20 may '97
The Weight of Water, a novel by Anita Shreve
Tuned to the same frequency established by
A.S. Byatt's Possession and Tom Stoppard's
Arcadia, Anita Shreve's latest novel tells a
nineteenth-century tale of love and murder. Intertwined with
this story is one of a present-day attempt to reconstruct,
to capture, the story from the past. Resonances between the
two narratives show themselves gradually, like something
from deep in the ocean brought up to the surface. We read
matching stories of multiple infidelities, crimes of
passion, and death.
"No one can know a story's precise reality," says
modern-times narrator Jean, and neither of Shreve's
narrators tell all that they do know. As Jean switches
between her own story and her reading of the official
account of the 1873 crimes, the cuts are razor-sharp,
creating a delicious tension. Between Jean's chapters are
passages from Maren's eyewitness account of the past events.
If some of the passages dealing with courtroom testimony
seem lifeless and dull, perhaps it's because this version of
events is farthest from the truth.
Shreve does well with narrative detail: a Mr. Hjorth,
part of Maren's journal, is introduced, crosses the
Atlantic, and dies of dysentery within the span of one
subordinate clause.
This is a fine, well-paced novel of "pleasure and death
and rage and tenderness, all intermingled."
9 may '97
How Late It Was How Late, a novel by James Kelman
The arrival of James Kelman's celebrated
novel in this country was preceded by its reputation as a
foul-mouthed, impenetrable exercise in Scottish dialect. No
question, it is not an easy book to understand, or to like.
Dialogue pops up almost without warning, and certainly
without a hint of punctuation; the narrative slips from
third to second person, often within the course of a
paragraph. And then there is the vocabulary.
But these devices serve the ends of the book, the
portrayal of a down-and-out, the pettiest of petty outlaws,
one Sammy. He is not without his endearing traits, including
his taste for American country music. Like most of us, Sammy
has a bad attitude about bureaucrats of all sorts -- it just
that he finds himself after these encounters bleeding on the
pavement. From the profoundest depths, he speaks in
universal rhythms that reveal the poetry of despair:
Ye wake in a corner and stay there hoping yer
body will disappear, the thoughts smothering ye; but ye want
to remember and face up to things, just something keeps ye
from doing it, why can ye no do it; the words filling yer
head: then the other words.... He shivered and hunched up
his shoulders, shut his eyes, rubbed into the corners with
his fingertips; seeing all kinds of spots and lights.
Equal parts Bright Lights, Big City and Waiting
for Godot, this rewarding novel is worth the struggle
that it is to read.
4 may '97
Some Instructions to My Wife, a novel by Stanley
Crawford
The nameless narrator of Stanley Crawford's
book has something in common with today's survivalists of
Ruby Ridge and the Republic of Texas. Isolated in his
hillside homestead, growing most of his own food, he would
create the perfect family -- Husband, Wife, Son, and
Daughter. Not at all a conventional narrative, Some
Instructions... is his guidebook to the good life.
And what a regimented, joyless life it is. Attached to
the back of every cupboard door is a list of the cupboard's
contents. For his daughter, still a toddler, he has prepared
a toy washing machine for doll clothes. The warmth that he
must have felt for his wife, at least once, breaks through
in shadowy asides and subordinate clauses.
Crawford himself is a grower (read his nonfiction A
Garlic Testament) and his narrator shows the farmer's
wisdom in the chapter "Waiting."
But his narrator is pathetically trapped in his own
control fantasy. By giving his son a bicycle and toy cars,
he somehow expects the boy to extrapolate to driving the
real thing. In his ridiculous fight to protect his children
from all harm, he reveals the helplessness that every parent
feels.
The joke of this book may wear a little thin, after a
while. But it is a fascinating look at certain ideas carried
to their logical conclusion and beyond: home schooling,
living in harmony with the land, "family values." This is an
interesting, scary, and peculiar book.
14 april '97
The Beach, a novel by Alex Garland
Alex Garland's slacker thriller is a new
entry into the utopian canon.
