The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus

Communication is poisonous

Sam and his wife Claire are getting sick. Their faces are "shrinking" and their bodies are wasting away. The voices of children seem to be poisonous, in particular, the malicious responses of their angry adolescent daughter Esther. Some combination of language or communication or comprehension is releasing a noxious chemical. Like a mad scientist, or homeopath, Sam tinkers in the basement, searching for a cure. Things change for the increasingly desperate Sam when he meets the red headed Murphy, a neighborhood loiterer who takes a suspicious interest in the Jewish families in the neighborhood.

The novel begins somewhat realistically, then the reader gradually discover that Sam and Claire are "forest Jews", who visit a shack deep in the woods to listen to fairy tales and nursery songs from a "Jew hole" buried in the floor. The revelation of this extremely odd world was wonderfully done.  The sentences are beautifully carved and the strange imagery is fully imagined. Mountains of salt drift across America.

The novel is well balanced, with a Part I and a Part II, and a short little Part III. However, overall, this one might have been a little too cerebral for my taste. In the middle, Sam's attempts to develop an antidote to the wasting disease got repetitive and boring and I very nearly gave up. It was lots of pages about some guy sitting at a desk fiddling with homemade machines and letters and script and I grew tired of him. Can't we have a sense of beauty or joy or a laugh or two?

There is an uneasy mismatch between the essential silliness of the thriller plot, such as the cackling dialogue of the super villainous villain, and the extreme seriousness of every character we encounter. Although I am glad I didn't bail on the book because the last part became emotionally moving as we returned to the family story. Sam's hope is the only thing that sustains him at the end. But hope is there.

 

 

Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee

What is the right way to live?

Well, she's always stepping in it, isn't she, Elizabeth Costello.  She is unable not to intrude on other people's comforting illusions and must always speak the truth.

Elizabeth Costello is a cranky old Australian writer who travels the world, speaking at various conferences, and always on topics she feels strongly about. This is a novel of ideas which gives extremely short shrift to the novel part.   Reading the book was an intense emotional experience, but is it even a novel? Yes, I believe it is, for even though there is a very sketchy plot (basically an extended travel itinerary -- final destination Limbo), there is in fact one key novelistic element. That is, a main character. Elizabeth Costello is depicted as a passionate hurting human being. A person who keeps screwing up but keeps charging into battle. The square peg in the round hole. You root for her. She is just trying to do the right thing, even as she accepts the freebie cruise and the rubber chicken and the big check.

The structure of the book is a series of lectures, lectures which apparently Coetzee has in fact given. (Again, is this a novel?)  The lectures are highly interesting and I had to keep putting the book down, not because I was bored, but because I was overwhelmed and had to keep putting it down to think. What is evil? Is it the mindless munching on other sentient beings, their cruel profitable industrialized transformation into protein? Is it a novelist exploiting humans' intrinsic desire to witness depravity, or should a respectful curtain be drawn over literary depictions of evil and suffering? Should life be approached in a religious posture or a humanist posture? They both are a "quest for salvation."

Is the novelist an entertainer for the wealthy rich, or a moral teacher? (Hint - you make more money as an entertainer.)

The book did stop me from eating meat, at least for a day or two.

 

 

Slow Burn by Sabina Murray

Party girl resists her fate 

I wasn't particularly interested in this story of a rich promiscuous young woman's nightly drinking binges, but once I started reading I was immediately sucked into the narrator's very concrete sense of unhappiness and was compelled to find out what happened next. The main character is Isobel, a rich girl from the Manila upper class, who will not be controlled by her society's rigid rules about class and gender. The scenes are mostly set in affluent bars, restaurants and the opera hall. In some ways, the story progressed like a Jane Austen novel.

Isobel doesn't play nicely with the other girls, or even with the other guys. She lets herself be used by men. To get something or feel something. She likes outraging people, and in fact there is another kind of outrage here simmering underneath. An outrage at a deeply macho, deeply corrupt society.

At the end, a supernatural element enters the story with a fortune teller and a curse and a madman with a gun. I enjoyed it.

 

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

What is honor?  

I had no idea this book was so good.   I thought it would be stupid.  The first chapter was amazing, establishing the impressive Sternwood mansion, the suffocating hothouse preserving the decrepit old man, the two corrupt girls. The hero, Philip Marlowe, educated private detective, is hired by General Sternwood, the dying oil magnate, to discover who's been blackmailing him on account of his two beautiful wayward daughters. Carmen, the younger, clearly has a screw loose, and Vivian, the older smarter one, seems to be hiding something. Numerous shootings and car chases follow.  Nearly every woman he encounters has a soft spot for tall dark Marlowe.

Chandler's strength is description, and it was entertaining reading about LA and Hollywood in the 1940's. Rialto is farmland here, orange groves, not acres of housing like it is now. The writing is deadpan and funny and even though the dialogue is sometimes hampered by obsolete slang it moves the story along and is witty. The book is a very easy read.

