Banned Book Week: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

Earlier this month, North Carolina’s Randolph County Board of Education banned Ralph Ellison’s classic 1952 novel Invisible Man. Heralded as one of the best novels written during the post WWII era, Invisible Man explores racism and the complex web of racial identity in 1950s America. It has since become required reading for high school and college students.

The fact that North Carolina is behind this latest effort to ban books seems appropriate considering that this state has also been behind the effort to deny voters the right to vote through their heinous Voter ID laws. The right to vote and First Amendment rights go hand-in-hand. One cannot exist without the other. The right to choose who will represent us in local, state, and federal governments is as dependent on expressing and being exposed to the market place of ideas as breathing is to life. The fact that Voter ID laws will disproportionately affect African Americans (as well as women, the elderly, and college students) makes this latest move by Randolph County Board of Education seem like an overall strategy to affect the local and national dialogue regarding issues concerning African Americans.

Ellison’s novel goes to the heart of how racism operates in this country, how it depends on denying our voices and our very existences. As he writes in the novel’s prologue: 

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me.

Whether it be President Obama, who has become a caricature in the minds of his Republican opponents, or Trayvon Martin (and countless other black men), who tragically was unable to live beyond the “figments” of George Zimmerman’s rabid imagination, this modern, so-called “post-racial” America continues to prove how much Ellison’s voice is still very much needed. 

UPDATE: due to numerous complaints both in Randolph County and across the country, the Education Board voted Wednesday 6 to 1 to return Invisible Man back into the local school libraries.  

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel Garcia Marquez begins his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude with this line: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” What a marvelous way to begin a story, so alive with the world in its very clauses, just as William Blake suggests exist within a grain of sand. So much is going on here and yet Marquez presents his world, Macondo, the fictional community that figures predominantly in many of his stories, with the kind of fluidity that is pure music.

Notice how he begins this sentence: “Many years later.” There’s something wonderfully vague about this beginning. Not five years or twenty years or even the one hundred years in its title, but “many years” as though time is a flowing river blending effortlessly into the sea. Even this beginning suggests a media res, a middle of things, a violent disruption of order. Here is a history being suggested, whether the history of Colonel Buendía or a history of Macondo or a history of Latin America. The sentence sets the reader up for a tale that goes beyond the singular, and frankly violent moment of its beginning. Someone will die, but this death is but a moment in a far bigger canvas. Marquez pitches his novel backwards and forwards in time, beginning with the Colonel facing a firing squad, then moving further back to his childhood. We know in the sparsest sense what this childhood might entail. There is something magical about the idea of “discovering ice,” as though this memory not only encapsulates a “distant afternoon” of the colonel’s childhood but of history itself. Marquez further drives this impression home in the following sentences with “a bed of polished stones...like prehistoric eggs” or of a world “so recent that many things lacked names...” This is the way a child might see the world: huge and new and strange and wonderful. The first sentence sets up this magic and what will soon follow throughout the entire novel.

I mentioned before about a violent disruption, but the entire sentence is full of disruptions and contradictions. The clause “as he faced the firing squad” is as violent a disruption as any sentence can bear. It punches its way through brutally and unforgivingly, interrupting the rhythm of the sentence with a rhythm of its own, as all acts of violence must. Yet this violence is well into the future, a future that pushes further outward as the sentence continues. From there Marquez establishes another rhythm, one that is much more languorous, as though one falling into a daydream to escape the unpleasant or mundane, and indeed Colonel Buendía is facing the violent end of his life. Yet, as the old saying goes, his life flashes before his eyes, unfolding delicately like onionskin. Marquez fully builds his world with the complexities that it contains. There is the end of history and the beginning of it as well. There is death and birth, destruction and renewal. One can read this single line and have a sense of an entire story. We might not know who Colonel Buendia is or why he is being executed, but it is the very ambiguity of these questions that fuels the beauty of this first sentence and why it pulls me in as a reader. 

The best stories are the ones that leave enough space for writers to enter. They reveal only what is necessary and allows the reader to fill in the white spaces with her own imagination. Marquez creates a first sentence that is balanced beautifully between what is there and what is imagined. We do not need a fully descriptive passage of what Buendía looks like or what his executioners look like. And yet there they are: as real as what could possibly have been written on page. This is the world Blake refers to. Within one sentence, with carefully selected words, Marquez is able to construct a world in which, as the novel soon unfolds, a world so fully realized, so fully contradictory and ambiguous and magical, that it leaps off the page.

A Review: The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus

Title: The Flame Alphabet
Author: Ben Marcus
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Year: 2012
Length: 289 pgs


Viruses run rampant in literature. There’s something appealing about setting a virus loose in a story and letting it do its damage. It makes writing a lot easier. After all you don’t have to fret over killing off your babies. You can just let the virus take its course.

In Ben Marcus’s latest novel The Flame Alphabet he’s found a novel virus to kill off many of his characters. Language is corrupted, when delivered from the mouths of babes, sickening and killing adults. In a world polluted by noise, that’s a pretty scary way to go.

