“When people asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up, Paul Krovik did not say he was going to be a fireman or soldier or pilot, as some boys will before they know the kind of drudgery and danger such jobs entail. He did not want to be an actor or rock star or astronaut, nor did he harbor secret desires to dance, design clothes, or write poetry — the kinds of dreams most in his world would have regarded as evidence that his parents had failed to raise a true man, whatever that might mean.

He always wanted to build houses.

And now they are trying to take away the only house that belonged to him. He is not about to give up the one thing he ever wanted.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (JAN 23, 2014)

A perfect title for a stunning book. Its literal meaning is explained in the 1919 prologue, when a tree on which two men have been lynched falls deep into a sinkhole with the bodies still on it. The rest of the novel takes place in the present, or perhaps the not too distant future, when the land has been developed as an upscale subdivision for a rapidly growing city in the Midwest. But we are not quite there yet. In a second, slightly longer prologue, a woman goes to visit a convict on death row. It is a creepy, brilliant scene, although we know little of either of them, except that his name is Paul Krovik, and she regards him as a destroyer.

The next 380 pages tell of Paul’s crime, among much else. He starts out as a property developer, building neo-Victorian houses with more love than skill, and when the recession hits and he is sued by purchasers demanding repairs, he goes bankrupt and his own house is foreclosed. It is bought cheap at auction by Nathaniel and Julia Noailles (pronounced “no-eye”), a couple who move from Boston with their seven-year-old son Copley. Large sections are told through their eyes, but they have two watchful neighbors who ad the protagonists of their own sections. One is Mrs. Washington, an African-American woman whose century-old farmhouse gets condemned to make way for the new development. And the other is Paul Krovik himself, who cannot bear to lose touch with his former property. So the title gets another meaning: the erasure of farmland and the rural way of life to make way for subdivisions springing up like faceless Stepfords. And it is all focused on the house, like a horror movie in the making. Nathaniel and Julia gut it of all its detail, paint it white, and install security, but still feel they have moved into an alien environment. Copley, brilliant, unhappy, and borderline autistic, believes the house has been invaded by strangers, but his parents merely take him to the doctor for medication.

One of the remarkable things that Flanery does is to recalibrate our sympathies. Yes, we will discover why Kravik is arrested, but he is not the worst villain of the piece. The company that Nathaniel works for, a Haliburton-like global conglomerate called EKK, specializing in total security, has virtually rebuilt the city as a company town, requiring compliance to its right-wing rules. I mentioned Ira Levin’s Stepford Wives; there are also after-echoes of Orwell’s 1984 in the inhuman authoritarianism that only seems futuristic if you ignore the changes that have already taken place over the past dozen years. That is the third meaning of the title: the moral fall of this land, America, from a country of humanity and individualism towards a managed state of paranoid conformity.

And it starts young. The scenes in the company school where Copley goes made me livid, especially as the parent of a once-troubled child myself. Indeed, the more the boy was in the limelight, the more disturbing the story became. For there are other themes in play beyond corporate security. The legacy of abusive parents, for example. The tyranny of psychologists and psychiatrists. The intolerance of anything a little bit out of the ordinary: an old black woman who won’t sell her land, a sensitive boy who prefers reading to sports, a same-sex couple who set up house together. Although this is in no sense a personal confession — indeed it has the makings of a good Hollywood movie written all over it — it is hard not to look past its mounting terror and political commentary, and wonder about what experiences the writer must have had to write with such conviction about outsiders. And that makes a special book very special indeed.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 32 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (August 15, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Patrick Flanery
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Absolution

Bibliography:

• Absolution (2012)
• Fallen Land (August 2013)

“A formidable wind seemed to have flown in through the half-inch of open window, but had then immediately found its way under the duvet…”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (APR 5, 2011)

Once upon a time…no. On a dark and stormy night…wait–there was no storm. Long ago and far away…but, it was only a few years ago, and not far if you live in suburban New Jersey. So, one dark and December night in the safe and tidy suburb of Stellar Plains, New Jersey, an arctic chill seeped under doors, a frigid blast blew through windows, and a glacial nipping swirled between the sheets of spouses and lovers. And, just as suddenly, the woman turned from their men, and stopped having sex.

A spell had been cast, unbeknownst to the enchanted. Married woman turned in disgust from their husbands, and teen girls recoiled from their pimply boyfriends. The town was in chaos, but nobody was talking.

