Yggdrasil, suitably pruned, arrives in Chelsea

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Border Songs by Jim Lynch - Some Early Buzz

Dennis Haritou: If you are in the business of publishing or bookselling, I suggest you try to get yourself a pre-publication galley of Knopf's Border Songs by Jim Lynch. Although off to a slow and skeptical start, I am currently past page 100 of this 400 page novel and continuing my reading with a sense of mounting excitement. I am having the experience of reading a potential New York Times bestseller that I actually like. (!) At first I thought: too rural, too Pacific Northwest for my East Coast urban corridor taste and too sentimental. But I am being won over page after seductive page by this story about a dyslexic border patrol agent named, very winningly, Brandon Vanderkool.

The book has a slow fuse...at least so far...and maybe there are one too many descriptions of birds in flight or dairy farms for a city guy like me but I am sticking with it and I don't think I'm going to be disappointed. I have just taken a liking to Brandon, the big lug, and I want to find out what happens to him. I guess even I need a break from the neurotic New Yorkers and drugged-out Londoners that I have been reading about in the last two novels that I read. After I finish with Border Songs as a welcome break, I'll be ready to return to my own presto urban planet again. Later on, maybe the Three Guys will tell you what we thought about the whole thing. So my first impressions may be subject to a lot of revision as the whole story arc is grasped. We'll see. Border Songs will be on-sale in the summer of 2009. Read more!

Where I've Been

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The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Jason Chambers: The judges for the Man Booker and I are almost never on the same wavelength.  I've read a lot of the winners and frequently find that I prefer something else on the short list far more than the winner. So it was with trepidation, along with a little annoyance that I declined to read the galley when it was offered to me in January, that I picked up The White Tiger.

The White Tiger is the assumed name of our protagonist Balram, born to the candymaker caste, ambitious chauffeur, loyal servent, traveller from the dark to the light, entrepreneur and murderer, and his epistolary tale is written over 9 nights to Chinese Premier Wen Jaibao, preceding his visit to India. Balram uses his personal history and insights to point out the strengths and weaknesses of modern Indian society. Along the way, he skewers family traditions, religion, government corruption, the rich and the poor.

Balram moves through Indian society, from a rare gifted child in a poor village, destined for an arranged marriage and abysmal living conditions, to driver for a rich family, where he bribes and threatens his way to a respected position just below the family dog. Finally escaping his predetermined role in society in a shocking scene, he also makes a transformation to a modern sensitivity, running his own business, and treating his employees not like servants to be abused and ridiculed, but as men deserving respect, and hopes that his country will follow.

I thought this was a good first novel, with lots of social satire and some poignant indictments of the gap between India's wealthy and impoverished. However, I'm not sure it falls in my top 10 books of 2008, and it is half the book (both literally and figuratively) as the likewise Booker shortlisted A Fraction of the Whole. 

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Better than a Sharp Stick in the Eye.

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Serena by Ron Rash

Jason Chambers: I know that the reviews are pouring in for this book and so I decided that I had better go ahead and review it before my curiousity got the best of me and I started reading the other takes on the book. I will agree with the NYT headline, however, that readers of Serena will likely be intrigued enough to search out Rash's earlier works. It's a dark parable of class struggle, power, and greed inhabited by industrial giants of the early twentieth century.

Serena bursts upon the Pemberton logging operation as a curiosity - arriving unannounced as Pemberton's wife, intending to live on site where none of the other wives could survive. She immediately makes an impression, ostracizing her rival, and monitoring workings of the camp with a cruelty and robber baron sensibility beyond even her husband's capability. She haunts the workers, riding a white stallion and bearing an eagle trained to kill rattlesnakes on her arm. As fearful as they are of the eagle, the consensus among the workers is that any woman who can master the animal would be even worse to confront than any bloodthirsty bird.

Channelling the toughest of the early industrial giants and not a little Lady Macbeth, Serena mounts a campaign against the mother of Pemberton's illegitimate child, and makes plans for the deforestation of Brazil, as soon as they finish with the Great Smoky Mountains.

What Rash accomplishes in Serena is, first, the creation of an astounding character. A hunger encompasses her every scene, for power, for money, for sex. Her quest is one of such cold fixation that even the capitalist Pemberton looks like an innocent when left in her wake. Further, her inhumanity serves as a foil to the emotional strength of the workers, as they fight for survival, fodder for the saws' teeth, and two young lovers as they flee Serena's iron grip.

