The exquisite study of life and all its bittersweetness in The Hours

From The Week of March 17, 2014

As much as our memories suggest otherwise, life is filled with mundanity. Yes, we vividly remember the emotional moments that fire through our recollections, but these weddings and divorces, vacations and exhilarations, stand out largely thanks to just how much normality our brains have shrugged into the trash. Add up all the flashbulb days that transform and transfix us and, if we're fortunate, we're left with 40 or 50 standouts compared to tens of thousands of ordinaries. Which leads one to an inevitable conclusion.

To be good with life we must be good with the mundane. There is simply no other way to be happy. For to live principally for the days and nights that excite our blood is to place bets we're far more apt to lose than win. We must live for today, in whatever form it comes. But what if we cannot? What if the prospect of mundanity is a crushing reminder of of all of life's failures large and small? What if excitement is the only way for one to feel alive? What then? It's hard to imagine this pain demonstrated better than in Michael Cunningham's mesmerizing novel.

Decades apart, in three different parts of the world, the lives of Clarissa Vaughan, Laura Brown and Virginia Wolfe would appear to have little in common with one another. Clarissa is a woman of privilege, surrounded by artistic friends, living out the downside of middle age in 1990s New York; Laura is a still-youthful mother in California just beginning to come to grips with the constrictions of marriage in 1940s Los Angeles; and Virginia is a famous author, as brilliant as she is unstable, persisting in the suburbs of 1920s London. And yet, their lives are connected not just through the story of Mrs. Dalloway, which Virginia is creating, Laura is reading, and Clarissa is living, but through the extent to which they are all attempting to make good with the lives they've created and the talents they've been given.

The sum of these three interwoven narratives, The Hours is a captivating, non-linear rumination on the nature of everyday existence. Mr. Cunningham conceives of a single day in each woman's existence and, as the novel unfolds, allows their thoughts, their reactions and their emotions to fill in a life's worth of detail. By the work's conclusion, we not only understand Clarissa, Laura and Virginia in ways both profound and poignant, we come to understand that life is itself comprised of interactions which may individually appear to be meaningless but are, in the aggregate, quite literally who we are. We may be influenced by how our parents raised us, how our schools trained us and how our obligations wear on us, but how we handle all of life's moments is how we come to know ourselves and what we care about.

For The Hours' three spellbinding protagonists, this gestalt portrays a largely disquieting image of lives stifled by mental illness, by the chains of matrimony and by the weight of regret. In each case, we find disappointment lurking close by, waiting to ambush us at the first opportunity. For it is easy to feel, in retrospect, that we should have tried harder, should have overcome more, should have chosen better. And yet, we did what we could do in the moment. We gave what we could at the time. That this has failed to yield the optimum result is as much the fault of chance and circumstance than in our own stars. Of course, to us, this knowledge is cold comfort. It changes nothing. Our lives are still our own, still for us to lead, to endure.

As depressing as this truth appears, The Hours is in no way emotionally burdensome. Not only is there happiness here, even pleasure, an acknowledgement that mundanity has its own rewards, there is a powerful sense that most wounds can be healed if one recognizes them early enough. Regret and matrimony, for instance, are temporary states. Their condition can be alleviated in any number of ways, provided one has the time and the courage to do so. And in this way, we come to understand that mundanity is exquisitely bittersweet. It is the recognition of the good amidst the difficult. And it is this spirit that vivifies the book, elevating it from the dismal to the mind opening.

This is all quite deep. The fact is, in addition to its many rewarding layers, The Hours possesses glorious prose, a tender heart and a poignant message. It's little wonder that it won one of the most prestigious literary awards we have. Deservedly so... One of the most touching experiences I've had in years... (5/5 Stars)

A weird, re-imagined American West in the universe of The Half Made World

From the Week of February 17th, 2014

We all have our masters, powers into which our service has either been captured or sold. They take many forms, of course, from the internal demons that drive our actions to the external forces that seek to puppeteer our strings, but the influence remains, a constant, guiding pressure that redirects us onto paths of another's choosing. Occasionally, these influences are positive -- the mentoring we receive from parents on our lives and luminaries on our careers --, but often they are negative, coercive pleas, from within and without, that entice us to surrender our money, our will, even our freedom. What we can do about this is unclear. After all, it is not as though these influences always make themselves known to us. But we must try to resist. For to do otherwise is to sell ourselves into slavery, to ourselves and to others, of a kind vividly illustrated in Felix Gilman's weird world of spirits and steam.

In an alternate 19th-century West, where the land is as unforgiving as the people are ruthless, the Great War is a constant, undulating vice that squeezes the hope from the humans caught between its two, thrashing sides. To the east is the Line, the relentless march of mechanized civilization captained by the ruthless Engines, a collective of conscious machines who have tasked themselves with bringing their relentless order to the world. The Engines are so oppressive, so pitilessly efficient, that they have largely rubbed out the spark of individuality that flickered in the hearts of their subjects, assembling them into a mass of amoral tools with which to act out their will. To the west, meanwhile, are the anarchic agents of the Gun, guerilla fighters endowed with extraordinary powers who regularly infiltrate the lands claimed by the Line, seeking to disrupt the schemes of the great engines who want them exterminated. Both are nearly immortal, causing the fallout of their unfathomable conflict to land on the very mortal humans attempting to live in the cracks between forces.

But after many years and countless skirmishes which have ground to dust several attempts at democracy and a more human order, the war might be at an end. For the last great general of a conquered republic may well have, within his shattered mind, a weapon capable of defeating both the Engines and the spirits of the Gun who have risen up to fight for control of the human world. The race to find the broken general and pull from him this terrible secret is fierce, as the victor will surely hold in their hands ultimate victory. But it may well be that the general is too far gone to surrender what he knows, leaving it to the will of others to find their way out of darkness.

Two fascinating entrants into an already crowded genre, The Half Made World and its successor, the Rise of Ransom City, are sweaty, gritty exemplars of the power of Weird. Hailing from the strange shoals of Steampunk, they are a playground in which Mr. Gilman can re-imagine our past, casting it in a far more archetypal light. The author dispenses with the restrictions of our grounded reality and, in their place, animates the cultural and economic forces that shaped the West, investing them with power and agency. The result is the creation of tangible gods who walk the earth, who guide human affairs, who fight and bleed and scream and plot, but who remain as alien to us as any god we can imagine. We do not know why they do what they do, only that they do it, only that they will continue, only that it is within their nature. These truths are so prevalent in Mr. Gilman's world that his people accept them without thought and, largely, without struggle.

Of the two works, The Half Made World is by far the more successful. The author gently introduces us into his brave new world by giving his first work the familiar-unto-trope structure of a small band of heroes racing to find the key to everything before the pernicious forces chasing them can seize it for their own wicked will. This customary plot is then fleshed out with powerful and beleaguered personalities who, in their own ways, are haunted by the demons that this world has bestowed upon them. Their hunger for absolution, for escape, for understanding, for purpose, is as mesmerizing as this world of living, breathing concepts is darkly vivid.

But where The Half Made World succeeds, its successor fails. Structured as an autobiography from a highly unreliable narrator, it is little more than a series of explosive bloviations that, though they advance the plot, do very little to capture the reader's interest. Rather than explore the strangeness of his weird world, Mr. Gilman, here, finds himself with little more than a paean to the literature of 19th-century America, a time in which the P. T. Barnum's of the world could largely get away with penning extravagant tales of their dubious exploits. Harry Ransom, the work's narrator, is a garish bore about whom it is exceedingly difficult to care, a reality that naturally drains the work of its impact and significance.

Notwithstanding the struggles of The Rise of Ransom City, Mr. Gilman has made a substantial contribution to the new and energetic world of the Weird. Superficially, the genre seems like little more than a lazy attempt to attenuate the familiar until its distorted form can produce some kind of entertainment. But this reading misses the way in which breathing actual life into otherwise inanimate concepts compels the reader to acknowledge both their power, in shaping our existence, and their excesses which, when unchecked, have the capacity to plunge us into a world of grit and smoke. In its fevered dreams, it asks us to reckon with what we are making of our world, questions that will linger long after the last page has been turned.

An engaging journey... (3/5 Stars)

A profound journey through the shoals of fame in The Zuckerman Trilogy

From The Week of December 1st, 2013

Our lives are defined by pivotal moments, convergences of chance and self-determination that redirect us towards new and unexpected destinies. Of these impactful moments, we remember the negative outcomes with far more clarity than the positive, not only because it is in our natures to rue our failures more than we celebrate our successes, but because these misfortunes leave us grasping vainly for our fleeting triumphs, leaving us to dream of what could have been. But while this is understandable, perhaps we should give more thought to the consequences of our successes as well. After all, achievement doesn't come without its own costs. In fact, often, those costs are cloaked by the warm glow of having advanced our interests, making it all the more difficult to brace for them. This is a lesson driven home by Philip Roth's at-times mesmerizing trilogy.

