“Five viral strands propagate, infecting the air with runaway joy. At three and a half minutes, a hand scoops Peter up and lifts him high above the blocked vantage of his days. He rises in the shifting column of light and looks down on the room where he listens. Wordless peace fills him at the sight of his own crumpled, listening body. And pity for anyone who mistakes this blinkered life for the real deal.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (MAR 20, 2014)

The protagonist of Orfeo, Peter Els, listens at age thirteen to a recording of Mozart’s Jupiter symphony and is transported. This novel continues the author’s literary exploration of cutting edge science and its impact on its practitioners. Peter Els becomes a composer of serious music, very much of the current moment in the arts. He is a musical idealist, with a belief in the power of music to truly move the listener. As he matures, his work becomes ever more difficult and timely. As a young man he was a prodigy in music with talent in science as well. The creative juices of both flow in his veins. In college he starts out in chemistry, but becomes enmeshed in music through the musical connection with his first love, Clara. In graduate school at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, his work becomes ever more difficult and “modern,” in part through his collaborations with Maddy, who becomes his lover and later his wife for a while, and with Richard Bonner, an experimental theater director who he meets while in graduate school. Richard pushes him to become ever more radical.

Peter teaches music at a small university for some years, but retires fairly young and returns to chemistry, taking up biohacking as a hobby, encoding music into the DNA of the serrata marcescens bacterium. Peter chooses it because of its ubiquity in scientific research and ready availability despite the fact that it can cause illness. On the surface, this might seem like an implausible fantasy to write art onto DNA, but Joe Davis, an artist, in Cambridge, MA, hijacked the expertise of molecular biologists at Harvard and MIT more than 30 years ago to modify the DNA of e-coli to encode a bitmapped image as well as the decoding scheme onto areas of that organism’s “junk” DNA. Through a Kafkaesque series of happenstance Peter becomes pursued by the authorities who are concerned that Peter might be a bio-terrorist.

Orfeo is literary science fiction of the highest order. It is not about the future, but rather takes the cutting edge of contemporary science and makes it part and parcel of the novel. Among other things it is also a learned and passionate discourse on western music as it has developed over time to the present with an emphasis on more recent work. Powers’ description of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony is remarkable. My composer father wanted to name me Jupiter because the Jupiter Symphony was, in his opinion, the greatest symphony of all time. I’ve listened to it many times and find it quite wonderful, but I do not have the musical vocabulary to really appreciate its depth. Powers’ description of Peter Els listening to it for the first time showed me why my father felt so strongly. The poignant and elegiac description of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is wonderful poetic history. It is a piece that I’ve enjoyed many times and one whose history was familiar to me as well. Powers’ sympathetic appreciation of music is admirable.

I’m familiar with much of the contemporary music he describes and as far as I can see, the details, historical and artistic, are correct. The composers, old and new are as described. Powers gets his science right as well. The writing is brilliant, not dumbed down in any way, and evocative as all get out. I recommend this novel and author without reservation.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 34 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (January 20, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Richard Powers
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Generosity: An Enhancement The Echo Maker

Bibliography:

• Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985)
• Prisoner’s Dilemma
• The Gold Bug Variations (1991)
• Operation Wandering Soul (1993)
• Galatea 2.2 (1995)
• Gain (1998)
• Plowing the Dark (2000)
• The Time of Our Singing (2003)
• The Echo Maker (2006)
• Generosity: An Enhancement (2009)
• Orfeo (January 2014)

“Why are we interested?” Taggart said. He smiled at his old teacher. “We’re both just curious about them— there’s a lot of discussion about how they evolved. Why do you think a cave-dwelling species might lose its eyes?”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (MAR 2, 2014)

Phoebe Cornelius, the protagonist of “The Ether of Space,” the second of the five long stories in this collection, makes a living explaining scientific concepts to laymen. This is Andrea Barrett’s forte also. Three of these stories are set in the wings of some great scientific discovery: Phoebe is trying to comprehend Einstein’s Relativity; her son Sam becomes a pioneer in the relatively new science of genetics; and an earlier story explores the impact of Darwinism on the younger generation of scientists in America. In all these cases, Barrett explains the underlying concepts with great clarity. Sometimes, though, the stories seem to be running on two tracks simultaneously, one scientific and the other personal; I don’t know that readers with little interest in science would get much out of the book on the personal level alone.