At the start of the new school year, the new bohemian and canny drama teacher, Fran Heller, had come to teach at Eleanor Roosevelt High School (Elro), where much of the action takes place. She was staging a production of Lysistrata, the ancient Greek play written by Aristophanes. And, in case you aren’t familiar with it, it is about an entire city of woman that resolves to stop having sex with their men in order to end the Peloponnesian War. That includes their favorite position—The Lioness on The Cheese Grater. Yeah, think about it! This extraordinary mission inflames the battle between the sexes in Athens, just as the suburban spell provokes a war between the mates in Stellar Plains.

Dory and Robby Lang, the central couple of the book, are spirited English teachers at Elro with a high approval rating with students. Until this spell, the Langs had a youthful vigor and robust sex life. Their sophomore daughter Willa, who Dory has deemed “conventional” (average), had found first love with Eli, the drama teacher’s son. But things are now frigid in the soundless fury of their house. Only their old lazy dog lingers to lick himself clean.

The Nordic, big-boned gym teacher, Ruth, had a largely healthy sex life with her sculptor husband—as active as one can expect with twin toddlers and an infant—all boys. She was not immune from the “enchantment,” either. Then there is Bev, a stout and menopausal woman with her hedge fund husband, Ed, who had said some cruel things to her not long ago. The spell has her in its grip, and she is fighting back frisky.

Does Leanne Bannerjee, the hot school psychologist, go on an icy sex strike when the wind chill factor blows her way? She has three boyfriends and a love life that rivals her students.

Wolitzer’s prose is gusty and cinematic, immaculate from start to finish, with well-considered, write-‘em-down one-liners and irrepressible, lucid characters. The voice and style are similar to Tom Perotta, but with a more whimsical moral thrust. The spell’s chaos must reach some conclusion, and this is where the reader enjoys sliding into the ice.

This is a domestic comedy/drama with some acid moments, some poignant insights, and a sprinkling of the psychology of love, coupling, and married life. To enjoy this book, it helps to be flexible about a few unrealistic elements present in a contemporary, earth-bound setting.

This is warm Wolitzer on ice, with a few Mazurkas and a double lutz finale. She did employ a risky contrivance, but it was an active choice, not a slack trick of the pen. Along the way, she demonstrates fine regard to our tech-savvy, digitally addicted society. A delicious sorbet book, this is sly chick-lit that pricks—and puts a spell on you.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 66 readers
PUBLISHER:	Riverhead Hardcover (April 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Meg Wolitzer
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Little Children by Tom Perrota And from Meg Wolitzer: The Interestings

Bibliography:

• Sleepwalking (1982)
• Hidden Pictures (1986)
• This Is Your Life (1988)
• Friends for Life (1994)
• Surrender, Dorothy (1998)
• The Wife (2003)
• The Position (2005)
• The Ten-Year Nap (2008)
• The Uncoupling (2011)
• The Interestings (April 2013)

Movies from books:

• This is My Life (1992)
• Surrender, Dorothy (2006)

“Gwen’s a model citizen, you know that. It was just a wrong place at the wrong time kind of thing. I can see this just going away.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (JUL 27, 2010)

Debut novelist Klein has written a smart and nervy domestic drama/thriller. The pages fly, and the prose is crisp and economical. He tackles difficult, dicey, and controversial subject matter without handing out platitudes or falling into blunt party line agendas. I am tempted to call it a non-puff beach read. It is lively, energetic, and easily accessible, but it is also thought provoking and ultimately bold.

Loving mother and housewife Gwen Raine bought some pot from ex-boyfriend Jude for recreational use. On the way home, driving down some precarious mountain roads, she was involved in a car accident. She was hit by an elderly driver (suffering from dementia), and both end up in the ER. Although Gwen was not at fault, the police found the bag in her car and the THC in her system, and now the DA is poised to strong-arm or throw the book at her due to escalating drug sales in the community.

Concurrently, husband Brian is having some problems at his high-paying job at Caladon Pharmaceuticals. They have been walking a fine line with marketing an anti-anxiety medication as an off-label weight loss drug. Some speculative and hazardous risks were taken by the company’s executives, which threaten to topple over onto Brian. The Raines have separate stressors and two small children together. The marriage is now loaded with accumulating anxieties and legal problems. How–or if–they pull through keeps the reader on edge.

Told from multiple narrative perspectives in alternating chapters, the story focuses primarily on Gwen and Brian Raine; the enigmatic and laconic Jude; and Jude’s daughter, Dana. Gwen and Brian’s depiction as a suburban married couple devoted to their children do fall into a quasi-stock profile. The “form” of their characters is familiar. However, Klein keeps the story taut and the reader tense by compounding the problems resulting from a ripple effect that connects the characters to each other. He convincingly pushes the envelope with Gwen. She is faced with difficult ethical and moral choices, and her responses aren’t canned or predictable.