It's not easy being Nathan Zuckerman. He may have come from good, Jewish stock that drove him to be his best; he may be an ambitious and talented writer with a deep desire to make his mark on the world; he may even be a man of some considerable attractiveness and charm, allowing him to enjoy all of society's various pleasures. But these advantages, both external and internal, are of little comfort to a man haunted by his most famous, and infamous novel, a work of fiction that drew on aspects of his own youth to make some difficult and pointed comments about American and Jewish culture.

For anyone else, becoming a famous author would be cause for celebration, and perhaps it was for Zuckerman too, for a time. But as the years accumulate, he finds himself, his family and his relationships increasingly defined by the audaciousness of that novel which deeply offends his father and compels his mother to continually guard herself against the snide and insinuating comments of her neighbors. This ever-increasing burden robs Zuckerman of his health and his happiness, plunging him into a succession of relationships that are as torrid as they are dysfunctional. Eventually, Zuckerman's bitterness completely seizes hold of his existence, making a mockery of his dreams, his plans and his hopes and leaving him with nothing but his dark emotions.

A journey as brief as it is profound, The Zuckerman Trilogy is a fascinating examination of the life of a man blessed and cursed by talent. Mr. Roth, widely thought to be one of the greatest living American authors, creates something of an alter ego in Zuckerman and then heaps upon him all the punishments of ambition and unrestrained desire which feast upon him until there is nothing left of the man but the most jagged of emotions. In lesser hands, such a premise might seem like the height of arrogance and self-indulgence. Writing harshly about one's own fame, knowing that to do so will only make one even more famous? It seems rather cynical. And yet, Mr. Roth is such a keen observer of the human condition, and is so disgustingly skilled at conveying his own revelations through taut, imaginative prose, that the reader is left humbled by his prowess rather than being amused by his conceit.

Of the three works, the first is the most narratively engaging. While introducing us to Zuckerman, The Ghost Writer posits the idea that Anne Frank survived her ordeal with the Nazis and emigrated secretly to New England where she proceeded to live out a quiet and secretive life, cognizant that revealing her existence would inestimably reduce the power of her diary which she never expected to be published. This is a delightful thought experiment and one that helps carry the novel to a complex conclusion. But it's The Anatomy Lesson, the trilogy's final work, that finds Mr. Roth at his most spellbindingly profound. From about the halfway point of the work, the author goes on what must be one of the most powerful and entertaining rants in literary history, one that combines conceit, cowardice and cruelty in a manner that cannot but move the reader to conclude that the author is truly as skilled as his puppet Zuckerman is disfigured by a life lived at odds.

For all of the wonderful ideas and exchanges contained within these pages, however, most lasting is Mr. Roth's implication that fame is an uncontrollable beast. Zuckerman sets out to be successful, certainly, but he never contemplates what that fame might do to him and to the people he's closest to. Nor does he realize that the moment he publishes his work, he loses every ounce of control he has over his public life. He cannot dissuade people from judging him, much less judging his parents. He can't unmake the work. He can't unmake the thoughts people have about the work. He cannot make a plea for people to not read the book. He has made himself subject to the riptides of history and popular opinion which he is in no way able to steer, or even to influence. This is a delicious insight that lends fire and force to the trilogy throughout.

Challenging at times, but well worth the contemplation. For this is nothing short of work that stretches the boundaries of fiction. Such blazing lights are exceedingly rare. (4/5 Stars)

An innovative if monotonous The Book Thief

From The Week of October 1st, 2013

However much it entertains us in theatres and agonizes us in our personal lives, tragedy, more than anything else, is the revealer of true character. For it is only when pushed to the extremity of ugly circumstance and torturous emotion that we come to understand who we are. Do we buckle in the face of cruelty from both the world and our fellow humans? Do we resign ourselves to fates imposed upon us by powers far more immense than ourselves? Or do we remind ourselves that setbacks, in whatever form, are merely opportunities to learn, to grow and to be better next time? All humans, at one point or another, have been compelled to respond to tragedy by taking one of its many roads, but how many of them have comprehended just how consequential that decision was, just how much it shapes their lives and their souls? Marcus Zusak ruminates in his interesting, if problematic, work.

Growing up in the harsh, racist nationalism of Nazi Germany, Liesel is an angry girl with nothing to call her own. Her parents, communists who fear the worst from Hitler, have sent her to a foster home in Munich where she's softened by the kindness of her foster father, Hans, and stiffened by the sternness of her foster mother, Rosa. Teased for being slow to learn how to read, she proves to be fearsome with her fists, pummeling anyone who deigns to scorn her. For she is a girl determined to overcome her own shortcomings and prove everyone wrong.

With Hans' help, Liesel slowly learns her letters, knowledge that kindles a lifelong thirst for books and the wisdom contained within. Her family's relative poverty, however, leaves little expendable coin for the buying of such luxuries, so Liesel turns to stealing them from book burnings and private libraries, insatiably accumulating a collection of works that fill her with words and dreams. But no collection of books can shield her from the outside world which is convulsed by World War II and all of its civilian atrocities. Liesel may have conquered the word, but she cannot conquer the world that made them, and so she must hold on in hopes that those she's come to hold dear make it through to the new dawn.

The claimant of numerous honors and awards, The Book Thief is inventive fiction. Told from the perspective of Death, a seemingly omnipotent force tasked with the claiming of the souls of the recently deceased, it narratively dips in and out of the lives of its main actors, sometimes granting them the privacy of their own thoughts while at other times exposing, in depth, the secrets of their most closely guarded memories. In this, Mr. Zusak is able to paint a wide canvas, filling in his characters at the pace and the style of his choosing. This proves to be a fairly successful technique that affords the reader a blend of both the intimate and the removed, the soulful and the dispassionate, as we revisit the harshness of Nazi Germany and life beneath its yoke.

Despite the grimness of its setting, The Book Thief is populated by warm characters who, though they possess different motivations and occupations, share in a common desire to endure, as best they can, this life as they know it. Kindness, faithfulness and generosity from the commonfolk stand in stark contrast to the uncaring mercilessness of the Nazi machine which does its best to feed them into its voracious maw. Most everyone in Liesel's orbit exhibits a desire to protect what they have and to forge ahead despite the nightmare in which they've found themselves. Liesel, meanwhile, takes that stoicness a step further, repeatedly placing herself in danger to aid those that society has deemed unworthy. For her, kindness does not stem from pamphlets or marches. It flows from deeds, a truth she does not forget despite her own thievery.

Despite its engaging themes which ask us to contemplate both the ascendent good and the inescapable bad of humanity, The Book Thief is ultimately a disappointment that failed to hold my interest. Liesel's combativeness is, at times, engrossing, as is the sweetness of her foster father who will stop at nothing to make her dreams come true. But these virtues cannot make up for the slow, grinding relentlessness of the plot which fails to come to anything like a culmination. Our protagonists are merely presented with incident after incident, moment after moment, challenge after challenge, and asked to react to them. And so, when the novelty of Death-as-character wears off after the first few chapters, we're left with a monotonous journey that leads nowhere. This is a work animated by a wonderful idea that, for all its potence, lacks the power to carry 500 pages on its own.

At times fascinating and touching, but too much of a slog to be laudatory... (3/5 Stars)

A vivid but disappointing sea-stained journey in Jamrach's Menagerie

As much as life would appear to be a series of experiences chained together by familiar environments and occurrences, friends and attitudes, it is, at root, the gestalt of billions of choices that are as unquantifiable as they are immeasurable. Most of these decision points are numbingly mundane, having long since fallen into the rhythm of automatic reflex. And yet, others are so consequential, so profound, that they leave one's existence unfathomably altered. This can be for good or ill, but it is most certainly one of the two, a reality that gives extra significance to hindsight and regret. If nothing else, Carol Birch's novel demonstrates this in engaging detail.

Born in the east end of Victorian London, little Jaffy Brown was facing a grim future. The son of a working-poor mother and a father in the wind, he was a prime target to become a statistic, another victim of the merciless, Dickensien England of the 19th century. But then, when he was but eight years old, an encounter with a tiger that had escaped from the cages of Charles jamrach, famed naturalist, transformed his mundane existence into one of adventure and opportunity. For being exposed to jamrach's animals not only landed him a new friend, Tim, and a girl to love, Tim's sister, it opened up his world to the possibilities of science and the sea, the latter of which he wholeheartedly embraced.

Added to a crew hired to fetch a fabled dragon from Asian shores, Jaffy and Tim, now teenagers, set out on a grand adventure, imagining that they'll return home if not heroes then certainly in the good graces of their employer, Jamrach. But when a series of calamities strikes the expedition, they are compelled to re-evaluate not only their choices and their friendships, but their ethics and their futures. For fate and fortune have turned against them and all that's left is the desperate need to survive.

