“All he knew with sure was that his thoughts now converged around the idea of flying home to Nigeria to spirit away Ngene and sell the deity to Mr. Gruels. At first, the thought had scandalized him. He had tried to rebuke himself; he upbraided himself in all the stern silent languages he knew. In spite of his effort, he had found the temptation impossible to shake off. His waking hours were now often preoccupied with speculating what price the deity might command? He peered into what he always took to be his soul. He reminded himself how unlike him it was to peel away at all considerations until all that remained was the vulgar question of dollars and cents. Still his resolve was unyielding.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (FEB 15, 2014)

Foreign Gods Inc. by Ndibe is one of those rare books that has you laughing and crying at different intervals. It is well-written, excellently characterized and the story line is near perfect. I enjoyed this reading experience immensely.

Ike (pronounced E-Kay) is a Nigerian in America, a graduate of the elite Amherst College who has been driving cab in New York City for thirteen years because he can not get a job despite graduating cum laude and majoring in economics. He is told at job interview after job interview that his accent is too thick and he is not a good candidate for a public relations or financial position. He is at his wits end. His bills are overdue, his ex has taken him for everything he has, and he is now up to his ears in gambling debts.

As the book opens, Ike has the idea of going to a gallery called Foreign Gods Inc. and trying to sell them a statue, one that resides in his home village of Utonki. The statue is of the God of War, Ngene, a powerful god of war that served his people for centuries. At this time, Ike’s uncle is its protector. Ike believes that Negene is very powerful and will get him hundreds of thousands of dollars and take him out of debt. His mother has been begging him for money as has his sister. He has not sent them any support money for years.

Ike talks to Mark Gruel, the owner of Foreign Gods Inc. who tells Ike that he must bring the statue to him before he can tell how much it is worth. Ike decides to go back to his hometown in Nigeria and steal the statue and bring it back to New York. It is in Nigeria that a comedy of errors occurs and the reader is given the amazing history of the old and new Nigeria, the collision of the christian beliefs with the traditional religion. Ike is caught in the middle and ultimately we are left to wonder “Did he have the guts to snatch the statue of Ngene and sell it?”

The story unwinds slowly and resolutely, leading the reader from New York to Nigeria and back to New York again. We follow Ike with all of his conflicting beliefs and moral ambiguity. He is a complex and intelligent man trying to make a life for himself and for his family, while at the same time that life may end up destroying the very family he is trying to save.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 18 readers
PUBLISHER:	Soho Press (January 14, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Okey Ndibe
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives by Lola Shoneyin

Bibliography:

• Foreign Gods, Inc. (January 2014)

“The heat, the heat. It wakes Gretta just after dawn, propelling her from the bed and down the stairs. It inhabits the house like a guest who has outstayed his welcome: it lies along corridors, it circles around curtains, it lolls heavily on sofas and chairs. The air in the kitchen is like a solid entity filling the space, pushing Gretta down into the floor, against the side of the table.

Only she would choose to bake bread in such weather.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JAN 16, 2014)

Almost as though in reference to the title of her best novel, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2006), Maggie O’Farrell’s new one begins with a disappearance. One morning in 1976, in the midst of a heatwave, retired bank manager Robert Riordan, after laying breakfast for his wife Gretta, leaves their North London house, draws some money from his bank, and does not return. Within a day, their three grown children have all returned home to help their mother handle the crisis: Michael Francis from his house a few miles away, where he lives with his wife and two young children; Monica from a farm in Gloucestershire, where she lives with her second husband and, at weekends, his two children; and Aoife**, the youngest, from New York, where she is single with a boyfriend. Thus O’Farrell lays the groundwork for a book about family dynamics, not only Gretta, the absent Robert, and their grown children, but also the individual situations of the offspring, who will each confront and largely resolve their own personal crises over the four-day span of the novel. At this level, it is an extraordinarily well-constructed and heart-warming read.

Michael Francis is a bored high-school history teacher, who has had to give up his dreams of getting a PhD and becoming a professor, a circumstance that has cast a shadow over his marriage to his wife, Claire. Monica has gone from a failed first marriage to wed an antique dealer in the country, but has never felt at home in his deliberately unmodernized farmhouse or with his two girls. Aoife, by far my favorite of the three, is a free spirit, brilliant but severely dyslexic, a disability that she manages to hide from the photographer for whom she works in New York, her boyfriend, and even her family. I did wonder why O’Farrell chose to set the novel in 1976, apart from the fact that there was a severe heatwave in that year. I now see that it marks a particular point in the timeline of sexual liberation, which one gathers happened later in devout Catholic families than elsewhere. The stories of all three children are punctuated by something to do with sex or pregnancy, and what one might call the old morality will become an important factor in understanding the lives of Gretta and Robert.

This is a lovely story with moments of real beauty in its final pages. But it shows instances of carelessness that I don’t normally associate with O’Farrell. Some of these are verbal, such as the odd use of “both” in the quotation below, or confused similes such as a surprise that “rears up in front of you, like a cliff-edge you weren’t aware of.” Some are matters of transparent narrative convenience, like a priest who hears the name Riordan (surely not uncommon in Ireland) and just happens to reveal an important part of the back-story. And my empathy with Aoife was undermined by glossed-over details like how she could have obtained an American visa at the drop of a hat without the ability to handle any of the relevant paperwork. The publisher calls this “a perfect summer read.” Sure it is — but Maggie O’Farrell is capable of a whole lot more and although you will likely enjoy this novel, first-time readers may want to start with Maggie O’Farrell’s backlist to see her at her more nuanced and innovative best.