For some reason, Barrett seems to be drawn to scientists who are deluded or blind, rather than the great innovators. “The Island” is about the summer school set up on Penikese Island (the predecessor of the Woods Hole Institute) by the eminent American scientist Louis Agassiz, a celebrated critic of Darwinism. The grand old man in the background of Phoebe’s story is Sir Oliver Lodge, the great English physicist and radio pioneer who, late in life, made the double error of rejecting Einstein and embracing spiritualism. And Phoebe’s son Sam, although on to something important, invites ridicule by suggesting that some discredited Lamarckian notions might nonetheless coexist with Mendelism.

Barrett’s bookend stories are less tied to scientific theory. In the first, “The Investigators,” a Detroit teenager named Constantine Boyd, spends a summer at a research farm in upstate New York run by his uncle, and watches the early experiments with flying machines taking place in the adjoining valley. In the last, “Archangel,” Boyd reappears as one of the Polar Bear Expedition, that small contingent of American troops sent to Northwest Russia to fight against the Bolsheviks; the true protagonist of that story, however, is a young American woman working with early X-Ray equipment in a military hospital. I liked these two stories especially for their greater emphasis on historical action and human qualities. But despite their concern with scientific theory, the other stories share these qualities too. “The Particles,” the story about Sam Cornelius, begins in high drama with the sinking of the ATHENIA, the first British ship to be torpedoed in WW2. And Phoebe Cornelius, after all her tussles with the mathematics of Relativity, ends with an understanding of relativity in quite a different sense, in the embrace of her extended family, both living and dead.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 22 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition, edition (August 19, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Andrea Barrett
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Air We Breathe

Bibliography:

• Lucid Stars (1988)
• Sweet Harmonies (1989)
• The Middle Kingdom (1991)
• The Forms of Water (1993)
• Ship Fever and Other Stories (1996) 
• The Voyage of Narwhal (1998)
• Servants of the Maps: Stories (2002)
• The Air We Breathe (2007)
• Archangel (August 2013)

With Peter Turchi:

• The Story Behind the Story (January 2004)
• A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on their Craft (March 2011)

“I wondered how the wife I had known when Daniela was first born— the quiet, sunken woman who read the Czech newspapers in the library every morning and then wrote long letters to her mother in Prague,  letters Katka had known would be swallowed by security— could have become this confident voice on the line.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (FEB 21, 2014)

A title such as The UnAmericans begs this question: what is an American? Or more specifically, what is an unAmerican in Molly Antopol’s world?

Molly Antopol’s characters are mostly Jewish or Eastern Europeans and they are mostly alienated – from spouse or kids, from past ideology and beliefs, and often, from their most authentic selves. Each story is a little gem unto itself.

In one story, we meet an American actor of Russian ancestry who has eschewed his Russian past, only to leverage it in order win a part with a leftist film director. Fingered during the McCarthy era, he goes to prison in support of beliefs that aren’t even truly his. Upon release, he spends a weekend with his admiring 10-year-old son and comes face-to-face with his hypocrisy.

In one of my favorites, “A Difficult Phase,” a downsized Israeli journalist –floundering in her life – begins to question her life choices when she meets an attractive widower and his young teenage daughter. “This is what she was good at: being the blank, understanding face across the table; putting people so at ease they revealed the things they didn’t want to share with anyone, the things they wished didn’t exist at all.”

Another story, “The Old World,” focuses on a middle-aged tailor who meets and marries a Ukrainian widow, and travels with her back to her hometown, only to discover that he is a poor substitute for her dead husband. He reflects on his grown daughter who is a “born-again Jew:”

“Maybe in religion, Beth really had discovered a way never to be alone. Maybe I am the lost one, wandering the streets of Kiev, competing with a dead man.”

Other stories are equally well-crafted and psychologically acute: a decorated Israeli solder comes home and suffers a fluke accident, which sets in play some poignant dynamics between him and his brother. A political dissident in Russia discovers that his neglected daughter has written an autobiographical play with himself as a key character. A young American woman and her Israeli husband must face the reality of their marriage, which is “so scary and real it required an entirely different language, new and strange and yet to be invented.”

Psychologically astute, subtlety crafted and haunted, this is a confident and poised debut, which may very well end up on my Top Ten of 2014 list. There is not one mediocre story in this whole remarkable collection. It’s one of the best debut story collections in years.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 14 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (February 3, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Molly Antopol
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Foreign Brides by Elena Lappin Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon

Bibliography:

• The UnAmericans (February 2014)

“What happens to days that disappear? The light fades, the gates begin to close, and all that a day once held— a glance, a fight, a taste of bread, a handful of braided hair, thousands of worries and triumphs and regrets— all of it slips between those closing gates, vanishing into a dark and silent room. When Josephine Ashkenazi first invented Genizah, all she wanted to to do was open those gates.

