“Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them and believed them to be trustworthy. I’d hide myself away inside them, setting two mirrors up to face each other so that when I stood between them I was infinitely reflected in either direction. Many, many me’s. When I stood on tiptoe, we all stood on tiptoe, trying to see the first of us, and the last. The effect was dizzying, a vast pulse, not quite alive, more like the working of an automaton. I felt the reflection at my shoulder like a touch. I was on the most familiar terms with her, same as any other junior dope too lonely to be selective about the company she keeps.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 10, 2014)

“Nobody ever warned me about mirrors so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy.” So begins the dazzingly imaginative and enigmatically-named new novel from Helen Oyeyemi.

But what happens when mirrors are not trustworthy? When Boy is really a girl? When a beautiful pale-skinned youngster actually shares the bloodline of the blackest of black individuals? When beauty is not truth and when truth is not beauty? When a mother or a grandmother is not a safe haven but something else entirely?

Helen Oyeyemi explores questions like these in her own imitable way, mixing a dose of fantasy with a dollop of reality. Her writing gifts, carefully honed in her startlingly good prior novel, Mr. Fox, are on display again here as she merges the real with the fantastical to create a canvas all her own.

The book’s curious title is a compilation of the names of three unique women: Boy, who escapes from her abusive rat-catcher father to settle in a New England town called Flax Hill; her strikingly attractive and widely treasured stepdaughter Snow; and the daughter she conceives with Snow’s father Arturo, named Bird. As the publicist’s blurb on this book reveals, Bird is “colored” since Arturo and his family have long passed for white.

The observant reader can pick up the threads of the Snow White fairy tale: the “evil” stepmother (who is perhaps more protective than evil), the removal of Snow White from the scene and particularly the “Mirror Mirror on the Wall, Who’s The Fairest of Them All” query.

Who, indeed, is the fairest? Helen Oyeyemi writes, “”It’s not whiteness that sets Them against Us, but the worship of whiteness. Same goes if you swap whiteness out for other things—fancy possessions for sure, pedigree, maybe youth too…” Or, to put another way, nothing – not race, gender, or beauty – is valuable onto itself; it is we who place the value on these attributes.

Ms. Oyeyemi sometimes overplays her hand. The narrative (told by Boy in the first and third sections and by her daughter Bird in the second section) loses a bit of steam when Bird takes over. The metaphors on race become too concrete as the author tackles the unfortunate devaluing of persons based on shade of pigment; the writing is far more effective when the reader draws his/her necessary conclusions on the tyranny of the mirror rather than being lead there.

Still, Boy, Snow, Bird is so freshly-conceived – with writing that often leverages our mythic beliefs in fairy tales and soars into our subconscious – that it still manages to beguile. Ms. Oyeyemi is comfortable shattering many of our perceptions about race, gender, appearance, and family and does a masterful job of forcing us to confront our own mirror and ask, “Is the person reflected in the mirror a true representation about who I really am?”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 15 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (March 6, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Helen Oyemi
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Icarus Girl

Bibliography:

• The Icarus Girl (2005)
• The Opposite House (2007)
• White is for Witching (2009)
• Mr. Fox (2011)
• Boy, Snow, Bird (March 2014)

“The story of Oda Sotatsu begins with a confession that he signed.

He had fallen in with a man named Kakuzo and a girl named Jito Joo. These were somewhat wild characters, particularly Sato Kakuzo. He was in trouble, or had been. People knew it.

Now this is what happened: somehow Kakuzo met Oda Sotatsu, and somehow he convinced him to sign a confession for a crime that he had not committed.

That he should sign a confession for a crime that he did not commit is strange. It is hard to believe. Yet, he did in fact sign it. When I learned of these events, and when I researched them, I found that there was a reason he did so, and that reason is—he was compelled to by a wager.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (JAN 22, 2014)

I have never quite read anything like Silence Once Begun. It’s disturbing, lyrical, original, provocative, and experimental in the best of ways. Yet it stands on the shoulders of giants that came before it: Sartre comes to mind, as does Camus.

The premise is instantly (pardon the pun) arresting. A thread salesman named Oda Sotatsu signs a confession for a crime that has baffled the Japanese authorities – eight older individuals disappear without a trace in what becomes known as the Narito Disappearances. Yet once jailed, he utters barely a word….even though we, the readers, know he is not guilty from the first pages.

A man who refers to himself as the Interviewer – named Jesse Ball – meets with Sotatsu’s parents, brother and sister, jailers, and a woman perceived as a love interest. Written in the conceit of notes drawn from interviews via tape-device, the story takes on an immediacy and fascination – particularly as we realize that the character Jesse Ball is in search of existential answers in his own life.