Sam and his wife Claire fight to survive this deadly virus, while their daughter Esther who pollutes the air with her vile language thrives. Only it’s a matter of time before Esther will succumb to the disease as she ages. While Claire continues to cling to whatever love she has left for her daughter, Sam wavers between love and disgust for what Esther is doing to their family. Marcus doesn’t explain what causes the disease, except that it seems to originate within the Jewish community and that it infects the alphabet as well. Adults are now unable to speak, listen, or read any form of language.

Sam tries to find medical relief for himself and his wife. First he attempts to create a medicine based on various drugs he’s distilled into smoke or a liquid he injects into his wife. He and Claire travel to the woods near their home where they’ve set up a hut that is a makeshift synagogue. There they listen to sermons and instructions from Rabbi Burke in an underground Jewish network. Murphy, an interloper, wants to learn their secrets. He thinks they have answers to why this is happening. Murphy turns out to be the leading scientist LeBov who has blamed Jews for the virus and whose unorthodox research has led him to become both pariah and soothsayer. Needless to say, after the children are quarantined and the adults sent to LeBov’s laboratory, Sam is forced to work on a new alphabet that will provide relief to sufferers. He finally escapes and returns to his former hut in the hopes of finding his daughter and become the father he had denied himself before. The novel ends with Sam still waiting, resolved to his new life of silence.

While The Flame Alphabet has a plot that's more discernible than Marcus’s previous novels, it is still experimental. It forces the reader to contemplate each sentence to parse meaning and understanding. Marcus, who several years ago defended experimentalism against an attack by Jonathan Franzen, is also committed to language even as he imagines a world without one. His observations are fully enveloped in the world of its narrator so that the two become one: “The lights of Rochester were only mildly brighter than the darkness, small pale stains oiling the air.”

While the language is beautifully observed, it is also oblique. There were parts where I wasn’t quite certain what was happening. That’s largely because the story rests somewhat on understanding Judaism, which left me at a disadvantage. Yet at its core the story is about relationships and how language and the spoken and written word bonds us. As Sam shrewdly observed, “I was never very good at knowing Claire’s feelings, even, unfortunately, after she’d shared them with me. Somehow I still didn’t understand. Now, in silence, insights into my wife were out of reach entirely.” Without language societies break down and all one is left with is oneself.

The Flame Alphabet is a difficult and sad book. I was reminded of the ways in which language today has been polluted by nonsense and meaninglessness. Marcus offers no such hope that once this language is lost that it will ever be regained. That depressing thought should bring everyone to pause.

Passing Love by Jacqueline E. Luckett: A Review

Passing Love, Jacqueline E. Luckett. New York: Grand Central Publishing; Pg. 297; 2012.

Ah, Paris. The City of Love, the City of Lights. Paris looms large in the literary imagination. Writers from Charles Dickens to James Baldwin has written about this romantic city and now Jacqueline E. Luckett (Searching for Tina Turner) joins their ranks with her 2012 novel Passing Love. Paris takes center stage in this tale about two women whose lives intertwine despite passages of time, the separation of two continents, and family secrets.

Nicole-Marie Handy, fifty and divorced, travels to Paris after her friend’s death and a surprise marriage proposal from her married lover. A teenaged RubyMae Garrett escapes from her racially stultifying Mississippi home with an older jazz musician who takes her to New Orleans, New York, and finally to the fabled Paris of her dreams. Nicole and RubyMae’s lives intersect when Nicole finds a photograph of her father, a WWII veteran who also studied at the Sorbonne, among a Parisian street vendor’s wares. On the back of the photo is a message written to RubyMae in her father’s handwriting. After realizing that this RubyMae is the same mysterious and beautiful woman in a photograph she recollects from her childhood, she calls back home for answers. Rather than answering her questions, Nicole's mother instead mails a packet of letters which slowly reveal who RubyMae is and the connection that binds them all together.

The secrets Nicole discovers are needless to say rather predictable. Yet Luckett wields this story with enough of a steady hand, alternating between the present and 1950s Paris, that the cliches don’t overwhelm her tale. Luckett’s greatest achievement however is in the creation of RubyMae Garrett, a fascinating, complex creation of naked ambition and endearing vulnerability. RubyMae, desperate to escape the racism of her small home town, remakes herself into Ruby Garrett, a jazz singer who performs along with her lover, Arnett Dupree, who, unlike Ruby, is unable to escape his own insecurities as an artist in a town that is now swept away by bebop. After tragedy sweeps into their lives, Ruby strikes it on her own, attempting to pursue a career as a singer, sleeping with one of Arnett's old jazz compatriots to get a gig or to pay her rent. When Ruby's plans don't pan out (Ruby’s ambitions far outweigh her talent), the ambitious social climber changes her name again to Josette Dupree and decides to go after a wealthy Frenchman who might be able to provide her with the lifestyle she feels she deserves. Ruby’s determination to break out of the narrow confines of racial identity leads her to a decision that will also decide Nicole’s fate.

