Used Books Blog

Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson is a jumbled, frustrating post-apocalyptic novel. Don’t expect a paint-by-numbers approach to revealing how things went wrong, nor what happened between that fateful day and the present. There is no omniscient character to provide the necessary background. There is no guide. Instead Johnson’s characters inhabit the world as it is, without the explanation that might bring clarity to the reader.

I admire what Denis Johnson is trying to do in Fiskadoro. He immerses the reader in what it might really be like to be a survivor. History is lost or, worse, is a warped collection of things heard or imagined. The connection to the past is limited, receding away until it vanishes like a sunset never to return. What remains isn’t well understood or is taken for granted as part of daily life.

Admiration and enjoyment don’t always go hand in hand.

Johnson creates a realistic world in which the survivors, and reader, are often fumbling for answers. The survivors crave those answers. They want to know what happened, how it happened and what comes next. And so did I! There are a few sign-posts in Fiskadoro that point to a quarantine and some sort of civilization in Cuba. There is one particular scene late in the book that paints an interesting portrait of the hours or days after the bombs fell. But it’s not enough to quench my thirst for answers. And while I know that’s what Johnson wants me to feel, it leaves me frustrated.

Yes, I enjoy post-apocalyptic novels and Johnson provides one reason I might be drawn to this theme.

Can we help it if sometimes we like to tell stories that want, as their holiest purpose, to excite us with pictures of danger and chaos?

I’ll admit that I see part of myself in that statement. But it’s overwhelmed with the idea of starting again; of battling back from the brink; of stripping down all the old conventions and building anew; of how you might respond should civilization disintegrate. What would you do if …? I am intrigued by this idea.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr., Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, The Postman by David Brin and Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell all answer this central question and satisfy in different ways. Fiskadoro doesn’t.

Oddly, the best passages in the book revolve around the past life of a now elderly, nearly mute, woman. The reader is taken back to her harrowing escape from Saigon. This is where the book comes alive and Johnson is certainly drawing some parallels between the two timelines with themes such as the breakdown of society, of leaving the past behind completely and of survival.

I don’t doubt Johnson’s writing ability. He’s talented, with interesting insight …

The sabotage of knowledge by a wealth of facts - they weren’t professors, but guerrillas.

and observations.

The seagulls walked back and forth at the border of the water, all bellies and beaks, throwing out their chests with an air of flat assumption like small professors.

In the end Fiskadoro proves that the post-apocalyptic genre is tough to get right, even for gifted writers. With all the great post-apocalyptic novels out there, I simply can’t recommend Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson.

The Long Rain by Peter Gadol is a great suspense novel that explores relationships, morals and guilt. Jason Dark is putting the pieces of his life back together. He’s moved to a family vineyard, opened up a small law practice in the rural town and is renewing relationships with his estranged wife and troubled son. But then things go awry. On a rainy night on a country road he accidentally runs over and kills a teenager. No one is around for miles and miles.

What would you do?

Maybe the answer is easy for you and you do the right thing, but Peter Gadol explores the sinister side - the weak side - that might try to cover it up. Dark convinces himself that nothing good can come of his admission. The boy is dead and will stay dead. As a lawyer, Dark sees jail or a civil suit that takes away all he’s just reclaimed. He must accept the burden of guilt to protect his family and new life.

The Long Rain is a great suspense novel. Don’t mistake it for a mystery novel. This isn’t a whodunit because you know who committed the crime. It’s not quite a thriller either. You won’t find gory descriptions of a serial killer, no chases with gun waving thugs and nothing blows up in a fiery orange ball. You will be treated to a fascinating internal, psychological drama.

Gadol puts you right smack in the middle of this queasy situation. Good people sometimes make bad decisions. Once Dark lies, he can’t seem to go back and reveal the truth. It’s like that friend you were supposed to call and the longer you wait the worse you feel and the tougher it is to call and explain why you flaked. The beauty of The Long Rain is that you get to live this nightmare vicariously. Guilt and anxiety eat at Dark, threatening to consume his new life. And like Dark, I often found myself sitting, shoulders near my ears, with knots twisting my stomach, thinking ‘will he get caught?’

Vivid descriptions of the vineyard and the detailed process of making wine provide needed breaks from the treacherous plot. Some may find the explanations of the crush, fermentation and cultured bacteria to be too detailed. But if you’re even a little interested in wine, these sections should be interesting. Either way, they are welcome spots of relaxation in an otherwise tense novel. There are also a few overly coincidental plot points, but they weren’t glaring enough to derail my enjoyment of the story.

