Review of Claire Messud’s ‘The Woman Upstairs’

I reviewed Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs for Dallas Morning News. Here’s how the review begins:

The Woman Upstairs

Claire Messud

(Knopf, $25.95)

Nora Eldridge, a woman scalded by the fallout from an unusual relationship, narrates Claire Messud’s bracing fifth novel, The Woman Upstairs. Nora details the events that wounded her in retrospect, serving them with a mix of vivid anger, self-loathing and genuine appreciation for the objects of her affection that led to her unusual seduction and disgrace.

Nora reflects, “It was supposed to say ‘Great Artist’ on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say ‘such a good teacher/daughter/friend’ instead.” Nora wanted to have children and create stirring art, but instead at 37 she’s a childless schoolteacher, and when she meets Sirena Shahid, an up-and-coming Paris-based Italian artist, mother of Nora’s enchanting student Reza, Nora is particularly vulnerable to her charms.

The Woman Upstairs is not so much the story of the road not taken as it is that of the longed-for road that never appeared. Some of the blame for this lies in a lack of luck that found Nora at 30 still struggling to become an artist, and soon after spending years caring for her dying mother — but some fault lies in Nora’s restraint, her tendency to cleave to the practical, and her inability to pursue her passions at full tilt.

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Tagged: books book book reviews novels Claire Messud fiction Novel the woman upstairs

Posted on May 14, 2013 ()

Review of ‘The Interestings’ by Meg Wolitzer

I’ve been lucky to have a string of review assignments for three impeccable and very different novels this spring, all of which I’d categorize as feminist: The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer, The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud, and Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche. Here’s my review of the first, which ran today in Dallas Morning News:

The Interestings

Meg Wolitzer

(Riverhead, $27.95)

“Talent,” Meg Wolitzer writes in her sweeping, thoughtful novel The Interestings, “could go in so many directions, depending on the forces that were applied to it and depending on economics and disposition, and on the most daunting and most determining force of all, luck.”

The Interestings dramatizes this idea through a four-decade unfurling of the lives of six characters who meet at an idealistic summer arts camp, Spirit-In-The-Woods, in rural New York in 1974.

Although the perspective shifts throughout this engrossing, panoramic novel, the main guide is Julie Jacobson, at the camp on scholarship after her father’s death. The beautiful and brainy aspiring actress Ash Wolf invites Julie to join a group of friends that includes Ash’s handsome and arrogant brother Goodman, an aspiring architect; Cathy, a dancer; Jonah, a musician and son of a famous folk singer; and Ethan Figman, a skilled artist and animator. They call themselves “The Interestings.”

These friends, who live in Manhattan and seem sophisticated, dazzle suburban Julie. “Irony was new to her and tasted good, like a previously unavailable summer fruit,” Wolitzer writes. When Ash calls Julie “Jules,” she keeps the name for life, a symbol of her dream to change herself from “an outsider and possibly even a freak” into an admired comic actress. “They all seduced one another with greatness, or the assumption of eventual greatness. Greatness-in-waiting.”

The novel jumps back and forth in time, propelled by the repercussions of a dramatic incident involving Goodman, whose life, Wolitzer writes in the first chapter, has “an alarming trajectory.” As the friends’ lives develop, whether they fulfill their early artistic promise depends on a number of factors — money, connections, desire and hard work, and the quality of their talent. Jonah is among the first to drop off the artistic path, setting aside his musical gifts after a bizarre exploitation and studying engineering at MIT. Cathy’s womanly body dooms her dance career.

Please click through to read the rest: http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20130419-book-review-the-interestings-by-meg-wolitzer.ece

Tagged: novel novels book reviews book fiction Meg Wolitzer The Interestings feminist fiction

Posted on April 21, 2013 ()

Review of ‘The Fun Parts’ by Sam Lipsyte

I reviewed Sam Lipsyte’s new story collection for Dallas Morning News. I liked it a lot better than his most recent novel, The Ask, because he seemed to care about the characters more in the stories. Here’s the beginning of my review:

The warm reception for Sam Lipsyte’s most recent novels, Homeland and The Ask, enhanced his reputation for savage and profane satire. But if you’re the sort of reader who craves endearing characters along with wild scenarios and funny dialogue, Lipsyte’s stories might be the place to start.

