Cultural Pilgrim » Literary Fiction

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.

Tabula rasa: Book review of Martin Westley Takes a Walk by Andrew Humphreys

Andres Kabel — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 20:00:17 +0000

I bet I’m not the only one drawn to the notion of a complete fresh start, some way of casting the past aside and beginning with a tabula rasa. In Martin Westley Takes a Walk by Sydney author Andrew Humphreys, a businessman wakes up in hospital after being knocked unconscious by a falling kite. He can remember nothing about his life or family. Returning home with the stranger he is told is his wife, he is forced to reconstruct himself, only to find he is now nothing like the man he was.

Beginning with the sweet premise, the first third of Martin Westley Takes a Walk is a lovely mixture of plot revelations and unadorned, descriptive prose. The cast of characters – Martin’s hard-bitten wife, his rebellious children, his rapacious best friend, an Indian chief he befriends – is brought vividly to life. If the author’s inventiveness had been sustained, and if the themes of existential identity and morality were explored more thoroughly, this would be a superb novel. In the event it falters and I was left with minor letdown.

An intriguing and rather daring read. 2½ stars.

Interesting but flawed: Book review of Elizabeth Kostova’s The Swan Thieves

Andres Kabel — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 21:00:10 +0000

I missed out on Elizabeth Kostova’s bestselling debut The Historian but I heard so many readers praise it that I was looking forward to The Swan Thieves. The opening promises high entertainment: into the care of Andrew Marlowe, an institutional psychiatrist and hobby painter, is thrust uncommunicative Robert Oliver, a successful painter caught trying to slash a canvas at the National Gallery of Art. Marlowe is expertly drawn by the author and makes for a sympathetic protagonist who embarks on a journey of discovery into Oliver’s life, into his art and his women. I also admired Kostova’s sumptuously evocative descriptive writing, in particular on art. So . . . with a healthy narrative, lead character and vivid milieu in place, I settled in for an absorbing read.

Regrettably, The Swan Thieves becomes unmoored as a result of word bloat. Perhaps a different editor could have cut it down to the three-hundred-page novel it is at heart, but by the middle of the 564 pages, I grew dangerously restive. The central conundrum – why the painter seemingly went crazy – is intriguing, but Kostova stretches it out in the equivalent of a shaggy dog story, and several plot elements lack credibility. Rather than being a surprise, the ending is telegraphed eons earlier. And the other characters besides Marlowe lack special distinction.

With so much to offer, The Swan Thieves would have made a fine mystery or a lyrical literary novel; as a baggy mixture of both, it ends up as interesting but flawed. 2½ stars.

Fails to engage: Book review of Yann Martell’s Beatrice and Virgil

Andres Kabel — Sun, 30 May 2010 20:00:34 +0000

Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi delivered an absorbing narrative of man among animals, followed by a lengthy modernistic coda that explored broad concepts; the upshot was a surprise literary hit amplified by a Booker Prize. Martel’s apparently arduous follow-up, Beatrice and Virgil, again uses humanized animals but in the service of a much deeper theme, that of the Holocaust. The plot concerns a writer (containing too many shades of Martel himself to be a coincidence) and a mysterious taxidermist writing a play starring howler monkey Virgil and donkey Beatrice, but the author signals early that this is a post-modern novel of ideas, such as how to represent genocide in the modern era. A conventional narrative mixes with play fragments, a picture or two, and macabre game cards. The novel is a brave foray into experimental writing but it certainly does not work as a character-infused story, and the violent excursions into Holocaust territory have only muted emotional impact.

Overall, there is much to admire about Beatrice and Virgil but it fails to engage as either story or intellectual journey. 2 stars.

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

Andres Kabel — Sat, 29 May 2010 07:20:47 +0000

Point Omega, the fifteenth novel by Don DeLillo, one our most profound living novelists, is longer at 177 pages than a novella, but not by much. Yet the reading experience with Point Omega 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: the gliding sentences, the pared dialogue, the sidelong flights into the underside of reality.

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.