Luckett addresses the matter of light-skinned blacks who passed into white society a bit too late in the novel to give the subject the depth it deserves, yet she does foreshadow Ruby’s decision throughout the novel. As Luckett writes early on, “Though she had never seen that huge ball of light covered in such a way, RubyMae knew it was different and so, too, was she.” Refusing to allow others to define her, Ruby sets out on a path all her own regardless of social conventions. Luckett neither excuses Ruby’s decision nor entirely condemns it. Rather she writes a character whose actions are both infuriating as well as empathetic. RubyMae could easily have been turned into a villain, but her rather naive vulnerability makes her a deeply sympathetic character. RubyMae is a woman who is as much shaped by the times as she is one who is determined to transcend them. 

Nicole’s story, on the other hand, isn’t as entirely successful. It veers toward cliches (cheating men, a friend dead from cancer), but Luckett smartly limits Nicole’s story on her search for RubyMae, for it is RubyMae who gives the novel its power. She bursts from the pages with such verve and imagination that she towers above the novel’s weaknesses and becomes as intriguing as her adopted city itself.   

Their Eyes Were Watching God - 75th Anniversary

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston, New York: Harper & Row. 1937

This year is the 75th anniversary of Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. When it was first published in 1937, it won both critical praise and criticism within the black community for its perceived stereotypical portrayals of black southern life. Over the years it fell out of favor until it was rescued from oblivion by Alice Walker in the 1970s. Since then it has ranked high on the canon in English Lit, African American, and Women’s Studies.

Hurston’s novel has gone on to inspire many writers, including myself. I first heard of Their Eyes Were Watching God after reading Alice Walker’s essay “Finding Zora,” in her book of essays In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, and made it high on a list of books I wanted to read. When I finally read it I was swept away by Hurston’s rich language and languorous imagery of the 1930s South. Janie Crawford is a young, beautiful woman who battles both racism and sexism to find love and happiness. Unlike most heroines in romance novels, Janie doesn’t wait for things to happen to her, but reaches out and grabs at life, for both good and bad. As Janie herself understands early on, she “saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches.” After her grandmother marries a teenage Janie off to farmer Logan Killicks so that she can spare her granddaughter the hard life she believes is the fate of all black women, Janie languishes on the farm, dreaming that something better soon will come along to whisk her away. That “something better” arrives in the form of Joe “Jody” Starks, who indeed whisks Janie off the farm and delivers her to Eatonville, Florida, where he becomes both the town’s mayor and its successful businessman. Yet Joe’s early promise of liberation turns into another form of enslavement for Janie. In Jody’s store she is put up on a pedestal, prized more for her light skin than her mind and heart. Janie suffers for years under Jody’s abuse until he finally passes away, allowing Janie to free herself physically and emotionally from his chains.

Janie’s third and final chance at love comes in the form of the much younger Tea Cake Woods, a man who arrives in Eatonville with his guitar and harmonica and quickly sweeps the widow off her feet. In Tea Cake, Janie finally finds the love and freedom she has longed for since childhood. Unlike Logan and Jody, Tea Cake is Janie’s soulmate, as much comfortable in nature and song as Janie. In fact, Tea Cake woos Janie by taking her out on picnics and “making flower beds in Janie’s yard and seeding the garden for her.” Nature unites them as lovers:

[Janie] couldn’t make him look just like any other man to her. He looked like the love thoughts of women. He could be a bee to a blossom---a pear tree blossom in the spring. He seemed to be crushing scent out of the world with his footsteps. Crushing aromatic herbs with every step he took. Spices hung about him. He was a glance from God.

Janie follows Tea Cake to the Everglades where they work side-by-side in the bean fields. While Janie is working as she did when she was living on Killicks farm, she does so because she chooses to. Janie’s choice to be with Tea Cake, to go with him to the Everglades, are all her choices, even when those decisions rub against the resistance of the Eatonville community. Janie is neither a pretty doll to be put up on a pedestal nor a mule, but a woman who is slowly coming into own. Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel about one black woman’s struggle toward self-realization.

One of the strengths in this novel is its metaphoric language. “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board,” so begins the novel. “For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time.” This is the life Janie is born into, but it is the life she escapes from with Tea Cake. She is not content to be the “Watcher” bearing witnesses to the fulfillment of others. Trees, bees, and blossoms are also repetitive motifs which represent the flowering of Janie’s physical, emotional, and sexual maturation. The novel’s other greatest strength however is in its dialect. I usually detest dialect in novels. They’re rarely done well and often call attention to themselves in the worst way. Yet Hurston had a sharp ear for the musicality of black vernacular:

“It takes money tuh feed pretty women. Dey gits uh lavish uh talk.”

“Not lak mine. Dey loves to hear me talk because dey can’t understand it. Mah co-talkin’ is too deep. Too much co to it.”

“Umph!”

“You ain’t never seen me when Ah’m out pleasurin’ and givin’ pleasure.”

Umph!”

“It’s uh good thing he married her befo’ she seen me. Ah kin be some trouble when Ah take uh notion.”

“Umph!”

“Ah’m uh bitch’s baby round lady people.”

Hurston, who grew up in Eatonville, Florida with a father, like Jody Starks, who was also its mayor, used to sit on the porch of her home, listening to the men talk and trade jokes. Her ability to draw from their stories and distinctive way of speech resonates strongly in her work. Their Eyes Were Watching God is effecting precisely because she was a sharp observer of human behavior (Hurston also studied under anthropologist Franz Boas and spent several years in the field collecting folk tales and legends before she became a writer).

