The second of two LibraryThing Early Reviewer books I’m reading and reviewing this month. Peripheral Vision will be UK author Patricia Ferguson’s first novel published in the U.S. Two of her previous novels were long-listed for the Orange Prize. The book will be available within the next few weeks from Other Press, distributed by Random House. As always, my appreciation to LibraryThing and the participating publishers.

As a memory this book exists in snatches: the protagonist’s mother’s bucolic dog kennels, cancer, explicit and unforgiving medical procedures, stiff wool post-war suits and the void where love should be. Brazenly British and medically intricate (one might say too intricate, especially if squeamish), Patricia Ferguson’s first US-published novel tracks the subtly-intertwining lives of three 20th-century women across time. In doing so it breaks no real new ground, but it provides a comfortable and undemanding casual read.

Ferguson shines most when she is writing about her mid-century characters. Her post-war British landscape feels surreal, harsh and at times fantastical. It is a time of dying aristocracy, snobbery and early household appliances. Stiff upper lip. Iris, the heavy-handedly named working-class nurse, is intriguing enough to keep one reading.

Her modern characters–our protagonist, Sylvia, is a rigid and competent eye surgeon–feel flatter, going about their daily urban lives and having their Oprah moments. What makes them compelling? Aside from Sylvia’s inability to love her infant daughter (well executed), it’s hard to say.

A couple of times in the book Ferguson seems close to capturing an emotion in essence, as when Rob (one of our post-war characters) muses about being in love:

“A great many things had stopped worrying Rob. Sometimes, hurrying down a corridor or along a pavement, happiness required him to leap up, arm outstretched, to touch the light-fitting or branch high overhead. He was always hungry. When alone he slept deeply, dreamlessly. He grew an inch.”

Overall, though, the writing is efficient, not profound enough to flash your heart alight. There is the expected tragic love and redemption, but the true nature of the characters’ entanglement is an odd reveal near the end of the book: a spray of confusing details that feels too specific to be interesting.

LibraryThing Tags:

As always, see all of my reviews on LibraryThing.

Library Thing Early Reviewers

Tags: advanced reading copy, arc, Books, british, early reviewer, novel, random house, reading, review

This is the first of two LibraryThing Early Reviewer books I’m reading this month. Though I actually finished it second, the review was easier to write. My appreciation as always to LibraryThing and the participating publishers.

Holding the book Firmin as it is now, with its novella-like thinness and its stylized bite out of the side (makes for uncomfortable reading, being right where your thumbs would normally go), it’s easy to confuse it for something it’s not.

“Is this a children’s book?” was my first reflection. It has a crude drawing of a rat on the cover. It’s about a rat who lives in the basement of a Boston bookstore and reads and reads and reads and wants to be, Pinnochio-like, human. How charming. It’s a book whose actual shape is a gimmick. Let’s class it as a stocking-stuffer, a modern fable perhaps to be wrapped up with Coehlo’s The Alchemist and foisted off on some relative looking for some comforting but tepid philosophy.

Except, you’d be wrong. I was wrong.

Within a few pages, Firmin is clawing out his story: a desperate and raw dirge. His metaphorical yarn bemoans the traditionally ominous inhuman machines of progress as they triumph over sloppy–but much more meaningful–things like literature and love. This is a fable, sure, but it is one of viscera and coitus, redemption and meaning.

Born by chance in a bookstore, Firmin reacts to the innately marginal position of his species by (inexplicably) learning to read. His littermates follow in the primal footsteps of their alcoholic mother, all teeth and primitive drives, but Firmin finds the vaunted world of literature and is transformed by it. He reads everything, and loves it, except, if you don’t yet believe he isn’t cute:

“The only literature I cannot abide is rat literature, including mouse literature. I despise good-natured Ratty in The Wind in the Willows. I piss down the throats of Mickey Mouse and Stuart Little. Affable, shuffling, cute, they stick in my craw like fish bones.”

It’s not for kids. It’s not even for especially sensitive adults. It’s tone sometimes reaches mildly hopeful only to be drop-kicked down into a very dirty alley full of specters and sadness. Firmin is a sociopath, or at least delusional. He sees meaning where there is none and experiences interactions that don’t actually occur. He is, fundamentally, alone. And that’s where the sadness really festers.

Here is a rat who obsessively reads books on sign language, wretchedly trying to learn to gesture the phrase “What do you like to read?” Absent digits and opposable thumbs, the best thing he can learn to shudder out is “goodbye zipper,” which gets him about as far as it sounds like it would.