It sure makes me wonder what I missed with Rash's first 3 books. I'll report back on that.

jc

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The Butt by Will Self

Jason Chambers: Someone asked me why I only review books positively the other day. It's only partially intentional. Sure, I want to let people know about books I like, even if they are not absolute rave reviews and I think the other guys are the same. Also, though, if I don't really like a book after 100 or so pages I'll set it aside, unless someone can convince me that I'm missing something by not pressing on. Life's too short, and the reading pile is too big to read crap. That being said, I did press on to finish the new Will Self.

I'll concede that the idea for The Butt is brilliant: Tom Brodzinski, on vacation with his family in foreign country, finally decides to quit smoking and flicks the butt of his final cigarette over the balcony rail. Unfortunately, the errant butt lands on Reggie Lincoln, and a nightmare of government regulation and moral relativism unfolds before him. Sounds brilliant and I really wanted to like it.

The Butt is part Orwellian dystopia, part ironic Kafka-esqe bureaucratic nightmare, part bush travelogue and part bore. Self fans may disagree, but I found the second half of the novel tedious and repetitive. What started out as clever and fast-moving becomes bogged down in pseudo-legal machinations and inane conversations tinted with malice and the overt racism of several characters. It simply wore me down after a while, and the shocking ending just couldn't compensate.

So that's my bad review. I'll be back soon with something I liked better.

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Construction of a friend

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Narrative Magazine Story of the Week - The Looters

"Looters" is  violent word. It presumes an act of aggression, a violation of personal space and a conspiracy since the word is plural. But "The Looters" by Laura Jamison is a story about friendship. What's the connection?

Gwen and Ethan, an up-and-coming power couple, have invited some people over to their NY duplex for dinner. Denise, as Gwen's official best friend, is keeping watch over a suspect guest, Michelle. Michelle is suspect because Ethan may be attracted to her. Denise, playing guardian of Gwen's happiness, introduces herself to Michelle. "I'm an old friend of- she overenuciated- Ethan and Gwen's".

The plot falls into the back story of Gwen and Denise so we can understand this symbiotic friendship. It's 1989, five years before that dinner party. Both Gwen and Denise are aspiring journalists in San Francisco who half-way dream of writing novels. They want to form a writers' group of two and discuss each others' work. Some people think they are sisters. Others think they are lesbian lovers. "...but really Denise grew toward and around Gwen like a vine seeking the sun..."

In a plot twist of triangulating elegance, Denise encounters Michelle again and through her is set on the road to literary success. But Denise's growing personal power scrambles her friendship with Gwen as competition overwhelms their alliance. Laura Jamison has written the life cycle of a friendship from its youthful solidarity to its betrayal with age and "The Looters" is an apt title. 

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John Doe as a young man.

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Waste, by Eugene Marten

I stumbled upon this novella when I was reading book reviews of independent publishers latest releases on New Pages.com. I've actually found two other books that I've had the good fortune to get review copies of so look for those reviews in the coming weeks.

Eugene Marten writes with a chiseled flair that is basically unheard of in today's fiction market, at least in the books you'll find on the shelves in your local stores. There isn't a simple way to describe it, or how to believe the feelings you have once inside these sentences. Then you marvel at how you got so caught up in this main characters mundane attempt to clean up after people. It can be explained as more powerful than Hemingway (overblown writer...lets be honest) and less deadly than Palahniuk (are we witnessing the twilight of his career...no one likes him more than me). To describe Sloper, the emotionless hero of 'Waste' would be to drawn a line around your own shadow, impossible, but simple as it is confusing. I found each paragraph of Sloper's marginal existence as a man cleaning up in a high rise building to be as sad as the last paragraph I'd just read. He moves from one grotesque waste basket to the other with a sluggish high style that makes me want to slap the shit out of him. Marten describes the empty vacuum that is created after hours in this office building Sloper cleans with such a frightening banal accuracy, that I imagined the last high rise I worked in, and the two buildings seemed oddly similar. Whether he's raking the carpet on one floor, or eating Chinese food out of the trash left behind by some wasteful cubical employee, its unclear to me how he's gotten this far in life. How does Sloper live without dying of trichinosis? Questions of Sloper's existence are slowly answered.