**”Her mother is the only one who can properly pronounce her name. Her accent — still unmistakably Galway, after all these years — strikes the first syllable with a sound that is halfway between e and a, and the second with a mysterious blend of v and f. She drives the name precisely between both ‘Ava’ and ‘Eva’ and ‘Eve,’ passing all three but never colliding with them.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 120 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (June 18, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Maggie O’Farrell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

Bibliography:

• After You’d Gone (2000)
• My Lover’s Lover (2002)
• The Distance Between Us (2004)
• The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2006)
• The Hand That First Held Mine (2010)
• Instructions for a Heat Wave (June 2013)

“When I think of Nilsen now, how he came and vanished again in the one day, I don’t feel any warmer towards him in the remembering than I did when he was here.  I don’t even feel grateful for what he gave me, because he and his kind kept it from me for so long.  But I do think of the difficult journey he made, and why he made it.  What set him off, he told me, was seeing me being interviewed on television, after Khalil Khazar’s death.  He said he’d watched the interview over and over.  He’d wanted to feel what I felt.  But you cannot feel what another person feels.  You cannot even imagine it, however hard you try.  This I know.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (DEC 28, 2014)

On December 21, 1988, almost exactly twenty-five years ago as I write, Pan American flight 103 from London to New York was brought down by a bomb and crashed over the small town of Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people aboard and eleven more on the ground. Although others may have been implicated, only one man was convicted of planting the bomb, a Libyan national who was released several years later on compassionate grounds; he died of prostrate cancer in 2012. His death may well have been the trigger for Scottish author James Robertson’s imaginative and morally profound novel; it is certainly the event with which it opens. Not that Robertson mentions real names: the airline, places, and foreign countries involved are left anonymous, and the convicted bomber, his presumed accomplice, and the chief witness are given pseudonyms. But as every detail that Robertson does give — even down to the date, time, and 38-minute duration of the flight — are precisely the same as the Pan Am crash, he is clearly not trying to disguise his intended subject.

Or rather, not his subject. For although he goes into the crash and subsequent investigation in detail, his focus is on aspects of such a story that are not put to rest by a simple verdict. Do law enforcement agencies ever bend the facts to fit a politically expedient narrative? Can vengeance be exacted against a scapegoat who may not in fact be guilty? Is there such a thing as true closure? What happens when a man’s grief turns to an obsession that prevents him from leading a meaningful life? When truth is found, will it stand out like a pristine shining object, or will it be a tarnished affair of accident and compromise?

Alan Tealing is a Lecturer in English at a new university in an old Scottish town (I imagine Stirling). After losing his American wife and six-year-old daughter in the bombing, he devotes his research skills to following the case in every aspect. But some things at the trial convince him that they have got the wrong man, and he takes his doubts public. As the book opens, he is giving a television interview proclaiming that the death of the convicted bomber will change nothing. But it does change something. It brings to his door a former CIA/FBI operative named Nielsen who needs to make peace with his own conscience before dying. What he tells Alan will send him off to Australia, where the novel reaches its climax in the midst of a series of devastating bush fires. The antipodean leap from the first part, entitled “Ice,” to the second, “Fire,” is the one weak point in an otherwise superb novel, requiring that the reader shares Alan’s obsession enough to follow even the slimmest of clues. But his encounters with the two principal people he meets there will propel the story into new depths, and open him to disasters other than his own. The action climax is magnificently handled, but even more magnificent is the quiet settling that follows it, so much more meaningful than a pat solution to some mystery or conspiracy theory. A truly fine book.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Other Press (September 10, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on James Robertson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another real event fiction: An Accident in August by Laurence Cosse The Submission by Amy Waldman

Bibliography:

• Close: Stories (1991)
• Ragged Man’s Complaint: Stories (1993)
• Scottish Ghost Stories (1996)
• The Fanatic (2000)
• Joseph Knight (2003)
• The Testament of Gideon Mack (2006)
• And the Land Lay Still (2010)
• Republics of the Mind (2012)
• The Professor of Truth (2013)

“Because this was the part she couldn’t tell anyone, except her mother. And then, not all of it, not right away. She still thinks it came from knowing too much, more than she understood or could accept. She needed her world to be safe, and if bad things happened, she had to work them out first in her head, then only later, inside, deep, deeper than she could ever have imagined.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (OCT 27, 2011)

Nellie Peck is thirteen years old going on forty. She is wise, intelligent and impulsive. Despite her precociousness, however, she is still a child. She lives with her parents and two siblings, Ruth and Henry; Ruth is a half-sister from a relationship that her mother had in high school. The Pecks are struggling financially. Nellie’s mother works as a hair dresser and Nellie’s father owns a hardware store that is slowly going under. Her father’s passion is his writing – he is writing a tome about the history of their town, Springvale. His goal is to get it self-published so that it can be read by a wide audience.

To enhance their income, the Pecks rent out an apartment attached to their home. Nellie loves to listen in to conversations in the apartment through the bathroom wall. Their latest tenant is Dolly Bedalia, an exotic dancer, aka a stripper. Nellie likes her and feels that Dolly actually listens to her. Her brother Henry has built a treehouse and from the treehouse Nellie and Henry can see into their neighbor’s living room and also view the comings and goings from Dolly’s apartment.

