“The porch was unpainted and its wood bleached to a silvery white. When the sky filled with clouds, it often turned the same silver color as the wood, so that it only seemed missing a grain to be wood and the wood only missing a breath of wind to stir it and turn it into sky.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (MAY 27, 2011)

I can honestly say that I have not read a book so evocative of place and time since reading anything by Faulkner.

“Nearly seventy years before George died, his father, Howard Aaron Crosby, drove a wagon for his living. It was a wooden wagon. It was a chest of drawers mounted on two axles and wooden spoked wheels. There were dozens of drawers, each fitted with a recessed brass ring, pulled open with a hooked forefinger, that contained brushes and wood oil, tooth powder and nylon stockings, shaving soap and straight-edge razors.”

See what I mean?

Tinkers picks up eight days before George Washington Crosby, a New England patriarch, expires. He is lying on a hospital bed in his living room, “right where they put the dining room table, fitted with its two extra leaves for holiday dinners.” He is surrounded by the antique clocks he collected and repaired, each tick-tock a motion closer to oblivion. His family, like his consciousness, comes and goes. He built the house in which he now rests. “The cracks in the ceiling widened into gaps. The locked wheels of his bed sank into new fault lines opening in the oak floor beneath the rug. At any moment the floor was going to give.” As he dies, the house and room dissolve, family members disappear. His fragile consciousness returns him to the hardscrabble existence of his upbringing in New England.

George’s father, Howard, was a tinker and traveling salesman. He plied his trade in the backwoods of Maine. He had a hard life. He was epileptic. Upon learning that his cold-hearted wife is going to have him institutionalized, he abandons his family, leaving George and his siblings. “His despair came from the fact that his wife saw him as a fool, as a useless tinker, a copier of bad verse from two-penny religious magazines, an epileptic, and could find no reason to turn her head and make him into something better.” The event–the abandonment–haunts and plagues George to his last breath. “…personal mysteries,” he thinks, “like where is my father, why can’t I stop all the moving and look out over the vast arrangements and find by the contours and colors and qualities of light where my father is, not to solve anything but just simply even to see it again one last time, before what, before it ends, before it stops. But it doesn’t stop; it simply ends.”

A good reviewer worth his or her salt, would not, should not, pad a review with so much lifting of prose, so many passages directly rendered. But I cannot help myself. The writing in this compact little book is so taut it hums like a drawn bowstring. The reader wonders, how such tension can so artfully be sustained? But sustained it remains, each paragraph more precisely constructed than the previous one.

Tinkers is Paul Harding’s first novel. The publisher, Bellevue Literary Press, had only been in business a couple of years when they brought it to market. The New York Times did not review the book, it being so far off the radar. (“Every now and then a good book completely passes us by,” Gregory Cowles wrote in the Arts section, a full year after publication.) It won the Pulitzer. Deservedly so. At a time when a thinking person might despair over the crassness and commercialization of, well, of virtually everything that matters, one finds hope and its reward in the tale of such talent realized. Indeed, all is not lost.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 331 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bellevue Literary Press (January 1, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Paul Harding
EXTRAS:	Excerpt UWIRE interview with Paul Harding
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Pulitzer Prize winners: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Bibliography:

• Tinkers (2009)
• Enon (September 2013)

“It is possible that we are fatally conjoined to this ancient illness, forced to play its cat-and-mouse game for the foreseeable future of our species.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowksy  (NOV 25, 2010)

Siddhartha Mukherjee’s monumental The Emperor of All Maladies meticulously outlines the trajectory of cancer (derived from the Greek word “karkinos,” meaning crab) over thousands of years, starting in ancient Egypt. In 2010, seven million people around the world will die of cancer. Many have experienced the horrors of this disease through personal experience. The author provides us with a global view of this “shape-shifting entity [that is] imbued with such metaphorical and political potency that it is often described as the definitive plague of our generation.”

In The Emperor of All Maladies, we meet a variety of patients, doctors, scientists, and activists. We also hear the voices of such iconic figures as Susan Sontag, author of Illness as Metaphor, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose Cancer Ward is a desolate and isolating “medical gulag.” Cancer is such a complex subject that it can only be understood by examining it in all of its facets: through myths, the anguish of its victims, and the untiring efforts of its adversaries, both past and present, some of whom were well-meaning but horribly misguided. Mukherjee says in his author’s note that he has made an effort to be “simple but not simplistic.” In this he has succeeded.