He is the employee of the month, he lives at home with his mother that he never sees...communicating with her through the heating vents of their home, he lives alone in the basement. This entire existence is told without irony, humor, or any kind of narrative from the author, it just is. Simple and plain, nothing magical or inventive, and I mean that in the most flattering of ways. When Sloper masturbates into a pair of shoes that have been left under a desk I have to say that I shuddered at the intimacy which suddenly popped out of this novel how ever sick it was. There is a lot to be said for a story this tight, coming in just over one-hundred pages, there isn't a waisted moment. Somewhere in the middle is a shocking surprise which will give you nightmare's once you realize what Sloper is doing, how surgically precise his actions are and how horrendously vacant of emotion he is.
-Jason Rice Read more!

On Time

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The Believers by Zoe Heller

Jason Rice: There is a distinct pleasure that comes from reading Zoe Heller's novel's, for me it grew out of her fantastic first book, 'Everything You Know'. I used to commute on the train two hours a day and I frequently would wake other travelers from their sleep when I couldn't control my laughter anymore. Her writing isn't just funny, or funny ha-ha, but funny because it's true, it's like holding a very cute porcupine and marveling at it's ability to be cute while you bleed to death. To be honest I had a lot of trouble getting into 'Notes on A Scandal', and actually set it aside for a while, and then after hearing it was going to be made into a movie, I picked it up sheepishly (reading Barbara's assessment of Sheba's husband is a truly fantastic experience, then seeing it on the big screen...it's magical). Wouldn't you know, it's even better than her debut. I don't feel cheaply entertained when I read her work, I get the distinct feeling she's showing the world what an incredible storyteller she is, how she can sum up the human condition in just a quick tightly woven sentence. In her new novel 'The Believers', her ridiculously acute anti-heroine describes a doctor at a local New York City hospital as having a mouth shaped like an asshole. Heller saves her best barbs for the medical community, and in her first novel turns the sharp end of things on a poor nurse that her dopey hero Willy Muller refers to as "that idiot woman". Heller practices the fine art of the self contained cut down, it can stand alone, and reduce you to nothing, which always makes for good writing.

In her new novel; The Believers, the same artistry is on display with a family of miscast social heroes. Audrey, the self proclaimed Queen of the clan uncovers her children's failings and shines an unflattering light on them while more or less staying at the bedside of her less than faithful husband, Joel, who happens to be a bright shining star, a champion of social injustice, a beacon of truth, a man who can only be judged on his success, not on his weaknesses. Audrey looks past his infidelities, and turns her wicked eye on her family and whomever has the grave misfortune of crossing her path. The novel starts off brilliantly with a trip down memory lane to the day Audrey and Joel met. The entire novel is a smashing success, and prologue is only a small part, but it's something of a magic trick. I loved how she turned us all onto these well meaning characters who are soldiering against some gruesome injustice that is going on in the world, only to reveal it for what it is, and ultimately embarrassing her characters with a dose of reality.

Dennis Haritou: This entire novel is a smashing success...oh my gosh, I'm channeling JR! But let's get this straight...and JR wouldn't mind me saying this...I'm a believer and JR isn't so we are looking at this novel out of different sides of the mirror. When I noted that this novel was called "The Believers", I had to wonder what that meant from my perspective. And as for "embarrassing her characters with a dose of reality", well that's JR's scenario as the worldly atheist so it's understandable that he would see the novel from that perspective. Audrey is the focal point character, crazily neurotic and not afraid to tell others, including members of her own family, what ass-holes they are. ("There's no system in the world that can keep a man's dick in his pants.") She has three great characters for progeny: her adopted son, the drug adeled but endearing misfit Lenny, the obsesively overweight union activist Karla...who is stuck in a frustrating marriage and is trying to have a child that she apparently doesn't really want and Rosa; who is torn between helping the urban kids uptown and the desire to discover her Jewish roots and find her own errant way, perhaps, closer to God.

I loved the scene, set with great sensitivity by Heller, of Rosa wandering into a Jewish service and being drawn toward a community that, as a very secular person, she could scarcely understand. And I loved the comedy of absurdities as Rosa confronts religious practices that she has to view, from her materialistic perspective, as absolutely nuts.

When Audrey tries to talk Rosa down from religion: "...perhaps it's not right for you. Just because it's right for them you know...it doesn't mean it's right for you".

