Used Books Blog

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.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides is a dense, sprawling epic that successfully marries a unique family experience with Greek and American history. The story follows the Stephanides family from a small town in Greece to Detroit and finally suburban Grosse Pointe. The impetus for this trip back in time is a gender identity struggle by Calliope Stephanides. In other words, why exactly is Calliope a hermaphrodite?

Yes, the central subject matter of Middlesex is the incestuous relationships that cause a recessive gene to bubble up to the surface. So if you’re uncomfortable with sexuality, incest or hermaphrodites you may want to pass on Middlesex. However, that would be your loss because Eugenides does a brilliant job of making these topics accessible and relevant. I’m not the only one who thinks so, the Pulitzer Board thought so too.

The story starts out with an exploration of Greek history and a frightening look at the destruction of Smyrna in 1922. I’m always impressed when a writer makes me uncomfortable. And there are passages in this section of Middlesex that made me wince, to think and to appreciate what I have.

Desdemona and Lefty, a brother and sister, escape Smyrna and make their way to Detroit. Through Desdemona and Lefty we are immersed in a number of detailed and evocative vignettes that range from the conditions of the Ford automotive plant, to rum-running, to a nascent ‘Nation of Islam’ sect to the race riots of 1967. If there’s one flaw to Middlesex it’s the sometimes tenuous relationships that string these scenic detours together.

By this time you’re wondering when exactly you’re going to learn about Calliope. (A subconscious backseat ‘are we there yet?’ whine.) It’s a very clever device to keep the reader moving forward in the family history. In discussing Middlesex with others, it seems many had problems with this structure. They just “couldn’t get past the first 100 pages” or found it “too slow.” I say, stop to smell the roses! These sections, though disconnected from the plot, are pitch perfect. Say no to instant gratification and just enjoy the top notch writing.

Sure enough, the next generation is introduced and we then ride along with Calliope’s parents, Milton and Tessie. It’s here that the novel shifts away from history and more toward interpersonal drama. The writing is too detailed and descriptive to ever devolve into a soap opera, but all the ingredients are there. We also begin to delve into Calliope’s formative years which finally culminates in an intense relationship with a redheaded female classmate dubbed the Obscure Object.

Then, finally, the payoff. Eugenides chronicles the awakening, struggle and journey of Calliope into adulthood. There’s no doubt that this part of the novel is compelling and gives Middlesex something other similar novels lack. Certainly you’ll remember this theme, but it’s what surrounds it that really has a lasting impact: the struggle for identity, the complex nature of family, the random events that bring about change in a person’s life.

One of my favorite books of 2007, I highly recommend Middlesex.

Zeroville by Steve Erickson is what I would describe as a mood novel. The narrative, plot, description, imagery, structure and dialog all combine to produce a certain vibe, they strike an emotional chord that produces a general mood. I hear this happens a lot when people listen to jazz. I’m not a big jazz fan myself, but I can relate and would include OK Computer by Radiohead, the theme to Six Feet Under and anything by Ride as music that elicits a very specific mood.

It’s rare that this happens with books in my opinion. Yes, there are some that have a theme, that set a specific tone that you might immerse yourself in, but it’s not the same. What I’m talking about is the ability to create and influence the reader’s mindset. It’s like the ink is tinged with some sort of pathogen that infects you through the fingertips. Thus, every word you read is seen through this filter that the author has instilled in your brain. (That actually sounds like an interesting science-fiction plot don’t you think?)

One of my favorite passages from Zeroville relates to this concept:

It’s like the first time I heard the second Pere Ubu album and throught it just blew completely, I thought anyone who liked it must be stupid and full of shit - and then for about a year it was practically the only album I listened to. It was the only album that made any sense at all. So why does that happen? The music hasn’t changed. The movie hasn’t changed. It’s still the same exact movie, but it’s like it sets something in motion, some understanding you didn’t know you could understand, it’s like a virus that had to get inside you and take hold and maybe you shrug it off - but when you don’t , it kills you in a way, not necessarily in a bad way because maybe it kills something that’s been holding you down or back, because when you hear a really really great record or see a really great movie, you feel alive in a way you didn’t before, everything looks different, like what they say when you’re in love or something - though I wouldn’t know - but everything is new and it gets into your dreams.

