Cultural Pilgrim » Literary Fiction

Rock music in panorama: Book review of Bill Flanagan’s Evening’s Empire

Andres Kabel — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 20:00:01 +0000

As a sucker for novels set in the milieu of rock music, I was blown away by Bill Flanagan’s Evening’s Empire, partly because it is completely different to all the others I’ve read. Rather than embedding the reader in a character who is a singer or guitarist in a band, the hero of Evening’s Empire, Jack Flynn, is a band manager. Fortuitously thrust as a callow young lawyer into the epochal period of 60s British rock music, he becomes manager of the Ravons, Flanagan’s fictional band that comes across as a blend of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd. Early superstars, the Ravons fracture and its four members progressively move to America, as does manager Jack, allowing the author to track the evolution of rock music through the decades. Which he does with a marvellous combination of insight, name dropping and narrative flair. There are no gymnastic stylistics here, but Flanagan manages to imbue his uncertain hero’s retrospective story with a satisfying, idiosyncratic voice. As a fan of rock music, I can tell you his retelling of the epochs of rock is spot on. And at a more fundamental level, Evening’s Empire is a reflection on creativity, fame and its many discontents, and happiness. The novel is long but deservedly, for it’s no less than a reflection on the history of rock music from its inception in the late 60s (you can forget earlier periods in my opinion).

A grand ‘rock family’ drama that will embrace you with its sweep. 3½ stars.

GFC satire at its peak: Book review of Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets

Andres Kabel — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 20:00:53 +0000

It’s funny how literary fiction often throws up doppelgangers, two concurrent novels whose storylines appear to be twinned. A week after reading Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask (see my review), I found that Jess Walter’s fifth novel, The Financial Lives of the Poets, offers a very similar tale, that of a modern young man heading for career, monetary and marital wreckage. Both are wicked satires, both offer laugh-out-loud scenes, both manage to be poignant windows into a slice of modern life. But while The Ask portrays an artist reduced to corporate begging, The Financial Lives of the Poetstackles the heart of the Global Financial Crisis. Matt Prior, a finance journalist, has launched a no-hoper website combining poetry and financial insight, even as he and his wife, teetering on the edge of marriage breakdown, hock their house to the edge of ruination. The opening scene, where Matt goes out in the middle of the night to buy milk and ends up with two dopesters, is hilarious, and there are plenty more laughs, but the author’s intent is serious. How, he asks, did we get to this point? The characters all bubble with life, the descent of Matt into the low life is well paced, and the frequent interior monologue rants are so, so entertaining. I found the ending curt but quite apt.

Another winning satire with heart. 4 stars.

Virtuoso stylistics: Book review of Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask

Andres Kabel — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 20:00:32 +0000

Sam Lipsyte is one of those authors you discover late and immediately commence locating his entire catalogue. On the basis of his fourth novel, The Ask, he is a virtuoso stylist, capable of funny and sad and serious, often on the same page. His language is worth savouring for itself.

Milo Burke, the hero of The Ask, has just been sacked from a New York university for insulting a potential charitable donor. That’s Milo’s job, to prospect for ‘asks’ from the rich with ‘gives’. An abandoned artistic career, looming mortgage default, a professional wife who is distant, a pre-school son . . . Milo’s life is spiralling into disaster. And then an old school pal surfaces from the past to request Milo as the intermediary for a huge university ‘give’. Salvation beckons; or, as Milo soon suspects, maybe not. Lipsyte has full command: his New York comes alive under his penmanship, he savages his characters yet somehow loves them, and the rollicking plot careens towards minor-key catastrophe. I laughed even as I longed for Milo’s salvation. And Lipsyte’s coruscating, gymnastic style rewards on each and every page.

Brilliant, revelatory up-to-the-minute fiction. 4 stars.