Ruth is obsessed with finding her real father who moved to Australia during high school. She has written multiple letters to him. When a return letter finally comes, Nellie absconds with it and hides it from Ruth which sets off a chain of events that leads to Nellie feeling like an outcast from her family.

Nellie is in that in-between age, not yet in adolescence but on the cusp of it. A wild child, Bucky Saltonstall, likes Nellie and tries to involve her in his illegal and wild schemes. One of them is stealing bicycles and then selling them. Bucky is also a bully and can turn on anyone at the drop of a hat. He is living with his grandparents because his parents can’t handle him.

Charlie is Nellie’s grandfather. He is the proprietor of the local junkyard. He is cold and mean, not at all what one thinks of as grandfatherly. Recently, he hired a helper named Max Devaney. Max has a history that includes being in jail and he is a registered sex offender for having sex with an underaged girl when he was a young man. He has a dog named Boone. Nellie really likes him and his dog. She dreams of going fishing with Charlie and Max but they only invite her along one time. Nellie considers Max to be a hero. There was an instance when Henry was attacked by a neighbor’s dog and Max came to the rescue, killing the offending dog violently. Henry ended up with a considerable number of stitches in his arm.

Jessica Cooper is Nellie’s annoying friend. She pursues Nellie like white on snow. Nellie does not like her because Jessica has very weird thoughts about killing people, hating her mother, and is generally mean and unfeeling. She calls Nellie all the time and Nellie doesn’t know how to get her off her back.

So far, the above events are just the daily workings of a small town and a small town girl. However, Dolly gets murdered and the only one there, the only witness to who might be the murderer, is Nellie. She was in the basement with Max while Max was fixing the hot water tank and they needed to get into Dolly’s apartment. The door of the apartment was unlocked and when they get in, Dolly is dead. Nellie saw another man coming out of Dolly’s apartment but has said nothing about it so Max is tried for the murder. Nellie is in a real fix – she feels like she can’t tell anyone about who she saw but she doesn’t want Max to go to jail for a murder she doesn’t believe he committed. Nellie also remembers hearing some thumps and bumps coming from the apartment earlier that same afternoon.

Most of the novel focuses on Nellie’s dilemmas about the murder, her family and growing up. She is the primary witness at the trial and she often thinks about Mark Twain’s quote that moral courage is more important than physical courage. Will Nellie have the moral courage to speak up? If so, what will be the consequences to those involved?

Light From A Distant Star is not one of Mary McGarry Morris’s stronger novels. I’m a real fan of hers and have read everything she’s written. I especially love Vanished and Fiona Range.  This novel includes some of the same types of characters for which she is known – the unlikable outcasts that just can’t seem to make it in the regular ways of life. However, in her previous books, the characters were so well-executed and brought to life that the reader feels empathy for them. I felt little or no empathy for the characters in this book. They were fleshed out, but not to the point where I cared all that much. The writing is excellent, just what I’d expect from Morris, but ultimately, it does not come up to her best work.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 22 readers
PUBLISHER:	Crown (September 13, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Mary McGarry Morris
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of The Last Secret Songs in Ordinary Time

Bibliography:

• Vanished
• A Dangerous Woman (1993)
• Songs in Ordinary Time (1997)
• Fiona Range (2000)
• A Hole in the Universe (2004)
• The Lost Mother (2005)
• The Last Secret (2009)
• Light from a Distant Star (September 2011)

Movies made from books:

• Dangerous Woman (1993)
• Songs in Ordinary Time (200)

“Just go sit in a café and read the play,” he told us. “Have a coffee. Take a pen.”

He said these things as if they were obvious, as if they were what any normal person would do.

But they weren’t obvious things to most of us. Even if I explored Paris on my own, even if I sat by myself from time to time on the banks of the river, when he suggested them they were different, as if we’d be crazy not to listen. And so those many of us who loved him, we did what he asked. And we felt important, we felt wild, we felt like poets and artists, we felt like adults living in the world with books in our hands, with pens, with passions. And when we returned to school, how many of us prayed he’d ask what we’d done over the weekend? Not only if we’d read but where.

And that’s something.

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (SEP 26, 2011)

Part school story, part existentialism primer, You Deserve Nothing, is a deftly told and absorbing debut. Ostensibly, the story of a troubled teacher who goes too far, You Deserve Nothing is also a thoughtful examination of moral education, of the ways in which we learn to navigate the minefield between duty and freedom, courage and cowardice, the self and the persona. The story, predominately concerned with a scandal that is as shocking as it is mundane, is told from three perspectives some five or so years later: Will Silver’s, a young and charismatic English teacher; Marie de Cléry’s, the beautiful, but insecure daughter of a cruelly elegant mother and a workaholic father; Gilad Fischer’s, an intelligent but lonely boy, the son of an American diplomat and Israeli mother, who idolizes Will.