Rosa's answer: "But Mom, if it's the truth, it has to be right for me doesn't it? If you'd thought you'd found the truth about something, would you walk away from it just because it wasn't the truth you particularly wanted or expected to find?"

I would like to give you Audrey's retort to this...it's a killer, believe me. Throughout this book, a phalanx of characters well-drawn to a T are finding out the truth that they didn't especially want to hear. This is a great book, encompassing many complexities, both JR's and my POVs.

Jason Chambers: I liked it too, though I may not be as effusive about it. In a way I see this as an interesting companion to The Great Man, which we discussed a little while back; the powerful and influential patriarch dies (or in this case becomes indisposed via coma) and as the unknown detail of his life unfold, his family reacts to his absence in unexpected ways.

Heller's characters are every bit as rich JR and DH suggest: Audrey, who once used her scalpel-like tongue to skewer fools as a party trick, now finds, absent Joel's shadow, that it's no longer a trick. It is who she is. Rosa finds herself drawn inexplicably to Judaism, captivated by the ritual and order, and determined to learn more, despite her secular past.

Of course, this book is about believers of all sorts, and doubters. Rosa has to make decisions, but how can she commit without faith, while the Rabbi suggests, paradoxically, that the faith should follow the commitment. Audrey's secular belief system is as strong as any christian's; only her faith in her husband is shaken, not that in his ideals. Several other characters hammer home the theme when thay make a transition from doubt to belief (though not necessarily religious) or, in a few cases, vice versa.

Not to belabor that point though - this is at root a story of a family transitioning through a limbo-like period of mourning. And a good one at that.

JR: I think we've struck on a great, great, novel, so good in fact that we should keep this discussion short, because people won't read this much about a book, except maybe Zoe Heller, (that...would...be...amazing) and her editor. Anyone out there who want's to read this book has to wait until March 2009. Or if you're really impatient you can order it from Amazon.com in the UK, where this book has already been published. But then you'd have to pay in Euro's and who has a stack of those silly things laying around, plus it's probably way pricey since you have to get it shipped all the way from England... Read more!

I Really Want You To See This

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I always wondered when you'd come back.

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This Might Win The Booker Prize

A Fraction of The Whole
Steve Toltz, Spiegel & Grau

This is my review that originally ran last April on Ain't It Cool News, and even shows up on the quotes page of the paperback edition which has just hit stores. So thank you to the nice folks at Spiegel & Grau.

I used to think that 'The Corrections' was the greatest thing I'd ever read, but I'll have to say that ‘A Fraction of the Whole’ is better than ‘The Corrections’. Toltz did it in one book. Franzen took two to get ‘The Corrections’ out into the world. Granted, you have your whole life to write your first novel, but my God, ‘A Fraction of the Whole’ does things in 530 pages that most writers can’t do in a lifetime.

I’m floored by what I found to be a wildly addictive exploration into a man’s soul, a profoundly moving experience almost religious in its execution and possibly one of the sharpest and irresistibly humorous post modern adventures I’ve had the pleasure to read. Where did this guy come from? Who has the stones to publish this first novel as one of their lead titles on a maiden list in a market that repels fiction written by men, literate fiction that is. Spiegel and Grau, get used to hearing that name.

Terry and Martin Dean are a pair of notorious brothers from Australia, one is hated the other loved, and Martin’s son Jasper tells their story from a prison cell. That’s where we start and it gets so sweet (I mean 'sweet' like, "man that's so sweet", not, that's sweet, oh, look at that puppy) from this point on I can hardly contain myself. Father and son stories are usually written by the son, and hardly ever told by the father, I don’t know why, but it’s basically true. The voices here are hard to tell apart and would have been phony if they were different as children often sound and say things just like their parents. But Jasper allows his father to tell him the story of his youth growing up in a small town with his troublemaking brother Terry. You see, Terry is the local bad seed and his town wants him shipped off to bad boys’ camp, Martin his sickly brother, and I won’t spoil how he gets sick, or how his parents try to keep him in his sick bed, but let’s say Dr. Phil wouldn’t be happy. Terry bands together with a couple of hooligans to make trouble, but then they decide they need a mentor. Their father coincidentally built the local prison and they figure it must have at least one teacher mixed in with all those criminals. A wild caricature named Harry gives them advice and this is where the novel goes into overdrive not really slowing down until page 300 or so.