The 13 stories in The Fun Parts delve into the lives of high school shot putters, teenage role-playing game enthusiasts and a male doula, or “doulo,” as he prefers to be called, a guy with “yellow teeth and ratty (vintage) buckskin jacket who wanted to make a positive and tremendous impact on [the] birth experience.”

Lipsyte is known for doughy, chronic-loser male protagonists, but in two of the strongest stories, he writes with sensitivity about women, without dulling his sharp humor. In “The Climber Room,” Tovah Gold is single and pining for a child as she ekes out a living at an upscale preschool called Sweet Apple in recession-era New York. She finds the parents more difficult to manage than the kids, particularly one father, Randy Gautier, whose name she aptly mishears as “Randy Goat.” Tovah was a poet before the pressures of making a living set in, and she learns that Randy, who made his millions in Silicon Valley, funds a poetry journal. When he offers her “a call girl’s fee” for a night of baby-sitting, her fantasies collide with unexpected realities.

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Tagged: Sam LIpsyte The Fun Parts Short Stories fiction books book reviews humor

Posted on March 18, 2013 ()

Review of ‘The Snow Child’

Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child is out in paperback, and it’s a good one for the end of winter. Here’s a bit from my review of it in High Country News:

Girl In the Woods: A Review of The Snow Child

The Snow Child
Eowyn Ivey
416 pages, softcover: $14.99.
Reagan Arthur Books, 2012.

Eowyn Ivey’s surefooted and captivating debut novel, The Snow Child, begins in 1920, as Mabel and Jack, middle-aged homesteaders in Alaska, try to rough it through their second winter there. They’d moved West to escape painful memories of their only child, stillborn 10 years earlier, and the crush of nearby family that reminded them of their loss. The brutal Alaskan winters batter them with isolation and relentless cold, and they nearly starve. Eventually, with the help of friendly neighbors, the new landscape helps Mabel and Jack remember why they loved each other in the first place, and in a fit of playfulness, they build a snowman, shaping it like a girl and dressing it with a red scarf.

The snow girl vanishes, and Mabel and Jack begin to catch glimpses of a child in the woods, “a red scarf at the neck, and white hair trailing down the back. Slight. Quick. A little girl. Running at the edge of the forest. Then disappearing into the trees.” They leave gifts for the girl, who approaches them cautiously. Her name is Faina, and she gradually becomes a mysterious, seasonal daughter to them, eating at their table, accompanying them on chores, and always disappearing into the wilderness at the first signs of snowmelt.

The Russian fairy tale of the Snow Maiden (“Snegurochka”) inspired Ivey, and she weaves it throughout The Snow Child, as Mabel consults the different versions of the story to try to account for the behavior of their surrogate child. Ivey takes a fantastical premise and runs with it, playing it two ways, creating a novel that is both realistic and magical.

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Tagged: books book reviews novel novels western novels Western American Fiction Alaska Alaskan fiction book review

Posted on March 8, 2013 ()

Review of Kent Haruf’s ‘Benediction’

“They say drowning is the way to go, isn’t that right?” Dad Lewis asks the loyal employees of his hardware store in Kent Haruf’s moving new novel, Benediction. “But how anybody would know that, I don’t know.”

In this graceful story of a dying man, Haruf brings the reader as close as possible to death’s threshold and shows a community’s dignified response to the impending loss. As Benediction opens, the doctor tells elderly Dad Lewis that cancer will soon kill him. His wife, Mary, and daughter, Lorraine, take care of him during his last days. As usual with Haruf’s work, the plot and prose are deceptively simple.

As in Haruf’s Plainsong and Eventide, Benediction is set in the fictional town of Holt on the eastern plains of Colorado, where “the regular small complaint and recover of the porch swing” is the ambient sound, and it features several families whose lives converge. Dad Lewis is a pillar of the community, “a man you can set your clock by,” whose unusual name fits this patriarchal figure. Although he’s admired by most, he nevertheless faces his death with several agonizing regrets.

Dad’s neighbors are Berta May, a woman in her 80s, who is raising her 8-year-old granddaughter Alice in the wake of her daughter’s death, and the widowed Willa and her daughter Alene, a retired teacher who regrets her affair with a married man decades earlier that never resulted in a husband or child of her own.

Through tentative, tender gestures, Alene and Willa participate in raising Alice, a regular girl, but also a symbol of innocence and youth to Dad and his neighbors, reminding them of all the children they have loved, lost or never had the opportunity to create.