Jude is morally ambiguous, and I applaud the author for an honest and organic rendering of this character, never falling into an easy trap of stereotype. Moreover, Klein doesn’t demonize all recreational pot smokers into categorical addicts or amoral/immoral deviants. He aptly illustrates the various lifestyle choices that people make and the consequences of their behaviors.

The author did his research and applied his details fluently. I worked for a company that performed drug trials, and I recognize the spot-on ethical dilemmas and vicissitudes that were portrayed and plagued Brian.

The denouement was tidy on one front, luridly messy on another. Klein doesn’t tarnish it by creating a sea change in his characters or laying on a heavy-handed, disingenuous morality. The final and anticlimactic scene was authentic and arch, and I admire the author for his audacious and honest story. It is sure to create animated discussions, which makes it an excellent selection for broad-minded book club readers.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 23 readers
PUBLISHER:	Broadway (July 27, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	David Matthew Klein
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Also read our review of: Blame by Michele Huneven

Bibliography:

• Stash (July 2010)

“He wants it each way. Both ways. All the ways. He wants his marriage solved, and he wants to be on the road with Rena, one of the undersea creatures strapped to the luggage rack, Yul Brynner with his head out the window, licking the air. He wants the Beanbags to smile, shake their heads, look at Hendrick’s charts and tell them ‘We’ve never seen anything like this. It’s a long road in front of you, but his chances for a normal life are. He may now be able to. We’d like to present this case at the.’ He wants to feel less lost.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill Shtulman (JUL 11, 2010)

Jack Lang is not great at being in the world. At the start of this quirky and original book, he has impulsively purchased a second ranch house – right across the street from his original house – at an auction. His wife Beth, a teacher at a local college, has just left him for his good friend Terry Canavan. Terry’s long-time girlfriend, Rena, may or may not be coming on to him.

To really complicate things, he is left in charge of his autistic savant son Hendrick, who has a penchant for memorizing the Weather Channel and mimicking advertising (in its entirety) and sloganeering verbatim.

And that’s just the start of things.

We never know exactly why Beth left Jack except for she’s just fed up. “You can’t just let everything happen to you,” Beth tells him at one point. “You can’t always just wait.” But Jack is out of control; his plans and ideas exceed his abilities to execute them. “Sometimes he thinks of his life like everything that’s happened to him has been something he’s at least half-fallen into.” That includes his mulch-and-garden business at Patriot Mulch & Tree, which is authentically described but if truth be known, is a little too heavy on the details (at least for this reader).

The novel takes place in an abbreviated time period and meanders along as Jack falls into one situation after another. For instance, he impulsively buys a huge fiberglass catfish from a defunct miniature golf course as decoration for a concrete tricycle path at the back of his new home. The point is made: Jack is unconventional and whimsical and Beth is solid and controlling. Still “he knows he needs Beth to save him from his crazier angels, or try to, and he knows, too, or hopes, that she needs him to try to save her from his plainer ones.”

The depiction of Hendrick, the autistic savant, is delightful, especially when he emerges from his shell to spout off Spanish or participates with Rena in a karaoke night; it’s hard not to fall in love with this child. The father-son interactions sparkle.

There is much wild black humor, despite the over-the-top, sometimes marginally successful characterizations. And there are fresh insights into what keeps couples together when by all natural instincts, they should fall apart. Drew Perry has a fresh and audacious imagination that shines through…again and again.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 20 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking Adult (April 1, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Drew Perry
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another quirky neighbor: A Kind of Intimacy by Jenn Ashworth And another guy who doesn’t know what he wants: Next by James Hynes

Bibliography:

• This is Exactly Like You (2010)
• Kids These Days (January 2014)

“It made her think about that Radiohead song ‘Fake Plastic Trees,’ with its fake Chinese rubber plant in plastic earth in a town full of other rubber plants. It made her think about her parents, too. How was it that they just kept at it day after day, living a sort of plastic life in a plastic house in a plastic suburb?”

Book Review:

Review by Mike Fredette (JUN 27, 2010)

Those who enjoyed Susan Coll’s last novel will be pleased to know that she has successfully recycled a different aspect of the same material in her newest, bitingly witty satire, Beach Week. While Acceptance took aim at the upper middle class suburban hysteria surrounding the college application process, Beach Week is much edgier, a novel whose focus is the post-graduation tradition of high school seniors in the wealthy DC suburbs. During the summer before college, mobs of college-bound spoiled eighteen-year-olds rent, with the sanction and cosignatures of parents, beach houses along the Delaware shore where they engage in a week of bad decisions and biblical-like immorality.