A vivid, sea-stained yarn of endurance and fortitude in the face of catastrophe, Jamrach's Menagerie is a rocky, uneven experience. Ms. Birch is an accomplished storyteller who demonstrates as much skill capturing the joys and the hardships of the sea as she does in crafting the voices of her characters who remain pleasingly human in the face of extraordinary circumstances. But while her tale is buoyed by these virtues, along with moments of explosive beauty and violence, it is profoundly weighed down by long stretches of listless inactivity that left this reader feeling suffocated and repulsed.

Jamrach's Menagerie sports some unforgettable moments. Several encounters with legendary creatures of the sea are taut with tension, the reader forced to look helplessly on as Jaffy, the narrator, is overwhelmed by situations he could've never practiced for, much less appreciated the gravity of. These incidents are heart-wrenching, not just because they imperil our protagonists, but because they memorably capture the unimaginable violence inherent in whaling, a practice that would have driven the species to extinction had humanity not found, and properly exploited, other sources of oil.

And yet, as much as one is floored by these riveting passages, they are far and few between, brilliant spots of brightness amidst an otherwise featureless sea of suffering and degradation. Which leads us to the novel's gravest flaw. For other than casting the practice of whaling in a more violent light, Ms. Birch makes not a single, novel contribution to the genre in whose waters her novel wades. Dozens of classics on this very salty subject have been penned, works that seek to so grievously test the wills of their actors that normal, for them, becomes a distant and unachievable memory. And while that should not in any way preclude Ms. Birch from writing her own account, it does compel her to advance the genre in some way, to bring something new to the sea-voyage maptable. She has sadly failed to do so.

A disappointment. For a work long-listed for several awards, I expected far more. But unoriginality and lethargy doomed the work beyond repair. (2/5 Stars)

As much as life would appear to be a series of experiences chained together by familiar environments and occurrences, friends and attitudes, it is, at root, the gestalt of billions of choices that are as unquantifiable as they are immeasurable. Most of these decision points are numbingly mundane, having long since fallen into the rhythm of automatic reflex. And yet, others are so consequential, so profound, that they leave one's existence unfathomably altered. This can be for good or ill, but it is most certainly one of the two, a reality that gives extra significance to hindsight and regret. If nothing else, Carol Birch's novel demonstrates this in engaging detail.

Born in the east end of Victorian London, little Jaffy Brown was facing a grim future. The son of a working-poor mother and a father in the wind, he was a prime target to become a statistic, another victim of the merciless, Dickensien England of the 19th century. But then, when he was but eight years old, an encounter with a tiger that had escaped from the cages of Charles jamrach, famed naturalist, transformed his mundane existence into one of adventure and opportunity. For being exposed to jamrach's animals not only landed him a new friend, Tim, and a girl to love, Tim's sister, it opened up his world to the possibilities of science and the sea, the latter of which he wholeheartedly embraced.

Added to a crew hired to fetch a fabled dragon from Asian shores, Jaffy and Tim, now teenagers, set out on a grand adventure, imagining that they'll return home if not heroes then certainly in the good graces of their employer, Jamrach. But when a series of calamities strikes the expedition, they are compelled to re-evaluate not only their choices and their friendships, but their ethics and their futures. For fate and fortune have turned against them and all that's left is the desperate need to survive.

A vivid, sea-stained yarn of endurance and fortitude in the face of catastrophe, Jamrach's Menagerie is a rocky, uneven experience. Ms. Birch is an accomplished storyteller who demonstrates as much skill capturing the joys and the hardships of the sea as she does in crafting the voices of her characters who remain pleasingly human in the face of extraordinary circumstances. But while her tale is buoyed by these virtues, along with moments of explosive beauty and violence, it is profoundly weighed down by long stretches of listless inactivity that left this reader feeling suffocated and repulsed.

Jamrach's Menagerie sports some unforgettable moments. Several encounters with legendary creatures of the sea are taut with tension, the reader forced to look helplessly on as Jaffy, the narrator, is overwhelmed by situations he could've never practiced for, much less appreciated the gravity of. These incidents are heart-wrenching, not just because they imperil our protagonists, but because they memorably capture the unimaginable violence inherent in whaling, a practice that would have driven the species to extinction had humanity not found, and properly exploited, other sources of oil.

And yet, as much as one is floored by these riveting passages, they are far and few between, brilliant spots of brightness amidst an otherwise featureless sea of suffering and degradation. Which leads us to the novel's gravest flaw. For other than casting the practice of whaling in a more violent light, Ms. Birch makes not a single, novel contribution to the genre in whose waters her novel wades. Dozens of classics on this very salty subject have been penned, works that seek to so grievously test the wills of their actors that normal, for them, becomes a distant and unachievable memory. And while that should not in any way preclude Ms. Birch from writing her own account, it does compel her to advance the genre in some way, to bring something new to the sea-voyage maptable. She has sadly failed to do so.

A disappointment. For a work long-listed for several awards, I expected far more. But unoriginality and lethargy doomed the work beyond repair. (2/5 Stars)

The lives that trap us brought exquisitely to life in Revolutionary Road

From the Week of June 10, 2013

To some degree, all of our lives are defined by constrictions, limitations both moral and circumstantial that inhibit our actions and hobble our desires. Some of these restrictions, like marriage, are voluntary, agreements of conduct entered into willingly, even happily, in hopes of acquiring a partner's love and trust in exchange for our freedom. But others, like class, are beyond our control, ceilings cemented above us that block, or make difficult, our social advancement. Nonetheless, they are present, small confinements that, over time, accumulate until one is confronted with a choice: resign oneself to these bonds as a means of making due or rebel against them in hopes of a better, freer future. The former is easier than the latter for it requires from us nothing more than our blissful ignorance, but the latter is painful indeed, demanding that we reject our society and all its tentacles. This conflict could ask for no better illustrator than Richard Yates.

The year is 1955 and the United States is outwardly enjoying an epic, post-war economic boom unrivaled in modern history. Technologies, from televisions to power stations, from affordable cars to handy home appliances, are sweeping across the country, creating the first generation of connected citizens in a network of entertainment and industry. It is the slow, sleepy dawn of the information age.

Inwardly, however, a different story is unfolding. Women, freed during the war years to experience the liberation of work and income, are largely forced back into the home by the millions of American men returning from Europe. Minorities, welcomed into the military to fight for their country, come home to find their nation full of racism and prejudice that selfishly refuses to recognize, much less honor, their service and sacrifice. Worst of all, religion, and the social mores of the time combine in an unholy union to dictate what they consider to be the good life from which deviation is cause for concern and reproof.

Into this narrow life come the Wheelers. Frank and April were ambitious spirits, freed by the Second World War to think and act for themselves. But with the resumption of peacetime, they find their dreams of intellectual and economic freedom besieged by social expectations which demand that Frank take a stable, bread-winning job in industry while April remain at home to raise their children. This is not the lives they wanted, and yet, at each turn, they are confronted by forces beyond their control, forces powerful enough to plunge them into darkness.

Marked by innocent dreams and exquisite tragedy, Revolutionary Road is an engaging meditation on the nature of modern existence. Mr. Yates, whose talented pen effortlessly spills forth mesmerizingly cinematic prose, captures here the way in which even the best laid plans can wither away, killed by not just peer pressure from the outside, but doubts from the inside. Questions of inadequacy plague both Wheelers, prompting them to second guess their decisions, then to loath their second guessing, and then finally to act rashly, results which often lead to recrimination and discord. This pattern, though only repeated here a few times, has clearly characterized the scope of Frank and April's time together, locking them into a history from which they cannot escape.

Though much of the narrative is productively consumed by the dream, championed by April, of escaping the empty, suburban existence into which the wheelers have trapped themselves, the novel's rhetorical and thematic highs are reserved for the dominant narrator, Frank, who is realized here with breathtaking clarity. Mr. Yates in no way spares Frank by allowing his ugly thoughts to remain hidden in the shadows of his mind. No, the author dredges up every selfish urge, every vain posture, every insecure act, presenting Frank to us in a way that few will ever understand him. For though his wife has clues of his deceits and his delusions, she would never wish to imagine the ways in which his private doubts drive him to redirect his energies from helping himself and April realize their dream of being liberated people to realizing his own goal of getting his own way, whatever that entails in the moment. It is almost impossible to imagine how this demonstration of man's public and private faces could be better rendered than it is here.

Revolutionary Road has its stumbles. After establishing its eloquence and its patterns of doubt and recrimination, failure and futility, its narrative stalls, choked up by Frank's internal life which grows tiresome after awhile. Moreover, there are secondary characters here who serve little purpose but to be backdrops against which the Wheelers' flaws can be writ large. These serve little purpose but to firm up the novel's structure and fill in for the passage of time. The novel, however, largely overwhelms these off-notes with its sharpness of vision which carries the work to an appropriate conclusion.