Dissipated brilliance: Book review of Paul Harding’s Tinkers

Andres Kabel — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 20:00:06 +0000

I’ve always found the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction a reliable marker of top quality, indeed I can’t recall the last winner that disappointed me. So it pains me to report that this year’s winner, Tinkers by Paul Harding, is ambitious and brimming with literary brio, but ultimately a rather ordinary read. Anchored by the last days of a clock repairer, dying with his children and grandchildren around him, this slim volume oscillates between feverish dementia, minutely detailed memories, and the story of the dying man’s father, who travelled the countryside in his tinker’s cart and suffered epileptic fits of frightening force. With the courage of Faulkner, Harding wheels through different times, tenses and writing modes, digressing at will and indulging in brilliant set pieces of description. The writing manages to impress and puzzle at the same time, a judgement that echoes my overall reading experience. At times I was bedazzled, some sections were hypnotically brilliant, and then disorientation or boredom set in. A tour de force that never quite makes it, Tinkersfails to cohere as a complete narrative.

Impressive but dissipated. 2½ stars.

A cruel fate: Book review of Lisa Genova’s Still Alice

Andres Kabel — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 20:00:35 +0000

Still Alice by debut American novelist Lisa Genova peers into the downward spiral of Alice, a Harvard psychology professor at the top of her profession, in the grip of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Few diseases frighten us more, for it has no cure and the inevitable creeping decline treats victim and loved ones with equal cruelty. Sticking to Alice’s perspective, the author begins with a telling example of forgetfulness and then artfully chronicles the slide and its impact on Alice’s boisterous, upper middle class family. Genova is particularly adept with the tricky parts at the end, by which time Alice recognizes no one. All the characters are alive on the page, so I was surprised by how little emotion the story aroused in me, yet I welcomed the eschewing of sentimentality.

For a story with a known dire end, the amazing aspect of Still Alice is that it never turns downbeat, never despairs. Alice’s spirit flails but remains strong, and this reader gained existential insight into one of the many paths towards our common end: death.

A skillful, compassionate novel. 3 stars.

Walking forever: Book review of The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris

Andres Kabel — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 20:00:42 +0000

New Yorker Tim, a wealthy law firm partner, walks. Rather, his legs walk uncontrollably, sending Tim away from his work and his wife and daughter, walking nonstop until he collapses into narcoleptic sleep. Intelligent, proud, tough, he joins battle with his unheard-of affliction.

The Unnamed, by sophomore novelist Joshua Ferris, is Tim’s weird, undulating tale. Ferris is a fearsome talent, constantly surprising the reader with plot twists and startling, fresh scenes. Although the walking compulsion seems inexorable, the inner battle between it and Tim’s mind or soul or whatever you want to call it builds into an epic. Ferris captures perfectly the terrible toll exacted upon Tim’s wife and child. What elevates The Unnamed from a good book idea plus skilful execution is Ferris’s superb, poetic style. Standing slightly aside from his characters, he paints modern America in brilliant, fierce prose.

The passage of the walker of course illuminates the landscape. In this luminous, uncomfortable novel we see the modern industrial world in all its glory and sickness. Somehow I found myself reminded of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, somehow the world I lived in seemed apocalyptic, as if diseased and stark.

A standout novel in 2010, a reminder of why we read. 4 stars.

Banking and life: Book review of Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic

Andres Kabel — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 20:00:51 +0000

Out of the last financial boom, in the wake of the GFC, come the novelists’ judgements. Often novelists can penetrate deeper than the analysts and historians. Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic is a coruscating dig into the ascendancy of a fictional American bank of that name, told through the eyes of four intersecting characters: an emotionally void ex-GI running the bank, who builds a McMansion in an enclave of the inherited rich; a spirited, askew spinster teacher who challenges the banker’s construction; her brother, chairman of the Federal Reserve; and a callow teenager literally caught in the middle of the battle.

Haslett propels the narrative of Union Atlantic without an ounce of padding, piling on scene after magnificent scene set in downtown Boston or semi-rural Massachusetts. Each of the characters vibrates with life; the author accords each an equal seriousness and moral weight. The nuanced yet muscular style is one of the most compelling I’ve read this year. And somehow Ferris crowds into this regular-sized volume a panoply of modern thematic touchstones: the GFC, invasion of Iraq, the collapse under fraud of Barings and the Bush years.

America of the noughties under the novelistic microscope of a bold stylist. 4 stars.