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Tagged: Kent Haruf Benediction novel novels western novels colorado writers colorado colorado fiction Western American Fiction books book reviews book review

Posted on March 7, 2013 with 1 note ()

Review of Pauls Toutonghi’s ‘Evel Knievel Days’

I reviewed Pauls Toutonghi’s excellent Evel Knievel Days for High Country News.

A Montanan walks into a Cairo bar: A review of Evel Knievel Days

By Jenny Shank

Evel Knievel Days
Pauls Toutonghi
293 pages,
hardcover: $24.
Crown, 2012.

Khosi Saqr Clark, the narrator of Pauls Toutonghi’s funny and winsome second novel, Evel Knievel Days, isn’t a typical native of Butte. Sure, he loves Montana and enjoys the annual Evel Knievel Days spectacle, complete with its “American Motordome Wall of Death,” but his neurotic nature (“the obsessive-compulsive’s worst fear: the world infinitesimally askew”) and his singular heritage set him apart.

Khosi is the only child of an eccentric single mother, Amy Clark, a caterer specializing in Middle Eastern cuisine using recipes she learned from her husband, Khosi’s Coptic Christian Egyptian father. Khosi’s father left when he was 3 and made no effort to keep in touch, leaving behind only unanswered questions and a garden full of invasive Egyptian walking onions.

Khosi works as a tour guide in his great-great-grandfather’s Copper King Mansion. “He was a copper king,” Khosi explains, “a second-generation Irish immigrant turned vest-wearing frontier industrialist.”

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Tagged: Montana Butte Western American Fiction western fiction western novels novel books book reviews Egypt Egyptian fiction novels set in Egypt novels set in Montana Pauls Toutonghi

Posted on February 19, 2013 with 2 notes ()

Review of Karen Russell’s ‘Vampires in the Lemon Grove’

After reading two of Karen Russell’s three books, I’ve decided she’s a writer whose every book I need to read. From now on. I reviewed “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” for Dallas Morning News:

Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Karen Russell

(Knopf, $24.95)

Karen Russell’s imagination is turbocharged, so amped that at age 31 she’s already publishing her third inventive book, Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Her second story collection follows her rollicking 2011 novelSwamplandia!, about a family running an alligator-packed tourist attraction in the Everglades.

Swamplandia! was a finalist for last year’s Pulitzer Prize in fiction, infamously not awarded to any book. But there’s no need to cry for Russell. Judging from the skill and range she displays in these eight surprising stories, plenty of accolades await her.

Turning to each subsequent story in this collection feels like trading in a known quantity for whatever happens to be behind Curtain No. 3. Anything might happen — Presidents Eisenhower and Hayes might be reincarnated as horses, seagulls might alter the future or you could be in for a trip to a tailgating party in the Antarctic where you’ll be urged to root for perennial loser Team Krill over Yankees-like Team Whale (“It must be real tough, you cetaceous [expletives], to support the best team in the league”). In each story, Russell creates an entirely new world from scratch.

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http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20130215-book-review-vampires-in-the-lemon-grove-by-karen-russell.ece

Tagged: novels novel fiction books book book reviews Karen Russell vampires Vampires in the Lemon Grove short stories stories

Posted on February 17, 2013 with 1 note ()

Review of ‘The Miniature Wife’ by Manuel Gonzales

I have been reading a lot of good short story collections lately. I reviewed The Miniature Wife, the debut collection by Austin writer Manuel Gonzales, for the Dallas Morning News. Here’s part of what I said:

The Miniature Wife and Other Stories

Manuel Gonzales

(Riverhead, $26.95)

The fantastical is commonplace in The Miniature Wife, the funny and clever debut story collection by Austin-based writer Manuel Gonzales.

A scientist returns from work to find his wife “shrunk to the height of a coffee mug.” A composer talks out of his ears. A narrator reveals that not only has the day-to-day grind of his office job rendered him zombielike, but also that he actually is a zombie, constantly convincing himself not to consume his co-workers’ faces.

In “Pilot, Copilot, Writer,” an airplane circles Dallas for decades, long enough for its pilot to age and die and for a young man who was born on the plane to take over flying. Some of us who’ve been stuck in an endless holding pattern over the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport might be able to speculate about the genesis of this story.