A powerful, poignant representation of how lives are eventually, inevitably defined more by the decisions we make than by who we actually are. In this, it is an exceptional, rare read that is well worth consuming. (4/5 Stars)

Racism and the harmfulness of social mores in A World Unseen

From The Week of May 27, 2013 As much as we benefit from society, that wonderful collective of traditions and mores that define localized cultures, it throws up its fair share of challenges. For while society organizes people of different faiths and ethnicities, classes and colors, into a powerful hive-mind capable of defending itself against all manner of external threats, it also imposes codes of conduct upon its participants that can benefit some at the expense of others. After all, society doesn't care about the niceties of personal liberty. It doesn't gaze hopefully into the future in order to bring to the present visionary standards of equality and deportment. Society unifies people on the back of traditions that the majority find acceptable, a reality which is far from inherently liberal. This sad truth is animated to chilling effect in Shamim Sarif's quiet, historical novel. The year is 1952 and South Africa has slid into the worst form of institutionalized racism. Its ruling political party, an all-white assemblage of British Colonials and their descendents, have not only forbidden the races to intermarry, but robbed native Africans of their land by forceably removing them to semi-autonomous districts beyond the urban havens enjoyed by whites. Though some of these restrictions have existed since western colonization, laws codifying this racism have only recently been past, empowering police and the military to execute the will of the European elites. At the same time, however, South Africa is undergoing industrialization for which it has opened its borders to Asians to come and fill its factories and run its shops as it accelerates into the First World.? Into this patchwork country are dropped two young, Indian women seized by exceedingly different circumstances. Miriam is the quiet wife of a Muslim shopkeeper who has relocated his family to South Africa in the promise of new opportunities. Confined largely to the home, unless her stern husband requires her assistance cleaning or taking inventory in the shop, Miriam is rapidly aging under familial burdens made toxic by a nearly complete absence of warmth from her husband. Her children are her only refuge, that is, until she encounters amina, an ambitious cafe-owner who not only flouts the traditional dress and deportment proscribed to women, but defies this racist state by secretly allowing Jacob, her friend and co-founder, to silently own half of their shared business. Though society and circumstance makes it almost impossible for the two women to connect, Amina persists in drawing Miriam out of her shell, offering her a future the beleaguered wife couldn't have otherwise imagined. A novel as quiet as it is moving, A World Unseen, later made into a film of the same name, is a disturbing snapshot of life in a time that has thankfully lapsed into history. With but two brief and emotional scenes, Ms. Sarif vividly captures the senselessness and hopelessness of apartheid, reviving its depravities for a 21st century audience that will largely find its practice abhorrent and shameful. This political backdrop, for all its ugliness however, provides a spectacular setting in which to root our two protagonists, Miriam and amina, both of whom represent the slow, incremental way in which change is brought to societies. They do not march in the streets. They do not organize protests and set fire to government buildings. They do not even lock arms with their fellows to force the state into revealing the hellish depths to which it is willing to sink. No, they simply resist in the most effective way, and in the only way they know how, by living their lives as they wish to, deferring to no one but themselves and to nothing but their own desires. Though superficially a love story, A World Unseen is, at root, a story about the right to choose: one's fate, one's loved ones, one's friends, and even one's mistakes. It harnesses the quintessential elements of liberty in the face of violent opposition and, through that liberty, seeks to capture the preciousness of life and the degree to which we are all lessened when that most universal gift is crushed beneath the boots of an unfeeling state operating on the principles of ignorance and selfishness. In this, it succeeds beautifully. A World Unseen has its troubled moments. It fails to give the uninitiated reader any any real sense of Apartheid's power,, much less where it came from or why it persists. Moreover, the choice to make both of the protagonists outsiders sets the reader at too far of a remove from the bone-deep wrongness of this country at this time. However, neither of these complaints are fatal to the effort and, indeed, perhaps aid some readers in experiencing what Miriam and Amina feel, visitors to an exceedingly strange land in which they've chosen to stay and live. Quietly excellent... (4/5 Stars)

Ordinary lives during the Cultural Revolution in Under The Red Flag

From The Week of May 13, 2013

Traditions are difficult to uproot. For humans are, by and large, creatures opposed to change, huddling around the fire of what's known while periodically peeking out at the darkness of the scary unknown. It's perfectly natural, then, to codify the truths we understand and impose them upon subsequent generations. From time to time, however, this chain of traditions is broken, interrupted by governments that seek to impose upon us their ethics, their ideals. They do this even while fully aware of the cognitive dissonance this creates within a public trying to marry generations of knowledge with months of political re-education. The results are understandably tragic and that is demonstrated to wonderful effect in this collection of short stories from Ha Jin.

China under the Cultural Revolution was a dangerous and merciless place. Thousands of years of Chinese history and tradition was forced to make way for a new, Maoist world, a theatre of imposed Communism that compelled all those within its grasp to not only act according to a new morality, but to meet standards of organized, centralized productivity never before seen in this country, much less in the world. Driven by a need to compete with a West awash in capitalistic competition and anchored by industrialized workforces, this new world sought to reach its hands into the lives of every-day Chinese to prod, manipulate, coerce and threaten them into contributing to the whole. No aspect of private life was exempt from government scrutiny which possessed the power to make even the brave tremble.

From lasciviousness to food-hoarding, from heroes created from happenstance to villains forged from jealousy, Under the Red Flag knits together a tapestry of rural and semi-rural, mid-century Chinese, men and women who largely endure the misfortune of being born in a chaotic time. Mr. Jin, who has won numerous awards for his literary work, steers clear of the tales of great and consequential men, choosing instead to document, with fiction, the lives of ordinary people growing up during the dawn of the modern Chinese state. In this, we come to understand the ripple effects caused by the uneven application of a new set of rules. For where some might implement them out of an earnest belief in the new China, others implement them with only personal gain in mind, using them to indulge their own biases, their own desires, their own jealousies.

It's often said that nothing great can be created without breaking a few eggs. Well, these are the broken eggs, lives distorted and set adrift by a new set of standards. For all this, though, Mr. Jin's tales are not heavy-handed. On the contrary, it's to his credit that each tale of woe and adolescence, of confusion and desperation, is enjoyable and affecting. And yet, at every turn, we see the shadow of the Cultural Revolution flickering at the edge of our vision, its caresses, its influences, subtly and drastically altering a way of life so familiar to generations prior. In this, Under the Red Flag Manages to not be in the least bit depressing. It is, instead, a testament to human adaptability, to the awareness we all possess of life's fleeting nature, and how we are, in some sense, subject to both external forces we cannot control and internal desires we cannot resist.

This is a brief and effective introduction to Mr. Jin's work. A fascinating glimpse of a world that, though it has slid into our past, will certainly rise again. For governments invariably seek to impose the moralities of the moment upon the publics they purport to serve. It is merely a question of how bold they are willing to be in the forging of that idealized future. (4/5 Stars)

Humor, tragedy and social injustice in the excellent The Observations

From The Week of April 1, 2013

We are what we make of ourselves, not what others make of us. This is a fundamental truth of human existence that seems, today, inarguable. And yet, for centuries, it was rejected for a more convenient truth, chiefly, that we are born into the fates and the circumstances that suit our personalities. If a man was born into a life of slavery, then that was what he was best suited for. Similarly, if a woman was born to a life of prostitution, then her character was capable of nothing else.

The appeal of this view is obvious, for it re-affirms to the holder that their world is exactly as it should be. To view the slave or the prostitute as we would, that they were forced into those circumstances by ill fortune and socioeconomic pressures beyond their control, would shatter the holder's conception of the world, would reveal to them the fundamental unfairness of their society and would call upon them to change a system that would have seemed to them monolithic. So they wrapped themselves in their biases and condemned untold millions to proscribed lives. This unbearable narrowness of life is beautifully, and humorously, captured in Jane Harris' outstanding novel.

The year is 1863 and life for a poor Irish girl, trying to make her way in Scotland, is far from easy. And yet, this is the lot of Bessy buckley, the Catholic daughter of a woman of ill repute and dark disposition who, alone and sixteen, is attempting to find a place that will allow her to get ahead in the protestant world. Made aware of a job opening in what she imagines to be a castle, young Bessy stumbles, starving, into an estate outside of Glasgow where she encounters the intellectual wife of a lawyer who offers Bessy everything she could want: a wage, a roof and all the food she could desire. Only, as with everything in life, there are certain...strings.

At first, Bessy imagines she can cope with the lady's odd requests. Beginning a daily diary and handing it over to the lady isn't terribly onerous. Nor is acceding to the lady's desire to take every conceivable measurement of her head and body. But when Bessy learns the truth, that she is little more than a pawn in a demeaning game, she's had enough. And her response will set into motion a chain of events that not even she can imagine.