International School of France is an expensive private school in Paris, and while the majority of students at ISF are “kids who’d been plucked from an Air Force base in Virginia and deposited in Paris, who resented the move, refused to adapt,” the informal style of Will Silver’s Senior Seminar resonates with the privileged offspring of upper-echelon executives and foreign diplomats, kids “who were fluent in several languages and cultures, who were so relaxed, so natural in exquisite apartments at elaborate parties, who moved from country to country, from adult to adolescent with a professional ease.” A dynamic and charismatic teacher, Will pushes his students to think through ideas of duty and freedom, courage and responsibility as they appear in the Bible and the works of Sartre, Camus, Shakespeare, and Faulkner. Although a true believer in the power and importance of literature, Will can’t help but wonder if much of the pleasure of teaching “lies exclusively in the performing, in being adored.” Will enjoys celebrity among the student body, and undoubtedly, his exhortation to pursue your dreams “in spite of fear . . . No matter what. Because you have to. Because you know it’s right. Because you believe in it. Because by not doing it you’re betraying yourself” will remind many of Robin Williams’ character (carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary) in Dead Poet’s Society, and as I read the classroom scenes, I half-expected everyone to jump up on chairs and quote Walt Whitman (O Captain! My Captain).

An obvious association, I know, but I couldn’t help but feel at times that that’s the point, that Will is aping that role – the role of risk-taking, life-changing teacher. This is a book about courage and responsibility, about the ways in which we shirk our freedom and opt out of creating ourselves; moving half-way across the world for a job you love might seem like a brave choice, but for Will it’s an act of cowardice, an abrupt flight from a wife he loves when the pain of his parents’ deaths becomes too much.

Numbing himself with a sort of Sartrean bad faith, Will’s dazzling persona protects him from having to emotionally engage with the world. Even when he flouts conventional morality and starts a sexual relationship with Marie, both a minor and a student at ISF, it is less a principled embrace of desire than a retreat from his despair, having witnessed a murder, and his shame at having done nothing to apprehend the murderer. Even the young and inexperienced Marie starts “to have the impression that [she] was making love to a ghost or something.” However, there are no easy villains here, and Alexander Maksik wisely avoids moralizing their relationship. Although Marie, masking her inexperience and insecurity, plays at being the seductress, Maksik allows her a honest sexuality, and Will, unable to doff his role as the instructor, gently teaches her how to enjoy her sexual nature. This is not to excuse Will, of course. Mickey Gold, ISF’s bumbling biology teacher, hits it on the head when he advises Will that trading in the complicated (and reciprocated) love of a real woman for the empty pleasure of “those adoring eyes” is “a coward’s game.”

Just as Marie’s disappointment with Will is inevitable, Gilad’s hero-worship can only mature through disillusionment. Gilad, in the way of the young, conflates the thrilling ideas being taught with the character of his teacher and when, after a heartbreaking scene with his parents, he sits in a café, reading Camus, it pleases him to think that Will would approve of him “there alone, so early in the morning, paying such attention to simple, beautiful things” and when Gilad admits that his infatuation was so complete he “wanted to go to war for him,”,I was reminded of one of the best instances of hero-worship and disillusionment in literature: Nicholas Rostov’s infatuation with Tsar Alexander in War and Peace (in case there’s any doubt: I mean this as a compliment). In fact, it’s partly  Maksik’s astute understanding of adolescent psychology and mannerism that makes this book so good and his characters so real, as captured here in this bantering dialogue between Will and a former student, Mazin:

“ . . . I miss our talks.”
“But we’re having one now.”
“Yeah, on my free period. Lame.”
“I’m flattered you’d waste your free period with me, Maz.”
“Yeah, well don’t get too excited. Anyway Silver, school’s a waste of my time.”
“Carrot?”
“No man, I don’t want a carrot, I want to know why I shouldn’t just move to LA and start a band.”
“Who says you shouldn’t?”
“Please. Everyone.”
“You realize, right, that this is a tired conversation? You know everything I’m going to tell you. It’s the height of boring.”
“No, I don’t. You’re the height of boring. What are you going to tell me?”

However difficult Marie and Gilad’s loss of innocence is, narrated from a place of relative wisdom many years later, that past pain is softened. In comparison, Will is frustratingly opaque, and I couldn’t help but wonder about the place he was narrating from: had he found the courage to dismantle his armor or was he “teaching the needy in some unspecified African nation” or “living cheap in Thailand,” still a ghost?

You Deserve Nothing is an auspicious debut, both for Alexander Maksik who shows himself here to be an unfairly talented writer and for the new Europa Editions’ imprint, edited by Alice Sebold (of The Lovely Bones fame), Tonga Books. I look forward to seeing more from both.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 73 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions; 1 edition (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Alexander Maksik
EXTRAS:	Excerpt and Interview with the author
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah

Bibliography:

• You Deserve Nothing (August 2011)
• A Marker to Measure Drift (July 2013)

“In the old days, you had caste, and you had religion: they taught you how to eat, marry, live and die. But in Bombay, caste and religion had faded away, and what had replaced them, as far as he could tell, was the idea of being respectable and living among similar people. All his adult life Mastejri had done so; but now in the space of just a few days, he had shattered the husk of a respectable life and tasted its bitter kernel.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (SEP 20, 2011)

When does the heartfelt convictions of one solitary man negate the jointly held consensus of the rest of any civic society?

That is the question posed at the center of Aravind Adiga’s audacious new novel, an impressive and propulsive examination of the struggle for a slice of prime Mumbai real estate. It is a worthy follow-up to Adiga’s Booker Prize novel, White Tiger, as he goes back to the well to explore the changing face of a rapidly growing India.

Adiga pits two flawed men against each other.  The first is Dharmen Shah, a burly and self-made real estate mogul who is the “master of things seen and things unseen.” Through his left-hand man, the shady Shananmugham, he offers each resident of the Vishram Co-operative Housing Society the highest price ever paid for a redevelopment project in the suburb of Vakola.