At least, that was how it started.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (FEB 18, 2014)

The idea for writing a modern version of the biblical story of Joseph came apparently from the author’s husband. It is a brilliant one, even more brilliantly executed. First, because she uses it for resonance rather than prediction; you recognize the biblical parallels after they have occurred, but you never know when she is going to depart from the Genesis version, so her novel remains surprising to the end. Second, because the Egyptian setting grounds the book in aspects of Jewish history that are perhaps less well-known, but obviously relevant to the eternal geopolitical situation in the Middle East. And third, because the Torah reference provides the perfect opening to explore many issues in Jewish teaching and philosophy, most notably those concerning divine providence, accident, and free will. The title of her novel, actually, is borrowed from a treatise on these very questions written in Cairo by the twelfth century doctor and philosopher Maimonides. The result, in Horn’s hands, is a richly layered novel that is humane, exciting, informative, and thought-provoking, all at the same time.

Josephine (Josie) Ashkenazi is a software developer and CEO of a company called Genizah, which enables its customers to record, index, cross-reference, and recall even the most trivial aspects of their lives, linking them to everything around them in both historical and geographical dimensions. She is asked to go to Egypt as consultant on a vast new library in Alexandria, and accepts the challenge, leaving behind her Israeli-born husband Itamar, her six-year-old daughter Tali, and her elder sister Judith, who has a subsidiary position with the firm. I must admit that there was something a little science-fictiony about the premise (or magical realist, if you will); although the ideas are all conceivable, it requires some suspension of disbelief to accept the degree to which they had been developed. But two things happen to anchor the book almost immediately. The first is that the action suddenly shifts back to 1896 in Cambridge, England, where two formidable Scottish sisters confront the University Reader in Rabbinics, Solomon Schechter, with a fragment of manuscript they have recently brought back from Cairo. Despite the slightly comic tone of this episode, it is also feels entirely true, and indeed one discovers that Schechter was a real person. And when Josie goes to Egypt, she falls victim to a more contemporary reality: she is kidnapped and held for ransom. The suspension of disbelief quality never goes away completely from Josie’s story, but from now on her role as CEO fades behind those as absent wife, missing mother, and beaten woman.

Genizah, the name of Josie’s firm, is the Hebrew word for the store-room in a synagogue where Torah scrolls and similar documents were placed after they had become unusable, for the name of God could not be erased. The real Schechter unearthed in the Genizah of a Cairo synagogue a chaotic hoard of documents, secular as well as sacred, a discovery which made his name. Among them were letters from Maimonides and a draft of his Guide for the Perplexed. This opens the door to scenes in Cairo of the 12th century, to interweave with those in the 19th and 21st. It also introduces some of the philosophical themes of the book.

Horn is a Jewish writer (and winner of two National Jewish Book Awards), not just because she writes about Jewish characters and subjects, but because she shares the Jewish fascination with philosophical debate. There is a chapter, for instance, in which Maimonides outlines five theories of divine providence, ranging from total predestination to utter chance, and another in which he classifies three different kinds of evil. Other readers might consider these dry diversions, but they fascinated me both as ideas and for how they linked to the moral implications of the story of Josie and her family at home. They formed a serious core to the novel that amply balanced its more fantastic aspects. And indeed balance is all; the more I look, the more I see parallels and linkages that bind this complex novel together. Perhaps some of its characters could be developed a little further, but as a theme-based novel it could hardly be bettered.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 68 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (September 9, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Dara Horn
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt Wikipedia page on the biblical Joseph
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

Bibliography:

• In the Image (2002)
• The World to Come (2006)
• All Other Nights (2009)
• A Guide for the Perplexed (October 2013)

Nonfiction:

• The Rescuer (DATE)

“Four – almost five – years of erratic visits – perhaps twelve visits in all. No, Avis corrects herself; she has not lost track after all. There have been eight visits to date, no more no less. She has seen her daughter exactly eight times since she turned thirteen.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (SEP 15, 2011)

Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber is a richly layered and beautifully written novel. It is akin to an archeological dig – each layer uncovering unexpected treasures. The book begins five years before Hurricane Katrina hit and ends during its aftermath.

The gist of the novel is about a family living in Coral Gables, Florida. The chapters are told from the viewpoints of different family members. Felice, the protagonist of the novel, is a thirteen year-old runaway who, at first, runs away repeatedly and is brought back by the police or social services. At some point before she turns fourteen, she leaves her home for good, leaving a distraught, broken family behind.