Ancient physicians thought that such invisible forces as “miasmas” and “bad humors” caused cancers. Many years of experimentation, studies of human anatomy, laboratory work, and clinical trials have shown cancer to be a “pathology of excess” that originates from the uncontrolled growth of a single cell. Cancer is “unleashed by mutations–changes in DNA that specifically affect genes that incite unlimited cell growth.” What treatment to use–surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, or a combination of these approaches–is rarely an easy decision. Equally significant are the efforts of public health officials, who seek to reduce cancer’s mortality through early detection (mammography and colonoscopy, among others, are screening methods in use today). In addition, cancer may be prevented by encouraging people to avoid environmental carcinogens such as cigarette smoke.

This elegant and heartrending narrative is far more than a biography of a terrible malady. It is also a story of paternalism, arrogance, and false hope, as well as inventiveness, determination, and inspiration. We meet Sidney Farber, who pioneered a chemotherapeutic approach to leukemia in children during the 1940’s and helped launch “the Jimmy Fund;” William Halstead who, in the nineteenth century, disfigured women with radical mastectomies that, in many cases, were not curative; Paul Ehrlich, who discovered a “magic bullet” to combat syphilis from a derivative of chemical dyes; Mary Lasker, a powerful businesswoman and socialite who zealously raised money and political awareness in what would become a national war on cancer; and George Papanicolaou, a Greek cytologist, whose Pap smear “changed the spectrum of cervical cancer.” Mukherjee constantly moves back and forth in time, showing how the past and the present are closely interconnected.

Throughout the book, Dr. Mukherjee’s keeps returning to one of his patients, thirty-six year old Carla Long. In 2004, she was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a cancer of the white blood cells. Carla would have a long road ahead of her, one filled with pain, fear, and uncertainty. We look to the future with cautious optimism that even greater progress will be made in our never-ending battle against a treacherous and multi-pronged enemy. Mukherjee is a brilliant oncologist, gifted writer, scrupulous researcher, and spellbinding storyteller. The Emperor of All Maladies is a riveting, thought-provoking, and enlightening work that deserves to become an instant classic.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 146 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (November 16, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Siddhartha Mukherjee Blog
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More “doctor” books: How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman Better by Atul Gwande

Bibliography:

• The Emperor of All Maladies (November 2010)

“I want interviews, features, you name it,” Bosco went on. “Fill up my life with that shit. Let’s document every fucking humiliation. That is reality, right? You don’t look good anymore twenty years later, especially when you’ve had half your guts removed. Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression?”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (NOV 03, 2010)

In Jennifer’s Egan’s lively and inventive novel – A Visit From The Goon Squad – each of its characters feels his or her mortality. Each is a in a tenuous danse-a-deux with “the goon.”

Every chapter is told from a different character’s point of view and it is no accident that the novel starts with Sasha – the assistant of music producer Bennie Salazar, one of the key focal points. Sasha has sticky fingers and is constantly pirating away meaningless objects to compose “the warped core of her life.” These objects serve as talismans, placing her at arm’s length from the love she wants.

And Bennie? A one-time band member and arrogant indie genius, he is now one step removed from the action, adding flakes of gold to his coffee to enhance his libido and bemoaning the state of digital technology. Like Sasha, he’s at arm’s length from a direct connection with love and life in general.

Bennie and Sasha will never know much about each other – even though they’ve worked together for decades – but the reader comes to know them through various stories. We get to know Lou, Bennie’s charismatic, misbehaving, skirt-chasing mentor during a harrowing African safari; Dolly, the PR mogul who places her own daughter in harm’s way; Jules, the ex-con journalist whose lunch with a Hollywood grade B actress goes terribly wrong; Ted Hollander, Sasha’s art-loving uncle, who travels to Naples to find her. Each will add a little something to the puzzle.

Yet none of their stories is told in chronological order, or even through flashbacks. Rather, time is revealed like the grooves of a record album, jumping from track to track in what appears to be no particular order. As each character takes his or her own moment in the spotlight, he or she is desperate for a second chance and to hold off the approaching goon. At one point, Dolly reflects, “Her deeper error had preceded all that: she’s overlooked a seismic shift…Now and then (she) finds herself wondering what sort of event or convergence would define the new world in which she found herself, as Capote’s party had, or Woodstock, or Malcolm Forbes’s seventieth birthday, or the party for Talk Magazine. She had no idea.”