The Long Rain taps into basic human flaws and puts them on display. It asks and answers a number of unsettling questions. Page by page the anxiety grows. You can’t help but feel the pressure of the situation. This isn’t an easy paint by numbers portrait. It’s a messy, emotional, visceral drama that exposes how secrets and guilt can damage trust and twist relationships. Enjoy the chaos knowing you can always close the book on the drama.

Outrageous Fortune by Tim Scott is a rare blend of action, humor, absurdity, science-fiction and personal insight. You know things are going to be interesting when the first word of Outrageous Fortune is ‘Fuckers’, uttered by main character, Johnny X67. He has every right to be pissed. His house has just been stolen. But that’s not even in the Top 10 of strange things that Johnny encounters in this non-stop adventure.

The world that Tim Scott creates is a fantastic collection of interesting ideas, vivid imagery and incisive social commentary. On top of that he’s laid out a riotous action plot coupled with interludes of penetrating observations. I knew I was hooked when he described a city that had been divided by music genres. Such a brilliant concept I’m green with envy!

The Classical section is high-brow and well maintained with sound ordinances and large signs that chide the noisy with large flashing ’shhhhh’ signs. In Jazz you have all sorts of strange free-form architecture but can’t be sure to get a decent pizza since they might be ‘experimenting’ with an ‘all olive’ phase. Or visit Compilation, the haven for those pale, boring souls who don’t have taste enough to identify with any one type of music. And stay away from Holiday Song, an area with perpetual snow and roaming, ho-ho-ho-ing Santas.

Scott takes readers on a fast-paced ride that reminds me of the movie After Hours and Brazil. It’s a desperate, funny, bizarre world where you (and the characters) are struggling to catch-up and digest what is going on. You don’t want to put the book down because you know something else is going to happen in the next few pages.

The only thing that distracted me was the mix of English and American phrases and places. Scott is English and that comes through unmistakably through his prose. However, the novel takes place in America in some sort of composite of Santa Cruz, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Perhaps the cultural collision is intentional and part of the alternate reality Scott wants to create. I don’t know, but it jolted me out of the regular reading and flow of the story.

Amid the Monty Python meets Philip K. Dick prose are amazing reflections on relationships, religion, reality and happiness.

On relationships:

I watched her character shrink before me and I felt so helpless. The spirit I’d loved her for had turned into fear, so that she no longer thought she could cope with the world; was so scared of the thought of being on her own that she crushed the present, suffocating any joy from life, and turned everything into a battle for survival. I knew this was not right - not for us, not for people who had a house and food and friends. And the more she clung to me, the more we both drowned, sinking under an invisible sea of desperation.

On religion:

Now the emphasis was on seeking peace rather than clinging to spurious explanations for our existence - and once the focus moved toward peace, religion seemed to lose a lot of its hold over the masses. Religions never had been interested in peace that much, anyway.

On happiness:

What mattered was regaining who I was, because the pleasure of being alive is not pining for different lives, or different things, but just being.

For every talking elevator who tells bad jokes there is a literary gem. Tim Scott gives readers both sizzle and steak; swashbuckling science-opera and high-minded literature. Read Outrageous Fortune and then wait for Scott’s next novel.

The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi covers a wide range of weighty topics without seeming to lose focus and never sounds preachy. The story follows Karim Amir, a teenager in middle-class suburban London, born to an English mother and Indian father. Karim’s coming of age story explores themes of family, love, sexuality and racism.

At under 300 pages it’s a wonder Kureishi is able to cover so much ground with so few words. It’s not that his writing isn’t incisive (it is!), it’s simply economical and efficient. A simple page or two and you can feel the suffocating boredom of Karim’s family life like dust trapped in stale sunlight. But before you have a chance to fully digest and process the scene you’re on to the next vignette.

Purposeful or not, the speed in which events occur mirror the accelerated development that takes place during those teenage years. The time when everything seems to happen at once. It dawns on you that your parents are people with their own foibles; you’re experimenting with sex; you gorge yourself on music as a proxy for self-identity; you fall in love or lust; and you begin to comprehend subtext, drafted into a new and messy adult reality.

The Buddha of Suburbia would be an above average novel if limited to just these ’standard’ story lines. Overlay the cultural and racial tension and The Buddha of Suburbia becomes unique. It is no longer a Catcher in the Rye variant (not a phony), but a layered period piece and social indictment with self-identity as the centering plot device; whether it is Karim’s struggle to find his place in the world; or generations of Indian immigrants grappling with native versus adoptive customs; or the definition of family relationships in modern society.