Felice manages to survive in Miami by doing odd modeling jobs, living in “the Green House” with other run-aways, and hanging out at clubs and partying. She is incomprehensibly beautiful, often compared to the young Elizabeth Taylor. She has run away to atone for a crime she believes she has committed which becomes clear as the story progresses.

Avis, Felice’s mother, is a baker – but not any baker. She has trained with French chefs at one of the best culinary arts programs in the United States. “She knew how to blow sugar into glassine nests and birds and fountains, how to construct seven-tiered wedding cakes draped with sugar curtains copied from the tapestries at Versailles…She studied Audubon and Redoute.”  When she had a show of her work at Cornell, where she interned, her own mother commented that the exhibit was “amusant.” In Florida, she has a baking business that she runs from home. “She could charge almost any price and customers seemed to consider it a privilege to pay it.” All of this came with a price for her, too. For years she was so busy baking that she had little time to see her son, daughter, or husband.

Felice’s father, Brian, is an attorney for a land acquisition firm. His firm buys land, develops it, and then flips it. He misses Avis and is drawn strongly to a co-worker.  He is losing his moral compass at this job. At one point, he is about to buy into one of the company’s land deals so that he can raise some capital for his son, Stanley’s, business.

Stanley dropped out of college to start a grocery based on local organic farming and green foods. His venture has become a phenomenal success but he sees his parents rarely, feeling like he lives in the shadow of his missing sister. Felice left when he was eighteen. He started college but felt like the real world was where he wanted to be. For years, he could not get into a car without looking for Felice.

Avis has seen Felice infrequently during the five years she has been gone. Most of these visits are when Felice needs money. She and Avis meet at a café and chat. Avis is careful not to touch Felice which would chase her away. As the book opens, Avis is waiting for Felice at a restaurant for hours and Felice never shows up.

This book deals with many themes. Obviously, food plays a big part. Avis is focused on the beauty of her creations, Stanley runs a specialized food market, and many of Felice’s friends suffer from anorexia or bulimia. While Avis is enamored of her beautiful pastries, “she didn’t really approve of food.”  She is smitten by the beauty of a pastry that looks like a replica of a cathedral but regular food makes her ill.

The book also deals with adolescents and the way they interact. Girls are known for their meanness through words and banishment and this book looks closely at the way that girls are cruel to one another.

Those of us who have kept up with real estate news know that Florida has been very hard hit by a depression due to its boom and bust housing market. Both Fort Meyer and Port St. Lucie in Florida are two of the hardest hit cities in the country due to flipping and the bust in real estate. Brian’s work puts him right in the middle of this.

The book is riveting and the writing is as lush as the Florida foliage. Abu-Jaber is an artist of the highest caliber and this is definitely one of the top ten books I have read this year.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 53 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (September 6, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Diana Abu-Jaber
EXTRAS:	NPR audio on Birds of Paradise
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Crescent Origin

Bibliography:

• Arabian Jazz (1993)
• Crescent (2003) 
• Origin (2007)
• Birds of Paradise (2011)

Nonfiction:

• The Language of Baklava (2005)

“I am imprinting this upon my memory,” she said. “The southern exposure of a winter morning light, the sounds of thaw, water dripping off the eaves, the squirrels…Sometimes I seem to know, in the split of a second of a moment, that it will be a moment I’ll want to keep.”

Book Review:

Review by Vesna McMaster  (SEP 12, 2011)

This is a beautiful book. If you want to read something that has the same effect as gazing at a vast and perfect ink-wash painting, calming and yet utterly absorbing, reach for this. Like the tiniest haze of seeping ink will be skillful enough to convey a distant village nestling in the hills, or the flight of a crane; there is not a word misplaced in this small and lovely work. Its theme is poetry, and indeed the exquisite style does full justice to the subject.

The plot follows the lives of a handful of graduate poetry students and their teacher. The initial focus is on their interactions and early relationships during university years, but as the story progresses the camera lens zooms with painful precision on subsequent pinpoints of time.

The technique of the writing is such that it leaves one with an impression of overlapping layers rather than a well-woven tapestry, the latter of which is the more usual impression in a well-plotted novel. Life depicted here is more a palimpsest than a continuous narrative. There’s an almost fatalistic crystallisation of the view of the past seeping into the present (or the ongoing) that’s highly peculiar, and entirely seductive.