Immersive tragedy: Book review of Anna Quindlen’s Every Last One

Andres Kabel — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 20:00:49 +0000

Anna Quindlen’s best novels, such as Black and Blue, burrow into violence and death. A writer who immerses her readers, she weaves a tapestry of characters into richly imagined lives and then . . . crunch, the horror of it all. So it is with Every Last One. Deftly Quindlen shoves the reader into the pell-mell world of Mary Beth Latham, a very modern upper middle class American mom: a job as a landscape designer; husband Glen, a busy ophthalmologist; forthright, rebellious seventeen-year-old daughter Ruby; younger, sporty achiever son Alex; and his moody, geeky twin brother Max. In the Ann Tyler mode of copious, vividly revealed detail, but with even more verve, Quindlen invites us into this bustling family and sets us up for tragedy, one transplanted intact from the lurid American tabloids. The terrible event seems to be withheld forever, so when it arrives it bludgeons. And then the real work of the novelist unfurls, portraying with insight Mary Beth’s existential struggles with the aftermath, a struggle made more poignant because she has a narrow view of the world.

Quindlen is a flawless stylist and Every Last One is an adrenaline rush of a read. No easy answers are rolled out, not one sappy cliche is employed. I’ll remember Mary Beth for a long time. 3½ stars.

Clever recasting: Book review of Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

Andres Kabel — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 20:00:52 +0000

There are two kinds of atheists. One branch obsesses over religions and their foibles, the other shuns any religiosity. I’m in the latter category and have avoided biblically slanted literature since Sunday school, so I only tackled Philip Pullman’s controversial The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ for a book club. Oddly enough, I found the experience to be an enriching one.

Commissioned to retell the Jesus Christ tale, Pullman has taken the opportunity to slam organized, rather than elemental, religion. His enabling device is to imagine two twins born to Mary: the charismatic prophet Jesus, convinced of the upcoming apocalypse and destined to die young as a raving cult leader; and the ordinary, wavering chronicler Christ, instrumental in launching a post-crucifixion church. Couched in plain language (nothing at all like his marvellous fantasy style) mixing a biblical tone with modern vernacular, Pullman’s storyline tracks that of the bible, except he transforms chunk after chunk to suit his purposes. One central oddity is the mysterious ‘stranger’ who guides Christ in his role – Pullman leaves the role of this manipulator as ambiguous as many strange, sometimes startling, novelistic changes.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is no literary masterpiece. The plot, if one can call it that, is humdrum. The author explores the tremulous character of Christ quite deeply, but Joseph and the other characters gain little depth. There are no lyrical evocations of place and time. As a read, this one is short and none too riveting or rich. Nonetheless, I surprised myself by extracting quite some pleasure from my sojourn into our society’s most enduring fable. I was delighted by the author’s clever, imaginative recasting, I enjoyed the thematic attack on church versus faith, and my writerly mind has been brewing ever since over the elemental power of the crucifixion-and-rebirth myth.

Bold, clever, if flawed. 2½ stars.

Hums with weight: Book review of Don DeLillo’s Point Omega

Andres Kabel — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 20:00:21 +0000

Point Omega, the fifteenth novel by Don DeLillo, one our most profound living novelists, is longer than a novella, 117 pages in a slim volume, but not longer by much. Yet the reading experience rivals that of the 900-pages plus of 2666, Roberto Bolano’s masterpiece. Every word, sentence, paragraph and page of Point Omega hums with weight. I’m a quick reader but you don’t read DeLillo fast. You taste, you savour. The pleasure is in the characters, always close to either collapse or ecstasy as a result of existential gravity. DeLillo’s oh-so-familiar prose is in top shape in this outing – bask in the gliding sentences, the pared dialogue, the sidelong flights into the underside of reality.

The book begins with an unnamed obsessive watching a slow-mo replay of Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy in a gallery. This is DeLillo at his art house best. Then the story proper kicks in: a young filmmaker staying in the desert with the subject he hopes to film, a scholar once co-opted by the American war machine to help conceptualize Iraq and rendition and all that nightmare. When the intellectual’s daughter arrives to stay, the plot deepens, and somehow by the end DeLillo has constructed a mini thriller puzzle even as he toys with subjects like identity and guilt and the human condition. I’m in awe of the perfection embodied in the author’s execution.

Right now I’m feeling guilty because I skipped Fallen Man, DeLillo’s previous novel. If it’s half as good as Point Omega, I was a fool.

A master – of language, of ideas, of atmosphere, of modern story – at his peak. 4 stars.