Hour of Lead

I liked this more than I thought I would— which, to be fair, was not at all (how much can an adult really like a schmoopy doomed teenage romance anyway?)— and the speed with which it can be read commends it.  But it’s hardly as powerful as Green or his fanatics wold have you believe.  Half heartstring jerk, half hyper-verbal jousting, it’s hard to get a a real emotional foothold in Green’s book.  Still, not unworth the time it takes to read it

The first cycle of this incredibly powerful book of poetry is written from the perspective of the supposed black hijacker Susan Smith invented to cover up for her killing of her children, and while the conceit seems impossible to pull off, Eady does it. Though it has a particular resonance now, after Trayvon Martin, Eady is speaking to something rooted deep, deep down in America, that existed long before Smith and Martin and will continue its cancerous growth long after. The second cycle was less successful for me, but that may speak more the sway of Brutal Imagination than to any inherent lack in itself.

Aside from what is by now King’s obligatory awful sex scene, this was a fun, sweet, fast read.  Not much beyond surface, of course, but the surface is nice enough to while away the hour or two it will take to read it.

I definitely checked this one out by mistake, thinking it was by the incredible Kate Atkinson (really, go read Life After Life right now, and then go read Behind the Scenes at the Museum right after) and was disappointed to find, mid-commute— when it was already too late to go back—that it was by Christensen.  My disappointment as such never quite abated.   To start, though the book postures as one of the foodie-memoirs so trendy now (see, e.g., My Berlin Kitchen or A Homemade Life),  food was mostly tangential to Christensen’s story.  Which is fine, of course, and even almost refreshing to not have to read page after page of orgiastic descriptions of eating, but it resulted in a feeling that what food descriptions there were were just shoehorned in.

Problematic on a deeper level is the fact that the autobiography never took the reader anywhere.  Christensen’s life is, itself, not that interesting.  This, of course, need not be a fatal flaw— a life doesn’t have to be particularly compelling or exciting to make great literature— but Christensen is neither reflective enough or sharp enough to make something meaningful enough to merit a memoir about what she does have.

How many books about an anachronistic killer of women who is guided by magical objects to his victims can a person reasonably read? One apparently, at least without having the second feel somewhat a slog.  I read NOS4A2 first and, for that reason alone probably, liked it more than the Shining Girls.  The differences are relatively minimal, mostly boiling down to the fact that Beuke’s book has more literary pretensions, while Hill’s is more unabashedly horror.  If I had to chose one (and you should if you are so inclined to read either, there’s a limit to the pleasures of this type), the slight edge goes to NOS4A2 as the more fun read.

This loosely animal themed sci-fi isn’t bad, exactly, just a little patchy.  The longest piece, “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” dragged the collection down a lot, and like much contemporary sci-fi, the author isn’t quite sure of her metaphors.  The title story and “Ponies,” at least, are worth checking out.

At the Mouth of the River of Bees—Kij Johnson

Take Lolita, make Humbert Humbert a female middle-school teacher and Lolita her male student, and you have this book. No, wait. Take Lolita, make Humbert Humbert a female middle-school teacher and Lolita her male student, then strip it of all Nabokov’s artistry and profound understanding, remove the hesitant yet enduring empathies it invokes, replace all of that with ten-thousand iterations of the word “moist” and you have this book. An awful attempt at being shocking, it’s really just gross and unpleasant. I suspect Nutting is trying to challenge the reader by titillating her with florid, tawdry prose about sex with teenagers, but it’s just a cheap trick, and an ineffective one, for all that. Art can and should challenge us; it can be pornographic, it can be obscene, it can be disgusting. But if it is those things, and this book is, please god, let it also be good. Tampa can make no such claims.

Rather than waste the few hours it will take to force this garbage down, you might try one of these instead:
Lolita—Vladimir Nabokov (for obvious reasons)
Notes on a Scandal: What Was She Thinking?: A Novel—Zoe Heller (similar vein, superior in every respect)
Tiger, Tiger: A Memoir— Margaux Fragoso (a truly insightful work)

Tampa— Alissa Nutting

It’s impossible not to feel some sympathy with Lasdun’s plight, but I feel John Colapinto had it exactly right in the New Yorker when he wrote that Lasdun as “narrator is considerably limited when it comes to understanding his own drives, emotions, and even actions.”  In a different book, this could have imbued the text with a driving mystery—Did he ask for it? Why would anyone behave the way Nasreen does if he did not? (Lasdun is so priggish in places, it’s impossible not to feel him a liar when he claims Nasreen’s obsession and her fury were born from nowhere).  But outside of the sympathy one feels for him (and discordant discomfort at letting oneself indulge in a bit of unsubstantiated victim blaming), the book fails to engage on any of the more interesting emotional levels it might.

The only real fascination this book had for me is as a piece of defining narrative.  Whatever really happened here has been rendered utterly irrelevant by Lasdun’s book. There can be no other narrative. For better or worse, this is now what happened, making this work an interesting artifact, perhaps, but not a better book for it.

Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked— James Lasdun

I want to call this a droll, observant little book, but it isn’t little.  There’s just something about Lewis’s targets here— the tiny universe of Gopher Prairie and its chipper reformer, Carol Kennicott— that give the book a satisfying lightness, even as its critiques draw blood.  That’s not to say it isn’t moving; Lewis applies the same light touch to the book’s true tragedies as he does its petty small town intrigues, which has the effect of making them all the more heartbreaking.  I wept openly reading this on the train.  I also laughed and felt the hot pinch of Carol’s frustrations as though they were my own.  You will too, if you read it, so do.

Main Street—Sinclair Lewis