A finalist for the Orange prize, The Observations is first rate historical fiction. Narrated in Bessy's mesmerizing brogue, it exquisitely animates 19th-century Britain in all its narrowminded, classist claptrap, revealing, through Bessy's sharpness of mind and wit, the depths of her society's idiocy. This, naturally, is thanks to the skillful and steady hand of its author, Ms. Harris, who possesses not only a keen eye for the entwined polarities of humor and tragedy, but the the often-times devastating consequences of cause and effect. She deserves, here, every bit of acclaim that has and will come to her.

Of the work's many virtues, though, none shine more brightly than the degree to which it demonstrates the travesty of a society, and a culture, that invests importance in classes and casts. The notion that we somehow deserve, or are tailored for, our lots in life is laughable now that we understand that we are born to a particular life, but that we are shaped by the circumstances into which we are born. Thus, if we are born of tailors, and our society makes it difficult or even impossible to rise above our station, then of course we too will be tailors. We have no other option. But rather than comprehending this obvious truth, Victorian Britain goes the other way, believing that people wind up in the occupations they are made for, awfully convenient for a society trying to justify its unimaginable disparities in income, privilege and opportunity. And yet, though society is inarguably damaged by this reality, the people are moreso. For the women who wish to be scientists are barred from that life. And the poor men with keen minds for finance and politics are cordoned off from the halls of power. The misery of people forced to endure lives unsuited to their natural talents is unimaginable.

The Observations has its shaky moments. Its plot is, at times, too tidy, with every piece fitting neatly into place, holding little of the messiness of real life. Moreover, its resolution strikes this reader has too hopeful for the time and place. And yet, even these flaws seem like small sacrifices in the name of irony and poetic justice, virtues that Ms. Harris puts to good purpose throughout.

A deeply enjoyable romp through a tragically narrow world. It won't soon be forgotten... (4/5 Stars)

Entertaining historical mysteries in The Hangman's Daughter series

From The Week of February 25, 2013
As much as the well-heeled would have us think otherwise, society runs thanks to dirty work. From glittering skyscrapers to speeding trains, from internet searches to life-saving medical equipment, countless men and women had to lay those bricks and dig those tunnels, unspool those undersea cables and test those machines, knowing that failure would, at best, cost people their lives and, at worst, undermine society's faith in the virtues of civilization. It is easy for us to forget these truths. For the souls who labor to keep our streets safe, our supermarkets stocked and our houses electrified are largely invisible, their efforts unheralded by a world far more fixated on the feats of the extraordinary than the toils of the masses. The efforts of millions to make the human world go round... This is a truth as relevant now as it has been at any point in the history of agricultural man and it is one explored with delight and darkness in Mr. Potzsch's entertaining series.

Seventeenth-century Germany was a grim and savage place. Riven by the Thirty Years' War, an apocalyptic conflict that claimed the lives of millions while leading to the widespread disintegration of law and order, it was comprised of a series of fiefdoms at the heart of the Holy Roman Empire. It laid claim to philosophers and universities, powerful armies and advancing technologies, and yet it was also consumed by the corrosive fire of religious discord that, having erupted from the rise of Protestantism, had spent the last hundred years washing across much of civilized Europe. But as much as the war's cost was monetarily incalculable, it took an even graver price from the men who were paid or compelled to perpetrate its atrocities and from the families who were forced to bear its deprivations. Such scars are generational, wounds that cannot easily be forgotten.

Jakob Kuisl's entire life was defined by the great war. The son of a town hangman, he disavowed his family's calling for the life of a mercenary. But when, after many years of senseless slaughter, this life proved too dark for his soul, he took up his father's fallen sword and became an executioner. As much healer as killer, Kuisl is as skilled with poisons as curatives, as capable of breaking bones as mending them. And yet, though he and his brothers perform necessary services for the people, they are viewed with suspicion and disrespect by the communities that pay them, communities that impose upon the hangmen a dishonor emanating from their own shame. Despite the obvious injustice, there's nothing Kuisl or his like can do about this disregard except live with honor and do what must be done.

Home from the war, circumstances conspire to keep Kuisl busy. For not only does his hometown require his services, but murder seems to follow him wherever he goes. Devils and ghosts, priests and traitors, stalk his steps and those of his fiery daughter who herself is enchained by the hangman's life. Together, they must endeavor to live free in a world that scorns them, all while meting out some kind of justice in a world that has been without it for so long it might not even recognize its righteous glow.

Though far from masterpieces of fiction, the novels of The Hangman's Daughter are entertaining fair from a promising German author. Translated into English and sold through an amazon imprint, each of the collections stories -- there are four to date -- follow the familiar mystery model, kicked off by a death, often gruesome, that the heroes then proceed to solve over the next several hundred pages. Though this formula is, by now, quite wrote, the deep-seated historical flavor of Potzsch's work elevates the series out of the mundane and into the engagingly foreign as our familiar, modern moralities and customs are thrown aside for a world rooted in gods and superstition.

This is undoubtedly the series' greatest virtue. For though its three core characters -- Kuisl, the bearish and brooding hangman; Magdalena, his stubborn and tempestuous daughter; and Simon, her diminutive but devoted admirer -- are interesting, if somewhat predictable, it is the world that mesmerizes. For though religion is still prevalent in the 21st century, it is a faith confined largely to the church. Science has compelled Christianity to largely withdraw in defeat from the battlefield of society, government, philosophy and especially medicine, leaving our days to be defined by data, by logic, by facts. The opposite is true in Potzsch's conception of 17th-century Germany the society of which is almost entirely subsumed by religion. Every mystery and every murder, every insult and every dispute, is viewed through the lens of faith which, unfortunately, allows many of the men and women raised in this time to seize upon God as an easy answer. Strange markings on the backs of children? It must be witchcraft. Women succumbing to fever and moments of madness? It must be the devil. snap judgements are made because they can be, because there is nothing like science to stand up to these unreasoned conclusions, to refute them with researched truths.

But though the series succeeds in its wish to entertain, it falls short of excellence. For Potzsch is far too captivated by masterminding Kuisl into a 17th-century detective to actually show us the man's occupation. Rarely do we actually see Kuisl perform his duties, let alone with anything other than supreme reluctance which smacks to this reader like an author unwilling to sully his hero with even a whiff of injustice. Strange, really, for Potzsch is quite content to bestow upon Kuisl a savage backstory, but this too is glimpsed only through faded recollection and not the fullness of Potzsch's dark prose. A similar criticism could be leveled at Magdalena, the eponymous hangman's daughter if, that is, she was relevant enough to bother with criticism. The woman may be charmingly self-possessed, but she is rarely anything more than a device for the author to advance the story. We're never truly made to feel the chafing of the constricted life she is forced to lead.

Entertaining work. These are fun mysteries to blow through on a weekend. However, they suffer from the plain fact that others have done better. The inevitable comparisons with Ariana Franklin and the like do not flatter The Hangman's Daughter. (3/5 Stars)

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

From The Week of November 19, 2012
For all that we aspire to achieve freedom, few of us manage to ever taste its glorious fruit. For even if we succeed in throwing off the government-imposed shackles that bind our bodies -- no simple feat in its own right --, the cognitive chains that burden our thoughts yet remain. These limitations, imposed by our ideologies, by our biases, by our prejudices and by our classes are so potent that it matters not if our bodies are free. For if the mind is enslaved to a cruel or destructive worldview, then what does it matter if the flesh is free to move about as it pleases? The mind is the engine. The mind is the light. The mind is the seed of civilization and the only defense we have against the lies and the deceptions that are imposed upon us and that we impose upon ourselves. Mr. Mitchell vividly demonstrates this truth in his narratively complex but eminently readable piece of genre-busting speculative fiction.

From the unfathomable expanse of the South Pacific to underground hideaways in Korea, from the industrializing colonialism of the 19th century to the despotic, technocratic states of the near future, six disconnected souls wage their own little wars against ignorance, deception and the vicissitudes of time. A gullible notary, a frustrated musician, a dogged journalist, a hapless publisher, a brave martyr and a curious villager should not have anything in common, particularly when each of them belong to their own space and time. And yet not only do they each battle against the lies that hope to bind them, they each manage to relate to the reader their histories in a way that will leave, at least in some, a lasting legacy of truth and determination. Of love and war, of justice and corruption, these are their stories.

Though it falls short of the lofty heights to which some have uplifted it, Cloud Atlas is a work rewarding thanks to its tangled nature, not in spite of it. Comprised of six loosely connected narratives, the plot is essentially one, long boomerang toss, with each of the stories progressing in chronological order until their midpoints at which they are each interrupted and compelled to give way to the next story in the chain. This succession ends at the farthest point in the future, or halfway through the book, where upon the narrative curves back on itself, telling the latter half of all six tales in reverse order until it concludes not long after the point at which it began. This not only generates suspense by making something of a mystery out of each of its tales, it allows Mr. Mitchell to unleash upon his readers the book's greatest virtue, its patois.