However, I never really ‘felt’ for Karim, though I understood and appreciated his motivations and actions. Karim seems somewhat disconnected and aloof, which may be how Kureishi is able to quickly navigate from one thematic element to the other. I wanted to feel more for Karim, but instead I felt for his situation. Objective empathy instead of visceral reaction.

This made The Buddha of Suburbia more entertaining and light, yet less penetrating. Despite this lack of emotional depth, I recommend reading Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole sticks with you long after you finish reading. I was initially turned off as I began reading since the ‘protagonist’, Ignatius J. Reilly, is somewhat unlikeable. In real life, you’d run the opposite direction from Ignatius - and fast! He’s an unkempt, ill-tempered moralist with a dim view of nearly everyone else in his rather large orbit.

I’d heard quite a bit about A Confederacy of Dunces. If you’re at all interested in literature you have likely heard the one about the Pulitzer Prize won by a dead man. Sure enough, A Confederacy of Dunces, written by Toole in the early sixties, won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, 12 years after his suicide in 1969. Reading the foreword you learn that it was Toole’s mother, having tremendous faith in her son’s work, who made sure A Confederacy of Dunces saw the light of day.

Ignatius J. Reilly makes A Confederacy of Dunces unforgettable, though I could have done without the descriptions of his gas, flatulence and other ailments. As the centerpiece of the novel, Ignatius is an over-sized bowling ball that flattens everything in his path. Reilly is a self-serving sloth who can rationalize his way out of any situation, responsibility or principle. Toole uses Reilly to look critically at nearly all facets of life: family, sex, relationships, commerce, politics, education, race and class.

A Confederacy of Dunces also succeeds as a historical composition. Toole paints a very visceral portrait of New Orleans. It feels grimy and worn at the edges. It feels like there’s a burgeoning lower-middle class stuck between the past and the future. The characters and dialog are pitch perfect whether it’s the wealthy, quarrelsome couple who own a struggling clothing factory or Darlene, a simple young woman performing burlesque (poorly) in a French Quarter bar.

The story really begins when Ignatius is pushed into the work force to repay a debt that he incurred. Though he certainly doesn’t see it that way! Most memorable are the scenes at Levy Pants, where Ignatius finds a co-dependent doormat as a colleague and boss. It’s here that Ignatius is allowed to do the most damage. We’re treated to Ignatius whip-lashing back and forth between adoration and derision of both the owner and the poor working class. In particular, his ‘leadership’ of a worker’s riot and crippling forged missive to a business partner are astoundingly funny.

It’s tough not to think about Toole and whether this was a chronicle of his own inner struggle. He obviously had many opinions, sometimes conflicting in nature, which found voice in Ignatius. While the events are often humorous, it’s a black humor filled with sharp edges of anger, dissatisfaction and resentment.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole is a fascinating book because I seem to like it more and more upon reflection. That’s high praise for any work of art. So, in this case you can believe the hype.

Everyman by Philip Roth is a short but satisfying chronicle of a life lived unapologetically. The majority of the novel, or perhaps it’s better classified as a novella, revolves around the ‘golden’ years of a man who has dealt with the specter of death through a series of hospitalizations. The beauty of Everyman is the engrossing delivery of such ordinary material. Roth is a gifted storyteller, and using his nameless character, he allows readers to empathize and relate to this “everyman.”

Everyman is about death, lust, love, family, frailty and human nature. These aren’t new themes for Roth or for the world at large. What is different is the pace and structure that Roth builds into Everyman. There isn’t a deeply rich exploration of family or vivid descriptions of modern America. Everyman starts out with the main character’s funeral. So the rest of the story unfolds almost like a Six Feet Under type of eulogy.

To me, it feels like an extended version of the ‘my life flashed before my eyes’ type of scenario. In those harrowing moments before death you relive your life in flashes, a dreamlike meta state that has no time boundaries. So, we do visit the hero in his youth and learn about his father. We see the bonding moments he’s had with his brother, how he met and fell in love with his wife and his affairs and human failings. They’re just vivid snapshots, life’s highlights, that have the most meaning and impact.

Roth creates a great amount of empathy for both the main character and those with which he interacts. It’s a literary feat that he’s able to create a clear portrait with such a brevity of words. Using the everyman device, he’s able to connect with the reader quickly and pinpoint those uncomfortable and messy areas of life that we all encounter. This is Roth at his finest, revealing the intricacies of relationships and the heartfelt turmoil that is part of everyday life.