Their Eyes Were Watching God is not without flaws. There is one curious scene where Tea Cake, Janie’s soul mate, physically hits her to keep her from running off with Mrs. Taylor’s son. Mrs. Taylor, a woman in the camp, latches onto Janie for her light skin and nearly Caucasian features. She dislikes Tea Cake and thinks her son would be a more appropriate husband for Janie. While Tea Cake acknowledges he has no reason to believe that she would leave him for Taylor’s son, Tea Cake, mostly out of insecurity, conjures up this plan to keep her dependent on him. While there might be many arguments for why Hurston included this episode, much of which could center on the prevalence of colorism (blacks judging each other based on skin tone) within the black community, it’s still a bit shocking considering that Tea Cake was otherwise very tender toward Janie and treated her as his equal.

Nonetheless, Janie’s journey toward self-actualization grows deeper when both she and Tea Cake brave the hurricane and floods which ravage the Everglades. After Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog, he goes mad. After Janie is forced to make the ultimate sacrifice to save herself, she is put on trial. Janie’s character is held in judgment as the black community of the Everglades blame her for killing Tea Cake.

[Colored people] were all against her, she could see. So many were there against her that a light slap from each one of them would have beat her to death. She felt them pelting her with dirty thoughts. They were there with their tongues cocked and loaded, the only real weapon left to weak folks. The only killing tool they are allowed to use in the presence of white folks.

Hurston rarely deals with racism in Their Eyes Were Watching God, focusing instead on her beloved Eatonville and the Everglades communities which existed wholly without the white gaze. Hurston’s refusal to tell stories that reduced life to sociological study earned her the derision of writers like Richard Wright, who felt it was his responsibility as a writer to shine a light on the social condition of black people. However, Hurston’s work nonetheless strikes a nerve for the way it presents black folks as complex human beings, as burdened by problems of love, friendship, community, and gender as it was by race. On the surface, Janie’s pursuit of love might seem frivolous next to works such as Wright’s Pulitzer prizewinning Native Son, but it is in fact every bit as important for its insistence that the sexual liberation of black women is a revolutionary statement. Her voice, along with Hurston's, is a powerful one and certainly worth reading again 75 years later.

Half Of A Yellow Sun - A Review

Yesterday I found out that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's second novel Half Of A Yellow Sun is being adapted into a film. Yesterday it was announced that Thandie Newton has joined the production, which will begin shooting this March. This is all great news because I loved reading Half Of A Yellow Sun and look forward to the film. I wrote a review of the novel several years ago for another site, so I'm bringing it here for the occasion. 

 Not since the Civil War have Americans experienced the gut reality of war in their own backyards. Although the U.S. has engaged in various excursions over the centuries, including at present in Iraq, and many Americans have lost friends and family members to war, most civilians have as much experience with the mundane realities of life during wartime as they have experiencing life on Mars. War has become a foreign concept to many of us, which is a shame because, unfortunately, our literature reflects this lack of experience. While we have had writers such as Ernest Hemingway or Tim O'Brien who have written about their war experiences (WWI and Vietnam respectively) they usually write from the perspective of veterans. It is rare for an American writer to explore what life is like for civilians under the constant threat of death and destruction unless she is writing from an historical perspective.

9/11, of course, could change that. But even the terrorist attacks against the United States doesn't compare to the daily terror citizens face in other countries under the auspices of war. Therefore, writers from other countries who have experienced war have often been left to pick up the slack, exploring the very ways in which violence infiltrates the most intimate and mundane facts of life. One such writer who has taken up this mantle is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her latest novel Half of A Yellow Sun, which depicts the war which ripped her native Nigeria apart during the 1960s. Described as the "21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe" by the Washington Post Book World, Adichie captures the horror, mystery, and insanity of war, while also delving into the more intimate and personal daily struggles of her characters.

Half of A Yellow Sun depicts a Nigeria swept up in the turbulence of the period. Following the end of colonial rule, the country plunges into a war when Biafrans, who are majority Igbo, struggle to establish an independent sovereign nation. With the support of Britain and the United States, northern Nigeria engages in a brutal crackdown on Biafrans. Many Biafrans are slaughtered or are forced to flee from their homes. Adichie describes the horror of these events through the perspectives of three characters–Ugwu, a thirteen year old houseboy for the intellectual professor Odenigbo; Olanna, Odenigbo's lover and later wife; and Richard, the British ex-pat who falls in love with Olanna's twin sister, Kainene. Their personal lives are a backdrop to the epic drama, highlighting themes of reconciliation, independence, and identity.

The personal dramas of her characters involve familial estrangements, affairs, illegitimate children, class and racial differences, and self-hatred. In the hands of a lesser writer, these themes would disintegrate into melodrama, but Adichie applies a quiet and subtle self-assurance to her material that respects and heightens these little dramas under the backdrop of the greater horrors that take place during war. War is treated with an even-handedness that likewise becomes frighteningly mundane. When Olanna, after being caught up in the ethnic cleansing against the Biafrans, travels home by a train crowded with other fleeing refugees, she is haunted by the image of the decapitated head of a woman's child, which the woman keeps in a calabash. Her language is direct, uncompromising, and shocking in its simplicity:

Olanna looked into the bowl. She saw the little girl's head with the ashy-gray skin and the braided hair and rolled-back eyes and open mouth. She stared at it for a while before she looked away. Somebody screamed.

