and Haile Selassie—only to thoroughly demolish those selfsame mythical edifices in later chapters. In an early chapter dealing with Biafra and the Nigerian civil war, Meredith paints a truly horrifying picture, where opportunities are invariably squandered, and ethnically motivated killings and predatory opportunism combine to create an infernal downward spiral of suffering and mayhem (which Western intervention only serves to aggravate). His point is simply that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely—which is why the rare exceptions to that rule (Senghor and Mandela chief among them) are all the more remarkable. Whether or not his pessimism about the continent's future is fully warranted, Meredith's history provides a gripping digest of the endemic woes confronting the cradle of humanity. (July)

The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences
by Louis Uchitelle. Knopf

Publishers Weekly

Devoting a book to the necessity of preserving jobs might just be an exercise in futility in this age of deregulation and outsourcing, but veteran New York Times business reporter Uchitelle manages to make the case that corporate responsibility should entail more than good accounting and that six (going on seven) successive administrations have failed miserably in protecting the American people from greedy executives, manipulative pension fund managers, leveraged buyouts and plain old bad business practices. In the process, he says, we've gone from a world where job security, benevolent interventionism and management/worker loyalty were taken for granted to a dysfunctional, narcissistic and callous incarnation of pre-Keynesian capitalism. The resulting "anxious class" now suffers from a host of frightening ills: downward mobility, loss of self-esteem, transgenerational trauma and income volatility, to name a few. Uchitelle animates his arguments through careful reporting on the plight of laid-off Stanley Works toolmakers and United Airlines mechanics. Descriptions of their difficulties are touching and even tragic; they are also, alas, laborious and repetitive. And Uchitelle's solutions are not entirely convincing: neither forcing companies to abide by a "just cause" clause when they fire someone, for instance, nor doubling the minimum wage are likely to increase employment. Yet Uchitelle's basic argument—that no American government has taken significant steps to curb "the unwinding of social value" caused by corporate greed— is all too accurate. (March 2007)

Reviews updated regularly...