Each protagonist is given distinct and sometimes difficult dialects, each of which, while at times labyrinthine, wonderfully embed the reader into the different periods in which he finds himself. This spares Mr. Mitchell the laborious effort of constructing vivid settings for each of his tales. His use of language does it for him, conveying not only social trends but the degrees to which the characters are educated, foolish and idealistic. Rarely has this device been deployed so effectively. For at times, the reader needs only a paragraph or two to understand that he has entered a very different mind locked in a very different world.

For all its linguistic and structural virtues, though, Cloud Atlas is at times overly simplistic and tonally deaf. His book envisions a future in which corporate branding consumes not only our culture but the nation state itself, a fear which largely spent its energy in the last two decades of the 20th century. Here, it smacks of a means by which Mr. Mitchell can express his skills at wordsmithing which is beneath the dignity of his novel. Moreover, the author's decision to transition between humor and seriousness, from tragicomedy to deathly struggle, left this reader cold. At times, the humor helped to make the work seem human, but this came at the cost of the gravity of some of its tales, leeching them of the import I would have otherwise bestowed upon them.

Cloud Atlas is an ambitious work that rises well above the fray of modern-day speculative fiction. For this, it should be celebrated as a success. However, it is also reminiscent of a wonderful golf shot that pulls up a few feet from the hole. Almost brilliant, but just...not...quite. (4/5 Stars)

Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel

From The Week of July 23, 2012
Though history flatters the kings and warlords, emperors and conquerers, by remembering their names and standing in awe of their deeds, it has forgotten those men who ensured that these luminaries rose to their positions of prominence. History has forgotten the creatures who carried out their wills, brought about their plans and softened their rages. It has forgotten the servants who made sure that the pettiness of tyrants did not destroy the world they knew. For imagine, for a moment, the mind of a king, raised from birth to rule. Would he truly be fair and wise? Or would all his learning merely fall upon a mind already flush with entitlement and power, self-importance and majesty? Where is there any chance to experience that special kind of humility that brings out the best of us? There is none. And so wisdom and moderation must come from elsewhere. And this is a truth winningly captured by Hilary Mantel in this worthy second chapter in the life of a king's minder.

Few who knew Thomas Cromwell as a youth would have ever imagined that he would someday be the second most powerful man in the infamous reign of Henry VIII. Having spent his youth being knocked about by his father, only to fetch up in Italy with only a sharp mind to keep him above water, he would, with good fortune and keen ambition, rise in status and power until, with the death of Cardinal Wolsey, that staunch catholic who was executed on the orders of his king for failing to expeditiously arrange the monarch's divorce from Katherine of Aragon, become the private secretary to the king of England. From this most powerful desk, Cromwell was viewed as the voice of the king, acting with the full measure of his authority, constrained only by the knowledge that,t o overstep himself and displease his monarch, would bring an end as swift as his rise.

Having masterminded the creation of the Anglican church and the taking of the monasteries, Cromwell has cemented himself in the king's inner circle. But as the final years of the king's marriage to Anne Boleyn unfold, his position becomes tenuous. For as the king's inability to beget a male heir upon Anne Boleyn eats away at him, the fortunes of everyone around him are put in flux. Henry must have an heir, for himself and for the realm. And if Anne Boleyn, for all her legendary powers of beguilement, cannot deliver that to him, then someone else must. As fortunes at court shift and churn, Cromwell plays the great game with but three goals in mind, to preserve the reputation of the king, the health of the realm and the fortunes of his son Gregory, the only relation to whom he can bequeath all that he has made. Will his star be dragged down by Anne Boleyn as she has promised him, or will he survive this latest twist in the life of a king?

A worthy, if less luminous, successor to Wolf Hall, Bring Up The Bodies is excellent historical fiction. Ms. Mantel, one of the genre's most decorated figures, rejects the cheap romanticism espoused by many in the field, attempting, instead, to construct a realistic version of the events of Anne Boleyn's fall, as they might have transpired, while infusing the characters in her drama with intelligence, menace and selfishness. For it is this last quality that is so often missing in such chronicles, a substantial oversight given that most humans, then and now, are masters in its practice. Consequently, her players transcend their era to be universally recognizable as people who, though they've been stamped by their time, nonetheless harbor the same flaws of character that we do. This realism does wonders for the relatability of her work.

More than the boldness of portraying Henry as something of a child, and the sharpness of her characterization of Anne Boleyn as a cunning if limited queen, Ms. Mantel's star is unquestionably Cromwell. He has evolved splendidly across this duology, but not in the manner of most characters. For his was not a descent from innocence into cynicism and servitude. Instead, Cromwell becomes what most men must when placed in a precarious position of power and compelled, from that perch, to do the hard things. He surrenders as much of himself as he can to both the king and necessity, while maintaining, for himself, the very core of his being around which he can put up armor against the harshness of his duties. In this way, he does what he must do while preserving some measure of decency for himself, some love for Gregory and his dead wife and children, and some honor for England which he unswervingly serves. It is an exquisite portrait o a man looking necessity in the eye and making with a bargain whose sacrifice is an emotionally fulfilling life but whose gain is the capacity to do what must be done.

Bring Up The Bodies lacks the punch of Wolf Hall, but none of its the tone or class. Anyone who enjoyed the Man-booker-winning predecessor to this novel will certainly enjoy it as well, all while lamenting the end of a rewarding journey between author and character. (4/5 Stars)

True History of The Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

From The Week of June 11, 2012

Given sufficient time for a man and his life to pass into legend, to become the stuff of heros and villains, love and tragedy, the truth of a thing becomes virtually impossible to grasp. For too much first-hand knowledge of legends, and the world they unfolded within, have been lost to the rigors of time. Robbed, then, of context and neutrality, we impose our own wishful narrative upon these important, cultural events, viewing them through our own biased lenses and judging them by the standards of our times, not those that birthed them. But what if there were compelling, contemporary accounts of these events, accounts that survived time's erosion to inform our present? Would they change our view? Would they add flesh to bloodless myth? Mr. Carey speculates and demonstrates in his sweeping, epistolary novel.

A key figure in the early history of Australia, Ned Kelly (1854-1880) was a legendary robber of banks and a thief of horses, a lover of women and a giver to the poor. The son of Irish immigrants, his father a convict and his mother a landholder's daughter, he came of age in a brutal period of colonial history in which the unforgiving law listened obsequiously to the rich while deeply ignoring the poor. This pervasive sense of injustice, along with the difficulty of making it in the hard-scrabble world of frontier Australia, combined to limit Ned Kelly's options and set him upon the path of crime that would earn him so much fame.

In boyhood, he was tasked with providing for his family. Having lost his father early, he spent his youth laboring to clear his family's uncultivated land while his mother managed his half-dozen siblings, earning coin for the table through the selling of spirits. Apprenticed, in adolescence, to a bushranger, the young Kelly learned the skills that would one day make him famous. However, in the process, he also earned himself the enmity of the police whose watchful eyes would never long stray from him. Consequently, the authorities would not be far afield when a combination of family disputes and police corruption exposed Kelly, now an adult, as an outlaw. Their subsequent pursuit of him would force Kelly deeper and deeper into banditry and crime until, pushed to his limits, he made one last stand against the men who had hassled, harangued and hobbled his him, his wife, and his family for the whole of his short life.

The winner of the 2000 Man Booker Prize, True History of The Kelly Gang is an engrossing tale of life in the face of corruption. Narratively driven by a fictionalized, 12-part autobiography of Ned Kelly's life from boyhood to demise, it captures not only the impossible challenges faced by settlers in 19th century Australia, but the extent to which its stratified culture all-but precluded those at the bottom of the social ladder from climbing out of the lawless and soul-crushing poverty into which they'd been sold. And so, as much as Mr. Carey should be commended for authenticating his account with the lively and colorful vernacular of the period, utterly convincing the reader, at times, that this is Ned Kelly's voice, the extent to which he vividly depicts the inescapable degradation of the poor is the virtue that carries his thoughtful, funny, harsh and ultimately tragic novel.

There have been, certainly, more worthy recipients of the Booker. After all, at root, Mr. Carey has simply re-imagined the biography of a real man's life. Yes, he has animated it with relationships and shootouts, glossed it with a sympathetic sheen and packaged it with an outlaw's captivating voice, feats all,but it remains another man's story, not one conceived of by the author's own mind. His is, I'm sure, not the only winner to draw inspiration from history, but surely Mr. Carey's stands alone in the fact that all of its creativity flows from its shaping,not its content.