The woman closed the calabash. "Do you know," she said, "it took me so long to plait this hair? She had such thick hair."

Even in the face of such evil, the longing for the normal and mundane becomes a life raft for those caught up in the throes of war. When Kainene, against military orders, crosses enemy lines to continue her black market business to provide much needed goods and food to refugees in the camps, her actions are predicated less by the needs of these refugees but her own desire to find a semblance of order in her pre-war life as an independent and enigmatic entrepreneur running the family business. The ways in which war rips apart lives and complicates the often complex web of relationships between her characters are the main themes of Adichie's fine novel. Death is both brutal and arbitrary, as Richard soon discovers when an airport official is slaughtered by Nigerian soldiers after his Igbo origins are discovered. Most Americans might not be able to relate to the fears of being forcefully conscripted into army, which is the issue that commands much of houseboy Ugwu's story after the family flees to a refugee camp, but can certainly relate to his desire for love and his willingness and foolishness to risk danger when he walks a young sweetheart home. This one simple and endearing act sweeps Ugwu into the middle of the events that are ripping the country apart when he is snatched by Biafran soldiers and is forced to fight in the civil war. The sequence when Ugwu is sent to training camp is both heartrending and ironic as it becomes apparent that the Biafran army, lacking weaponry, training, and discipline, is unmatched against the better trained Nigerian forces. Yet Ugwu's need to place the conflicts that are tearing his country and people apart in context, such as his obsession with a paperback copy of Frederick Douglass's autobiography, do not spare him from becoming complicit in the evil and bloodshed he has witnessed thus far. The gang rape of a barmaid during a night of revelry by a group of soldiers whose youth and immaturity are exacerbated by the immorality of war haunts young Ugwu for the remainder of the novel.

While the story of Olanna and Odenigbo's marital discord might seem like an anomaly in the face of the greater horrors taking place, their relationship forms the moral heartbeat of the novel and reveals how even the normal problems of marriage–lack of communication, betrayal, commitment–parallels their compatriots' independent struggles. As Biafra attempts to break away from Nigeria and form a national identity, often in the face of its own political, social, and class differences, Olanna and Odenigbo struggle to keep their marriage together despite Odenigbo's betrayal. The glimmers of hope in their reconciliation during their journey from their home to refugee camps provide the glimmers of hope that Biafra and Nigeria will see through their regional differences and that both war-ravaged nations will find peace.

Adichie's novel, nonetheless, is not a fantasy, nor does it offer simple resolutions. Her characters' growth come from the hard-won realities of life and war. Adichie neither placates the reader nor presents a sanitized portrait of Biafrans–they can be every bit as snobbish, arrogant, enigmatic, confused, and complicated as they are passionate about their country's freedom. Rather, Adichie documents the history of her country and allows the reader to come to her own conclusions.

Half of A Yellow Sun, which represents the flag of the independent Biafra, is a crowning achievement for so young a writer. Adichie documents a moment in African history that is otherwise overlooked, bringing to the intimacies of war a clarity that is rarely experienced on American shores. Haunting and sparse, Half of A Yellow Sun joins a pantheon of great African literature documenting post-colonialism and its haunting and troubling aftermath.

Year in Review 2

There were a number of books in the past year that, for whatever reason, just didn’t hit the sweet spot for me. Some of these books were overhyped. Most weren’t reviewed for this blog---I can’t write about a book when I don’t have much enthusiasm for it one way or another. I didn’t finish the others (my tolerance for books that don’t work for me has gotten pretty low in recent years. I can read 200 to 300 pages, struggling to work against waning interest and boredom, before throwing my hands up in defeat). So why compile such a list in the first place? Since this is a review in the past year of reading it makes sense to look back on those experiences that didn’t work out as well as I thought they would. I enter a relationship with a book with great enthusiasm, finding in those first few pages an exciting chance to explore a new adventure. I don’t read expecting to be disappointed (though on those cases where books have been overhyped I might admit to being a bit suspicious). So I compile this list not to be a hater, but rather to note which books didn’t move me and why. But more than that, each book, whether loved or not, explains a little bit more about who I am as a person and as a reader.

One book that had gotten a lot of hype in the previous two years was Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. I thought the premise was intriguing enough, but in the end I was underwhelmed by the effort. There were so many possibilities that Bender could have taken with that premise, but she instead settled on the tried-and-true route of far too many contemporary literary writers: suburban ennui. The subplot revolving around the narrator’s brother, Joseph, had far more potential and I wished Bender could have centered the novel around him since it was apparent that that was where her interest lay. As I wrote in my review, I did enjoy reading the novel, but its unfulfilled promise kept it from being a truly satisfying experience.

Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer prize winning A Visit from the Good Squad was another novel hyped within the past year that I read but did not review for the blog. Much has been written about its form and how it sought to push the envelope in novel structure. Since A Visit from the Goon Squad was a collection of interlinked short stories, I failed to see what was so revolutionary about it. One chapter, told entirely in Powerpoint, offered a glimpse of what Egan was attempting to accomplish, but overall I wasn’t as impressed as others.  I don’t begrudge Ms. Egan’s Pulitzer, but I do think that we have reached a point in the development of the novel that everyone is looking for anyone to push it forward and breathe new life into the form. As a reader and a writer, I am interested in the question of what new configurations can be got out of the novel, so I’m curious to see whether Egan will continue to explore that path with future efforts.

I’ve just started reading Jonathan Lethem’s latest collection of nonfiction works The Ecstasy of Influence, Nonfiction, etc., making this the second Lethem book I read this year (in by a squeaker). The first was his 2009 novel Chronic City. While I appreciated reading it for the most part, I didn't find it earthshattering either. Like Colson Whitehead (whose latest I partly review below), Michael Chabon, Kevin Brockmeier, Aimee Bender, George Saunders and other contemporary writers, Lethem is interested in (re)blurring the lines between literary and genre fiction. Part realist fiction, part fantasy/sci-fi, Chronic City takes place in an alternate universe otherwise known as Manhattan, where an escaped tiger and an international team of astronauts stranded in space, one of whom happens to be the girlfriend of the novel’s hero Chase Insteadman, a former child star who occasionally does voiceover work, become a part of the urban landscape. As intiguing as that premise might sound, in the end, the pieces didn’t gel. Perkus Tooth, a culture critic who intrigues Insteadman was introduced as a wildly eccentric free spirit whose profound statements on culture (particularly on Marlon Brando) was meant to leave everyone who comes in contact with him in awe, but instead he turned out to be a bore. I was often left wondering why Insteadman was willing to bend over backwards for such a nondescript man (Hari Kunzru's review offers a huge clue that I certainly did not pick up on while reading). The mystery concerning Insteadman’s supposed girlfriend and a mesmerizing chaldron didn’t have much impact either. Still, Chronic City held my interest, had some interesting turns, and was funny at parts.

I wanted very much to like Zone One, Colson Whitehead’s latest novel. I’m a fan of Whitehead’s works and have read practically everything he’s written (The Intuitionist will always be one of my favorite novels of the last fifteen years). And yet like the others on this list I was disappointed. I’ve been debating about whether this is a failure of the novel or a failure of my own expectations. Granted, when I heard that he had written a zombie novel, I went in expecting a genre novel with a literary bent. What I got instead was a literary novel that happened to be about zombies. While reading I was left with one question: does the desire to make genre fiction more literate overwhelm what makes genre fiction so attractive to readers in the first place: larger-than-life characters, plot, action? I’m not suggesting that genre fiction can’t be literary or vice versa, but I also wonder how much the readers’ expectations limit both literary and genre fiction for both readers and writers (or is this simply a failing of mine and not others?). These are interesting questions that deserve far more space than I am allowing here. Needless to say, as much as I wanted to enjoy Zone One (Colson's wry observations about pop culture notwithstanding), I did not, and wound up not finishing it. Perhaps one day I’ll pick it up again and read it without any literary preconceptions to get in the way. 

Isabel Allende’s novel Island Beneath the Sea, about love and political intrigue during the Haitian Revolution had, like the other novels, a lot of intiguing potential, but played like a Harlequin romance set against an historical backdrop.  In the past, Allende has written urgently of historical subjects, most particularly of her personal background growing up in Chile (Allende was related to the late Chilean president Salvador Allende). This latest effort seemed a bit of a trifle and lacked any sense of urgency, despite the important events shaping both the Carribbean and American landscapes.

Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom, more than any on this list, had received the most fanfare when it was published in 2010. It’s still discussed and written about on blogs and print publications, often to appreciative, analytical reviews. Even the president weighed in by picking up an advance copy while on vacation last year. And yet it goes down as one of those novels I simply could not get through to the end. While it started off fine enough, I soon found it harder and harder to keep turning the pages as the novel got bogged down in the self-absorbed musings of its main characters. After a while, I stopped caring. It wasn’t so much that its main characters were unlikable. Unlikable characters are certainly not a deficit to any novel. Rather it was because they were both unlikable and boring. Novels about the upper middle-class who have everything they could ever possibly want, but are still miserable might have been revolutionary when John Cheever and Richard Yates started writing (or for that matter Gustave Flaubert, Edith Wharton, Henry James, etc., etc.), but why does this subject still earn critical praise now when very little new is wrenched  from it (or do I even need to ask?) It became apparent that the novel was more a hook on which Franzen could hang his musings about liberal politics and people who sell out their principles than an actual story in which characters became more than just archetypes to which readers can nod with hipster recognition. Unlikable or not, I needed to care what happened to these characters and I simply did not.

There were certainly plenty of other books that I read, both with relish and disinterest that I either did not review or did not have any particular bent toward. All in all, 2011 was a productive year for reading and I look forward to seeing what will turn up in my hands next year.

A Review: The Emperor of All Maladies

 

The Emperor of All Maladies, by Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD. New York: Simon and Schuster. 2010. pg 571.