It’s even more astonishing to find such alluring excellence in a book that is essentially about writing. Generally, tomes ranting away about the torment of literary endeavours and the social inadequacies of their perpetrators are best put out of their misery immediately by means of a swift bonfire. But rather than wallow first-hand in the self-absorption and uncertainty as so many of these efforts tend to, Chang depicts a view onto these same themes that’s as unnervingly detached as a high-resolution spy satellite picture: taken from space, but accurate enough to read the print on a newspaper. The style is formal, bordering on the stilted, the tone even and quiet.

Two of the central characters are the poetry student friends Roman and Bernard. Roman is driven, moderately gifted, insistently handsome and, eventually, inordinately successful. Bernard is his counterpart, with caricature-like introversion, religious torment and more than a hint of obsessive compulsive disorder born out in poverty, and the novel makes no bones about his role in the narrative as the “traditional” poet.

These extreme stereotypes should be flat shadows by rights. Instead they’re almost luminous, depicted by refraction, like a painter using the space that is not to denote the presence of an object. These two characters vie with each other, in their peculiar way, for the attentions of their teacher Miranda Sturgis, the acclaimed and established poet. Their differing approaches, viewpoints and degree of success in gaining her approval and attention are at the core of the novel.

Along with the much-debated question of “why write poetry,” the novel explores facets of the role of the teacher (or mentor), the relationship of the mentor with the recipient, and the progression of the student in turn becoming mentor. The development here is linked structurally and thematically to the ageing process, which gives the novel as a whole a feeling of natural evolution; something organic and inevitable. Perhaps this is why I can’t remember reading anything with so little a sense of contrivance. Despite, or perhaps because of, the meticulous precision with which it’s put together.

The character reveal is also atypical. It’s not so much a reader discovering an already-formed entity but the entity and the reader making the discovery together. Again, the sense of extreme detachment fused with extreme intimacy is slightly dizzying.

If you read action thrillers exclusively, then I suppose this book is not for you. Apart from that I’d recommend it to anybody. You don’t need to know about writing or poetry, just be ready to think about why art is necessary for life. And read a jolly good story in the meantime, complete with romance, betrayal, suspense and verve. It’s quiet, but it’s a page-turner.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 15 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (September 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Lan Samantha Change
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another book on poetry: The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

Bibliography:

• Hunger: A Novella (1998)
• Inheritance (2004)
• All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost (September 2010)

“People don’t like themselves today. We’re a rentier class left over from the last century. We tolerate everything, but we know that liberal values are designed to make us passive. We think we believe in God but we’re terrified by the mysteries of life and death…We’re an accident of nature, but think we’re at the center of the universe. We’re a few steps from oblivion, but we hope we’re somehow immortal…”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (SEP 4, 2011)

Millennium People by J. G. Ballard is an important existential novel, not as some suggest about the corrosive effects of technology, but rather about the vacuity of middle class life. As the middle class comes to realize that all the things for which they have yearned are meaningless traps, they become consumed by a fear of nothingness. In response they seek authenticity. They find authentic feelings from violence and protest, the more meaningless and random the better.

The protagonist is a psychologist whose ex-wife was killed by a bomb that went off in the luggage carousel at Heathrow. He has decided to infiltrate a middle class revolutionary movement in order to investigate the crime. In the course of his investigation he becomes involved with their charismatic leader and her shadowy mentor in revolution; a doctor who specializes in treating terminally ill children; and a priest who has lost his faith only to see it becoming reborn out of violence.

Characters in this novel posit that true meaning can only be found in authenticity, an authenticity that derives most purely from absurd acts of meaningless rage. Inescapably we are led to the conclusion that the fear of nothingness is the fear of a very real situation that finds a remedy only in escape from the entire system via revolution. The middle class will go to revolution only if fortified by a fresh cappuccino and never in yesterday’s underwear. They are vacuous revolutionaries. Their revolution is by its very nature foredoomed to failure. God is found only in the absurd, particularly in meaningless violence.

One might consider this book as an explanation of Osama Bin Laden and al Qaida. He was the spoiled and educated child of wealthy Saudis; a man who had learned that there were no consequences to his actions. His search for authenticity led him to embrace the stupidest, most ignorant excesses of Islamist fundamentalism and the most profoundly absurd violence against that icon of modernity, the World Trade Center, emblem of 20th century America. The result has been a Holy war that corrodes life on all sides and resolves absolutely nothing. But a similar analysis can be made for Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing and those children who commit mayhem in public schools, further demonstrating the point that meaningless violence is the middle class’ response to the void of inauthenticity. For that matter, the same could be said of many of our political leaders for whom consequences are for the under classes.