Terry and Harry momentarily disappear from the story only to resurface after some truly biblical events make their presence almost too perfect to be believed, (killing corrupt sports athletes is just one example). All the while Martin decides to help Harry write a book about becoming a top notch criminal and what a book it is. I won’t even tell you about the suggestion box that Martin concocts which sends his brother on the wrong path, to do that would be bad form on may part. But Martin is trying to mark his territory just like his brother who can’t spell his name if he pissed it in the snow.

Toltz does something dazzling at this point, while Martin is trying to discover why he’s such a mashed potato sandwich and his brother the spice of life he tells his son Jasper about his long lost mother, again, the book soars. These pages told through diary entries that the son discovers are so vivid and filled with soul crushing philosophies that a page didn’t go by where I wasn’t gob smacked by the profundity that bleed from the page. Each chapter of this book is another layer of Martin’s life, and we find out more about Jasper, while a strange man named Eddie appears and I thought this was an odd plot twist, but he turns out to be the tails up bad penny you never bend over to pick up, and Toltz winds him tight as a wet rope for the rest of the story. It’s with Jasper’s birth that the book turns on a dime and we start to really understand the depth of Martin’s despair, his loneliness and his insanity that is spreading faster than crab grass on my front lawn in July.

Martin has always lived in his brother’s shadow and when he finally gets out from under it he can only frown at the world while his son lives in a place that echo’s both his uncles success and his fathers continued failure. When Martin braces his son with the fear of death after he gets kicked out of school, not actual death, but the idea of death, Jasper doesn’t get it and this is where father and son split up, mentally that is. Martin says, “I wash my hand of you.” Jasper replies, “be sure to use soap.” Which is a sample of the how funny Toltz can be.

I can’t tell you anymore, the revelations of Martin, Terry, and Jasper are too rich and it would be a spoiler to do so. I can safely say that Steve Toltz has written a masterpiece, a smashing debut that will long be remembered as a colossal example of just how good fiction can be. He keeps you wired to the page from the jump and he defies gravity all the way to the end.

-Jason Rice Read more!

You Decide

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Narrative Magazine Story of the Week - The Story of an Hour

Dennis Haritou: Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" consists of three pages totaling 23 paragraphs. One paragraph, mainly exposition, is five sentences long. The rest range from four sentences to several paragraphs that are only one sentence long. One paragraph, a very telling one, consists of just five words.

This structure is gossamer, like a silk worm spinning out a thread. What it's meant to catch is the extremity of a woman's life. Mrs Mallard has just received the kind of tragic, out-of-the-blue, news that we all dread: a loved one has been in a horrific accident. 

She withdraws into a comfortable chair in her room. This story needs to spin a delicate web: we are going to explore the movements of her mind at its most pivotal moment. It's very Jamesian. But I mean William not Henry. William James had this utterly cool pre-Freudian idea of how the mind worked as process. It was like a series of perchings and flights, as if an elusive bird kept trying to secure its footing and keeps missing it, so it has to try again and again and this striving never stops until everything is over. Robinson Jeffers said that it's a bitter earnestness that makes beauty. And he was talking about a flight of birds at the time. 

Mrs Mallard, so named, has experienced traumatic loss. Loss can be a very equivocal thing sometimes...far more than we are willing to admit to ourselves or others. Doors close and doors open and the mind pivots and reels. Please read the story.

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the endless city

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The Wettest County in the World by Matt Bondurant

Jason Chambers: In the first of several historical novels I plan to review this month, Matt Bondurant writes a story based on the story of his grandfather and two granduncles, notorious moonshiners in the Prohibition and the years immediately following.

Bondurant does a great job in this novel shifting from magnificent imagery to violent outbursts of fury and drunkenness. The brothers - Howard, the war-haunted giant, Forrest, the mythic survivor, and Jack, the fearful dreamer - traverse a hard-scrabble Appalachian world where liquor becomes trade and livelihood, courage and shame. The story is framed by the appearance of writer Sherwood Anderson, on magazine assignment, as he tries to suss out the truth to the moonshine trade, which everyone knows about and about which no one will talk, and the personal tragedies and political corruption that accompanied it.