“One can’t say how one behaved or why, really. Such situations, they are far more complex than any either/or proposition. It is simplistic to produce events in pairs and lean them against each other like cards.”

And so it is here. Each person whom Jesse Ball encounters provides a credible part of the puzzle, yet each urges him not to trust anyone else. From one character: “You have to be very careful whom you trust. Everyone has a version, and most of them are wrong.” Who is telling the truth and who is lying – and in the grand scheme of things, does it even matter? As Sotatsu’s brother says about their father: “He said I had a liar’s respect for the truth, which is too much respect.”

The author Jesse Ball (through the character of Jesse Ball) raises the most elemental and universal issues. Among them: it is impossible to see things while we’re still searching; we can only find things by seeing what is there. Reason alone is not the answer; we go to absurd lengths to prove ourselves reasonable.

Interwoven with fables and poetic language (it is no surprise that Jesse Ball has published several works of verse), this story is also grounded strongly in reality. For literary readers, this book is sheer genius and has put Jesse Ball firmly on my radar for his past and future books.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 11 readers
PUBLISHER:	Pantheon (January 28, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Jesse Ball
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Way Through Doors

Bibliography:

• Samedi The Deafness (2007)
• The Way Through Doors (2009)
• The Curfew (2011)
• Silence One Begun (January 2014)

“Two twists of smoke at a time of year too warm for cottage fires surprise us at first light, or they at least surprise those of us who’ve not been up to mischief in the dark. Our land is topped and tailed with flames. Beyond the frontier ditches of our fields and in the shelter of our woods, on common ground, where yesterday there wasn’t anyone who could give rise to smoke, some newcomers, by the lustre of an obliging reapers’ moon, have put up their hut -four rough and ready walls, a bit of roof- and lit the more outlying of these fires. Their fire is damp. They will have thrown on wet greenery in order to procure the blackest plume, and thereby not be missed by us. It rises in a column that hardly bends or thins until it clears the canopies. It says, New neighbours have arrived; they’ve built a place; they’ve laid a hearth; they know the custom and the law. This first smoke has given them the right to stay. We’ll see.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (JAN 15, 2014)

Jim Crace’s Harvest reads like a simple moral fable of a tiny and remote medieval English village, destroyed externally and internally by the conversion of farms into sheep pastures, but wait! There is far more to it than meets the eye.

Mr. Crace is particularly interested in pairings: everything comes in twos, right from the opening pages.. Two signals of smoke rise up: one signaling the arrival of new neighbors who are announcing their right to stay; the second, a blaze that indicates the master Kent’s dovecote is gone and his doves taken.

Both subplots radiate from these two twinned smoke signals. The stories, narrated by Walter – the manservant of Kent who was paired with him from the start by sharing the same milk – is both an insider and an outsider (yet another pairing). He is not of the village although he has become part of it.

Yet the kind Kent is soon paired with someone else: his pragmatic and heartless cousin, who has come to declare his right to the farm. He has plans for the peaceful agrarian village: “this village, far from everywhere, which has always been a place for horn, corn and trotter and little else, is destined to become a provisioner of wool.” The cousin arrives at a particularly fortuitous time: despite evidence to the contrary, the town has wrongly blamed and pillored the outsiders, an older and younger man, and has placed them in gruesome confinement. The woman who was with them has had her head shorn – much like the sheep to come – and is now in hiding, ready for revenge.

Mr. Crace writes like a dream. His prose is rich and rhapsodic. One example:

“The glinting spider’s thread will turn in a little while to glinting frost. It’s time for you to fill your pieces with fruit, because quite soon the winds will strip the livings from the trees and the thunder through the orchards to give the plums and apples there a rough and ready pruning, and you will have to wait indoors throughout the season of suspense while the weather roars and bends inside. “

Pure poetry.

And he pairs THAT – the beauty of his prose – with some substantial themes that resonate for today’s times our close-minded distrust and demonization of outsiders. Our disregard for the true “tillers of the land” in the pursuit of the almighty profit motivation. Our fall from innocence into mistrust and exile. A munificent harvest that reaps nothing but dollars.