The main character is not the quintessential everyman, since he’s colored with Roth’s unique perspective. In particular, the introspective ability to analyze and to forgive poor decisions, chalking them up to being human. There are no apologies, only the tacit knowledge that he’s screwed up from time to time, that it wasn’t optimal, but it was what happened and that … is that.

Everyman is also interesting as it pertains to longevity and medicine. Living longer due to medical advances is a double-edged sword in many respects. You get more time to experience the world and people around you, but what happens when some of those people die and parts of the world aren’t available to you anymore? Is longevity for it’s own sake worthwhile? I find these themes increasingly relevant as I (and my peers) get older.

Philip Roth has once again demonstrated why he’s one of America’s best modern writers.

Strong Motion by Jonathan Franzen is a fantastic mix of literary fiction and mystery. Superbly drawn characters, psychological punch and vivid descriptions are mixed with an intriguing mystery that revolves around the cause of a swarm of earthquakes in the Boston area. Strong Motion is the Jonathan Franzen version of Erin Brockovich. In it, he deftly and intelligently deals with issues of abortion and corporate malfeasance, while retaining the introspective flow of his dynamic characters and their intense interactions.

The novel follows Louis Holland as he deals with a dysfunctional family, middling career and conflicting love interests. Earthquakes are what set this story in motion. They kill his grandmother and bring Renee Seitchek, a seismologist, into his orbit. The paths of many characters get tangled up and converge seamlessly as they delve into his grandmother’s inheritance, which is composed of stock in a industrial chemical company.

This type of convergence-plot seems in vogue recently and it doesn’t always work. It often feels forced, and you can imagine the author struggling to find ways to unify the various plot lines and characters. The links are sometimes tenuous and there are instances when you simply must employ a suspension of disbelief to make reading enjoyable. That isn’t a problem with Franzen’s Strong Motion. The intersecting plot lines make complete sense and bring natural order to the story.

I have a habit of turning down the corner of a page that has a particular passage that I found extraordinary. Sometimes I’ll review them later and not quite know what I found so compelling, but it’s easy to understand my many markers in Strong Motion.

The hum of the fan in the window was the sound of unhappiness in its rotary progress, always developing and yet always the same, a sound that marked every second of the minutes and hours in which improvement was failing to occur.

Obviously, no one had been eager to be personally crushed by falling timbers or to see their possessions go up in flames, but for a few days in the spring Nature had toyed with the city’s expectations, and people had rapidly developed covert appetites for televised images of bodies under sheets of polyethylene, for the carnival-ride sensation of being tossed around the living room, for a Californian experience, for major numbers.

If you get your life in balance with your death, you stop panicking. Life stops being just the status quo that you hope won’t end for a long time.

If you haven’t already figured it out, Franzen likes long sentences and has a penchant for beautifully describing discontent and those things that we rarely admit to ourselves. Strong Motion is a more raw, blunt version of Franzen’s acclaimed The Corrections, which makes it different, not better or worse.

The one area where Franzen seems one-dimensional is sex. The sexual interactions between characters are confrontational and often mixed with violence. I don’t doubt that this is part of the broad spectrum of sexuality, but it seems a bit one note and distracting at times. I think it’s a red flag if I’m wondering whether Franzen just has some horrible sexual past he’s trying to work out on the page or if he’s trying to make a point through or about sexual intimacy.

I’m being hard on Franzen, but only because there’s nothing else to pick on. Strong Motion is that good. Franzen delivers gripping personal portrayals, frightening human insight as well as a taut and well plotted mystery. I highly recommend Strong Motion, for fans of The Corrections or those new to Franzen’s work.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami is another solid effort by one of the best modern writers on the planet. Sure, it’s not as absorbing and gripping as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or as eerie and complete as Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World. But that’s a massive pedigree to live up to, the former a taut, rich and uncomfortable story similar to David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten, while the latter (one of my favorite books of all time) an amazing mix of surrealism and science fiction.

Kafka on the Shore seems to borrow from both of these former works; from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the exploration of dark themes and revealing personal histories; from Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World, the surreal and a convergence of dream and reality. This isn’t a rehash though, it’s a fresh story and perspective. This time it feels more like a collage, with different ideas, images, people and perspectives stitched together in an almost poem like format.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a typical narrative style fiction novel told from three distinct perspectives, a 15-year-old runaway, an elderly dullard and an aimless truck driver. The characters start from very different places and at first it’s not altogether clear how they’ll cross paths. Thankfully, Murakami surprises the reader - or at least this reader - and doesn’t follow a paint-by-numbers plot.