Just about every resident jumps at the chance to sell – the anxious Ibrahim Kudwa, an Internet-store owner and the only observant Muslim in the neighborly society; social worker Georgina Rego who loathes amoral redevelopers but wants to trump her wealthy sister; Sengeeta Puri, who cares for her son afflicted with Down’s Syndrome; Ramesh Ajwani, an ambitious real-estate broker and more.

Only one resident holds out: Masterji, a retired schoolteacher who lives alone after the recent death of his wife and the death of his daughter. Only here, at Vishram, can he cling to his memories and so he refuses to sell, even when the pot is sweetened… even when he is threatened emotionally and physically. Masterji is the one immutable roadblock between Shah and his legacy.

Whether the reader sympathizes with Masterji – who stands in the way of his neighbors’ most audacious dreams, and whose integrity and incorruptibility borders on narcissism – may be equivalent to, say, how each of us felt with the Ralph Nader spoiler in the Bush-Gore election. Was he an honorable man to have taken a stand? Or was he simply an egotist? There is a grudging admiration for Masterji’s stand, mixed with an impatience and frustration at how this high-principled man stubbornly torpedoes the will of the majority.

Shah is ruthless but also fair-minded: his price is more than fair. Masterji is principled but tin-eared to his neighbors’ pleas as the deadline to accept the offer looms. And as the developer – and his one-time friends – become more and more desperate, the novel cranks up to almost unbearable suspense, with a hint of a Lord of the Flies scenario. Like Piggy in that novel, Masterji is seen as less and less human as the conflict endures.

The background to this tension-filled plot is Mumbia itself, where countless workers commute on nightmarishly overstuffed trains, where they all emerge: “fish, birds, the leopards of Borivali, even the starlets and super-models of Bandra, out of the prismatic dreams of Mother Garbage. Here, fetid slums, the most luxurious high-rises of the future, and the temples of old co-exist within a fragile and all-too-often corrupt democracy.

A Dickensian quality pervades this ambitious novel, which fearlessly tackles electrifying themes: what price growth? Will good people risk their humanity when faced with a chance to score a big payday? When does the will of a man who foregoes monetary gain resemble selfishness as opposed to virtue? And who can we trust to stand by us when we take a lone stance? This book of contrasts – between a man of finance and a man of virtue (although, of course, it is not as simple as that)… between wealth and squalor… between the old and the new is a tour de force. And it is certain to add to Aravind Adiga’s already sterling reputation.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 94 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (September 20, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Aravind Adiga
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The White Tiger

Bibliography:

• The White Tiger (2008) 
• Between the Assassinations (2009)
• Last Man in the Tower  (2011)

“We have an extra responsibility to play the game right.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (SEP 07, 2011)

The book jacket of the hard-bound edition is entrancingly deceptive. Printed on what feels like watercolor paper, it shows a colored vignette of men in white playing cricket on a village green watched by spectators relaxing in the shade of a spreading chestnut tree. It could well be the nineteenth century, except that the skyline in the background is Manhattan, and Joseph O’Neill’s novel is set in the first years of the present century.

Written in a style of such lucidity that it might almost be an autobiographical memoir, it is the narrative of three years or so in New York City. The protagonist Hans van den Broek, a Dutch-born financial analyst, thirtyish and near the top of his profession, arrives there at the start of the millennium with Rachel, his English wife, herself a high-powered lawyer. But after the attacks of 9/11, Rachel returns to England with their infant son. Hans stays on.

On one level, this is a novel of displacement. Having already relocated to London from Holland, Hans makes the further move to New York, where both he and Rachel prosper. But they have to evacuate their loft apartment after the attacks, and move into temporary quarters in the Chelsea Hotel, which is portrayed as an almost-surreal world unto itself. So Hans is essentially rootless before the story truly starts. By sheer chance, he stumbles upon the fact that cricket is played in New York by scratch teams of immigrants from former British colonies: Indians, Pakistanis, Caribbeans. Hans, who learned the game at an exclusive school in Holland, becomes the only white member of a team formed of taxi-drivers, store-keepers, and small businessmen, who offer him a kind of camaraderie that he cannot find among his professional colleagues.

Although cricket is an important symbolic presence, it plays a relatively minor part in the action, and it is not necessary for the reader to know the game. At first, cricket is presented as a symbol of the immigrant subculture, the thing that both brings people together and emphasizes their differences from mainstream America. As a successful Wall Street banker, Hans might be expected to fit right into New York society — and indeed the author makes the point that, as a Dutchman, he is actually a member of the historic first tribe of New York. But in soul-crushing scenes at the DMV and INS that might have been penned by Kafka, but which any victim of American bureaucracy will recognize, O’Neill does not spare Hans some of the worst aspects of the immigrant experience. Hans spends the first part of the book in a cultural limbo; when he joins the team, he find that most of his old skills come back, but he cannot bring himself to modify his patrician batting form in order to hold his own with players who learned in dirt lots; by his final American cricket game, he is hitting out with reckless abandon.

The English have an expression, “It’s not cricket,” when something contravenes an unstated social law. Later in the book, Hans remarks: “I cannot be the first to wonder if what we see, when we see men in white take to a cricket field, is men imagining an environment of justice.” That “imagining” is important; O’Neill gently suggests that America’s image as the champion of justice has become tarnished in the last few years. But he is also framing the moral dichotomy of the novel.