“The plowing’s done. The seed is spread. The weather is reminding me that rain or shine, the earth abides, the land endures, the soil will persevere forever and a day. Its seed is pungent and high-seasoned. This is happiness,” Walter reflects. Magnificently evoked, unsettling, and at times painful to read as the village life implodes, Harvest is yet another testimony to Mr. Crace’s vast talents. For me, it is an undeniable 5-star novel.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 77 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage (September 20, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jim Crace
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Pesthouse

Bibliography:

• Continent (1986) 
• Gift of Stones (1988)
• Arcadia (1992)
• Signals of Distress (1994)
• Quarantine (1997)  /
• Being Dead (1999)
• The Devil’s Larder (2001)
• Genesis (2003) (published as Six in UK)
• The Pesthouse (2007)
• All that Follows (2010)
• Harvest (February 2013)

“Only a madman unaware of what he was doing would admit to being directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds and thousands of people and then behave as if nothing had happened.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (OCT 4, 2011)

Saramago’s last, indeed posthumous, book is a real treat. Brief, inventive, funny, it furthers the author’s well-known distaste for religious dogma by traversing many of the familiar stories of the Old Testament by means of a fanciful parable told from a rational point of view. Much like The Elephant’s Journey, it shows Saramago’s stylistic fingerprints in relaxed form. There are still the run-on sentences, but they are the product of irrepressible exuberance rather than philosophic density. There is a lot more dialogue than usual, but, liberated by the author’s minimal punctuation, it propels the page forward rather than breaking it up. And his avoidance of capitals (except to start sentences and dialogue) has the familiar effect of demystifying his various beings — most especially god — making them earn respect rather than being granted it automatically. He treats the lord as an omnipotent but rather amateur bungler, forever tinkering with his unsatisfactory creation, as here with Noah’s ark:

“God was not there for the launch. He was busy examining the planet’s hydraulic system, checking the state of the valves, tightening the odd loose screw that was dripping where it shouldn’t, testing the various local distribution networks, keeping an eye on the manometers, as well as dealing with tens of myriads of other tasks, large and small, each of them more important than the last, and which only he, as creator, engineer and administrator of the universal mechanisms, was in a position to carry out and to which only he could give the sacred ok.”

Saramago’s most audacious stroke is to choose the outcast murderer Cain as his protagonist. He has him argue successfully that at least half the blame for Abel’s murder should be shouldered by god (let’s stick with lowercase) for his unreasonable provocation. Condemned to wander the earth as a kind of compromise, Cain finds the rest of the Middle East quite adequately populated already; it appears that the Garden of Eden was not the beginning of anything, simply god’s private experiment. Other than an extended amorous interlude with the capricious Queen Lilith, Cain will jump around in the Bible story, turning up at most of the key events of Genesis, and several from other books of the Old Testament also. Sometimes he gets there only in the nick of time, as when the official angel arrives too late to prevent the sacrifice of Isaac, and Cain himself has to intervene.

The middle sections of the book are rather episodic, and I was not entirely convinced by Saramago’s choice of just these episodes in just that order. But it gradually becomes clear that Cain’s role is to be a witness, and — murderer though he is — a moral conscience that Saramago’s god himself lacks. The chosen stories focus on god’s capriciousness, apparent unconcern for human life, and willingness to accept any amount of collateral damage in pursuit of his goals. Cain cannot understand how the killing of one’s son can be a worthwhile test of anything; would god be willing to sacrifice his own son? (Well, yes.) How can god think that giving Job another set of sons and daughters can replace the ones he has arbitrarily destroyed, as though family, like wealth, were a fungible commodity? Cain is haunted by the cries of the innocent children slaughtered along with their Sodomite parents. He leaves Joshua’s army in horror at the massacre of combatants and non-combatants alike, and the capture of virgins for other purposes. Finally, having been brought onto the ark by Noah, he takes matters into his own hands directly, standing up to god once more face-to-face.

So a fun book with a serious message. From any other writer, it would be a wonder; from Saramago, though, little more than a jeu d’esprit. Compared to his rewriting of the New Testament in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, a complex book which proves by no means hostile to religion even while denouncing the official manifestations of it, this seems little more than a whimsical after-dinner entertainment. But I would have happily gone to dinner with Saramago any time, and listened to his stories for as long as he cared to tell them. (Translated by Margaret Jull Costa.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 25 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; None edition (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on José Saramago
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Elephant’s Journey The Double The Cave

Bibliography:

• Baltasar and Blimunda (1982, translated 1987)
• The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1991)
• The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1993)
• Manual of Painting and Calligraphy: A Novel (1994)
• The Stone Raft (1994)
• The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1996)
• Blindness (1997)
• The Tale of the Unknown Island (1999)
• All the Names (2000)
• The Cave (2002)
• The Double (2004)
• Seeing (2006)
• Death with Interuptions (2008)
• The Elephant’s Journey (2010)
• Cain (2009; 2011)
• Manual of Painting and Calligraphy (2012)
• Raised from the Ground (2012)

Other:

• A Journey to Portugal (2001)

