Everybody Loves Somebody by Joanna Scott

Things always work out in the end, don’t they?

I really didn’t get this book of short stories.  I hated the first five, loved the fourth, thought the long one was very interesting and provocative, then back to the hating.  Overall, I had problems with the flippant tone and believed in many cases the stories were a waste of beautiful prose.  I mean, shouldn’t fiction speak to the heart – what’s the point of solely an intellectual connection?  Art is the depiction of emotion, isn’t it?  Why else bother?

The writing is vivid and descriptive, begging to be read aloud.  A multiplicity of characters – a high energy level.   I found the abstract words offputting and distancing.  Obviously I didn’t get the point.  The relentless happy endings were painted on like a clown’s smile.

Peace by Richard Bausch

Three GI’s wonder if war is worth it

This short novel about World War II sucked me in immediately.  There are some great scenes, really great, (I cried when the solider left home), interspersed with long passages of boredom.  Why?  The nominal plot is three GI’s climbing a snowy mountain, pursued by a faceless sniper.  The prose style is kind of Old Man and the Seaish (which works).  The secondary plot, the moral plot, is the three GI’s discussing whether they should turn in their commanding officer for a war crime, which had been depicted in the first scene.  Part of my problem was that I didn’t understand that the first scene depicted a war crime until we were well into the book.  To me it seemed like another unavoidable bad thing happening during a war.  And if I, a Hollywood Hills liberal Democrat, didn’t think the first scene depicted a war crime, I have a hard time believing the three young kids in wartime getting shot at would make that distinction.  A panicky action in the heat of battle is not a war crime.   So the stakes weren’t there for me.   Surely these guys would be more concerned about the sniper killing them than debating moral permutations.   Partly the cause of my boredom were that the characters of the three GI's and their elderly Italian guide felt straight out of central casting.  The bigoted hick, the Jewish guy from Brooklyn, the noble American, the shifty old Italian.  The narrative consciousness is that of the noble American, the good Catholic.  But here we have the problem of the essentially uninteresting nature of inherent goodness, rather than the tension of striving for goodness.  So the stakes weren't there.  The final scene stretches credulity and ends in a welter of sonorous though ultimately meaningless words

This would have made a pretty powerful short story.  Instead it turned into a short novel, flabbed up with rhetoric.

Devil In A Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

In 1940’s LA, a workingman’s search for a missing woman is interrupted by a number of murders

I read a short story by Walter Mosley in the latest Tin House and it was really good which inspired me to pick this book up. I was a little disappointed as the novel was more like a typical apprentice like detective novel although with a unique setting.Mosley's most famous character, Easy Rawlins, a careful, quiet narrator/detective, is introduced. The writing was spare, well crafted and Mosley has a facility for expressing emotions without dialogue, with gestures and movements. It just wasn’t as original and surprising as the short story.

The plot felt kind of cliché, but it was a very easy read. The setting is unique. African Americans from Houston in LA. The woman who is the devil with a blue dress doesn’t feel quite real, (or quite motivated) although all the male characters do. They are perverse and full of eccentric life. I also like the way the book quietly comments on a lot of larger issues, such as racism, police brutality, the movement of poor black southerners to industrial cities, how men treat women, and alcoholism.

What makes me want to continue reading the series is the relationship between laid back Easy and his amoral friend Mouse. Maybe put together they will make up a complete man. Who is worthy of redemption? Maybe Easy Rawlins, maybe not.

My New American Life by Francine Prose

A young Albanian immigrant cannot believe these crazy Americans, their optimism and their luck

This novel is the story of the first person Albanian narrator, Zula, acerbic and hopeful, as she tries to figure out America and get what she needs.  It reminded me very much of Rose Tremain’s novel The Road Home, which was also a novel about Eastern Europeans illegally immigrating to a trendy Western capital, but this book is less artistically realized, more winking, a satire instead of Tremain’s deeply felt character study. Here, the colorful Albanians are contrasted with the earnest do-gooding rich Americans, Zeke and Mister Stanley and crazy Ginger and the wonderfully vivid Don Settebello. He was the only character that really felt alive, even more so than Zula.

The novel felt a little overplotted but undercharacterized with an overreliance on overdone characters, such as the monosyllabic teen, the Albanian goons– nobody here surprises the reader but plays true to type.

The writing was very good with sprightly descriptive sentences, and very well constructed scenes. Finally, it’s legitimately funny. The novel zips right along and is a pleasant read as it quietly comments on the US government’s policy in Guantanamo, the public’s fear of Muslims, American ignorance and innocence, suburbia, school shootings, avaricious women (of which Lula can’t quite bring herself to be.)