Zeroville follows Vikar Jerome as he lands in Hollywood in 1969. He’s easy to spot, what with the tattoo of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift on his shaved head. He’s prone to quick violence, particularly if you mistake Clift and Taylor for James Dean and Natalie Wood. Yes, Zeroville is about movies and if you’re even a little bit interested in movies it will make the story that much more fulfilling. Erickson often doesn’t come out and tell the reader what movie he’s referring to, encouraging you to piece together the reference.

Vikar’s love of movies leads him to work as an editor. That’s about the most ‘normal’ thing I can say about the plot, which pinballs from one strange situation to another, chopped up into over 400 ‘chapters’ that range in length from a word to a few pages. This is quintessential Erickson, weaving together the odd and bizarre into something that is entrancing. There are times when you may not fully understand what he’s driving at but it feels interesting and important.

In this city a person can hide from God for a long time.

He uses film as a metaphor for life, and editing as a mechanism to manipulate, or to make choices by showing the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ profile of an actor. I highly recommend Zeroville and any other Erickson for that matter. Simply be prepared to absorb the material on a different level and let the mood of his work take over.

Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami is a frenetic, disturbing coming of age story. It’s a compelling read, that keeps you interested despite the sometimes gruesome activities and descriptions. I stumbled on Coin Locker Babies while trying to figure out which Haruki Murakami novel I’d read next. Coin Locker Babies popped up after a search for Murakami and I became intrigued because it wasn’t a title with which I was familiar. Had I found a rare or new Haruki Murakami novel? No. I quickly found that there was another Murakami. Perhaps Murakami is to Japan what ‘Smith’ is to America.

I checked it out and Ryu Murakami’s bio was interesting enough that I decided to give Coin Locker Babies a try. The novel follows two orphans - Hashi and Kiku - both abandoned in a coin locker soon after being born. They befriend each other at an orphanage and wind up being adopted together by a childless couple on a small rural island. From here the novel begins to accelerate as we follow Kiku, a pole vaulter prone to violence and Hashi, a frail and musical sort who winds up an excessive rock star.

The novel doesn’t quite hang together all the time, as Murakami explores different genres and topics. Most of these explorations are interesting, though sometimes overly grotesque in my opinion. Murakami delves into the underbelly of Japanese youth culture coupled with the struggle around bisexuality; the inner-workings of the music industry and the tortured artist; life within a progressive prison facility; and biologic weapons.

The central theme of Coin Locker Babies is self-discovery, with the vehicle being the struggle to do so after being abandoned in such a callous way. But there’s a secondary element of debauchery, darkness, self-loathing and hatred. In the end, it’s these secondary themes that overtake the novel and the narrative. Lives gone awry, a society gone astray.

Not for the feint of heart, Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami is a consuming read, but may not ultimately be satisfying.

Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo was disappointing and ranks as my worst book of 2007. Perhaps I expect too much from DeLillo. I’m an ardent fan of his work, having started with Ratner’s Star and read everything except Players and the new Falling Man. The cadence of DeLillo’s work is always engrossing, a stylized, off-kilter pacing, rich description and dialog that is hyper-real.

White Noise, The Names, Americana and Underworld are some of my favorite novels. They evoke a mood, a time, and a place, provoking thought on both modern and timeless themes. With Cosmopolis, all that once seemed so effortless for DeLillo now seems forced. It feels like an attempt to modernize, to make himself more relevant to the Internet age.

Cosmopolis starts out promisingly enough. There are descriptions and turns of phrase that rival those of his best work. We follow Eric Packer as he sets out in his white limousine, beset by the confusion of a modern world fraught with instant success and the conflict between technology and humanity. The set-up is good, and there’s a real vehicle (both literal and metaphoric) to move the plot along.

Sure enough Eric gets caught in New York traffic. But so does DeLillo’s focus. The deconstruction of Eric Packer is clunky and the happenstances that occur are forced and the returning phrases (a DeLillo trademark) just don’t seem to work. Usually, these returning phrases, these echoes of the character’s subconscious, help to shape the mood and tone of the novel. They’re the border collie of his prose.

Cosmopolis is nothing if not challenging, thought-provoking, and utterly different.

That’s what the Chicago Sun-Times had to say about Cosmopolis. That should have been an warning, a red flag, since it says absolutely nothing positive about the book. Quintessential critic-speak for an author that they can’t quite pan given his track record and following.

Avoid Cosmopolis and instead pick up any DeLillo work before Underworld.

