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.
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.
Eric Maisel is a humble, brilliant writer on creativity, a guru (though he would argue against the very term) to the stumblers like me. Brainstorm: Harnessing the Power of Productive Obsessions breaks no new ground but instead takes Maisel’s notions of ‘making meaning’ and living through creativity to prod us towards obsession. Not the destructive obsessions endlessly named and chronicled in memoirs but what he calls ‘productive obsessions’. By giving ourselves permission to drop everything for real work, rather than everyday nothingness, by then igniting a fire underneath us to obsess over a big goal, we achieve and we light up our lives. As always, Maisel’s writing is supple and melodic, and the message set out in accessible chapters is fully practical. Quotations from an Internet ‘obsession group’ run by the author add real-life examples. Fascinating sidebar historical examples, presumably sourced by co-author Ann Maisel, illustrate how weird and wonderful, and how inspiring, obsessions can be.
Brainstorm is a solid addition to Eric Maisel’s lifesaving body of work. 3 stars.
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.
Most forays by actors into music are not worth listening to, but the first album from She & Him – actress Zooey Deschanel teamed up with beguiling singer-songwriter M. Ward – was spirited and atmospheric. She & Him are back with Volume Two, with eleven original Deschanel songs and two covers. The sophomore release is as fresh and listenable as the debut. Deschanel’s voice is waifish candy in 60s style and the songs echo that ambience – throwaway but like a cool breeze. M. Ward adds clever arrangements and rootsy guitar and is a splendid backup vocalist. Highlights of Volume Two include the Nancy-Sinatra-like bubbly pop of ‘In the Sun’; the plaintive ‘Thieves’; and the bouncy ‘Over It Over Again’.
Perfect for a road trip with the windows open. 2½ stars.
This must be the season for wonderful thrillers. I had admired Steve Hamilton’s private eye series, featuring Alex McKnight, during its early years, but stopped following him some time ago. Glowing reviews of his new standalone The Lock Artist: A Novel drew me back and thank goodness for that, for this is one of the cleverest, most engaging books I’ve read this year. The complex plot follows Michael, a youthful ‘boxman,’ what we know here in Australia as a safe cracker, through the early years of his dangerous career. Hamilton alternates two separate storylines, constructed highly intriguingly to slowly reveal Michael’s tragic childhood. The author uses an intimate, chatty first-person style that enfolds the reader, and his descriptions of safe cracking techniques are fascinating. Not a word is wasted, and the mystery and tension make for a breathless read.
The Lock Artist is an original and compelling pleasure. 4 stars.
A lifelong fascination with ants led me to read one excellent book last year (see my review of The Lives of Ants) but now I’ve chanced upon an even more remarkable book. Adventures among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions, by famed wildlife photographer and writer Mark W. Moffett, is just the tonic for anyone who stills stops to marvel at a long, bustling trail of ants on a city footpath. Moffett combines a partial memoir – that part of his life tracking down, investigating and photographing ants – with a wonderful, nuanced introduction to six ant types. From aggressive omnivore marauder ants to massed army ants, from weaver ants high up in the forest’s canopy to the weaver ant slavers, from leafcutter ants tending their gardens to the supercolonies built by the Argentine ant, Moffett dovetails his own tales of discovery with revelatory overviews of each ant species. The Argentine ant, overrunning one continent after another, intrigued me the most. Four supercolonies of them, the largest one 160 times more numerous than the entire human race, blanket California, and between these colonies lie border areas subject to never-ending trench warfare killing millions annually.
Moffett is a sparkling writer and Adventures among Ants would be superb as pure text. But it is the photography that had me gasping. Shot after short, beautifully taken and beautifully presented, brings ants to life as I’ve never seen before.
A stunning, approachable window into the world of ants. 4½ stars.
What a dazzling premise! Charlie Huston posits for his sci-fi thriller Sleepless: A Novel an alternative early 21st century in which a tenth of the population has turned sleepless, a condition that torments and eventually kills the afflicted. Into a familiar, yet ghastly Los Angeles, Huston plunges Park Haas, the last honest cop, and his insanely destructive antagonist, the assassin Jasper. A propulsive plot propels Haas into a quest to save his loved ones, amidst a dystopia portrayed vividly by the author’s luscious prose. Characters major and minor bloom on the page. Huston’s dialogue is among the best I’ve read this year.
Sleepless grips and never lets go until a harrowing, yet redemptive end that literally had me teary, no mean feat. And as I reluctantly read to the end of the short epilogue, wishing for more, I was struck by the sensation that this brilliant thriller succeeds exactly as did that classic film Bladerunner.
One of 2010’s best novels bar none. 4 stars.
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.
Walter Mosley’s character-based crime fiction series are such pleasure to read. He has the uncanny ability to imbue every page, even in midst of a speedy plot, with the thoughts and memories of his core character, so much so that the prime joy of reading is in growing into the heart and mind of that hero. James Lee Burke uses similar techniques, plus he offers ravishing place descriptions, but Burke’s two series characters are by now wrung out. Mosley, on the other hand, moves on, and his heroes bristle with life.
Known to Evil is Mosley’s second book featuring Leonid McGill, a New York private investigator repenting of a former dirty life. A nuggetty block of a man, his unprepossessing appearance hides a fertile, intelligent inner life. In this outing, McGill is asked by a feared gangster to locate a mysterious young woman, a task that immediately entangles our hero in violence. At the same time, one of his sons somehow invites the attention of Romanian gangsters. Mosley launches the convoluted plot at rapid pace and it never lets up. I found myself constantly sighing with amazement at yet another McGill action that startled me yet seemed completely consistent. The author’s hardboiled yet semi-poetic style has never sung sweeter.
Within the crowded PI subgenre, Leonid McGill is a winner and Known to Evil is Mosley’s best in years. 4 stars.