“Life on Capra II” begins with the irresistible line, “Just as we bag that piece of [expletive] swamp monster, the robots attack.” The narrator is trapped in a repeating cycle of annihilating intergalactic beasts that blow his buddy’s head off. He never finds time to romance “the tomato who runs the commissary, a pretty little thing named Becky.”

Although Gonzales is too subtle a storyteller to reveal that the narrator is a figure in a video game, it becomes clear that’s the case, as he repeatedly finds himself set back in places he’s been before, not knowing why he returned, his weapons reloaded and his buddy alive again. “Life on Capra II” asks: What if those muscle-bound gunmen in video games had souls, desires, fears and a creeping suspicion that their memories and experiences were being toyed with?

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http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20130104-review-the-miniature-wife-and-other-stories-by-manuel-gonzales.ece

Tagged: short stories fiction western american fiction Texas Texas writers western fiction magic realism unicorns swamp monsters zombies stories books book reviews

Posted on January 11, 2013 ()

Source: dallasnews.com

Review of ‘Elsewhere, California’ by Dana Johnson

I have been telling all my friends to read Dana Johnson’s Elsewhere, California since I first read it this summer, and happily my review of it is in the new issue of High Country News. This funny, heartfelt, and just plain real coming-of-age/grown-up-reflection novel struck a chord with me. Here’s a bit from my review:

Elsewhere, California
Dana Johnson
276 pages, softcover: $15.95.
Counterpoint, 2012.

Dana Johnson’s thoughtful and affecting first novel, Elsewhere, California, is narrated by a girl named Avery, whom we first meet as a child growing up in South Central Los Angeles in the ’70s and ’80s. When her brother is threatened by gangs, their parents decide to move to the suburbs. Avery eagerly prepares for the “long journey” to West Covina. Her father responds, “Journey? It ain’t but thirty minutes up the road.” But Avery learns that however short the distance, West Covina might as well be another planet.

The chapters alternate between Avery’s childhood and her life as an adult, when she has become an artist, living with Massimo, an older Italian man, in his swanky Hollywood house and looking forward to an exhibition of her art at a Los Angeles gallery.

Avery’s language deftly evolves throughout the course of the book. Johnson writes the early chapters in the voice Avery used as a young child — “We caint go tricka treating. The Crips went and shot somebody and the Bloods done shot em back” — while the later chapters show the way Avery has learned to speak as a successful black woman trying to move smoothly between society’s layers, a knack her best friend Brenna calls her “blendability.”

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http://www.hcn.org/issues/44.21/up-the-road-and-a-world-away-a-review-of-elsewhere-california

Tagged: novel novels books book reviews book review Dana Johnson fiction California Western fiction western american literature Western American Fiction race baseball novels baseball

Posted on December 10, 2012 with 1 note ()

Source: hcn.org

Review of Bill Roorbach’s ‘Life Among Giants’

I reviewed Bill Roorbach’s novel Life Among Giants for the Dallas Morning News. Here’s part of what I said:

Life Among Giants

Bill Roorbach

(Algonquin, $24.95)

The characters in Bill Roorbach’s lush novel Life Among Giants are larger than life, some literally. He manages to make them real despite their outsize abilities.

The narrator, David “Lizard” Hochmeyer, a nearly 7-foot-tall star high school quarterback with the sensitive soul of a poet, is kicked off the team his senior year for refusing to cut his hair. He still lands a full ride to Princeton and becomes a backup quarterback for the Miami Dolphins. But what he really wants to do is own a restaurant and hang around with ballerinas.

That’s because the “world-famous ballerina” Sylphide lives in the mansion across from the house where Lizard grew up in Connecticut. She was married to an “even more famous husband, the English rocker Dabney Stryker-Stewart,” friend and equal to 1970s rock gods Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton. Stryker-Stewart died in a mysterious car accident, his body found at a distance from the car.

Lizard’s own roots are hardly humble. His beautiful and exacting mother, Barb, is a Michigan-raised social climber, whose country-club-tennis prowess earns her access to elite circles. His sister, Katy, becomes a tennis standout at Yale, and his dad is a loving but shady investment banker. Even Lizard’s high school girlfriend Emily becomes Sylphide’s protégé and world-famous in her own right.

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http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20121130-book-review-life-among-giants-by-bill-roorbach.ece

Tagged: Bill Roorbach Life Among Giants Algonquin Novels fiction books book book reviews football fiction

Posted on December 3, 2012 ()

Source: dallasne.ws