“…what mattered very much to Richard was what an imaginary dwarf would encounter once he hefted a virtual pick and began to delve into the side of a mountain. In a conventional video game, the answer was literally nothing. The mountain was just a surface, thinner than paper Mache, with no interior. But in Pluto’s world, the first bite of the shovel would reveal underlying soil, and the composition of that soil would reflect its provenance in the seasonal growth and decay of vegetation and the saecular erosion of whatever was uphill of it, and once the dwarf dug through the soil he would find bedrock, and the bedrock would be of a particular mineral composition. It would be sedimentary or igneous or metamorphic, and if the dwarf were lucky it might contain usable quantities of gold or silver or iron ore.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (SEP 30, 2011)

Neal Stephenson’s ReaMde, a play on words for the ReadMe file that accompanies many computer programs, is above all a wild adventure/detective story set in the present day. As one would expect from this author, current technology features prominently. The cast of characters is international, offering windows into such diverse types as Russian gangsters, Chinese hackers, American entrepreneurs, Idaho survivalists and second amendment fanatics among many others. A video game, T’Rain, is central to the tale. Most of the characters are addicted to the game; much of the detection is done by playing the game or by mining the data kept by the game. ReaMde as a story is something like a prolonged session of T’Rain. T’Rain is a play on words for terrain.

Reamde is a computer virus that hijacks data by encrypting it so it is unreadable. Victims get a computer message including a file named ReaMde, that they mistakenly read as ReadMe. ReadMe files are text files with important how-to information and are commonly bundled with downloaded computer programs. The victim opens the file, but instead of getting a text message with useful information, they activate the virus. The victim is told that they must pay a ransom in virtual currency within the T’Rain game in order to receive the encryption key that will free their data. The virtual currency is worth a fairly inconsequential sum in real money, something like $75. The action starts as a consequence to Reamde hijacking credit card data that has been sold to Russian gangsters. The gangsters kidnap the seller and his girlfriend, who just happens to be the niece of the founder of T’Rain, the computer game in which the ransom must be paid.

T’Rain is a game played on the Internet with thousands, maybe millions of players at any given time. The game play consists of the interaction of this massive cast of characters in an incredibly detailed world. ReaMde is played out in much the same way with a very large cast of fascinating characters. They include:

Richard Forthrat, billionaire founder of Corporation 9592, the parent company of the computer game, T’Rain, a game distinguished by the incredible richness of its simulation of an entire world, its underlying physics and 4.5 billion year geophysical history;
Zula, his niece, an Eritrean refugee with a specialty doing computer simulations of the geophysics of volcanoes, a skill she is employed to use to enhance the virtual richness of T’Rain; Ivanov, the Russian gangster who purchased the credit card data from Zula’s boyfriend and kidnaps the two to start off the adventure; CIA and M16 operatives, gun nuts, fundamentalists of all stripes from Christian survivalists to Islamic jihadists.

The story flows remarkably smoothly for all its complexity, and is immensely readable. All the ends tie together and the action never flags, just like an addictive video game. This is a great entertainment for anyone in tune with modern computer technology, gaming or just plain interested in a good adventure story. One wonders how an entire world’s physics could be simulated in such a game. The story itself is like the computer game that is itself a part of the story, raising the idea of recursive games within games. How could a game with such virtual complexity be supported? This is the only part of the tale that is science fiction in that even the much simpler complexity of atmospheric or ocean physics is beyond the reach of current technology.

ReaMde is like a video game, and recalls the serialized adventure stories from the pulp era with its intensely interconnected series of adventures and adventurers. The characters are all fascinating. They each embody an adventurer or geek type possessing exceptional luck, physical and/or technical prowess. Each spin of the adventure dial is within the realm of possibility, but there is no sense that this is realism. What we have is great escapist literature with a gaming twist. In short, just about perfect for the geek-gamer audience.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 508 readers
PUBLISHER:	William Morrow (September 20, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Neal Stephenson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Our reviews of: Anathem Quicksilver The Confusion Snow Crash

Bibliography:

• The Big U (1984)
• Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller (1988)
• Snow Crash (1992)
• The Diamond Age (1995)
• Cryptonomicon (1999)
• Anathem (2008)
• Reamde (2011)

The Baroque Cycle

• Quicksilver (2003)
• The Confusion (2004)
• The System of the World (2004)

Non-Fiction

• In the Beginning… Was the Command Line (1999)
• Some Remarks (August 2012)

Written as Stephen Bury (with his uncle J. Fredrick George):

• Interface (1995)
• The Cobweb (1997)
• Artists’ Multiples, 1935-2000 (2002)

“The circus arrives without warning.

No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers.  It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (SEP 13, 2011)

Illusion and reality intersect and overlap to reveal a luminous, mesmerizing character– Le Cirque des Rêves (The Circus of Dreams). As the sun is the center of the solar system, the Circus of Dreams is the central character of this enchanting tale. Like a magnetic field, Le Cirque des Rêves pulls in other characters like orbiting satellites around a bright star. This isn’t your childhood circus–rather, this is more in tune with Lewis Carroll or M.C. Escher–a surreal and hypnotic place of the imagination and spirit.