This is a whale of a good read, well plotted, competently told and with an important message about the core meaninglessness of our civilization. It is also profoundly pessimistic. Ballard is the real thing and this next to the last book of his life should be read by anyone with an interest in the Hell that is modern middle class liberal culture.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (July 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on J. G. Ballard
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Bibliography:

• The Wind from Nowhere (1961)
• The Drowned World (1962)
• The Drought (1964)
• The Crystal World (1968)
• Crash (1973)
• Concrete Island (1974)
• High Rise (1975)
• The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
• Hello America (1981)
• Empire of the Sun (1984)
• The Day of Creation (1987)
• Running Wild (1988)
• The Kindness of Women (1991)
• Rushing to Paradise (1994)
• Cocaine Nights (1996)
• Super-Cannes (2000)
• The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (November 2010)
• Millennium People (2003; July 2011)
• Kingdom Come (2006; March 2012)

Movies from books:

• When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)
• Empire of the Sun (1987)
• Crash (1996)
• The Atrocity Exhibition (2001)

“The life around us had the thin, flimsy quality of a stage set, the walls and furniture and props made of the cheapest, lightest materials. We lived a life whose only certainty was that it would change—just when we’d settled in, just when we’d gotten comfortable, the lights would go down and the scene would be cleared away.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte  (JUL 19, 2011)

The premise—we are shaped by our interactions with others—sounds like something from a school summer writing assignment and is almost too bland to be worked with. But if truly great writing creates marvels from almost nothing, then Christie Hodgen’s Elegies for the Brokenhearted is one such wonder.

At the outset, it should be made clear that despite its title, this novel is far from depressing. The narrator, Mary Murphy, remembers her coming of age in small-town America in a family full of misfits. Through elegies narrated in the second person to five different people, Mary tells us the story of her life.

“We were a family of bad citizens,” Mary says when remembering her single, womanizing uncle Michael, “Drunk drivers and tax evaders, people who parked in handicapped spaces and failed to return shopping carts to their collection stands.” Despite his many failings, that Michael was one of the few stabilizing forces in Mary’s girlhood, is proof of the neglect she suffered at the hands of her mother. Mother was too busy living in denial that she had two girls (Mary and her sister, Malinda) and spent time watching movies that produced “unreasonable expectations about men, romance, and the tendency for wealth and good fortune to bestow themselves by happenstance on the world’s most beautiful people.” When Mom slowly realizes that good fortune does not automatically bestow itself on Liz Taylor look-alikes, she comes undone and takes the girls through a series of her failed marriages. By the time the last one to a Southern minister rolls around, the girls have long since given up on their mother as a source of emotional comfort.

It is through one of Mom’s many marriages that Mary’s path crosses Walter’s. Walter is a decent and suave black man who encourages Mary to look beyond the confines of the crumbling town in which she grows up. Eventually Mary moves on to college and meets a roommate who also has a profound influence on her.

Despite all the trials she goes through, Mary emerges with some level of stability at the end—a few steps short of triumphant. One hesitates to use the word “redemption” because it is overused so much these days, but this is one story of redemption that is done just beautifully. The daughter of a poet, Christine Hodgen’s prose is also spare and lyrical. There are many instances when the writing just blows you away. Here is one such: “Love—whatever else it might or might not be—was fleeting. Love stormed into your life and occupied it, it took over every corner of your soul, made itself comfortable, made itself wanted, then treasured, then necessary, love did all of this and then it did next the only thing it had left to do, it retreated, it vanished, it left no trace of itself. Love was horrifying.”

Hodgen’s metaphors—“The woman had white meringue-like hair that stood up in peaks”—are equally tremendous. Even if the prose is economical, Hodgen can really set up a sense of place. The chapter set in Maine is a case in point.

One of the many creative aspects of the novel is the way in which it is laid out—not linearly but like a puzzle that slowly clicks into place. Even better, there’s not an ounce of the saccharine rah-rah “you go girl” bravado that could easily have percolated into these pages. Hodgen focuses on bruised lives without a trace of melodrama and in doing so she has created a gem of a novel.

As kids, Mary and Malinda loved watching Tom and Jerry cartoons on television. “In that world, which we loved, characters suffered one fatal blow after another and yet sprang up, every time, unharmed,” Mary recalls. Real life unfortunately is never that simple but Hodgen has mined its complexities to wonderful effect. Elegies for the Brokenhearted makes for absolutely compelling storytelling.

