EMPIRE FALLS, by Richard Russo

Empire Falls is an engaging book about the decline of the American Dream in a small town in Maine. It won the 2002 Pulizer Prize for fiction, perhaps partially because of the theme. The writing is solid, but not amazingly good. There is a soap opera-like feel to the book, probably because of the very small cast of characters set in a tiny town...sort of a Peyton Place environment, only post-industrial. The social stratification there has historic roots, back to the boom days of the early 20th Century, but everything has been going downhill for decades. Despite the dark theme, the atmosphere of the book is not all that dark - it even has humorous elements. The narrow plot line revolves around one Miles Roby, manager of the Empire Grill, an old diner owned by the town's de facto matriarch, Ms. Whiting. Miles is in the midst of a divorce he does not want, which affects his relationship with his precious daughter Tick as well as his disabled brother David and deadbeat dad Max. Mom is long dead, but haunts the story considerably.  It's a story worth reading.

For a review of the book from NY TImes, click here:  http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/06/24/reviews/010624.24scottt.html

Empire Falls was made into a 2-part miniseries and played on HBO in 2005. Paul Newman played Max. For a review of that production, click here:  http://www.wordandfilm.com/2013/01/from-the-vault-empire-falls-by-richard-russo-starring-ed-harris-paul-newman-and-helen-hunt/

MIDDLE C - by William H. Gass

Middle C, published in 2013, is a hugely entertaining book by a writer I greatly admire for his verbal dexterity and broad, ironic humor. The novel is a sort of bio-piece about a family,  that starts out shortly before WWII in Austria and fakes Jewish ethnicity in order to be able to migrate to England. The father of the family continues his shape shifting and eventually disappears, supposedly to America, after the war. The mother and son follow sometime thereafter, although with no contact from the disappeared father, ending up in small-town Ohio. The story centers on the life of the son, Joey Skizzen, whose childhood and adolescence we trace, and who eventually becomes a professor of music by means of his own version of his father's reinvention strategy. He also ends up to be a great pessimist and, well, fake. The story is told with wonderful humor and vividly inventive language that often had me laughing out loud. Gass is an extremely gifted and meticulous writer, with a great verbal fluency and a wonderful gift for producing the perfect turn of phrase.

For a review of the book by The Telegraph, click here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/10146231/Middle-C-by-William-H-Gass-review.html

 

THE WATERWORKS, by E. L. Doctorow

The Waterworks is a strong effort in a genre familiar to readers of Doctorow. Set in New York, in the post-Civil War era of "robber barrons", the story is a thriller that leads readers through the piecing together of a bizarre set of circumstances surrounding the disappearance of a freelance jounalist and the mysterious "resurrrection"  of a dead captain of industry. The story is almost Hawthorne-like in its gothic qualities and in the narrator's language style; "The Birthmark" comes to mind as sharing the theme. The two most interesting aspects of the novel are the narration and the setting. The story is narrated as a retrospective tale told by a retired, hard-edged New York journalist with an interesting personality including a believable set of flaws. The 1870s New York setting is  vividly portrayed, but it is not a pretty sight. The reader has the feeling that the city, and particularly, the era,  is a major character in the story. For those who like Doctorow's style of historical fiction, done so beautifully in novels such as World's Fair, Loon Lake or Ragtime, Waterworks will not disappoint.

For a review of the book by  NY Times, click here: http://www.symbaloo.com/?sethomepage=1&t=1372381700562#

THE LATE BOURGEOIS WORLD, by Nadine Gordimer

Stumbling upon a Nobel Prize-winning author for the first time is always interesting. I found Nadine Gordimer's short novel The Late Bourgeois World , written in 1966, to be a good book. It's very spare  yet nicely narrated with a strong sense of character, particularly the narrator. The mid-1960s world of Gordimer's South Africa, seen through the eyes of a sympathetic liberal white woman is very vividly portrayed. And it's got to have one of the all-time great titles of any book anywhere. Gordimer's an author worth reading, and had a story worth telling. I appreciated the open-endedness of the book, and her restraint as a writer to not wrap-up the story too neatly. The strategy fits the theme perfectly.

For a review of the book from NY Times, click here: http://www.nytimes.com/1966/09/11/books/gordimer-bourg.html?_r=0      

SILENT HOUSE, by Orhan Pamuk

Being a great fan of the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature, I was excited to see a "new" book by him that I hadn't yet read. The book, Silent House, was written in 1983, which makes it his second novel. It was only recently translated and published in English this year. The book is a good one - themed as a portrait of a nation on the verge of the particular social collapse that led to the 1980 military coup. As in his beautiful novel Snow, the political situation is filtered through the experiences of "ordinary" people. In the case of Silent House, though, "ordinary" is a relative term. The book has a distinctly claustrophopic or even gothic atmosphere, suggested by the title. The case of characters is a grandmother, her dwarf servant, middle class members of her family visiting from Istanbul, and a young, disaffected family acquaintance who falls in with 'nationalists" and inpacts the family in a serious way. There are plenty of skeletons in the closets.The story is told via multiple narration by the main characters and consequently meanders widely across history and psyches.   It's a strong novel, and an interesting insight into the historical period and early Pamuk for his many fans.

For a review of the book from NY Times, click here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/books/review/silent-house-by-orhan-pamuk.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

NEUROMANCER, by William Gibson

Neuromancer is the amazingly forward-thinking scifi novel written in 1984 in which Gibson coined the term "cyberspace". The story, set in an indeterminant, dystopian Japan (and other venues, including an outerspace "location"),  traces a kind of "cyber-cowboy" named Case as he embarks on a mission to breach a kind of digital "matrix". It's a very interesting experiment in putting into words the abstract construct (at the time) of going online into cyberspace. The characters of Case, his two women Molly & Linda, and an assortment of other strange characters, some human, some "constructs" and some of indeterminate form are not well rounded in general . The novel reads like an extended hallucination and is somehow compelling despite its very loose structure and plot. If anything, it is a visionary piece of writing that unwittingly invented the "cyberpunk" genre and catapulted us into the cyber age at a time when we were banging on word processors with 16K of memory and using dot matrix printers.

For a review of the book from NY Times, click here: http://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/08/books/they-ll-always-have-tokyo.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

 

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

Having read a couple of other books by Murakami that I liked  (The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. and After Dark) I had expectations that this well-known novel would be interesting. I was rather disappointed as it proved to be long (not necessarily a problem in itself) and boring. The novel uses twin narratives to follow the two main characters, Aomame (a  young fitness trainer/assassin) and Tengo Kanawa (drop-out math genius who teaches in a cram school). There is a link between the two, of course, which is revealed half way through the book. The plot, such as it is, revolves around Tengo ghost-writing a book called Air Chysalis, which relates to a kind of parallel universe (not exactly parallel, but something like that). Both protagonists find themselves drawn into this universe. Well, nothing much happens after that...  I have  a high tolerance for books that are not plot driven and that have confusing elements, but this just goes nowhere, and takes a long time to do so.


For a review of the book from the NY Times, click here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/books/1q84-by-haruki-murakami-review.html?_r=0