Le Cirque des Rêves is a dazzling venue of magical intensity and Tarot images, a story of dreams and desires. It is an invention that reflects the Jungian collective unconscious and personifies the archetypes of polarity–night/day, good/evil, life/death, safety/danger, among other symbols and experiences that have repeated themselves since ancient times. The manipulations of these images and forces speak to the core of the story.

At the end of the nineteenth century in London, two self-regarding necromancers arrange a duel, part of an ongoing contest reaching back through their long history. Prospero the Magician and “the man in the grey suit” agree to provide a worthy opponent each for this contest of illusion, a competition that is only partly visible to the reader’s eye. Prospero trains his daughter, Celia; the grey-suited man selects a fitting boy, Marco, from an orphanage. Sealed with a ring in a familiar ritual, the turf war proceeds.

When Marco and Celia become adults, the duel commences within the venue of the atmospheric, aromatic circus, which is open only at night, in colors black and white (and shades of silver). The duel and its setting is showcased in its artistry of conception, the beauty of its containment, and the mystery of its migration. Le Cirque des Rêves travels silently, invisibly, from country to country, unannounced. There’s a tent of stars, a room of sculpted ice, a pool of tears. The fireplace burns eternally with a white-hot blaze. The landscape of the duel’s setting is a phantasmagorical tour de force.

The cast is inseparable from Le Cirque des Rêves. Among others, they include the tattooed contortionist, Tsukiko, the twins, Poppet and Widget, (born on the dawn of the circus’ opening night), and the Tarot reader, Isobel. Marco is a chameleon-like magician and Celia is the Isis of alchemy. They mirror the archetypes of Jung’s collective unconscious–the shadow; the animus/anima; the hero; the mother; sacrifice/rebirth; the Self, and the wise old man.

The tarot readings, like the story’s progression, are dynamic components of character transformation, digging down to the layers of repressed memories and sublime intuition. ??Within this process of transformation, the individual characters of this story must journey through uncharted terrain like portals in the soul, proceeding toward a cosmic relationship with humanity. How to separate reality from illusion and arrive at the totality of the Self? What obstacles and pathologies must be overcome to achieve a kindred consciousness? Likewise, the duelists become lovers, complicating the stakes of the game–if you win, you lose.

A magnificent, spectral clock is commissioned from a renowned German clockmaker, a clock that is mystical and harlequin, dreamlike and figurative. It stands like an emissary at the gates of the circus, a timepiece of magical stratification, an emblem of temporal shifts. No patrons can enter until dusk, and all must be gone by dawn.

In Erin Morganstern’s enchanting first novel, illusion and reality are two sides of the same coin. Inspiration and imagination become tangible territory, a dream circus of the wakened mind, a magical mystery tour of the unconscious. This is a Fool’s (Hero’s) journey, an adventure for the immortal child and enduring lovers, to a star-filled tunnel and a silver sky. Step from bare grass to painted ground, eye the towering tents of black and white stripes. Enter.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1085 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday (September 13, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Erin Morganstern
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers

Bibliography:

• The Night Circus (September 2011)

“I was a young man. Strong. Tight. White. And ready to love.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  AUG 11, 2011)

Crude and hilarious, Ladies’ Man from American author and screenwriter, Richard Price is a week in the life of Kenny Becker, a thirty-year-old college dropout who works as door-to-door salesman selling crappy cheap gadgets. It’s the 1970s, and Kenny lives in New York with his girlfriend, “bank clerk would-be singer” La Donna, a good-looking, marginally talented girl whose big night revolves around a cheesy talent contest at a hole- in-the-wall club called Fantasia. Kenny has a series of failed relationships in his past, and when the book begins, La Donna’s singing lessons, according to Kenny, appear to be placing a strain on the couple. On one hand, Kenny understands he’s supposed to support La Donna, but he also resents the time she is devoting to her singing lessons. Their sex life isn’t as hot and wild as it used to be and with Kenny’s rampant libido largely unsatisfied, he tends to blame the singing lessons for turning La Donna’s head. He sees her night at Fantasia as a potential disaster, but he feels unable to confront his doubts. For one thing, discussing La Donna’s singing is like handling dynamite, and for another, Kenny knows that keeping the peace is the surest way of getting laid:

“I wasn’t going to say dick. I couldn’t. In the beginning we could say anything to each other, but now it was too dangerous; if we started cracking on each other with truths at this point we would inevitably get to the bottom truth, which was that we had no damn right being together anymore, and I for one was scared to death of the alternatives. So I settled for the bullshit low-key rage of two people going through the motions of a relationship, a life; and I couldn’t let her humiliate herself at Fantasia in the name of not rocking the boat even though the boat was capsizing fast, and I would even have the stones to call it being supportive.”