The rich, lush, adventurous life that these characters once lived is being replaced by PowerPoints (one young character reveals her story through a 40-page PowerPoint presentation), paid “parrots” who create social media buzz, truncated emails, and digital technology. As Egan’s characters “strut and fret” their last hours on the broader stage, the world of technology is making them increasingly irrelevant. When Alex – Sasha’s would be beau whom we meet in the first chapter – tells Bennie, “I don’t know what happened to me,” Bennie’s answer is, “You grew up, Alex…just like the rest of us.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 257 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (June 8, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jennifer Egan
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another genre bending new school novel: Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

Bibliography:

• Emerald City and Other Stories (1996)
• The Invisible Circus (1997)
• Look At Me (2001)
• The Keep (2007)
• A Visit from the Goon Squad (June 2010) /

Movies from Books:

• The Invisible Circle (2001)

“Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping sates, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster (JUN 20, 2010)

What is the Pulitzer Prize winning The Road by Cormac McCarthy really about? The plot is easily summarised as a man and his young boy moving south on foot through a post-apocalyptic North America towards southern shores, in hope of better chances of survival. The core reasons for the novel’s existence may be a little harder to grasp.

The scenery they move through is burned and dead – there is no alteration in the state of the entirely annihilated landscape, and nothing at all living apart from a scattering of humans – the solitary exception is one bark of a dog. Whatever the catastrophe was, it seems to have wiped out something like chlorophyll or plant life at some fundamental level. The sea is entirely barren when they reach it. There is no moss, no grass, the trees are all dead and continually falling over, and of course no crops grow. Without the base of the food chain to work on, there are no animals – hence the only living things remaining are the alpha predators that are humans, now also predominantly turned into cannibals. Scavenging sustains the two main protagonists but the obvious implication is that almost everything has already been scavenged, it is only a matter of time before all nourishment finally runs out. There is no indication whatsoever that there will be any change in circumstances.

Opinions that have been mooted (along with many others) as to the core thrust of the novel are:

• It is a story of the love between a father and his child
• A story of every parent’s worst nightmare, of not being able to live long enough to secure your child’s future
• A story of biblical redemption
• A warning to the present generation to cherish the luxuries we have

I have to confess, I do not see any redemption in this story. There is no hope anywhere, and though at the end the child is “saved” temporarily, the implication does not change for the “long-term goals,” as the child himself puts it. The father and the child certainly love each other, but what the nature of that love is might be slightly different to what one would expect. There are a few passages that point what this might be.  For example, when the child gets ill with a fever and the man is sure the child is about to die, he is frantic with the fear of isolation for both of them. He tries not to leave his son’s side so that he will not die alone, and repeats to himself the oath he made that if the child dies he will not let him “go alone”– in other words, the father will commit suicide. Interestingly, he terms this the “last day of the earth,”  not the last day of his own existence on earth. As everything else has been wiped out, his perishing would demark the end of the world.

At another point, they encounter a key moral dilemma. After a solitary traveller steals all their provisions, they track the thief down and the man makes the thief take off all his clothes at gunpoint, leaving him naked and stranded in the road, justifying it as being exactly what the thief had attempted to do to them: the biblical eye for an eye. The child weeps uncontrollably in pity for the stranded man and they eventually return the clothes, leaving them piled up on the road as there is no sign of the traveller. The father tries to explain to the son why he has acted so uncharitably, and that he too is afraid. He says:

“You’re not the one who has to worry about everything.
The boy said something but he couldn’t understand him. What? He said.
He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes, I am, he said. I am the one.”

Why is the boy the one that has to worry about everything? He relies on his father for food, shelter, ideas, directions: everything. The implication is twofold. The boy is the true repository of “the flame” of charity and compassion that they both think they are carrying. Also, the boy is well aware of the insubstantiality of the status quo – that of his father being present and guiding him through the desolate world. He watches his father for the worsening signs of sickness, and knows it is only a matter of time before the father is no more. Once that happens, the father will have no further worries. Both protagonists are often shown envying the dead. Death is by no means an ultimate state not to yearn for; it is the dying that is the problem.