Notwithstanding the extent to which the work has been cribbed from history, True History of The Kelly Gang is full of colorful cutthroats and crooked cops, legendary feats and tragic calamities, polished by a memorable brogue. This well-spiced stew is more than sufficient to drag over the line Mr. Carey's fascinating and sympathetic re-imagining of one man's life. (3/5 Stars)

By Blood by Ellen Ullman

From The Week of April 09, 2012

No matter how our lives turn out, whether we become presidents or poppers, innovators or winos, our happiness is determined by our origins. We may be lavished with honors, plaudits and triumphs. We may explore the ends of the earth and hold industries in our hands. Nonetheless, securing the approval of those who birthed us, those who shaped us, consumes us. For without them, we would not exist. Without them to shelter us through our development, we would not be who we are. For all that they might anger and frustrate us, we owe them. We want to repay that debt by making them proud.

But what if we can't? What if, because of small minds and small hearts, we can't win their approval? Worse yet, what if, through no fault of our own, we never had the chance because they surrendered us to other parents, other futures? How then do we satisfy our need to be loved? Ms. Ullman ruminates in this wonderfully strange novel.

The year is 1974 and foggy San Francisco is still hungover from the energetic highs of the 1960s. Disco fills its nightclubs and the Zodiac Killer occupies its tabloids while its districts expand and contract, shift and evolve, to meet the wide-ranging tastes of the cities multicultural and multigenerational clientele. Into this sleepy sea of self-discovery tumbles another in a long line of seekers, a university professor who, thanks to an indiscretion with a male student, has been banished from the familiar world of academia. Forced to adjust himself to this world of the real with which he's only passingly familiar, the professor engages a room on the eighth floor of an office tower where he begins to optimistically sketch out lesson plans for future semesters even while the investigation into his misconduct continues.

All of the professor's plans, however, are aborted when, one day, he realizes that he shares a shockingly thin wall with a psychiatrist's practice. Over the subsequent weeks and months, the professor falls into the habit of eavesdropping on the psychiatrist's sessions with Patient 3, a lesbian in her 30s who, in spite of a successful career, is less than happy with the life she's carved out for herself. The source of her discontent stems from her adoptive parents who keep secrets from her even while struggling to accept her gayness. If she could only find her birth mother, perhaps she might find some acceptance... The utterly engrossed professor has a new mission, a new obsession. Secretly, stealthily, he will bend his powers upon the problem of uncovering the woman's origins. For it is infinitely more interesting than contemplating his dim and meager future.

Refreshingly bizarre, By Blood combines an inventive premise with a gripping tale of secretive origins to create an engrossing read full of war, its degradations and its shames. Told primarily through the overheard dialogue between the psychiatrist and her patient, the narrative taps into the turbulent political and economic times of the 1970s before expanding to touch upon the careless freedom of western Europe in the 1920s and 30s, the horrific deprivations of the Nazis in the 1940s, and finally the creation and the maintenance of the Jewish state in the 1950s. All are sourced in order to enrich a tangled tapestry of twisting lies and fateful choices. Ms. Ullman's characters, though few, are as fully realized as her lush reconstructions of wartime Germany and post-1967 Israel, both of which are delightfully and chillingly animated so that we might step into the past and regard the full extent to which war, and the ideologies that feed it, contort the human soul and compel it to make decisions it should never have to make.

The richness of the story, however, is secondary to the author's contemplations of the nature of identity and the extent to which it is shaped by ones origins. Her story's primary protagonists, the professor and the patient, are never named. More over, they both have allowed their uncertain parentage to distort their personalities, reducing them to successful but hopeless obsessives who require answers in order to be complete, to be at rest. What they miss, of course, is that they are seeking love, not answers, affection not explanations. They desire what they did not get when they needed it most, a foundation of unreserved support and acceptance that empowers children to flower into adults.

This is a fascinating and compelling novel which strongly resists being put down until its final page has been turned. Such origin stories tend towards navel-gazing, but Ms. Ullman's tale possesses more than enough sinfulness to keep things spicy. (5/5 Stars)

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

From The Week of April 09, 2012

We may exist for thousands of days, but our lives pivot on a handful of moments. No matter how cautious our choices, how judicious our actions, how wise our deliberations, we cannot control, nor can we anticipate, the varied and random events that come together to rain disaster down upon our heads. Like converging icebergs in a stormy sea, chaos and chance can effortlessly smash us to pieces between their limitless slabs of icy steel. How do we cope with such pain? How do we move on and live with this burden upon our souls when we cannot forget? Johnson reflects.

Robert Granger never was a brilliant or talented man. Born of meager means, into the harsh frontier of the 19th century Wild West, he grew up aimless in a pitiless world. Having never benefited from the guidance of parents to shape him, to motivate him beyond his limitations, his was a desultory youth until a chance encounter with a man condemned to die taught him to find some focus in an unforgiving world where the law was as scarce as mercy. Understanding his limitations and yet driven to make something of himself, Granger found a job, laying down new track for the railroad, and a wife who made it all worthwhile. But when a disastrous fire ripped through the Pacific Northwest, taking away all that he loved, all his plans, his work, his toil, became ashes and dust. He would have to start again in a world just beginning to succumb to the powers and the technologies of man.

As brief as it is powerful, Train Dreams is a glorious glimpse at the rise of American power. Granger, an average man in every respect, is the lens through which we watch human ingenuity begin to conquer the land and subject it to the whims of man. We watch the track of civilization laid down through hills and gorges, through valleys and towns, track that reaches out to connect the untamed frontier of the west with the domesticated class of the east. But no matter how powerful our machines, no matter how fearsome our engines, no matter how profoundly we rework the earth that birthed us, we are still subject to both the whims of fate and the erosion of time, eternal forces that brush aside our plans and wear us down until we are but shadows of what we were, a truth that Granger comes to learn all too well.

There's silence here, silence and grace reminiscent of Hemingway and McCarthy. Few words are wasted in the portrayal of colliding worlds: Indian and European, nature and civilization, family and commerce, east and west. All swirl about Granger, hardly noticed by a man who, having endured a tragedy he could not have prevented, endeavors unbowed through a world that has less and less time for mysticism, for chicanery, as the harsh lights of industry blast away all but the most monetary conceits.

A quiet but deeply affecting novel about change in all its forms. Mr. Johnson picked a perfect, unobtrusive protagonist, a man of such bland character that he becomes a template upon which the reader can weld himself, experiencing the tumult of the transition from the old world to the new. Beautiful in its artful simplicity... The rise of a grander world has rarely been so exquisitely juxtaposed against the frailties of man. (4/5 Stars)

River Of Smoke: The Ibis Trilogy 02 by Amitav Ghosh

From The Week of April 02, 2012

Trade is the foundation of human civilization. Not only does it provide the means by which we peacefully exchange goods, it underpins and empowers our economies which are the engines of innovation. For without trade, there would not be a means by which the inventive could profit from their ingenuity. Remove this incentive to innovate and our world would swiftly devolve into pre-industrial tribalism, knowledge hoarded by a select few while the masses eke out meager and ignorant existences in a world without light.

While we cannot dispute trade's value to our civilization, we can question its morality. For it often seems as though goodness and decency are left behind in the name of profit. All too often, the lives of the exploited are gathered up and ground down without the profiteers taking even a passing notice in their unjust fates. Is this simply a reflection of human nature, greed overpowering honor on the road to the future? Or is it a failure to look beyond our own stars, our own gain, to gaze upon a world driven by incentives but moderated by fairness? These are the questions Mr. Ghosh weaves into his textured tapestry of life in 19th century Asia. They are questions we all should ponder.

The year is 1838 and China is dusting off the drums of war in preparation for a vigorous pounding. For decades, this proud nation has looked the other way while British opium, grown and shipped from colonial India, made its way into its harbors and thence into the lungs, minds and dreams of its countless millions. For decades, China has watched helplessly as British merchants were enriched by this amoral trade while its own subjects were indentured, sold into slavery to the poppy. No longer... This situation is an offense to the dignity of the Chinese emperor and will not be tolerated, hence the appointment of an imperial commissioner to see to it that this addictive scourge is banished from its shores. Endowed with extraordinary powers, this commissioner must not be swayed by British bribes or British power in an effort to execute his divine mission.

Arrayed against the will of the emperor are the men who have made opium their exploitive stock in lucrative trade. A consortium of British and Indian operators based in the coastal town of Fanqui, they consider opium merely a product to be bought and sold, hiding behind the enlightened principles of free trade in order to avoid the grim reality of the lives their product destroys. Among this consortium is Bahram Modi, an Indian merchant who has elevated himself, through skill and marriage, from his meager roots into a position of wealth and status. This prominence is threatened, however, when the machinations of his family necessitate that Bahram wager his career and future on a single shipment of opium whose value could make him entirely his own master. Having succeeded in bringing this shipment through a terrible storm, Bahram is confronted by the Chinese crackdown on his product and must, with the help of is household, weather this latest and greatest tempest that threatens to engulf the entire region in war.