While Kenny, who’s the glib narrator here, argues that he’s trying to protect La Donna from humiliation and a greedy, lying voice coach (a woman he insists on calling Madame Bossanova), it’s clear to the reader that Kenny’s “protectiveness” is rooted in other things. His own insecurities, fears, and possessiveness all play a role in his begrudging, resentful attempts to support La Donna’s Big Night at Fantasia. Kenny is the classic unreliable narrator; we see his world through his eyes, and Kenny, a self-styled ladies’ man, isn’t quite honest about his relationship problems:

“I must have lived with four La Donnas in the last six years and sometimes I thought I was destined to have twice as many in the next six. I seemed to float from one bad, heavy relationship to another, like a trapeze artist swinging from one suspended bar to the next with no net below.”

As Kenny’s week unfolds, the narrative vacillates back and forth between Kenny’s personal and professional life. His mornings begin in a diner with his fellow Bluecastle House salesmen–men who are older than Kenny–older, heavier, and not as handsome, so it’s easy for Kenny to reassure himself that he’s better than them and that the sales job is temporary–just until something better comes along. But Kenny’s at the age when it is becoming harder and harder to kid himself that he’s going somewhere.

Kenny’s relationship with La Donna inevitably implodes, and when he becomes “Kenny Solo,” his desperation grows as he pursues a series of meaningless sexual encounters–each one more degrading than the one before. With a flagging self image, an obsession about his abs, and with his life spiraling out of control, Kenny seeks meaning in his life through sex. While he stalks the neon bars, greasy, sordid whorehouses, and stroke booths of New York, it becomes obvious that Kenny is terrified of being alone, and that his attempts to fill the holes in his life conversely only serve to expose the hollowness of his existence. Author Richard Price establishes one incredibly-staged scene after another–the humiliation of meeting a high school loser who’s now affluent and happy, a late night talk show that draws frantic, lonely losers, the desperation of a singles bar, and the stroke booth where girls hype men into masturbation.

As an unreliable narrator, Kenny is at times the last person to “get it,” and that also means that we aren’t supposed to take his view of life without some skepticism. Kenny may think he’s special, but he’s just as desperate as the guy in the next stroke booth. Here’s Kenny in a singles bar:

“For the next hour I sat at the bar, drinking rum and pretending to watch a basketball game which had orange guys against green guys. People started piling in. I was having a hard time getting rolling so I continued watching the tube. A lot of guys watched the tube, leaning against the bar or the room divider, their drinks tucked under their armpits like footballs. There was no sound on, but we all watched that fucking game with a burning intensity like we were politicos and the screen was flashing election results. I didn’t even know who the hell were playing. My elation was taking a bath. Around me guys swamped girls like pigeons after croutons, blurting out lines so transparent and tacky that even I was offended. No wonder nobody ever got laid. I watched. I listened. I was an observer. A girl nearby, the brittle remains of an almost-melted ice cube floating on top of her half-hour-old drink, listened politely.”

Ladies’ Man is slated to become an American classic. This is a study of one man’s search for meaning and fulfillment through the neon lights of an emotionally barren landscape, and in Kenny’s case, he arrives at his destination with a new uncomfortable knowledge of his weaknesses and his limitations.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 10 readers
PUBLISHER:	Picador; First Edition edition (June 21, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Richard Price
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Lush Life

Bibliography:

• The Wanderers (1974)
• Bloodbrothers (1976)
• Ladies’ Man (1978; June 2011)
• The Breaks (1983)
• Clockers (1992)
• Freedomland (1998)
• Samaritan (2003)
• Lush Life (March 2008)

Movies from books:

• The Wanderers (1979)
• Clockers (1995)

“We’re not the kind of people who take taxicabs.”

Book Review:

Review by Maggie Hill (AUG 3, 2011)

Like a fairy tale, way (way) back in the day when you could still be enchanted, and yet they were happy makes you feel giddy and haunted at the same time. I found myself blinking a lot while reading, as if I couldn’t quite believe what my mind was seeing. Slowly, I realized:  I believe.

This is a novel for lovers – of wonderful writing, of mothers, of stories, of husbands, of the nature of the beast. What’s being traversed, in this fabulous world, is the personal odyssey, the high drama, the biblical quality, of joining with another human being in matrimony. Sure, it happens every day….but the literate, unique mind of the author gives us a peek inside the kaleidoscope of one young couple’s journey like you’ve never heard it before. Ever.