When the final piece in the book fits in just so, we come away with a wonderful portrait of a young woman who is shaped by life’s vicissitudes just like the rest of us. What’s different about Mary Murphy is that she is the person she is, not because of the people around her but in spite of them.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (July 18, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Christie Hodgen
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Everything by Kevin Canty Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos

Bibliography:

• A Jeweler’s Eye for Flaws: Stories (2002)
• Hello, I Must Be Going (2006)
• Elegies for the Broken Hearted (July 2010)

“The Stark River flowed around the oxbow at Murrayville the way blood flowed through Margo Crane’s heart.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (JUL 18, 2011)

Odysseus was a legendary and cunning hero on a journey to find home, and lived by his guile. Annie Oakley was a sharpshooter with an epic aim, living by her wits. Siddhartha traveled on a spiritual quest to find himself, and defined the river by its timelessness—always changing, always the same. Now, in Bonnie Jo Campbell’s adventure story, we are introduced to sixteen-year-old Margo Crane, gutsy, feisty survivor who manifests a flawed blend of all three heroes, who lives once and inexorably upon a river.

Raised on the Stark River by throwback hicks (some who are rich) in rural Murrayville, Michigan, Margo can shoot and skin a buck, fish like Papa Hemingway, and fire a bullet clean through a rabbit’s eye. She’s a free spirit, a river sprite, a dog lover, an oarswoman and a woodcutter. Her heroine is Annie Oakley, a renowned figure that she hopes to embody.

A series of incidents in Margo’s young life cause her to run away. Her beloved grandfather dies, and her mother—who never adapted to the river life—abandons the family. At fifteen, Margo is raped by her Uncle Cal, but is more perplexed than traumatized when it happens.

“Rape sounded like a quick and violent act, like making a person empty her wallet at the point of a knife, like shooting someone or stealing a TV. What Cal had done was gentler, more personal, like passing a virus.”

It takes a year for Margo to comprehend that she was violated; circumstances eventually culminate in a baroque twist on a Mexican standoff–with one dead body, one tip-shot pecker, and one pissed off family. She quits school, grabs her Marlin .22, boards her rowboat, and heads up river with her mother’s address found under her father’s bed. She is determined to reunite with her mother and forge a new life.

Margo likes to hear the water rustle against the rocks; sleep under a canopy of stars; watch the pink dawn of the sky; listen to whip-poor-wills call from the trees; and count blue herons as they wade in the river. But her journey is tangled by an undertow of complications, a ripple effect of the sand and silt and muddiness she brought with her from Murrayville and continues to accumulate. Margo has a ripe sexuality, a flood of pheromones and hormones coursing through the channels of her body like a tidal wave. As she paddles upstream, she bounces from one man to the next, (lying about her age), leaving a wake of misadventures at each stop, with minimal contemplation between disasters. With each imbroglio, she unwittingly tugs at the past, pulling it into the present and future, like floating debris that follows along.

The reader is enticed to root for Margo, but I was turned off by her attraction to losers and drunks and skeptical of extremes in her nature. The commando girl power was redundant—she was a superwoman of courage and resolve, and when it was favorable, she would vulnerably depend on the kindness of strangers, who appeared at convenient times. She also inflicts some irreparable damage to a menacing one-eye-blind man from the recent past—his brute strength was reminiscent of the Cyclops in the Odyssey–and then wipes her hands of it with too much nonchalance.

The adventures lack variety or surprise–Margo’s marvel trick shots often gild the lily, and whatever a grown man can do, she can do better. Her noble relationship with Smoke, an elderly, smelly, chain-smoking, wheelchair-bound hermit with emphysema, is supposed to be the pinnacle of the story, but it reeked of authorial manipulation. Margos’ beneficence is obviously meant to offset her other transgressions, which only calls attention to the incredulity of this relationship. When she climbs in bed (platonically) and sleeps with Smoke as an act of virtuous love, it came off as orchestrated. Smoke ultimately became a plot/story device, rewarding Margo with the right things at the right time.