I liked this book quite a lot, although I would venture to suggest that the Anderson passages were not necessary. I don't think that they hinder the story, but I do think that the Bondurant Boys and the cast of Virginian drinkers and holy-rollers and lawmen carry the book quite sufficiently.  When Anderson appears, it is clear that his modernist views and appraisals are not only unwelcome in these hills, but are simply irrelevant.  

What really moves the action are the Bondurant Boys, each with his own internal conflicts - Howard's horrors of WWI,  Jack's desperate need to match his brothers' success, Forrest - trying to outreach their father's shadow- as they combat the encroachment of modernity, prohibition, and local political corruption with guns, cars, and booze.  Good stuff.

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Something I Learned Along The Way.

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MIxed Blood by Roger Smith

Jason Chambers: I was a bit surprised when the guys pointed me toward this book as review option, as it initially seemed like something I would not pay much attention to.  It looks like just another thriller, and with us having recently reviewed Beat the Reaper, and evokes a lot of the similar motifs from that book.

Two meth-head Cape Town gangsters on an unrelated errand break into Jack Burns' house and end up dead. Of course, he can't call the cops, since he and his family are on the lam from U.S. authorities. So, he disposes of the bodies, and, as we know from many other thrillers, sets a chain of events into action that endangers his family, puts him on the run again, and enters conflicts and accords with characters from Cape Town's dark underbelly.

I liked a lot about this book. First, the use of Cape Town as a setting is a great choice. Smith's characters move through the landscape, revealing apartheid's remnants - racism, social inequality, political corruption, and a healthy drug and gang culture.  A great comp to this aspect of the novel is Pelecanos' hard look at Washington DC, or an earlier Richard Price. 

And the ancillary characters are intriguing, too. Rogue cop Rudi Barnard thrashes innocent and guilty alike with a religious fervor that recalls a nightmare version of Burke's Clete Purcell.  Benny Mongrel - an amazing and apt moniker - an aging ex-con with a mean streak for people and a soft spot for his dog. Fingers. A Government Councillor with his revenge on his mind. Pretty fun stuff.

On a slightly negative note, I did think that Jack Burn was pretty much the standard fare as a protagonist: Ordinary Joe who gets himself in trouble with the mob or the cops, goes on the run, gets outed by a screwy coincidence, and has to save his family, etc. He's fine, but doesn't drive things forward or distinguish himself in any way. 

Most thriller readers will find this highly entertaining.

Dennis Haritou: I agree with the astute JC, who reads more thrillers than I do and has more expertise in the field, in his assessment of this charnel house of depraved characters. But the characters that stand out for me are those from "The Flats", a largely lawless Capetown ghetto/slum. The Flats are a maze-like expanse of run-down one room shacks with hot tin roofs and fallen-in fences and multiple dwellings that would make any slumlord proud. It seems like most of its residents have never left the place. And if you are a stranger there, once in, you might not be able find your way out. But if there were tours, I'd go. To most of its residents, it seems like it's the whole world and Roger Smith makes it come alive from that POV.

Like any dangerous urban sprawl it contains a lot of ordinary, decent folk just trying to hang on as well as more than it's share of psychopaths, addicts and felons. But I found this ghetto picturesque: a hermetic environment with its own slang, its own customs and its own distinctive appearance. I think this tale was juiced when it was in this terrain and suffered oxygen depletion when it was out of it. It's worth reading the book just to savor the uniqueness of this drug and crime-blasted community.

I found the body count with their brain splattered heads and severed body parts mind-numbing after a while. I even rewrote the story in my head as a recoil from all the sadism and gore that the citizens of Capetown apparently enjoy or suffer through in their daily lives. (Hey, I have friends who have been to Capetown and I know it's a beautiful place.) In my ghetto cozy version, Benny Mongrel, my favorite character, proceeds through the Flats with his beloved dog Bessie like some disfigured Miss Marple, solving crimes but still having time for late afternoon tea while Bessie enjoys one of her favorite dog biscuits. I could take about 20 of these in a series. But that's not what we got in Mixed Blood. We got Roger Smith as the Mickey Spillane of Capetown. Roger Smith is no Agatha Christie but as Mickey Spillane, he rocks.

 

Jason Rice: I think what appealed to me most about this book was the brutal internal force that all of the characters had in some form or another.  They were making their own luck, for better or worse, no matter what.  From the very first page you knew you were in for a tough ride, and I couldn't put this book down.  I felt involved in each person as we discovered that there are no happy endings in life and besides getting born into this world you don't really get many breaks.  Jack Burn surveying the nighttime sky in the first moments knows that somewhere out there someone is out to get him and that it's only a matter of time before they catch him.  The overwhelming sense of foreboding that bubbled onto the surface after every chapter was really wonderful to read. 