Coll’s story focuses mostly on the Adler family, recent transplants from the Midwest whose transition to the east coast has been less than smooth. Besides the financial troubles still haunting them back in Nebraska, Charles and Leah are suffering from marital boredom. Since moving to the DC suburb of Verona, Jordan, their daughter, has suffered a massive head injury on the soccer field, turning Leah into an overprotective, neurotic mother. At the center of this domestic turmoil is beach week, which Leah surprisingly encourages Jordan to attend since she is actually more worried about her apathy towards Verona than her safety. Not surprisingly, the novel ends with teenage drug use, a burning beach house, a number of police officers, and some runaway lobsters (you’ll have to read it to find out). Along the way, however, Coll introduces us to an array of quirky characters. She takes what could easily be the book version of American Pie and infuses it with a profoundly funny exploration of the angst and turmoil at the heart of America’s suburban experience.

What strikes the reader first about Coll’s new novel is the cover art. It suggests, without even having to read the first page, that this book is not really about the kids. A person’s foot hangs threateningly posed overhead a pristinely constructed sand castle on the beach. In the distant background, waves crash that, once the tide comes in, will eventually wash the castle away. For those who already know the basic premise of this story, it is easy to dismiss this picture as just a clever way of foreshadowing a week-long high school beach party turning into something reckless and self-destructive. However, the reader who gazes long enough will see that the sand castle represents not just the beach houses where these youth reside during beach week. It also suggests a domestic, familial space whose very existence is threatened by an onslaught of destructive, external forces. As Leah thinks to herself, the onslaught might just be one overlong episode with a whole lot of chapters, not unlike when you moved across the country and lost your center somehow, and then your husband’s job hit a wall, and your daughter, already unhappy about the move, suffered a concussion and became moody and secretive, and then money problems worsened and your marriage began to fray, and your mother-in-law’s dementia intensified, and then your husband and daughter wound up in prison.

Leah is arguably one of the best characters, illustrating that middle age women often suffer from the same existential anxiety as men. Much to the dismay of her also angst-ridden husband, she offers to host the initial parent meeting concerning Beach Week at her home because “she wanted to go to Beach Week herself.” She would “dare say that in some private corner of her mind she longed for the bad stuff that Beach Week was known for, too.” Add to this feelings inadequacy in the face of peers who are all aggressive parents, high-powered lawyers, and ambitious Washington types, and you have all the fixings for a bona fide midlife crisis. She and Charles “were cultured, educated people. They listened to NPR and saw foreign films,…so why was it she felt she didn’t belong in this town?” She realizes these feelings are “pathetically cliché,” but as she approaches a soon-to-be empty house with just Charles, she cannot help but fantasize about the risky youth she never had or worry that she does not meet the social criteria of her new environment.

The book’s next best character has to be Noah, the man whose dilapidated house the girls end up renting during Beach Week. Recently divorced from his wife Clara, this MIT graduate now sells salt water taffy on the boardwalk of Chelsea Beach. Unfortunately for him, the rest of the world thinks he’s a perverted peeping tom because of a best-selling book his ex-wife published soon after their divorce. As he tries to explain, however, the reason he fell from the tree in his yard and injured his head was not because he was leering at the neighbor but because “he was trying to prevent a murder and write up a report.” Eventually, the reader discovers that Noah is innocent enough, probably suffering from some type of congenital brain defect that skews his interpretation of the world and its events. Predictably, he ends up being the one character to whom Jordan can relate, the novel’s only other character with a severe head injury. A truly unique character, Noah’s chapters are hysterical. How can the reader not laugh out loud at a character who, when watching his house burn with lobsters running across his yard, thinks “of that graphing program on the computer at work and [tries] to visualize some kind of theory of lobster outcomes?”

Coll possesses the perfect literary voice for satire, with spot-on, well-timed wit. She moves effortlessly between the interiorities of men and women, adults and adolescents, exposing all their quirky foibles while making all her main characters likeable and endearing. Whereas Acceptance truly focused on the college application process and the neuroses of high school seniors, Beach Week is a more imaginative effort in terms of characters and subplots. The beach week activity itself is secondary, more a vehicle to explore the regrets, resentments, and dissatisfactions of middle-aged suburban Americans in a very humorous way. Adult readers will definitely appreciate Beach Week far more than Acceptance because, let’s face it, adults don’t really care anymore about getting into college, acing the SATs, or guzzling beer and having risky sex at a week-long, unchaperoned high school blowout. Or if they’re like Leah, maybe they still do.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 7 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (May 25, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Mike Frechette
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Susan Coll
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More satire: Perfect Life by Jessica Shattuck and more humor: Beginner’s Greek by James Collins

Bibliography:

• Karlmarx.com (2001)
• Rockville Pike/a> (2004)
• Acceptance (2007)
• Beach Week (May 2010)

Movies from books:

• Acceptance (2009)

“We both got committed to this enormous delusion, because that’s what it is, an enormous, obscene delusion-this idea that people have to resign from real life and ‘settle down’ when they have families. It’s the great sentimental lie of the suburbs.”