The other major character in the story is a Trinidadian immigrant, Chuck Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure who thinks big and maintains a finger in every pie. At the very beginning of the book (which is all told in flashbacks), Hans learns of Chuck’s death in what seems like a mob killing. But his first chronological appearance in the story is when, as the umpire for a cricket match, he defuses a potentially dangerous situation, and follows it up with a clubhouse speech that is both a defence of the highest ideals of cricket and a potential vision of America as the Promised Land. Chuck has grandiose plans to build an international cricket stadium in New York, and he enlists Hans into furthering his vision. But he also has shady activities on the side, whose nature only gradually becomes clear. In dealing with these two sides of Chuck’s character, Hans gradually comes to re-examine his own moral sense, identity, and priorities.

But Netherland is no mere novel of ideas; it is also an emotionally wrenching love-story. For most of the book, the marriage of Hans and Rachel is virtually non-existent. When she leaves him, it is clear that she needs to escape more than the physical dangers of the bombed city. Hans flies to London every two weeks to see his son, but his relations with Rachel are painfully distant. And yet the novel opens some years later, with the two of them back together again, and apparently happy. Amazingly, O’Neill makes the fact that “you know how it all comes out” into a source of more tension, not less. The days in New York between Rachel’s decision and her actual departure are agonizing and so so true. And even when Hans leaves America and returns to London for good, the story is far from over; there is love to be found, but it must be new-forged, and it does not come easily. At one point towards the end of his stay in America (in Las Vegas, no less), Hans talks of reaching absolute bottom. But it is not Hell that he has been through, rather a very special kind of Purgatory.

The author Sebastian Barry, in a comment quoted on the back cover, writes: “The dominant sense is of aftermath, things flying off under the impulse of an unwanted explosion, and the human voice calling everything back.” Without that human voice, this story might merely be an offbeat curiosity. But O’Neill, with his clear moral compass and extraordinary power of writing from the heart, has created what may be the most moving book I have read in awhile.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 178 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Reprint edition (May 7, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Joseph O’Neill
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More cricket: The Sly Company of People Who Care by Rahul Bhattacharya

Bibliography:

• This is Life (1991)
• The Breezes (1996)
• Netherland (2008) 

Nonfiction:

• Blood-Dark Track: A Family History (2001)

“Do you remember?” Mitch said staring out the darkened window, “how we used to talk about the rich guys, the CEOs and politicians? How we used to hate them for acting in their own interests instead of for the good of everyone else

“We went into this thinking we were going to stick it to guys like that. Like Johnny. People who broke the rules for their own good. And now here we are. Thinking the same way.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  AUG 6, 2011)

The titular novices of Marcus Sakey’s recent novel, The Amateurs, are four friends, three men and one woman, who band together against the frigidity of Chicago’s winters and the loneliness of urban life to form the Thursday Night Drinking Club. But amateur drinkers these four are not – experts in the art of throwing back martinis, the first thing any of these four do in a time of crisis is reach for a bottle of vodka. If only the same could be said for their foray into the criminal underworld.

Rounding thirty, they are poster children for urban ennui: Alex is a former law-student whose sideline as a bartender turned full-time ten years ago when his now-ex wife gave birth to their daughter, Cassie; Ian, a trader with a coke problem, flew too high, too fast with a phenomenal trade in undervalued Hudson-Pollam Biolabs stock, only to face increasing loss and derision as he stalks the financial markets, looking for another off-the-radar meteor to ride back to his seat among the stars; Mitch is a bookish hotel doorman who carries a torch for Jenn, the only female member of their drinking crew, but lacks the spine to do anything about it; Jenn is a travel agent who dreams of travelling herself but can’t seem to commit to making it happen, much like she can’t seem to commit to any of the men she dates, content to coast along on what is left of her good looks. If the group reads like a clichéd list of youngish urbanites, well that is largely because it is. But in lieu of nuanced characters, Mr. Sakey presents us with a moral dilemma.

Imagine you could steal a substantial sum of money, not enough to make you rich, but enough to alleviate some of your immediate problems and broaden your future horizons, would you do it? What if I promised you wouldn’t get caught? Or what if that money belonged to people you knew were overdue for some karmic comeuppance, people like professional criminals?

That is the question the Thursday Night Drinking Crew faces when Alex’s no-good boss, Johnny Love, bullies him into posing as muscle for an after-hours deal. The money for the deal is locked away in a safe, but Alex knows the combination. Resentful of Johnny Love for coercing his participation, Alex tells the crew about the deal. With their last game of “What would you do if . . .. you had half-a-million dollars?” (called “Ready-go” here) still fresh in their minds, the others are primed and ready to fantasize about travelling the world or day trading themselves to a fortune, but the stakes for Alex are much higher.

Cassie’s step-father has received a promotion that requires moving the family to Phoenix. Alex’s ex-wife informs him that, while she has no intention of keeping his daughter from him, due to a series of late or missed child support payments, he doesn’t have a legal say in the matter. Figuring (bizarrely) that making up the late payments will give him the legal right to stop the move, Alex pushes his friends, first Jenn, who he’s casually sleeping with, then Ian, who has developed a gambling problem (and the concomitant debts) to help him steal the money. Following Alex’s lead, the group uses Mitch’s crush on Jenn to coax him out of his reluctance.