The climactic scene isn’t really earned (though almost). The end works, I think, unsettling, a bit scary,but things always work out ok for our kooky heroine. In America!

Tunneling to the Center of the Earth by Kevin Wilson

Quiet characters can’t quite figure out how they are supposed to fit into this apparently well ordered world

This book of short stories was original, a pleasure to read. The author approached each story differently, with maybe only the weirdness (and perhaps a certain sort of repressed pissedoffedness) a constant. And prose that could cut glass. The writing was quite beautiful, but only rarely did I feel we had drilled down to boiling emotion.   Perhaps I am a sentimentalist? Maybe it’s because I’m not sure if dream like surrealism is my cup of tea.

My favorite stories were Birds in the House and Go Fight Win. These were family stories, of which there are a few in here. The family stories resonated more with me.  The other clump of stories in the book were young people trying to connect.

One further note - at the end the author discusses each story and how it relates to an earlier story he read. I didn't like this - it implied that instead of the inspiration for the stories coming from this world or the recesses of the author's soul , the inspiration came from another story someone else had written, an apparently more superior story. First of all, I don't think that is the case. Secondly, it planted the thought in my head, then why am I wasting time reading your stories when there are eleven more superior stories out there? This gimmick must be working for I am going to check out the eleven stories referenced.

Le Divorce by Diane Johnson

A California and a French family clash when the children go through a divorce

The theme and the overarching plot of this novel is practically the same as "Persian Nights"; the clueless Americans parachuted into a polite bemused foreign culture, though Paris is not in such a state of crisis as pre revolutionary Tehran. I would say this book is expertly plotted, as a fast moving farce. The concluding set piece takes place, this time not at Persepolis but Euro Disney. That climax is followed quickly by a genuine tragedy.

I was a little timid about reading this, because I had so much loved Diane Johnson’s earlier black comedies and this is her most famous book, so I thought it might be sitcommy or sentimental, but no, the satire remains razor sharp, but communicated by a youthful exuberant compelling yet still ditzy first person narrator. I enjoyed reading her voice very much.

Isabel Walker, wealthy young Santa Barbaran, comes to Paris to help her older sister Roxeanne with child care. Only Roxeanne has a secret- her French husband has abandoned her. Reluctantly Roxeanne agrees to a divorce, French style. But there’s that matter of a two million dollar family painting she has gifted her faithless husband. The rest of the American family comes to Paris to investigate. In the meantime, Isabel, whose name echoes that of Isabel Archer, another expatriate dealing with unbreakable European traditions, grows very fond of Paris, its food, its fashion and its 70 year old politicians.

The energy and the comedy come from the culture clash between the two families. Many of the sentences were full of a love of language and a love of life. The plot elements, the Hermes bag, the painting of St Ursula, the glazed bowls, were inserted discreetly. Also, I really admired the way the dinner scenes with several characters were perfectly clear. And even though the story was nominally first person, there were plenty of glimpses into other characters’ heads, in other parts of the world.

I thought it was delightful.

So Much For That by Lionel Shriver

Americans aren’t ready, financially and emotionally, when people die

I had mixed feelings about this novel. The set up was excruciating – I felt like my head was positioned between two clanging cymbals. Pages after pages of characters spouting polemics about the state of health care in America. Is this even a novel, I wondered? The only thing that kept me from quitting was that I didn’t want to quit a book two weeks in a row. So I stuck with it.

I’m glad I did. The novel is about Shep, a mild mannered millionaire (although a million dollars clearly means nothing nowadays) whose dilettantish wife Glynis gets cancer, destroying the frugal Shep’s dream of getting away from it all for a cheap Third World retirement. Shep, (who comes across like a doormat) spends his last dime fighting the incurable cancer (this action is not really motivated). All the while Glynis refuses to accept the fact she’s dying. Meanwhile’s Shep’s dad needs nursing home care, and family friend Flicka has an incurable genetic disease. The moral and financial dilemmas of each situation are explored quite effectively.  I actually learned quite a bit about health care.

In a way this novel reminded me of Larry’s Party by Carol Shields, in terms of the not so macho main character, although that story was executed with much more artistry.  It is also in the tradition of Upton Sinclair (not that I've ever read any Upton Sinclair).  A novel addressing a social problem - that of unfair and inefficient health care.

In the last third of the book, the story got much more compelling as we left off the sloganeering and the author turned her attention towards the family and the sensitive portrayal of Glynis’s death. One of the themes was our society's abandonment of the sick and dying. It made me resolve to be more diligent about keeping in touch with the ill.  So perhaps this novel achieved its moral purpose as well.

Was the painful setup worth the beautiful end? I am undecided whether I will ever read a Lionel Shriver novel again. If I do it won't be for a long time.