Picking up soon after the conclusion of the excellent Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, the second, expansive novel in a proposed trilogy by Mr. Ghosh, plunges the reader into the fumy tumult that presaged the First Opium War. Gathering up most of his well-rendered characters from the prior novel, the author transports Neel, the deposed Raj, Ah Fat, the escaped convict, and Paulette, the would-be botanist, from the sea to the hustle and bustle of the Chinese ports. Here, Mr. Ghosh is at his best, bringing to life a dead world with such exquisite clarity and lifelike vitality that the reader can almost feel the oppressive humidity, see the waterways clogged with fishboats, and hear the self-important justifications of British merchants trying to excuse their perfidy. Politics, culture and self-interest have rarely been more judiciously used to spice such a rich literary stew.

For all of Mr. Ghosh's imaginative and reconstructive talents, however, River of Smoke is severely hindered by a shocking absence of plot. At the best of times, the author's novels have a tendency to meander, a complaint readily forgiven when, as with Sea of Poppies, their conclusions are so rewarding. Here, though, Mr. Ghosh doubles down on this less-than-pleasant trait while failing to deliver anything like the conclusive punch that made River of Smoke's progenitor so memorable. This is, without doubt, a novel to delight the senses, a stimulating revivification of a world now lost to us. But this virtue, along with the author's nuanced critique of amoral capitalism, is not enough to rescue it from a disturbing absence of story.

Mr. Ghosh has few peers when it comes to quality, cinematic fiction. Unfortunately, his storyteller's instincts are, here, not equal to his imagination. (3/5 Stars)

Far to Go by Alison Pick

From The Week of January 30, 2012

Though, as a world, we've come some way to restricting state power, it remains a potent force that can easily become pernicious when it is not checked by robust opposition. For with a few, clever manipulations, the state can tap into its people's worst fears, stoke them, inflame them, and then harness and shape the resulting anger into a blowtorch of violence and destruction, a righteous weapon that can be deployed against anyone foolish enough to stand in its way. Not only has this curse of nationalism been extensively discussed in countless works, its results are still visible in the ghost-filled battlefields of western Europe where two such bloody, propagandist wars were fought just in the last hundred years. Less visible, though, are the individual wounds inflicted by such conflicts, the costs, to families and their offspring, that are born in silent misery. It is to these small-scale pains to which we turn in Far to Go, the suffering of a single family who stand in for so many. It is a matter on which Ms. Pick speaks with passion and clarity.

The year is 1939 and, though Neville Chamberlain believes he has bargained with Hitler for "peace in our time," he has, in reality, purchased a few months of quiet at the cost of millions of souls. For in exchange for this brief respite, England has agreed to look the other way while Nazi Germany gobbles up Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland, territories it considers German by dint of the ethnically German populations who live there. Though this is notionally true of at least a portion of the population, these territories consider themselves free actors, imbued with their own traditions and councils, cultures and notions. They are proud to be who and what they are. The prospect of being annexed by a fascist Germany, and having all that they know overturned, is as terrifying as it is inevitable.

Pavel Bauer is a proud Czechoslovakian who, until the coming of the Nazis, never thought much about his Jewish heritage. He filled his days with family and the operation of his successful factory which earned him a comfortable, quiet existence. But as the Third Reich descends upon him and his country, Pavel, for all his wisdom, spirit and kindness, is no more able to defend himself than his country. Abandoned by France and England, Pavel and his country are forced into a succession of humiliating retreats: armies absorbed, factories repurposed, Jews disenfranchised. Eventually, faced with betrayal on all sides, Pavel flees to Prague, attempting to plan an escape for his young family, but doom seems to stalk his every step and not even the love of a good woman can keep the Damoclesian sword from descending upon him and the country he loves so much.

Longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, Far to Go is a stunning novel. Told from the perspective of the Bauer's tender-hearted nanny, it is an exquisitely detailed reconstruction of everyday life in the midst of apocalyptic disaster. For the Bauers are witnessing nothing less than the end of everything they know. Though Ms. Pick succeeds in vividly reconstructing Czechoslovakia during World War II, crafting a cast of believable characters and embedding them in the midst of that nation's tragic circumstances, her genius truly shines in the extent to which she details the individual efforts of the Bauers to fend off the darkness. Holding onto his pride and his decency, Pavel tries to be stoic in the face of Nazi degradations, to endure their fists, their words and their deeds with silent courage that gets him nowhere. Meanwhile, his far more pragmatic wife, Anneliese, while fragile and emotionally remote, yields to the inevitable and tries to bargain with it in hopes of earning leniency. Together, they are the portrait of a marriage in war.

But as much as this is Pavel's story, Marta, the tale's narrator and the nanny to the Bauer's young son, is Ms. Pick's greatest success. Having never known her mother, and having been forced to bear the unwelcome attentions of her father, she is a damaged but lovely creature in a constant but silent search for love. Her life experiences tell her that she is too dirty to be the object of such pure emotion, to be the center of someone else's world, and so she is plagued by doubts that manifest in bouts of destructive self-sabotage. Nonetheless, she tries and in this we are witness to an achingly delicate girl trying to become a loved woman in one of our world's ugliest times. She is as exquisite in her sadness as she is beautiful in her gentle bravery.

Ms. Pick has a painter's eye for detail and a poet's emotional gravitas. Together, they have produced a novel as powerful as it is quiet. Rarely has war's devastation been writ small so well. (5/5 Stars)

The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness

From The Week of January 09, 2011

Though many, if not most, attempts to socially engineer a better world have failed, often disastrously, it is difficult, even with the benefit of hindsight, to condemn them. Popular movements are animated by the grievances of the masses who, when ignored, churn and boil until they finally explode in righteous revolution. No matter how bloody the revolt, nor corrupt the regime implemented in its wake, we cannot fault the people for seizing back the power so long denied them. However, if we cannot condemn them for the attempt, we can condemn them for the result, for not recognizing when their experiments have failed. We can condemn them for holding onto power with the same, sad desperation of those they once overthrew, believing so fervently in their dogmas that they cannot admit defeat. This is the potent lesson that underpins Mr. McGuinness' quiet, icy novel.

The year is 1989. Bucharest, once Romania's gleaming jewel, is a befouled and broken city, a sea of concrete seemingly in constant, pointless flux. Far from the worker's paradise promised by Communism, this shattered place with its barren supermarkets, its police checkpoints, and its mandatory rallies, is the personal plaything of Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania's bloody and brutal dictator. Though he claims to rule at the behest of the people, Ceausescu is little more than an aging tyrant, a man driven to libidinousness and madness by years of ugly, dictatorial deeds. For all of this, he is still dangerous, moreso now that his greatest ally, the Soviet Union is disintegrating before the eyes of the world. For unlike his fellow Communist dictators who are acceding to Western reforms, he will fight to the bitter end, confident in the misguided belief that his people love and worship him.

Into this painful and existential morass sinks a young man from Britain. The story's narrator, he describes how the sad dissolution of his family precipitated his going abroad. Working at a university in Bucharest, he quickly falls in with the great city's anarchists and revolutionaries, looking on laconically while, in their own ways, they try to preserve what they can of the past while agitating for the revolution of tomorrow, for a time when, no longer able to sustain itself, Ceausescu's decrepit regime collapses under the weight of its own shameless lies. Though the narrator imagines himself to be at the heart of an earnest if smalltime conspiracy, he soon discovers that matters are not as they seem and that, in a security state, where informers outnumber the honest by ten to one, nothing is ever achieved without the notice or the consent of powerful, corrupted interests.

Long listed for the 2011 Man Booker, Mr. McGuinness' sharp and insightful examination of the death throws of the Romanian dictatorship is as cold and surgical as a scalpel. The unnamed narrator, beset by his own troubled childhood, expresses little in the way of emotion as he endures the daily grind of living and working in one of the world's last Communist strongholds. As he watches everyone around him fight, bargain, scheme and conform in hopes of advancing their own ends, he's the perfect, opinionless lens through which the reader can view and experience life at the end of a failed experiment. For make no mistake; the Ceausescu regime, in the winter of 1989, is a dying animal, a creature in desperate need of being put out of its misery, a demon that, nonetheless, continues to fight on and cling to power because this is all that it knows.

The Last Hundred Days rewards the reader with plots and counter plots, with keen observations and thinly veiled criticism. But for as ably as Mr. McGuinness captures the feel of 1989, his metaphors are his most effective weapons here. As he recounts the various ways in which humans try futilely to escape a machine that refuses to release them, the deathly cold of winter hangs over everything; the universal freeze of entropy to which all must inevitably decay. It's powerful work that more than compensates for the quiet isolationism of its narrator, a man who seems only halfway present in the story of his own, muted life.

A grim tale of end times and how, inevitably, they are nothing more than the beginning of the next chapter of the same, tired story. (3/5 Stars)