I am immediately drawn to the story when it turns out that the elderly dullard has a talent for speaking to cats. I’ve always liked cats and, as a kid, loved the idea of them talking and doing all sorts of mysterious things. What if my cats could talk to me?! What would they say? What would they sound like? At 7-years-old I pestered my parents to see The Cat from Outer Space. What can I say? I was 7.

That’s the strange thing about Kafka on the Shore. It mixes and matches style and pace. The beginning is more like an X-Files episode trying to determine the cause of unexplained phenomena, full of recollections, eyewitnesses and official interview passages. There is a horror-like vignette, like a dash of salt, added to the narrative as well. Yet there are soul searching passages of personal revelation, poignant philosophical musings, some Greek mythology, a hearty dose of sex and sly barbs at our diminishing grip on culture.

It’s tough not to fall for Murakami when he rattles off some truly gorgeous prose.

Just by looking at that happy smile, you can trace the beautiful path that a contented heart must follow. Like a firefly’s glow that persists long after it’s disappeared into the darkness.

Kafka on the Shore is about how to keep that glow alive once it’s disappeared into the darkness and the everyday, meaningless tragedies that make it difficult to do so. Not for those with delicate constitutions, or for those who want things to be neat and tidy, fully explained and mapped out. The rest of you should pick up Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami and enjoy the journey.

Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick is absorbing, interesting but somewhat academic and dry at the same time. The story follows Rose Meadows, an orphan who winds up working for and living with the Mitwissers. Set in the 1930s, the Mitwissers flee Germany, find their way to New York and survive solely on the generosity of a bitter and capricious heir to a popular children’s book franchise.

There’s a lot to like in Heir to the Glimmering World. Ozick captures time and place perfectly, richly describing upstate New York and the Bronx in the run-up to World War II. In addition, the relationships between Rose and her emotionally crippled father, family friend Bertram, and Professor Rudolf Mitwisser are finely crafted, revealing a central father-daughter theme that runs throughout the novel.

Heir to the Glimmering World is about damaged and flawed individuals looking to find their place in a tumultuous world. The character portraits are as interesting as they are diverse: a son who’s only connection to his father was as the source of his books; a strident communist who’s changed her name to Ninel (Lenin spelled backwards); a cynical, gambling single father who resents the yoke of his daughter; a once shining academic star mentally broken by losing her country and profession; and an obsessed academic who hides from his family through his research.

Yet, the plot is rather aimless, and there’s no central conflict to resolve. This natural storytelling element seems to be lost in Heir to the Glimmering World. I’m not wedded to the traditional, but I am looking to connect with the story on both a intellectual and emotional level. So while the relationships that Ozick paints are intense, I don’t feel them in my gut, only in my head. They’re well documented and put on display like a butterfly collection.

For whatever reason, I felt a distance from the characters and actions in the novel. Instead of being sucked into the story, I was analyzing the story. Worth reading, Heir to the Glimmering World is thought-provoking … it just didn’t touch me.

Company by Max Barry was, to be direct, not very good. I had high hopes for Company, coming on the heels of Barry’s very interesting Jennifer Government. Unfortunately, Company has all the snappy dialog and cheeky humor but falls short on nearly every other front. My copy of Company has the image of a glazed donut on the cover, which I find an apt metaphor: sweet sugary exterior with nothing but airy dough on the inside. Oh, and there’s a hole in the middle and it’s not at all nutritious.

Barry’s aim is to explore and poke fun at large corporate business culture and their reliance on Six Sigma, KPI, TQM and other management techniques. Trust me, I’ve experienced some of these corporate torture devices and they are absolutely inane. Thing is, others have been down this road, most notably Douglas Coupland in Generation X. While not the direct assault that Barry is looking to deliver, Coupland winds up capturing the soul-sucking combination of boredom and stress far better than Barry.

In Company, Stephen Jones, a recent business graduate, joins Zephyr Holdings, the antithesis of a toxic corporate culture. His co-workers are a pale Glengarry Glen Ross and Office Space amalgamation who have no real idea what the company does or sells. There are some clever bureaucratic gags, anecdotes and insights, but not enough to offset the stale setting and hollow characters. In particular, Eve Jantiss, the model-like, amoral love interest comes off more like a caricature of a junior high version of a corporate fantasy girl.

Perhaps he’s too far removed from his days at Hewlett Packard, or there’s a cultural difference or time-zone like delay on this type of corporate satire. Whatever the reason, Max Barry’s Company is an easy read but, like a donut, you’ll search for something else to fill you up the minute you’re done.