And here I think we get to the very heart of what this book is about. It is a book about dying. What are the ethics of dying? I think the insistently dead grey scenery of the world and all the post-apocalyptic implications are mainly a metaphor for the situation of truly having nothing to live for. There really is no hope whatsoever, there is no redemption in this life. The biblical resonances so often noted are not aimed at an immediate, earthly application but the workings of the soul. The two characters both seem to be believers in some form of afterlife, but for different reasons. For the boy, the afterlife seems to have to exist logically as there is no before-life. He tallies the differences between the typically upbeat stories his father tells him about how life was before the catastrophe with the reality that he himself knows. If the stories are not “true” now they must have some truth somewhere, but he makes it plain that he has no point of reference for his sort of “happy” truth. But where does the boy’s “fire” come from? The answer to this, it is implied that the father thinks, can only be divine. Perhaps that is where the belief of the father comes from, not from the world past or present, but from the boy.

Why do the two of them stay alive? Certainly, for the man, his reason is the child. He labours entirely to save the child, and were the child to die, his link with life would be entirely severed. But what of the child? This is where the biblical tones come in. Christ-like the child is innocent but knows he has to take on the sins of the world and keep living for as long as is allotted. There is no love of life, no thought that life as it is has anything to offer but pain but that one must keep going because one is “carrying the flame.” Just to cement this, there is the background figure of the boy’s mother who has some long time ago committed suicide already – as the only sensible thing to do.

So there are the three options: get out of the running quick because it’s the sane thing to do (the mother), stay in as long as possible because you’re morally bound to (the child), or find yourself a reason, a person, to stay alive for (the father). Bind yourself to something like a raft otherwise the logic of the “secular” (a word McCarthy uses frequently in the most surprising applications) world will inevitably push you into the direction of self-destruction. All of a sudden, we find that the narrative is not in some horrifying future, but right here in our own godless world: these are already our choices.

This once again brings one full circle back to the implication that the dead scenery is indeed a world, but it is the world of the soul. Where has God gone, and where has creation and the gift of life gone? As per previous works by McCarthy, the punctuation in the book has been severely pruned, though relatively few critics bother to refer to the fact. The fragmentation of the sentences. The press-ganging of verbs made to work as adjectives or adverbs – the narrative is one painful trail of action after action. Most apostrophes have been slaughtered, there are no speech marks. The result is a flow of words that seeks to eliminate differentiation between personalities, scenery, time and space. The landscape and the travellers, the state of the world, are all blending into each other, like the corpses of the people who burned to death and were combined into the tarmac of the road as it melted.

The travellers are in constant fear of being “lost,” and indeed even when they know where they are it does not do them much good. What is the right thing to do when you are in the middle of a spiritual wasteland with not the faintest reason to continue to draw breath in this harsh world for one second longer? I believe that the implication here is: there is no sense, and there is no God and no creation apart from what dwells inside us, and that the capacity to care for another creature is the only thing that separates us – in this case, literally – from death. Placed back in the relentlessly materialist, capitalist, selfish scenery that is the reality of today’s world (perhaps more so in America than many other places), these are strong conclusions to arrive at. It is not so much a cautionary tale but a handbook on the choices of paths between the dead shores or the beach, the road and the woods.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2,853 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage Books; 1ST edition (March 28, 2007)
REVIEWER:	Vesna McMaster
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Cormac McCarthy Wikipedia page on Cormac McCarthy
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: No Country for Old Men Blood Meridian

Bibliography:

• The Orchard Keeper (1965)
• Outer Dark (1968)
• Child of God (1973)
• Suttree (1979)
• Blood Meridian (1985)
• No Country for Old Men (2005)
• The Road (2006)
• The Sunset Limited (2007)

Border Trilogy Novels:

• All the Pretty Horses (1992)
• The Crossing (1994)
• Cities of the Plain (1998)
• The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, the Crossing, Cities of the Plain

Movies from Books:

• All the Pretty Horses (2000)
• No Country for Old Men (2008)
• The Road (2010)

“Olive Kitteridge was crying. If there was anyone in town Harmon believed he would never see cry, Olive was that person. But there she sat, large and big-wristed, her mouth quivering, tears coming from her eyes.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (JAN 19, 2010)

Big-wristed Olive Kitteridge is the imposing, even frightful, over-sized woman at the center of this novel. She lives in a small town on the coast of Maine, where traditionally people keep to themselves, living out lives of granite-like individuality. She trucks no silliness, has little patience for people she does not care for, which is virtually everyone, and has no problem speaking her mind, in fact seems genetically predisposed to it. She is a retired high school math teacher, who, her adult son tells her, was the “scariest teacher in the school.” She is one of those individuals you meet and wonder, how does a person get this way?