Here is its geography: there are 19 chapters, each with roughly five two-page stories. The journey has floods, fights, failures. There are monsters, mistakes, hauntings. The line-up includes brides, mothers, wives. Far-flung families, regimes, and punishments have to be accounted. And, like the Bible, there will be droughts and apocalypses. So, where is the love?

Love sits in your hand as you hold this book. Every page, every word, all the punctuation pulses with it. If someone asks me what’s and yet they were happy about, I’d tell them it’s about love. Real, true, scary, effed-up love. Here’s fight#2:

“He slams her face into a maple tree until the bark is imprinted on her skin. She becomes a maple tree. He taps her for syrup. She poisons her sap. He falls beside a stream. She becomes the stream. He vomits in the stream. She slaps his face. He feels rejuvenated by the water and goes to punish the tree. She becomes a honeybee and stings him. He yanks her wings off.”

If this isn’t exactly, crazily, what happens when well-married people fight, then I don’t know what’s what. There are four more paragraphs to this fight, each successively straining and morphing and, finally, exhausting the couple toward the last line:

“…Their hearts become strong, and marigolds pile up in the yard.”

I’ve been married a long time; lots of marigolds in our yard. Nice to visualize this past detritus as having nurtured a garden, fertilized by years of living together.

An important point: each of the stories in the novel is two pages long. That means, when you open the book, the two facing pages are the whole story. Depending on the number of words per paragraph, the whole story averages about five or six paragraphs. It’s really incredible how much story, love, and Life can fit into that small of a space.

Helen Phillips is a magician. She invokes fable and reality, a tiptoe through the tulips is followed by woods snaked with monsters. You go into the woods anyway, because the author has cast a spell on you. You will follow her words anywhere. Every word in these stories is chosen, crafted, polished. Every story makes an impact – there is an utterly brilliant and fantastical human universe being miniaturized across two pages, right before your very eyes. Open wide. Allow yourself to be swallowed up.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Leapfrog Press (May 17, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Maggie Hill
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Helen Phillips
EXTRAS:	Huff Post interview with Helen Phillips
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	another uniquely written book: A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Bibliography:

• and yet they were happy (May 2011)

“I squatted immediately as above my head a projectile creased the air and smashed into the opposite wall. An irregular corona of cracks radiated from the impact against the shower tiles, and anchored deep in the center, a pointy barb of a small harpoon. From the direction from whence the projectile had been chucked spewed a fount of the foulest invective. A young woman, hardly more than a girl, swore and cursed like a sailor and stomped her feet in fury. “Whoreson dog, blot, canker! Blast to Hades, I’ve missed.””

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (MAY 31, 2011)

Centuries of June by Keith Donohue is a modern fable revolving around American myths and Hindu concepts of reincarnation. The protagonist is a man who awakens to find himself with a hole in the back of his head and no idea of who he is or who the eight nude women sleeping in his bed might be. An elderly figure who he believes is the ghost of Samuel Beckett helps him into the bathroom and then saves his life from each woman as they attack him in historical order of when they were wronged by him in his past lives.

This is a love story told through five centuries of American myth by the eight women from his bed, each who loved our protagonist more deeply, wisely and passionately than he could reciprocate. Each was wronged in some way or another. The cycle of fables starts with a tale told by S’ee, a Tlingit (Northwest Coast Alaskan Indian) woman of 500 years ago who marries a grizzly bear and ends with a story told by Sita at our protagonist’s wake to his brother in the present time.

Sita is the last girlfriend, a contemporary woman who grew up listening to tales from the Ramayana told by her Bengali father, a doctor in the United States. During the course of the story we move forward in time by roughly 75 year jumps and visit, among other times and places, Honus Wagner’s Pittsburg (note archaic spelling), early 19th century New Orleans with slavery, voodoo and the invention of New Orleans cuisine and the California gold rush of 1849.

Each of the chapters is told by one of the wronged women in the style of the period without being overly cute with obscure usage or spelling. There are references to Native American myth, to noir detective stories of the 1950’s and to William Shakespeare’s Tempest. Reference to Samuel Beckett and Waiting for Godot is explicit. Donohue’s colonial era tales and style remind me of John Barth.