Philip Marlowe is still a little shocked at how fallen the world is. What are principles? Some low down people seem to have them, and some high class people definitely don't. The family story provides the motivations here. The Sternwoods are trying to protect each other and Marlowe is trying to protect the Sternwoods. To a degree.

Certain elements haven't stood the test of time. The porn library on Hollywood Boulevard is funny now - the criminalization of stuff available immediately on the Internet. Also, a key part of the plot reminded me of The Sound and The Fury, in that the premise rests on a nutty concept of female sexuality. About a third of the way through, the story degenerates into a welter of dames shooting guns and having fits, and the novel stopped making narrative sense. Also, I am stumped by Marlowe falling in love with Mona Mars who he has apparently known for two minutes.

But I will definitely read more Chandler.

 

Toward You by Jim Krusoe

Who hears the cries of the lonely dead?

I found parts of this novel truly frightening and disturbing. I also thought the sentences were hilarious. Toward You is about Bob, an Aspergery upholsterer, who builds a helmet (the "Communicator') constructed of egg cartons and duct tape in order to hear the voices of the dead. The helmet seems to work, though not very well. Meanwhile, Bob is tormented by Steadman, a cop who suspects him of numerous crimes, and deranged Dennis, who feels that Bob had something to do with the death of his beloved rabid dog. Who is also named Bob.

Bob has a deadpan, slightly aggrieved voice. He earnestly labors on his helmet, much like Jonathan in Krusoe's Girl Factory labored on his lady revitalizing yogurt project. Meanwhile, Bob reminisces about the only woman he had a close relationship with, Yvonne, who dumped him. Inexplicably, according to Bob. Then one day Yvonne shows upon his doorstep, eight year old daughter Dee Dee in tow, searching for the dog who bit Dee Dee. In a surreal comic scene, Bob serves them yellow cake.

Eventually, the story turns plotty, though all the threads don't quite come together. I felt there was real pathos and horror with Dee Dee's story, who seems to be stuck in Limbo with Bob, the rabid dog who killed her. The deaths in Girl Factory were funny. The death of Dee Dee's wasn't. A crevasse opens up in the novel and there is real emotion under the dead pan prose.

In some ways, this novel is about trying or not trying to follow the rules in suburban American.  Bob tries to, but just can't figure it out.

The Necessary Hunger by Nina Revoyr

A high school basketball player suffers from unrequited love

This novel was strangely compelling, even though it was "about" schoolgirl basketball and I don't have that much of an interest in schoolgirl basketball. But the book didn't concern games and practices and sneakers, not really.  It was about a girl in love with another girl, and how the girl cannot bring herself to say so. The love story pulled me along, the way that Nancy is trapped, has no power over her love. In addition, the novel offers a glimpse into another world, a world not usually seen in literary novels-- African American 1980's LA, a background of endless freeways, carjacking and Laker championships.

Nancy Takahiro, 17 year old basketball phenom from Inglewood, is in love with Raina, the 17 year old star guard from a rival high school. It so happens (and this is handled believably), that Nancy's dad and Raina's mom are in love and move into together. The girls become housemates. Nothing much happens in the novel after that. Nancy pines, they drink a lot of beer, their respective teams win until they meet in the championship where Raina pulls a Isaiah Thomas bonehead style pass. Racial tensions, homosexual tensions, are in the background of this novel, not the foreground. These kids really don't know they're poor.

The novel is about 25% baggier than it needs to be.  We may need to know all the players on Nancy's team, but do we really need to know all the players on Raina's team?  At the end it bogged down, the emotions unsupported, but Nancy with her blind strivings, her passion for Raina, keeps the reader interested. Raina, however, is essentially unknowable. I guess that's what makes her the love object.

 

 

 

 

The Way I Found Her by Rose Tremain

A mystery and a love story and a growing up story

This is the third novel I've read by Rose Tremain, and all three have been deeply moving. The subject matter and settings have been very different, but each book has been written with a high degree of technical artistry, founded on a bedrock of fully imagined three dimensional characters, rich with telling details and emotions.

Lewis Little, the precocious, highly literate, 13 year old narrator of The Way I Found Her, accompanies his mother to Paris, when she is working as a translator for an eccentric chubby Franco Russian historical novelist. (So we get a little commenting on the craft of writing novels). Though Lewis is very smart, there are many things going on between the adults in the story that he is not quite aware of or doesn't understand. And therefore sometimes the reader doesn't fully understand, but the fogginess is not unpleasant. All the characters are well rounded, unique -- Lewis's unwitting father back in England, his red headed passionate mother, the existentialist roofer, the middle aged novelist Lewis is in love with. The little dog is a compelling character as well as a plot device.

Lewis is translating a famous French novel about adolescence, Les Meulnes (which probably needs to be read to really appreciate the book). He also likes Crime and Punishment, and those two novels clank and bang around this one. The book is also a travelogue of Paris.

The grand finale is highly plotted, a bit like the end of Huckleberry Finn, where a thought provoking piece turns plotty, and though the ending felt fantastical, it felt right.