Book Review:

Review by Danielle Bullen (NOV 30, 2009)

Two young people caught in a mundane existence are at the heart of Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. April and Frank Wheeler, formerly lively Greenwich Village singles, have become an ordinary suburban Connecticut married couple. The book is just as poignant now as it was when it was first published in 1961. Named one of Time’s top one hundred novels of the 20th century, it was re-released in time for the December 2008 movie version.

The story takes places in 1955. The Wheelers, just shy of their 30th birthdays, live with their two children in a subdivision called Revolutionary Hill Estates, one of the prototypical communities that sprung up across American after World War II. When we first meet them, April is performing in a rather poor community theater play. It’s the sparking point for the first fight between the two, as April accuses Frank of not praising her acting. The tension between the characters is palpable and Yates early on establishes his skill at peeling away their layers to reveal the rotten cores. Throughout the book, reading about Frank and April is like watching a car crash. You cringe but can’t look away from the destruction.

The novel succeeds as an indictment of American malaise. No more is this more evident than through Frank’s attitude towards his job at Knox Business Machines. It is never made clear to the reader exactly what he does. He prides himself on how little work he can do, remarking, “The great advantage of a place like Knox is that you can sort of turn your mind off every morning.”  As Frank wastes away in his cubicle, it becomes a game to him, testing the limits. April, wanting to rescue herself from the life of a housewife, hatches a plan to move the family to France. She’ll work to support them while Frank figures out what he really wants to do with his life. Frank, looking for an escape from his doldrums, readily agrees.

The Wheelers are not the only couple in the novel. Shep and Milly Campbell are the subject of Frank and April’s distaste. They’re convinced that they are better than the Campbells, but the four have been dealt the same lot in life. The Campbell’s, though, cheerfully accept their jobs and organized days and white picket fence, exactly what the Wheelers are fleeing. Another, older couple, the Givings, first figure in when Helen sells the Wheeler their house. Unlike April, Milly works outside the home, creating a sense of purpose for herself instead of waiting for someone or something to fulfill her. But the Givings really make an impact through their son John, who is in a psychiatric hospital. He is allowed day trips and on several of his excursions, he and his parents have dinner at the Wheelers. John says aloud what readers had been thinking, that Frank and April are only playing house, not living a real life.

Reality interjects when Frank is ironically offered a better positon at work. The promotion comes at the right time as April is pregnant. Frank suggests they postpone Paris for a few years while April is convinced everything is ruined. The pregnancy leads to another of the Wheelers raw emotional smackdowns. April wants to induce a miscarriage, defying Frank, “Do you think you can stop me?”  Frank talks her out of the idea, accepts his new job, and the two establish a truce. The peace is short-lived as April admits that she had fooled herself into wanting the husband and the house and the kids because it was expected of her. Her deluded desire to escape her situation leads to the novel’s sad but ultimately predictable ending.

Yates’ characters see themselves as “victims of the world’s indifference”  but is it society or themselves that cause the most disappointment? Revolutionary Road holds a mirror up to suburban clichés and then smashes the glass. Are we responsible for our happiness or is it determined by chance? The novel leaves the reader with the foreboding sense that their lives are no different than the Wheelers.

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AMAZON READER RATING:	from 268 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Reissue edition (December 30, 2008)
REVIEWER:	Danielle Bullen
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Richard Yates Wikipedia page on Richard Yates
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Others that you may like: Disturbances in the Field by Lynn Sharon Schwartz Perfect Life by Jessica Shattuck Little Children by Tom Perotta

Bibliography:

• Revolutionary Road (1961)
• Eleven Kinds of Loneliness: Stories 1962)
• A Special Providence (1969)
• Disturbing the Peace (1975)
• The Easter Parade (1976)
• A Good School (1978)
• Liars in Love: Stories (1981)
• Young Hearts Crying (1984)
• Cold Spring Harbor (1986)
• The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (2001)
• Uncertain Times (unpublished)

Related:

• A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Works of Richard Yates (2004)

Movies from books:

• Revolutionary Road (2008)