I just finished reading The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee, a biography that is that reads more like an epic novel. What struck me the most about the 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner is how much storytelling lies at the heart of science and medicine. As Mukherjee writes himself, “Medicine, I said, begins with storytelling. Patients tell stories to describe illness; doctors tell stories to understand it. Science tells it own story to explain disease.” And Mukherjee does a fantastic job of telling the story of cancer and the science and medicine arrayed to combat against it.

What I appreciated most about Mukherjee’s writing is its patience. He uncovers a lot of ground---from the antiquities to the present---and delves into the complex and scientific explanations of cancer cells, biological mutations, drugs, etc., but you never feel lost or confused. He has the sort of patience you would expect and hope from all oncologists. He knows his audience and that is always a good skill to have as a writer.

There are plenty of tense moments in the book and surprises---for instance how cancer cells actually grow and metastasize and the history of women’s health and the enormous role it plays in cancer research. There are a cast of characters in the war against cancer that sit indelibly on the mind, such as childhood leukemia researcher Dr. Sidney Farber and his civilian comrade, Mary Lasker, a New York socialite who helped make cancer research a top priority in the federal government; as well as the countless men and women across the world whose research pushed forward our understanding of one of the deadliest diseases in our lifetime.

Everybody has been touched by cancer. Either as a patient or a loved-one. I certainly lost my grandfather to cancer and my father has had his own victorious bout with it a few years ago. The more we understand this disease, then the more we’re able to find ways to treat and even possibly cure it. I encourage anyone who is interested in learning more about cancer to pick up The Emperor of All Maladies.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick: A Review

The Invention of Hugo Cabret, A Novel in Words and Pictures, Brian Selznick. New York: Scholastic Press. 2007

Later this year, Martin Scorsese will release a new film called Hugo, based on the 2007 novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick. This would seem like an odd choice for a director like Scorsese, known for his gritty urban dramas, to direct a film based on a children’s story. But this particular story is actually more up the alley for a well beloved cineaste.

The novel, which takes place in Paris during the early 1930s, is about a young boy named Hugo Cabret, left orphaned after his father is killed in a fire at the museum where he works and is taken under the wing of a drunken uncle who is in charge of making sure that all the clocks in the train station are on time. When the uncle disappears, Hugo is left to fend for himself, caring for the clocks and stealing food from the local vendors. One day he decides to steal a toy mouse from a toy booth across the way from the apartment where he is holed up. He is caught by the toy vendor and forced to work at the booth, mending toys, as punishment. He soon becomes embroiled in the lives of Papa Georges, the man who runs the booth, and his goddaughter, Isabel, who later helps Hugo undercover a mystery concerning an automaton his father tried to fix. After discovering the automation among the ruins of the museum fire, Hugo lugs it home and tries to fix it, hoping to discover the message his father left him through a mechanization which allows it to write. When he realizes that a key dangling from Isabelle’s neck might actually be the key that will turn on the automaton, he steals it. What he and Isabelle discover after they turn on the automaton uncovers another mystery about Papa Georges. It turns out that he is actually Georges Méliès, the film director responsible for the film A Trip to the Moon, one of cinema’s earliest sci-fi/adventure movies.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a novel about the wonder and beauty of film, so it’s hard to see why Scorsese wouldn’t have been attracted to such a project. Interspersed throughout the novel are the author’s own pencil hand drawings, which lend it a sense of cinematic splendor. Too bad the writing itself couldn’t have matched the illustrations. Selznick has a rather flat and unengaging writing style that could have used more of the same magical renderings of his illustrations. I never got a sense of the magic and mystery in Hugo’s story from the writing itself, which is disappointing since the story is interesting. 

No doubt, when Hugo will be released later this year, Scorsese will bring some of his own cinematic magic to a children’s tale about the magic of film. The film stars Asa Butterfield, Chloë Grace Moretz, Ben Kingsley as Méliès, and Sacha Cohen Baron.

Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones: Review

Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books. 2011. ISBN: 978-1-56512-990-0

“My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist.” So begins Tayari Jones’ latest novel Silver Sparrow, which tells the story of Witherspoon’s two daughters, Dana and Chaurisse, and the complicated and messy dilemma James traps them in. This is a novel of love, secrecy, complicity, and deception, one in which the questions Jones raises are neither easily resolved nor answered.

The novel is told through two perspectives: Dana Yarboro, the daughter of James’ second wife and mistress, the one who is aware that she is a secret and must act accordingly; and Chaurisse Witherspoon, James’ daughter from his first wife, whose life of normality is complicated by the fact that she is unaware of her father’s secret life. The girls are bonded by blood, but that is cold comfort to either Dana or Chaurisse, who are both forced to determine their place in their father's life once the truth is revealed.

The fact that one sister is aware of her father’s deception, while the other does not creates a tension that makes the novel pop within each page. Dana, knowing she is a “secret” yearns for something or someone to legitimize her. She refers to her father by his first name and is constantly second-guessing his love for her. When her father refuses to send her to a Science Academy that Chaurisse will be attending (he warns Gwen and Dana to stay away from his "family"), Dana longs only that James will hug her and make it "better."