Inspired by fellow Reign of Error blogger, I’ve decided to do a best books list. This is about books I’ve read in 2007, not those published in 2007. Remember, this is the Used Books blog. I’ve selected David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas as my best book of 2007. It was a very close choice between Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten, Mitchell’s debut novel. They both have similar styles, but I found Cloud Atlas just slightly more inventive from a structure and language perspective. Get your hands on a David Mitchell novel soon and you won’t regret it.

There was a solid list of contenders on my 2007 list. They included:

• Atonement by Ian McEwan
• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
• The World to Come by Dara Horn
• Strong Motion by Jonathan Franzen
• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

I haven’t reviewed all of the above because I’ve been busy with work (launching Santa.com) and family (a great wife and fantastic 3-year old daughter.) But look for the missing reviews (and more) in the coming weeks.

Right now I’m in the middle of Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, which will likely make it on the 2008 list. I’m also looking forward to Mischa Berlinski’s Fieldwork and Ian MacDonald’s Brasyl. The important thing is to keep reading.

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon is a slim, but satisfying mystery as well as an insightful examination and extension of a beloved fictional character. The story revolves around Linus Steinman, a nine year old mute, who escaped Nazi Germany with an African gray parrot named Bruno. Bruno’s past associations coupled with his numerical utterances bring the greedy and amoral to his lodging house.

The New York Times Book Review says The Final Solution is “On par with the best, most tightly written sections of Chabon’s last novel, the marvelous The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.” I’m not the NYT, but I’d beg to differ. I’m a huge Kavalier & Clay fan, and while The Final Solution is good, it simply doesn’t bristle with passion and power of the former. And I guess Chabon’s Summerland doesn’t count as a novel?

Instead, The Final Solution is a bit aloof like the unnamed detective who works to solve the mystery. So while the tight plot is enjoyable, the only character that truly jumps off the page is the aged Sherlock Holmes. And even then we’re never told it is that famous detective. So it reads more like a great cover band, or maybe Sammy Hagar as the front man for Van Halen. The ’story’ stands on it’s own, but is certainly given considerably more weight given Chabon’s literary history.

I found some of the P.S. features very interesting. The NPR interview in particular revealed Chabon’s admiration for David Mitchell and Cynthia Ozick. I’m a huge Mitchell fan and immediately picked up an Ozick title. I find the relationships between authors, most often exposed in the acknowledgments, to be a fascinating and valuable tool in finding other great reading.

For example, in Matt Ruff’s Bad Monkeys, he acknowledges Neal Stephenson of Cryptonomicon fame. Similarly, Susanna Clarke acknowledges Neil Gaiman in the fabulous Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I’d be extremely interested in a LibraryThing like interface that exposed these connections to readers.

So, pick up The Final Solution by Michael Chabon and then cross your fingers and hope that The Yiddish Policemen’s Union returns Chabon to his Kavalier & Clay form.

Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff is a condensed, fast-paced, insightful romp that walks the line between gritty literary realism and surreal science-fiction. I’ve been waiting for the next Ruff novel for quite a while and Bad Monkeys will hold me over until I get my next fix.

Bad Monkeys revolves around Jane Charlotte as she converses with a psychologist and explains how and why she’s now arrested for murder. The explanation is, as you’d expect from a Ruff novel, a whopper! Jane details two secret societies locked in a battle of good and evil.

She explains how, as a child rejected by her mother, she found herself in central California on the trail of a serial pedophile and murderer dubbed The Angel of Death. It’s here that she first encounters the ‘organization’ and uses an NC gun to fend off and kill the The Angel of Death. What’s an NC gun? Come now, it’s a gun that kills by Natural Causes. Quintessential, inventive Ruff!

As you may have realized, the topics covered by Ruff aren’t shallow or glitzy in an Elmore Leonard way. Like Set This House In Order, he’s dealing with serious issues that fracture the lives of people. Bad Monkeys covers some of the same ground as Set This House In Order, and nearly feels like a mash-up of that novel and Sewer, Gas & Electric.

But Ruff makes it different enough and keeps you guessing as to whether Jane is just a very troubled woman who’s built a fantastic and bizarre world as a coping mechanism, or if she’s on the level and is on the front lines in the war against evil. Just when you think you know which way it will go, that’s when the plot twist(s) make you doubt yourself.

I read Bad Monkeys in two round-trip BART rides. It’s a rather short novel, particularly for the usually Homeric Ruff. So part of me wishes he’d taken one more year and written another 200 pages to fully explore the fantastic framework he established. Another is happy that the next novel is that much closer.

Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff is a good read and Fool On The Hill is required reading. Extra credit? The Matt Ruff home page.

A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby is a novel about four very different people who unexpectedly meet on the top of a high-rise building on New Year’s Eve. Great rooftop party perhaps? No. As the title might give away, all four found their way to the roof to commit suicide. Sounds depressing, but if you’ve read (or seen) any of Hornby’s work you’ll know that it will be a (dark) comic romp.

Sure enough, A Long Way Down is a hyper-glib rim-shot of a novel that uses humor to explore the topics of loneliness, desolation and loss. Nearly all of Hornby’s work has a dark, troublesome theme residing at its core. His work is about how people find their way in the world, how they deal with hardship, how they … manage, which at times seems tough at best and impossible at worst. Laughter seems the best medicine.

Hornby has a bit of real-life experience to draw upon in this arena, given that his son is autistic. It’s tough for me not to read some of that background into his portrayal of Maureen, a middle-aged single mother with a severely handicapped son who keeps her housebound most of the time. The difficulty of that love shines around the wit of the words like an aura. You can’t help but feel it there.

The three other characters are Martin, a scandalized daytime tabloid star; JJ, a rock musician who believes his life is his career and his career is finished; and Jess, a young foul-mouthed girl without an emotional filter who lives in the shadow of her missing older sister. None of the four jump from the roof that night. Don’t worry, that’s not a spoiler! The book is about how they get on. It’s about how they band together and continue to live, despite their differences and despite any real fairy tale ending.

I like Hornby’s work and picked him up when High Fidelity was in paperback. I find it notable that his work translates extremely well to the big screen. While High Fidelity the movie was good, About A Boy the movie may be better than the book given the great performance by Hugh Grant. Speaking of Hugh Grant, it might be a stretch but the character of Martin seems like it could be loosely based on the scandalized actor.

A Long Way Down also covers some of the same material as Douglas Coupland’s Eleanor Rigby and there are similarities in wit and tone. However, the plot and format of A Long Way Down is somewhat formulaic. And even the interplay and dialog, while funny, doesn’t quite encapsulate the book. In the end, it’s a mood and a determination of life that is extracted.

It feels good, and at the end of the day that’s what most of Hornby’s work seems to wish upon the reader.

Ghostwitten is the debut novel by David Mitchell and is a true gem. This is the third novel I’ve read by Mitchell, the previous two being the fantastic Cloud Atlas and Number9dream. It’s tough for me to pick between Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas as my favorite. Both weave a narrative through multiple short stories that interconnect in a Robert Altman kind of way. Cloud Atlas is a bit more complex and subtle while Ghostwritten is far more raw and angry.

Mitchell has many gifts as a writer, the first and foremost being a natural storyteller. Whether writing about love, theft, quantum physics or Mongolian culture, Mitchell can rivet your attention to the page. He propels you through the narrative, plunges and dunks you with an amazing descriptive capability and empathy for his characters. I never felt cheated by any one of the stories or characters in Ghostwritten, which is amazing given there are ten distinct stories within the novel. One would think a few of these would be less satisfying and that Mitchell might have had passion for just 7 of the 10.

That is not the case with Ghostwritten. Passion is not a problem for Mitchell. And I mourned the passing of each story because I wanted more. Each did reach a satisfying conclusion, but you wanted to inhabit that world, that reality, for a bit longer, to experience more of what Mitchell had created. The odd thing is that Ghostwritten is not a ‘happy’ piece of writing, but instead an expose on the hideous things people do to each other. I say this is odd because it doesn’t seem depressing. The actions are frightening in sections, heartbreaking in others but the tone lyrical and ethereal, much like a ghost watching those that remain alive.

I was also taken with many turns of phrase by Mitchell, as seen in the July Quotation Contest. Here are the others I would have liked to have used if they weren’t already easily available on the Internet.

“Nothing often poses in men as wisdom.”

“Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present.”

“The human world is made of stories, not people.”

The last quote is apt given the composition of Ghostwritten. I’m partial to the more science-fiction themed stories of ‘Mongolia’ and ‘Night Train’. However, ‘Holy Mountain’ was a piercing and painful look at China’s evolution and ‘Petersburg’ a taut and powerful crime drama written from a unique point-of-view of a character unaware of the reality ahead of her. It’s akin to being in a movie theater and wanting to scream, ‘Don’t go out into the woods alone, that’s where the creature is!’

There’s nothing more for me to say other than to go and read Ghostwritten.