This pillar of Western literature, considered by many to be the first English novel, left me ambivalent and uncomfortable. Its antiquated mores clash with modern perspective, but not just because of quaint antiquity: Defoe’s Puritanical self-assuredness and cultural ignorance (resulting in subjugation) seem ominous in light of present-day conflicts.

Is it a fun read? Sure, most of the time. Defoe’s meticulous discussions of castaway lifestyle are captivating, if telescoped (a few paragraphs often represent years of island isolation for Crusoe). But because this is a masterful work, and does carry with it a serious message, thus passages about literal survival are interrupted by multi-page religious epiphanies as Crusoe faces his eternal survival.

Crusoe’s is a colonial white man’s world. There is not a single real female character in the entire story. Anyone not European is a savage, meant for enslavement. Defoe’s proud intolerance is not uncommon for the time, but paralleled with his relatively unsmiling Puritan tenets, it can feel downright grim. What is left unanswered for me is whether Defoe was aware of this hubris, whether it’s a trick on the reader that Crusoe is so blithely superior, that I’m the fool for not understanding that he was winking the whole time.

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Tags: 18th century, Books, british, classic, fiction, literature, reading, review

Brief, crystalline linguistic frameworks around essential, sensual experiences characterize this unusually-structured novel by Michael Ondaatje. It reads like a train of thought from start to end, drifting across space and time as they evocative memories of its characters tug at it.

It’s a jolting ride sometimes, leaping unapologetically from Anna, Coop and Claire’s family on an idyllic, Stegner- or Steinbeck-esque California farm to a brutal, drug-addled gambling montage in Nevada, where everything seems to be done in deep blues and night. Then a long jaunt in southern France where everything is different but ever so slightly the same.

Ondaantje peels his words carefully from a layered world of experience and emotional intensity. He captures well the high, sharp emotions that shape our lives, the pivots of meaning at which everything changes, sometimes across generations. Experiences had by people divided from each other by reality or time, but connected by the barest filament of something. A senescing author in Gascony, an overconfident card shark.

Don’t wait for something to happen or make sense. It is not a logical progression, nor is there the satisfaction of resolution at the end. To some it will likely feel frustrating and ill-focused. But if you half-close your eyes and let your mind loosen its grip on causality, there are some golden, sun-calmed fields in Southern France and a hermit’s cabin in the hills near Petaluma that you might want to go on a quiet, literary vacation to.

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Book #55 of 2008

Tags: Books, california, family, fiction, france, novel, reading, review

I can’t dislike a novel with this first sentence: “We were fractious and overpaid.” I can’t ignore a theme that seems ripped right from my own experience. Did Mr. Ferris follow me around in 2001 and watch my youthful tech entitlement fall disillusioned around me as the economy floundered and the world changed forever? Or–I hope this is closer to reality–is my experience part of a broader sadness that can be captured perfectly in a riotous novel written, to capture our togetherness on this sinking ship, in the first person plural?

Ferris captures the churlish, back-biting and smug hubris of the late 90s boom perfectly. Office workers aren’t just the obvious constructs of water-cooler herds signing TPS reports, but those who think they’re different and invincible: spurting forced absurdity and juvenile cleverness in that assertive way that means “nothing could possibly go wrong.” Of course it did go wrong and we all got numbed, lonely and old very fast.

What Ferris does here that other satirical novels do not is spotlight the panicky futility that crept up on us very quickly. His characters aren’t whimsical pastiches of quirks (although they are certainly quirky in ways that you’d both expect and not expect), but deeply faulted, tormented individuals. Office politics take on the ominous feeling of life-or-death struggles. In some ways they are; characters spin dark fantasies about how when they get laid off they’ll slowly lose all of their possessions, their family, their dignity until they are forgotten, desitute.

In between anecdotes about clicking and dragging and billable hours, Ferris gives us glimpses of the dark underbelly of the American professional psyche. It’s terrifying and hilarious.

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Book #54 of 2008.

Tags: Books, fiction, humor, novel, reading, review

After Tana French’s first novel, In the Woods, I was left breathless and absolutely committed to buying her sophomore effort. It’s not that I regret it, but it didn’t show the same care and craft. While still displaying some of her hallmark subtleties and qualities, it felt rushed, and lacked both in believability and polish. But she is still addictive, and there were a few late nights spent racing through this compelling tale.

Irish detective Cassie Maddox no longer investigates murders–her experiences in In The Woods caused her to switch departments to the definitely-less-awesome Domestic Violence unit–but a young woman is murdered in the countryside outside Dublin who is physically identical to her. Maddox gets sucked into on a risky but fascinating undercover operation in which she pretends to be the deceased, living with the victim’s four weird-but-extraordinary housemates in a ramshackle Georgian mansion. As an effectively eerie twist, the dead girl had been using an alias and character invented by Maddox and her erstwhile mentor, Frank, for an extended undercover drug investigation.

The elements that bugged me stick with me more than the good bits; I think I take for granted French’s general skill with writing and storytelling. I was annoyed that I couldn’t believe in the premise of someone being so identical to someone else. I was bothered that she could pull it off–fooling this girl’s closest friends. I was jarred by how hyperbolic Maddox’s reaction seemed to be to every minor epiphany. I was bored to nausea by her boyfriend, Sam O’Neill, another detective. I found the four housemates’ supposed profundity and closeness forced. They are always “beautiful” or “angelic.”

And yet I would read it again. It’s not a masterpiece, but it has a pull, like gravity.

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Tags: Books, fiction, ireland, mystery, novel, reading, review

The first time I tried reading this novel–thrust upon me with great exaltation by a writer-friend–I flipped through a dozen pages and then gave up. The time wasn’t right.

This time I read it in its entirety in two sittings. Grady Tripp is such a colossal plane crash of humanity that it’s impossible to look away, even as Chabon continues to pull charred limbs and dismembered teddy bears out of his past. Tripp, bluntly, is unlikeable: a philandering, hopeless pothead with minor literary genius long since spent.

His sidekick-cum-editor, Terry Crabtree, is barely better, an opportunistic hedonist wreckless with the psyches of others. Not that hedonism is a given evil, but in “Wonder Boys” Chabon makes it flinch-worthy; Tripp doesn’t even bother keeping an eye on his libido. Anything just kind of goes.

“Wonder Boys” is a yarn of Tripp and Crabtree’s weekend at a literary festival at Tripp’s college (he is, somewhat inexplicably, a professor, based on a long-ago string of novels–he can’t write anything now to save his life). The narrative spins out in a blur of molested youth, drugs, the combination of the two, and their mostly unpleasant after-effects. It’s enough to make the reader feel hungover and queasy.

In between these groggy episodes are some good reading. Tripp’s run-ins (they don’t end well) with pets are slapsticky hijinx, but ultimately hilarious. His perhaps ill-advised impulse trip to his in-laws’ homestead at Passover to (maybe?) try to save his imploding, farcical marriage (his mistress is pregnant) is a tapestry of misfit individuals and neuroses–perhaps the highlight of the novel.

Chabon leaves me feeling sticky and confused at the end. It’s like sitting in a bar during daylight hours: I can only see the stench and the dirtiness and feel the throbbing headache, while the characters are the ones who got to have all the fun.

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Book #48 read in 2008.

Tags: Books, fiction, novel, reading, review