Backpacking narrator Richard is on a vague search for the
last untouristed bit of the world. He sets off for a hidden,
nameless island in the Gulf of Thailand with two casual
acquaintances and a shadowy sidekick; he finds a tropical
Eden, peopled by a collaborative international tribe of
neo-hippies. But even his first meeting with the settlers
sounds a sinister note, and things will only get worse, at
their own hallucinatory, harrowing pace.
Been-there, done-that Richard has a descriptive gift as
sharp as South Asian spices. Here, he is watching a boy
swimming in a filthy Bangkok canal:
When the kid surfaced, he looked at me again,
treading water. The motion of his arms cleared a circle in
the floating litter. Shredded polystyrene that, for a
moment, looked like soapsuds.
Did Richard bring the spores of Eden's destruction with
him? This is one of the questions left to the reader in this
exciting, well-crafted debut.
30 mar '97
Medieval in LA, by Jim Paul
Jim Paul's glimpses of life in Southern
California, seen through a prism of 2000 years of Western
thought, are often rewarding. Paul combines sketches of the
life and work of philosophers like Bishop Berkeley, musings
on contemporaries like the composer John Cage, and
fictionalized portraits of his own friends and
acquaintances. His prose makes the dusty theologians of
history come alive.
Some good moments are to be found, like the story of his
friend Lloyd, a artist. Paul finds a worn-out turkey baster
in Lloyd's studio. Lloyd had saved it "without fully knowing
why. This was his prerogative as an artist and actually the
source and soul of art, this ability to allow an impulse to
exist and manifest itself in objects without requiring of
them a conscious reason or an excuse, only responding to a
personal feeling of rightness, of connection -- pure
particularity, insisted upon, observed, apprehended."
Likewise the story of Bertolt Brecht's work in Hollywood
on a production of his own Galileo, followed by a
summons to appear before the House Committee on Un-American
Activities, is a well-selected example of the odd
coincidences that pass for commonplace in LA. But anecdotes
about the film career of Jessica Lange seem pointless.
In the end, the pieces don't add up to much that's
insightful. The narrative's triggering incident turns out to
have little effect on events, after all. But you may find
the book to be an engaging read on your next flight to the
coast.
15 mar '97
I Was Amelia Earhart, a novel by Jane Mendelsohn
Jane Mendelsohn's first novel neither
warrants the high praise given by other reviewers, nor is it
without merit. This admittedly brief book is a series of
moods and impressions that wash over one another, like waves
on the island beach where Earhart is stranded. This is not a
story for those of the action-picture mentality.
Mendelsohn writes compact prose in winningly direct
images: "In the Electra the light is blue. There's a smell
of gasoline." But elsewhere, an effective metaphor in the
opening pages reappears so often that it loses its power.
There just isn't enough material here. Pages given over
to epigraphs (Woolf, Defoe, and Bronte) and acknowledgements
are too much like padding. In the end, this is an
undemanding fantasy that will please many readers.
13 mar '97
The Error of Our Ways, a novel by David Carkeet
Two unexpectedly endearing men act and react
in David Carkeet's entertaining comic novel. Smug,
successful businessman Ben is alternately baffled by and
devoted to his daughters. Childless, hapless, and generally
clueless Jeremy is an unemployed linguist, vaguely attached
to the university where his wife teaches. Forced to endure
one another at their first meeting, Ben and Jeremy find they
can't avoid stumbling over one another in the course of the
book's events.
Carkeet's accomplishment is the clear depiction of each
of Ben's children (or, as his vanity plates would have it,
his "4 GIRLZ"). Toddler Molly, with perfect comic timing,
nearly steals the show. If the adult women in this book are
a bit underdeveloped, at least Ben's secretary, with a
newly-found interest in bad knock-knock jokes, is a doozy.
Hilarious set pieces include Ben's midnight chase through
suburban St. Louis of his hellion middle-schooler Pam, all
the while negotiating via cell phone with a South Asian
supplier with a taste for the Kama Sutra.
This engaging book comes to a fitting, unpredictable, and
somewhat downbeat conclusion.
Reviews on this page were originally posted on
Amazon.com.
the chorister's c ||| pedantic nuthatch
©1997
David L. Gorsline.
All rights reserved.
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