Because why should they be shut out when everyone else has their hands in the cookie jar? Bear Stearns is in the midst of collapsing as the sub-prime mortgage crisis guts the economy, leaving many on Wall Street millions, if not billions, of dollars richer. Regular people like them are being stolen from everyday. Why shouldn’t they step up and start taking want they want too?

Ian brings up a problem that has become a classic in both game theory and moral philosophy, The Prisoner’s Dilemma. Although it can take many forms, the dilemma is usually presented in the form of two people getting arrested for a crime. The police know they are guilty, but don’t have enough evidence to press charges. The criminals are separated and told that if they rat out their partner they will go free, but their partner will get 10 years. If both criminals stay silent, they will each get charged with a lesser crime that carries a penalty of, say, 6 months in jail. If both confess, they will split the time, each serving 5 years. What is the rational thing to do here? If maintaining your freedom is a priority, then obviously you’re best off confessing before your friend does. But if the game is repeated, that is, if after the first prisoner confesses, the second prisoner is still given the opportunity to confess, the best thing to do over time is to stay silent, because 6 months (the time served if both stay silent) is better than 5 years (the time served if both confess).
Since the Thursday Night Drinking Club do not belong to the criminal underworld, and do not need to maintain trust and relationships of fellow criminals, there is no iteration of the game for them, and so, according to Ian, they have nothing to lose, and much to gain, by betraying Johnny Love.

But, in moral philosophy, the Prisoner’s Dilemma is often used to illustrate how rational self-interest can produce socially undesirable outcomes. Or to put it another way, the problem describes the tension between self-interest and the interests of the group, because a group where everyone acts in self-interest can sometimes produce individuals that are all worse off than they would have been if they had acted in the interest of the group.

As the four friends plan their heist, they fail to anticipate some obvious contingencies, and the robbery goes the only way it could – horribly wrong. Left with a pile of money and a new set of problems, the group promises to lay low for a while, each swearing not to spend their share of the money until the heat has died down and they’re sure they’re beyond suspicion.

But group interests aren’t enough to keep Alex from breaking their pact and paying his overdue child support. Ian, fearing for their personal safety (when Ian exchanged information about their plan for guns, Katz, the gangster running an illegal casino, threatened the lives of his friends if he didn’t settle immediately following the robbery) pays off his gambling debts. However, word travels fast in the underworld, and Victor, the other end of Johnny Love’s deal, gets wind of this ridiculously inept band of robbers. Not planning on ever having to deal with these criminals again, the group didn’t account for iteration – and as things go from bad to heart-breakingly horrible, they quickly realize that what they made the wrong choice: they should have played it straight instead of betraying a group of known criminals.

Despite all this philosophy – Plato, Nietzsche, and Sartre all get paraphrased for good measure – this is a darkly effervescent book. In this fast-paced and entertaining novel, Mr. Sakey spins the crime genre on its head to ask what happens when regular folk take it into their heads to become criminals.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 25 readers
PUBLISHER:	NAL Trade; Reprint edition (June 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Marcus Sakey
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes

Bibliography:

• The Blade Itself (2007)
• At the City’s Edge (2008)
• Good People (2008)
• The Amateurs (2009)
• Scar Tissue: Stories (2010)
• The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes (June 2011)

“They are too accomplished. They have accumulated too much. They expect too much. They demand too much. They even love their kids too much. This love is crippling in its own way.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (AUG 2, 2011)

Somewhere on the journey from the comfortable upstate college town of Ithaca to the glistening moneyed world of downtown Manhattan, the Burgamots have lost their way.

Dad Richard has become consumed by his prestigious executive role at a major New York university. Mom Liz is fielding social calls and taking her young adopted daughter to sleepovers in a lush and decadent midtown hotel where “the central part of the suite looked exactly like the one Tony Soprano had once rented in a dream sequence…double sink, toilet, shower, and bidet in the size of a studio apartment.” And their teenage son, Jake? He’s navigating adolescence without a roadmap. Like all too many teens, he feels like he “didn’t belong here, in the city, in this apartment, at this school, or in this family…”

This is a family crusin’ for a bruisin’. And it all comes to a head when one morning, Jake received an explicit emailed video from a sexually precocious eighth-grade admirer named Daisy. Stunned and clueless, Jake is overcome by a cocktail of emotions: “He’d gotten hard. He’d gotten proud. He’d been appalled, scared; he’d wanted to show off.” And just like that, without forethought, he clicks and forwards to a close friend…who clicks and forwards to HIS close friends…and so on. Soon the video has gone viral all over the world and Jake – and his entire family – is in murky legal waters.

Author and social observer Helen Schulman maps out this family’s spiraling journey to the top – and their ignoble withdrawal from favor. With cinematic pacing – reminding me somewhat of Zoe Heller’s What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal— she moves her focus in and out, in a blistering look at a family on the crossroads

Had this book remained tightly focused on the ensuing scandal, it would have been a page turning “read.” But Ms. Schulman is more ambitious. She takes on broader themes: how one two-second bad decision can change a teen’s whole future, when today’s technology in involved. How one’s sense of identity and security are all fragile conceits that can disappear in a heartbeat. And perhaps most important, how wealth without grounding can turn individuals into careless people who use questionable tactics to get optimum results. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, it becomes all too easy. The Bergamots, too, are on the verge of those who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.”