Despite the obvious flaws, Campbell’s story is a page-turner. Her prose is warm, rollicking, and natural. She conveys a spiritual power to the river and surrounding environs, massaging the narrative with the raw power of nature. Margo is earthy, plucky, and engaging, a passionate heroine with a physical, sensual nature and double-barrel gaze. The loose ends in this story imply that a series is in the works, or a follow-up novel.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (July 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Bonnie Jo Campbell
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: American Salvage

Bibliography:

• Women and Other Animals (1999)
• Q Road (2002)
• American Salvage (April 2009)
• Once Upon a River (July 2011)

“The very thought of turning back made me realize how barren, how diminished life would be after the excitement of the past few days, and as we went deeper and deeper upriver, and farther and farther away from the sea, I made no move to stop. I felt hope and doubt alternating in my chest. I felt a stirring of some hunger inside me, something I had never felt before, a conviction, almost, that I was meant to be here, on this boat, on this trail. It was like a breeze blowing through some long-forgotten section of my mind. ”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (MAY 16, 2011)

Rufus, a young journalist on his first major assignment, travels into the troubled oil-rich Nigerian Delta, hoping to land his breakthrough news story: interviewing the kidnappers of a British oil engineer’s wife and meeting the captive. The dangers lurking among the oilfields and the pipelines that meander snake-like across the Delta’s waters cannot deter him, especially as he is in the company of his much-admired former mentor, the erstwhile prominent reporter, Zaq. Helon Habila’s new novel, Oil on Water is a confidently crafted and absorbing, in parts totally gripping, chronicle of human ambitions, tragedies and failures, but also of love, friendship and perseverance of the human spirit. Evoking the rich and beautiful yet fragile environment of the Delta, that is slowly being devastated by the greed for oil and money, Habila gently guides his different narrative strands into a poignant story that is profoundly personal even where these raise broader political and societal concerns.

Habila weaves his story in a non-chronological way: it flows back and forth in time, reflecting the reporters’ meandering voyage through the vast intricate river delta. For example, we first meet Rufus and Zaq on the ninth day of their quest. In flashbacks we learn about their back stories and, over time, that of other memorable characters. Past events are hinted at early on, such as suggesting that they had been part of a journalists’ group, responding to the invitation of the kidnappers. But evidently, things had gone wrong and the two are now on their own, in a slow canoe, dependent on a local fisherman and his young son to find a safe place to stay while charting their next steps. Zaq, in a reflective mood advises the much younger Rufus: ” Forget the woman and her kidnappers for a moment. What we really seek is not them but a greater meaning. Remember, the story is not the final goal… ” However, their quiet time, hiding among the mangroves and later on a very special island of worshippers, is suddenly interrupted and they are caught in the middle of the conflict. They have to leave their observer role behind and use all their talents to stay alive…

Observing events through Rufus’s eyes and mind, the author takes us behind the news headlines and deep into the complicated quagmire of the violent conflict between the opposing sides and their claims for oil, land and control. Emotions run high, suspicions and fear are constant companions. Not only are deadly accidents common from fires and illegally tapped oil pipes, the local military units, tasked with protecting the oil business’s interests, are known for excessive, vicious force when confronted by any type of resistance, passive or not. The militant “rebels” also have a reputation of violence and kidnapping as a means to raise the money for their ongoing struggle against the government authorities and the oil companies. The local population of fishermen and farmers, with memories of a simpler and healthier life and happier times, are caught in the middle, but also tempted by promised riches from the oil wells on their shores.

Habila is an accomplished storyteller as well as a poet, having won numerous awards in both fields. His imagery is vivid, at times cinematographic and his lyrical language comes to the fore in particular when he connects the reader with the atmospheric seascapes of the Delta:

“Midriver the water was clear and mobile, but toward the banks it turned brackish and still, trapped by mangroves in whose branches the mist hung in clumps like cotton balls. Ahead of us the mist arched clear over the water like a bridge, our light wooden canoe would be so enveloped in the dense gray stuff that we couldn’t see each other as we glided silently over the water.”

Despite the oftentimes violent events that Habila describes, he softens their impact with his sensitive characterization of people, who rarely are totally evil or totally good, they are human beings. Nothing is taken as stark black or white. In a less rounded and skilled storyteller, the underlying important theme of the novel could have succumbed to the danger of taking on a didactic preaching tone. Not so. While Habila has definite deep concerns on his mind he never allows these to take over or skew the balance in this richly imagined human interest story. To me, the late writer and journalist Ken Saro Wiva, the human rights activist and, until his execution in 1995, foremost non-violent defender of the rights of the indigenous Delta populations comes to mind as a likely and strong inspiration for Habila. Indeed, the author’s important, multi-layered and thought provoking novel is a worthy tribute to the memory of Saro-Wiva. Some commentators have referred to Habila’s novel as a modern-day version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I find that surprising; as for me, hardly any parallels exist and placing the two novel into the same category would be misleading on both accounts.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (May 16, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Helon Habila
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Waiting for an Angel

Bibliography:

• Waiting for an Angel (2003)  Commonwealth Prize
• Measuring Time (2007)
• Oil on Water (2010; May 2011)