Regardless of literary references or allusions, Centuries of June is a whole lot of fun to read. I enjoyed it immensely and could not wait to read the next installment and find out how our hero was going to be attacked, by whom and why. It became clear early on that this was a tale of reincarnation and so I kept wondering if he was going to learn anything from this parade of cautionary fables detailing the mistakes and failures of ethics, loyalty and passion in his past lives. The weave of different styles of writing is refreshing and a lot of fun. Mr. Donohue has a great sense of humor, and eyes and ears for the absurd. I look forward to more of his well-crafted and inventive novels.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Crown (May 31, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Keith Donohue
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Stolen Child

Bibliography:

• The Stolen Child (May 2006)
• Angels of Destruction (March 2009)
• Centuries of June (May 2011)

“Irish nor English, Jerseyman nor bushborn nor savage, not Roman or Episcopalian or apostate, Judah was the wilderness on two legs, mute and unknowable, a blankness that could drown a man.”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (APR 8, 2011)

Michael Crummey opens his new novel with Judah, sitting in a “makeshift asylum cell, shut away with the profligate stink of fish that clung to him all his days.” Only Mary Tryphena Devine comes near him these days, urging him to take a little food – or, if he doesn’t want to eat – to just die. Judah’s story is the primary, yet not the only otherworldly theme that glides through this multigenerational family saga, touching everybody in its wake. The novel is set in one of Newfoundland’s wild and rough eastern coastal regions, and, more specifically, in two remote fishing villages, Paradise Deep and The Gut.

Crummey, himself a Newfoundlander, has written this highly imaginative, superbly crafted folkloric tale that blends with great ease strands of supernatural magic of old fairy tales and beliefs into a chronicle of the early colonists’ precarious existence. Spanning over one hundred years, starting with the early eighteen hundreds, the author spins a tall tale of life in the early settler communities, that delves deep into personal relationships, social strife between the Irish and West-country English, the political and the religious powers, competing for influence and control.

In the first few pages, Crummey hints at important future developments, but then he quickly moves back in time to events when Mary Tryphena was a child and a whale had beached itself on the shore of Paradise Deep. The villagers, starving and desperate for food after another meager fishing season and an icy-cold winter of scarcity, cannot believe their luck. However, when they carefully cut through the animal’s flesh, a human-like body emerges from its belly. Devine’s Widow (Mary Tryphena’s grandmother and one of the most powerful personalities in The Gut) while preparing the body for burial, turns him over, and the strange, completely white figure starts coughing up water, blood and small fishes…! He cuts an unusual figure among the locals and he stinks of sea and rotten fish, a smell that is so overpowering that nobody wants to be near him…

The locals, God-fearing yet illiterate, and with the priest not due for a visit for some time, cannot agree which of the biblical names belongs to the “story with the whale” and as a compromise decide on “Judah.” While suspicious of him from the outset – not just physically is he an oddity, being completely white from head to toe, he also appears unable (unwilling?) to speak – the villagers, who have a tendency towards superstition, start blaming the intruder for all the mishaps that are befalling them. Until, that is, when Judah joins one of the fishing boats and leading them to the most amazing catch. Is this a one-off occurrence or will the fate of the poor fishermen from The Gut finally change for the better?

Judah’s survival is intricately linked to the Devine family, the most important clan in The Gut. Paradise Deep is controlled by the Seller clan, wealthy merchants who own more than their share and exert their power over the communities by any means, legal or not. The clans’ disputes and quarrels go back to a personal fight between Devine’s Widow and King-me Sellers, the matriarch and patriarch of the respective clan, but over the generations it expands into a constant rivalry between the Irish and West-Country English, between poor illiterate fisher folks living in The Gut and the merchants/land owners from Paradise Deep. Crummey weaves such an intricate six generation portrait of the two clans and the people around them that it is difficult to go into details without revealing too much of the events or the many individuals that stand out as full-fleshed characters. For his realistic and factual backdrop, the author touches the political developments on Newfoundland, such as rise of the first fishermen’s union at the turn of the nineteenth century, and far away places where some of the younger generation escape to or fight in the first World War. Nonetheless, he never loses his focus on the local people of the two villages and, especially the women who carry a tremendous burden to ensure the survival of the next generation.

To help the reader through the myriad of names and characters that come to life in the story, a genealogical chart is displayed upfront with the names of the numerous offspring through the six generations. I can only recommend, however, not to look at this chart, if at all possible, prior to at least reaching part 2 of the novel. While such a chart is useful to remind us who is related to whom, and in what generation we find ourselves, it does hint at some surprising cross connections that are better discovered in due course as it will take away some of the pleasure in discovering and reading this rich tale.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 78 readers
PUBLISHER:	Other Press; Reprint edition (March 29, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Michael Crummey
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another “whale” of a tale: Fluke by Christopher Moore Another “folklore” novel: The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht

Bibliography:

• Flesh and Blood: Short Stories (1998; 2003)
• River Thieves (2001)
• The Wreckage (2005 in Canada only)
• Galore (2011) Commonweatlth Prize

Poetry:

• Arguments with Gravity (1996)
• Hard Light (1998)
• Emergency Road Assistance (2001)
• Salvage (2002)
• Went With (2007)
• Under the Keel (April 2013)