With an abundance of psychological acuity, Helen Schulman tracks a family who is having difficulty managing “this beautiful life” – a life that shows cracks and fissures along its underbelly. Everyone is affected, even their young daughter Coco, who, with her overblown kindergarten graduation ceremony and over-the-top schedule, is primed (it is hinted) for a similar destiny to Daisy’s. The ending is wrapped up a little too quickly, but the fragility of the shattered sense of self – for Jake, for the young girl, for Liz and Richard – lingers. No one is insulated by privilege…not when the demands of life have become so complex. And no one, the author suggests – rich or not so rich – is immune to the sudden scandal in a digital age.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 126 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper (August 2, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Helen Schulman
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Testimony by Anita Shreve Aftermath by Brian Shawyer What Was She Thinking? by Zoe Heller

Bibliography:

• Not a Free Show: Stories (1988)
• Out of Time (1991)
• The Revisionist (1998)
• P.S. (2001)
• A Day at the Beach (2007)
• This Beautiful Life (August 2011)

“She takes pea pods from her vegetable rack and dumps them on the table. For a while there’s just the snap of the pods, and the neat, percussive sound of peas falling into bowls, and through her open door the scratch and bustle of chickens and the whisper of the countryside. A dark lacquer of sadness seems to spread across the room.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (JUN 28, 2011)

The quotation shows Margaret Leroy at her best, describing the ordinary routines of everyday life, in a strongly realized setting, and an acute emotional sensitivity. The place is Guernsey, one of the British Channel Islands nestling off the French coast between the arms of Normandy and Brittany. The time is 1940, when the islands came under German occupation, after being more or less abandoned by the British as indefensible. The sadness comes from the fact that man of this little farm has been one of the few inhabitants killed in the bombing that preceded the invasion. One of the very few, actually, for as the title of the book that Leroy acknowledges in her introduction indicates (The Model Occupation by Madeleine Bunting), the German occupation of Guernsey was marked by civility on both sides and little effective resistance. I have never read a wartime story in which the brutal atrocities that have become a staple of WW2 fiction are largely (but not entirely) absent.

But that “not entirely” is significant; where does one draw the line between cooperation and collaboration? When must one raise one’s head and take a stand? It is a moral grey area that fascinated Leroy, who has re-imagined it in a consistently enjoyable romance novel, though sometimes her greys get a little rose-tinted. The misty period cover jacket showing a shapely woman of the 1940s looking into the sunset framed by exotic blooms absolutely screams Romance! Fortunately there is very little in the actual writing that is anything like as misty-eyed. It also made me think of the cover for Sadie Jones’ Small Wars, which had something of the same romance magazine air. An unfortunate comparison, however, for it reminded me that the Jones novel had a great deal more blood and grit than this one, without losing its feminine focus. I could have done with a bit more of that here. But having said that, I have said the worst; Leroy is a compelling writer and gives much to enjoy.

Leroy’s protagonist, Vivienne de la Mare, English by birth, is unhappily married to a Guernsey Islander. Now, while her husband is off with the army, she must look after her two daughters (Blanche and Millie, ten years apart) and her senile mother-in-law Evelyn. There are three main elements to the story. The first is the ordinary business of parenting: reading bedtime stories to the younger child, guiding the older one’s first forays into dating, fielding the criticisms of a demanding mother-in-law; Leroy handles all this with obvious understanding. The second is specific to the place and time, a curious cocktail of glamor and deprivation. This may well be Leroy’s strongest suit, as she captures both the style of the period and the beauty of the island’s leafy lanes and upland heaths, yet does not stint on the difficulty of making do under wartime conditions. Especially strong is her sense of community, and the way in which the inhabitants of nearby farms and homes rely on one another to get by. We have already seen some of this in my opening quotation; let me add to Vivienne’s description of the countryside near her home:

“I love that sense of going deep, of being enclosed. It’s like the way it feels when you follow the Guernsey lanes down here to our home, in this wet wooded valley of St. Pierre du Bois. The valley seems so safe and cloistered, like a womb. Then, if you walk on, you will go up, up, and out suddenly into the sunlight, where there are cornfields, kestrels, the shine of the sea. Like a birth.”

Then there is the third element, the wartime romance. The empty house next door to Vivienne’s is requisitioned by two German officers and their batmen. One of these, Captain Gunther Lehmann, an architect in civilian life, brings small presents to Vivienne; she refuses at first, but despite herself she falls in love. It is a beautiful oasis in the middle of war, answering a need in both of them, for Gunther is a man of peace trapped in a soldier’s uniform, and a passionate man in a loveless marriage. But of course strains do arrive which pull Vivienne’s loyalties and affections in different directions. Despite the model nature of the occupation as it affects people of her own nationality and class, she becomes aware of the more brutal aspects of the war and will ultimately be forced to make choices. Some of what happens at the end seemed a little implausible; this is, after all, a romance. But within its genre it is sensitive, richly textured, and consistently enjoyable.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 82 readers
PUBLISHER:	Voice; Original edition (June 28, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Margaret Leroy
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Yes, My Darling Daughter Postcards from Berlin and Small Wars by Sadie Jones

Bibliography:

• Trust (1999)
• Alysson’s Shoes (2002)
• Postcards from Berlin (2003)
• The River House (2005)
• Yes, My Darling Daughter (2009) (aka The Drowning Girl in UK)
• The Soldier’s Wife (2011) (aka The Collaborator in UK)

Nonfiction:

• Miscarriage (1987)
• Pleasure: the truth about female sexuality (1993)
• Some Girls Do: why women do and don’t make the first move (1997)