The body count didn't matter to me, this is cinematic style spread into a novel, much like Beat the Reaper, this book is slumming in a worn out genre.  Roger Smith shows an amazing aptitude by revealing each character slowly over the course of one story and I noticed that the narrative actually had cycles, first Burn kills the intruders, and then Benny Mongrel slowly curls into action, followed by corruption extraordinaire, and it suddenly moves to match point, but then compresses until it comes out the other side of the black hole that is Cape Town with a myriad of reasons for every action.  Each character's decisions are based only in greed, nothing more.  Jack Burn decided at one point decided that the normal life, ball games and barbecues (to quote Michael Mann) isn't what it's cracked up to be, and that taking a risk is almost as risky as doing the 9 to 5 grind.  He knew there would be a downside but he did it anyway. 

 

I loved Burn's wife, his kid, the maid who finds the sharp end of the story, and hot furnace wind that blows in from the mountains. I was surprised to pick up two thrillers in a row, this and Beat the Reaper, as I don't ever read these kind of books. Roger Smith portrays his setting so well I felt like I was there, and he did it without breaking a sweat, Cape Town, nice place if you're rich, a lot like America. The characters of this story will make a lot of people sit up and take notice. Even the package of the ARC was crisp and sharp.  I found a great many things to like in this book, and if anything, this novel is the text book example of great genre writing.

JC: Strangely enough, we're all more or less in agreement.  Smith's Cape Town is Hobbesian in its brutality and the struggle for superiority, and the unraveling of the characters' plans seeps into the landscape. I like Dennis' comment about the ghetto versus the hills.  I had the same impression of the differences, but thought of the highlands where the rich people live as oxygenated and expansive, but the ghetto as suffocating and desperate.  I think JR nails it too, when he says Mixed Blood is great genre writing.  What we sometimes forget looking for the next great read is that great genre works can be great works, period.  Let's face it, for everything that gets passed off as literary fiction, or general fiction, only a small percentage really hold up to scrutiny.  Such is the case with genres, too, but I'll leave it to others to question the numbers.

Since we didn't mention it above, Mixed Blood is due out in February 2009 from Henry Holt.

Now, will someone please recommend Dennis a ghetto cozy, so I know what that would look like?

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At journey's end, I returned to my beginnings, realizing that I had screwed everything up from the start

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Narrative Magazine Story of the Week 4

Dennis Haritou: Readers have the bad rep of being navel-gazers, like those New England Transcendentalists who would walk into a tree while they were reading about the history of ancient Rome. The pot roast is burning or little Fido needs to go out for a walk but you have your nose in a book and are oblivious. (I wish.)

But I think that reading keeps you honest. You can read a great short story like this one, for example, and there you are bracketed. The world and its burgeoning quota of animating life isn't just all about your personal agenda anymore. It's about all of us.

William Kittredge, in Stone Boat, has written 5-page short Story of the Week for Narrative Magazine that I'm not saying is perfect only because...how the hell could I know what's perfect. The setting is the rain forest country of the Pacific Northwest near the Willamette Valley in the 1940's. This is Ursula LeGuin and Jonathan Evison territory. I've been there and legends seem to seep out of the ground in that place. There is a cattle rancher, an Indian with attitude and a boy along with a herd of escaping cattle who dream of getting back to the orange-scented plains of Mexico...a country that they will never see again and also a country that a boy who has never been there can chain his dreams around so he can keep them from slipping away.

The boy has lost his grandfather to suicide and his father to the battlefields of World War II. But each of these three characters have their own personal survival story to tell. It's all about: "The idea is not to be a fool who can't live his life." But you have to remember the small stuff also like how to keep your legs wide in the stirrups if you're riding in pursuit of cattle into that rain forest. That's so if your horse falls out from under you, you can get clear before you get your ass crushed.

I mentioned "bracketing" your experience, or getting a perspective on it. That happens right at the end of this story in a dazzling way...what a master of the short story form Mr. Kittredge is! The rules of Three Guys discussions forbid me from giving away too much but hell, I take my caution back, this short story is perfect.

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