And yet, we are not repulsed by her. In fact, we root for her, seeing ever so slightly–and skillfully, I have to add–that she can be more human than first meets the eye. Can she take this humanity and nurture it? The reader hopes so. That would be a redemption we might expect. Yet, there are traits and ways of being that are so deep and developed that they can never be upended. Still, it is the beauty of how this story is drawn that the reader even wonders at such a thing as redemption. We root for Olive, but doubt her, dislike her, yet find something approaching kinship with her.

Olive lives with her loving and patient husband, Henry. Together they have a son, Christopher. The story spans an undisclosed period of years whereby Olive looses Henry, Christopher disappoints and moves away, and Olive is left alone in the village, surrounded by odd characters and old students, neighbors and enemies and a very small handful of friends. She daily passes the lovely house she and Henry built for Christopher, the place where he was to spend his life close to mother and father. But that did not happen and every day her anger grows. Her world was her son and he married a disagreeable wife who took him away and his house-home was sold. She has been abandoned by everyone. Or did she push?

There is a unique structure to this book, a structure, which I confess escaped me until the very end. This is a novel of thirteen short stories, which together form a highly informed narration and refreshing perspective on the protagonist, Olive. She is not at the center of each story chapter, but she is present, sometimes looming, sometimes passing through. If there is a failure with this technique it is slight and hinges on those few stories where she is just a pedestrian, crossing the stream of narration, a reflection in a mirror, so to speak. But even in these situations, we learn something more of her, of her community and her plight and thereby the story breaths afresh, albeit in an unconventional fashion. I like the technique very much. Although the narration follows a traditional sequential timeline, the reader gets the sense that you could take the stories in any order and the novel would work just as well. That is no small matter.

It is not hard to portray Olive as an unseemly curmudgeon. There are the neighbors she has offended, the shop keeper snubbed and professional peers put-off. But nothing is so painful as Olive’s break from her son, a break of her own making. After Henry’s stroke, Olive visits Christopher and his new, second, wife, who seems lovely. But Olive says she is stupid. And she thinks her grandson, a toddler, an idiot. As I said, it is easy to dislike this woman. Finally, she takes offense at being assumed on duty, watching her grandson in a park, and announces she is leaving. When she remains steadfast in her decision, despite the pleadings of her son and daughter-in-law, they fold and give up arguing with her. Christopher who grew up subject to her mood swings, wants no more of her and her antics. He welcomes her to go. Olive cannot believe they are going to let her leave. “You’re kicking me out, just like that?” Olive said. Her heart pumping ferociously.” For the first time Christopher reacts to his mother with calm and intelligence:

“See, there’s an example,” Chris answered, calmly. Loading the dishwasher calmly. “You say you want to leave, then accuse me of kicking you out. In the past, it would make me feel terrible, but I’m not going to feel terrible now. Because this is not my doing. You just don’t seem to notice that our actions brings reactions.”

Yet, it is the beauty of how her story is written that we still find in her qualities which give us pause. In one chapter (short story) Olive visits a woman whose young neighbor, Nina, is also visiting. Olive enters the kitchen, takes a doughnut, and with characteristic bluntness, upon seeing Nina, says, “Who are you?” It is soon apparent that Nina is anorexic.

Olive finished the doughnut, wiped the sugar from her fingers, and said, “You’re starving.”
‘The girl didn’t move, only said, “Uh–duh.”
‘“I’m starving, too.” Olive said. The girl looked over at her. “I am,” Olive said. “Why do you think I eat every doughnut in sight?”
‘“You’re not starving,” Nina said with disgust.
‘“Sure I am we all are.”
‘“Wow,” Nine said, quietly. “Heavy.”

A few sentences later, Olive’s neighbor, Harmon, looks over at her. She is crying. “If there was anyone in town Harmon believed he would never see cry, Olive was that person.”

This is an intelligent, insightful book. The technique of constructing the novel over a series of short stories is well devised. It is an example of telling a good story well while carving out new technical territory. Olive Kitteridge won the 2009 Pulitzer prize for fiction. It was well deserved.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 517 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (September 30, 2008)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Elizabeth Strout
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Other Pulitzer Prize Winners: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz Gilead by Marilynne Robinson The Known World by Edward P. Jones Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides Empire Falls by Richard Russo

Bibliography:

• Amy and Isabelle (1998)
• Abide with Me (2006)
• Olive Kitteridge (2008)
• The Burgess Boys (March 2013)