Behind this, a story about the demise of Scollay Square in Boston (wherein is located Firmin’s bookstore), with the expected lamentation about the boarded-up storefronts and abandoned buildings. It’s not a poor choice of backgrounds, but against Firmin’s story it seems jarringly anthropomorphic, occasionally distracting.

Firmin leaves a haunting miasma behind. It’s not an easy book, despite its length, and one has to take care to find the hope in the hopelessness. But it is a thought-provoking one, one for savoring and considering, perhaps remembering.

LibraryThing Tags:

Tags: Books, early reviewer, fiction, reading, review

This review is for Sweetsmoke, a novel by David Fuller, published by Hyperion and available in September of 2008. I obtained an advance copy via LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer program. My appreciation to both Hyperion for its participation in the program and LibraryThing for making it possible. You can also visit Sweetsmoke’s Web site.

David Fuller’s “Sweetsmoke” builds on the familiar tradition of modern novels set in the Civil-War ravaged south: slave narratives and personal epics that, through a mixture of history and emotion, bring contemporary audiences face to face with the massive iniquities of our collective pasts. What Fuller does that’s new, however, is tweak this landscape by adding something new: a murder mystery. No, really.

Cassius, our Shakespeare-monikered protagonist, discovers that Emoline, a freed slave who rescued him from the brink of disaster and nursed him back to health (not to mention taught him to read, from his ABCs to Homer, in three weeks. Apparently.) has been murdered. Emoline’s violent demise is a vehicle for the rest of Fuller’s explorations: the conflicts of slavery, the social crisis of the South, the dreadfulness of the Civil War, and a complete rehash of the battle of Antietam. This is a big steak to chew, and it’s occasionally overcooked.

Fuller is a competent writer. Though “Sweetsmoke” is his first novel, his long experience in screenwriting gives his tone a confidence and cleanliness, if sometimes also a paucity of metaphor. The long scene that unfolds at the big “To-Do”, a multi-plantation summer gathering of slaves for dancing, drinking, fighting and loving, reads almost as an inverse of the ante-bellum Tara hedonism in the film adaptation of “Gone with the Wind.” Likely the most evocative portion of the novel, it is a rare moment when Fuller’s (thorough) historical research transcends the literary gap into meaningful sociological application and nuance–that is, the facts of slavery gain warmth and personality; his dip into inter-slave politics and hostilities felt thoughtful.

It’s not that the descriptions that flesh out the rest of the novel are akward or tedious. They’re coherent and specific, but in the end, they don’t tell us much beyond literal rendition. They don’t reach into that sensuous part of our perception. It’s as if Fuller can’t move away from visual description as something to be translated into literal scenes. WIDE SHOT INTERIOR GENERAL STORE WITH DRY GOODS, SACKS OF GRAIN, TOOLS, ETC. would be in some cases more direct and as accurate as anything Fuller is saying.

In the same screenwriting vein, the dialogue is good, and in some places great, though Fuller’s decision to give free people (black and white alike) quotation marks and strip them from slaves is a trifle heavy-handed.

Fuller has to deal with issues of preposterousness. In an interview about the book, he confesses a concern about a scene in which Cassius confronts and threatens a white slave patroller with violence. Fuller asserts that the incident was based on a real occurrence, but unfortunately, it’s his own carefully-built historical framework that forces us to confront the issue of believability–even in fiction. Fuller’s plantation-era Virginia is so tightly bound in historical themes–oppression, racism, poverty, desperation–that to invite in deviations or extradordinary circumstance is troublesome and strains our credibility. The same goes for the whodunnit aspect in respect to Emoline’s murder, though Fuller does, thankfully, treat this loosely: Cassius isn’t chasing down forensic incidentals so much as he’s chasing intuition.

Fuller’s clear enthusiasm for military history breaks through in the climactic scenes that put Cassius in the middle of Antietam. Those of similar passions might find this fascinating, but for me the entire episode seemed glaringly out of place and much duller than the rest of the story. I know enough about the battle to find that Fuller’s descriptions didn’t add much to my understanding, and the long passages seemed to waste space in an already tight novel.

“Sweetsmoke” is an enjoyable read. It’s carefully considered and driven, if heavily expository (Fuller will tell you exactly what characters are undergoing what existential crisis, every time). Read as a story, it’s taut, with nightmarish suspense leaving characters exposed and in danger, with shame and love and murder. But in the end, it doesn’t bring an epiphany.

LibraryThing Tags:

As always, see all of my reviews on LibraryThing.

Tags: arc, Books, civil war, early reviewer, fiction, novel, preview, reading, review, slavery, south