Looking up at him, I wanted a hug. That was the full extent of my ambition. I knew he wouldn't say that I could go ahead and go to the Saturday Academy, even if I promised not to bother Chaurisse. But I hoped he would hug me and tell me that he was sorry that I had to get second pick for everything and that he was sorry that my mother couldn't wear a fox-fur coat and that I couldn't tell anybody my daddy's real name. But he didn't say anythign and his neck wasn't twitching so I knew that he wasn't stuck. He just didn't have any sorrys to say.


Chaurisse has the “legitimacy” that Dana yearns for---a father who teaches her how to drive and involves her in the planning of a surprise party for her mother---but she is still lonely for a friend. Unlike Dana, a “silver girl” whose beauty she inherited from her mother, Chaurisse is overweight, is always on diets along with her mother, and works in her mother’s beauty shop. She is not one of the “silver girls,” but when Dana enters her life, she develops an intense interest in her that ratchets up the tension and tears apart her otherwise ordinary life. The two girls become friends, even wearing the same tube top when they go to a party in the boondocks outside of Atlanta. Chaurisse hopes to become of those "silver girls." "Silver girls liked to be friends with each other, keeping all their shine, which, in my opinion, was little bit selfish. Silverness was catching, but it could only be shared girl to girl, and this could only happen if both parties tried really hard." Dana's interest in Chaurisse however is complicated by the fact that she knows they are sisters and Chaurisse does not. And when the truth is revealed, what emerges is not greater understanding but more pain and anger at the deception and a territorial possession over who is more legitimate. "It wasn't like daughters are supposed to expect some sort of exclusive relationship from their fathers, but what he had with Dana was an infidelity."

Jones sets up the story that allows the reader to become both spectator and accomplice after the fact. The Dana we witness through Chaurisse’s perspective becomes different and we are forced to wonder whether the voice we had spent engaging in during the first half of the novel was real. Where Dana describes herself as cautiously curious of her father’s other life, she becomes brazen in Chaurisse’s perspective, showing up at the beauty shop where Chaurisse and her mother work, poking around in their kitchen, and stepping into her life even though she knows it will undermine her parents’ duplicity. The novel questions reality in the sense that we can never truly know what is real or whether what we know is in actuality the truth. Who is James? Is it possible to be two different people under two different circumstances? Who are Gwen and Laverne? The rift that James creates causes a schism in the lives of the people he loves, and when Dana purposefully breaks through that schism she creates more damage than either family is able to fully surmount.

Jones asks these questions within a framework of fascinating characters and situations that make the novel an engaging and absorbing read. She has a sharp and musical writing style that soars when she lets loose a sentence that stays with you like a lovely refrain. “He was so long and lanky he moved like something engineered to bend with the breeze.” Jones’ observations on the politics of wives and daughters, men and women, black and white defies stereotypes. After Chaurisse and Laverne learn of James’ deception, Laverne retreats into a steep depression, instead of, as Chaurisse wishes, responding in rage as a black woman might. “My mother’s crying sadness reminded me of white women in movies, the kind who are liable to faint if something happens that they can’t handle.” The fact that Laverne or any of the other characters refuse to succumb to the usual stereotypes makes the novel one with its surprises. The player who is responsible for all this mess is a short man with thick glasses and a stutter. How he manages to win Gwen (he impregnated Laverne at fourteen and married her in a shotgun wedding) is never fully explained, but nor does it need be. Jones fully invests you in her characters and their twisted and complicated machinations that you are immediately swept into their world. Silver Sparrow is a masterful novel about the price people pay when they deceive and the destruction it causes to the innocent lives who are caught in its web. 

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender: A Review

Aimee Bender's second novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake starts off with an unusual premise. Nine year old Rose Edelstein eats her mother's homemade lemon cake, a birthday treat, and learns she has the gift of tasting her mother's emotions in her food. What might seem like a gift is in fact a curse since her mother suffers from the usual suburban ennui. The result for Rose is that eating turns to torture as she processes emotions she is far too young to fully comprehend. Unfortunately for the novel, what could have been an interesting premise only delves into the usual literary staples of how miserable it is to be middle class.

There is a lot to like about Bender's novel. Her narrator is engaging and mature (she ages from nine to her early twenties through the course of the novel), and is able to discern the complexity of human emotions and behavior through the food she eats. Her reactions to the food her mother prepares are unpleasant to downright violent, and yet we are able to see her mother's life only through Rose's reactions to the food. Rose is certainly aware of the complexities of her parents' marriage, her father's unwillingness to engage with his family, or how her mother favors older brother Joseph. When her mother begins an affair, Rose welcomes the reprieve since the food she now prepares is filled with more pleasant emotions. Rose responds to this outcome with levelheaded maturity, more relieved that her mother is at least feeling loved. However one would think that Rose, in experiencing what her mother feels, might question why she or her father were not enough to make her mother happy. Nor does Rose feel any jealousy regarding her mother's favoritism toward Joseph. These are interesting dilemmas that the Bender never addresses and, aside from the novel's engaging style, leaves it feeling rather hollow.

The novel's premise also doesn't allow for Rose to act decisively independent of what any person would normally do. Her coping mechanism is to eat a lot of processed foods since they are devoid of any human and emotional interaction, an interesting idea that could have used further exploration. Otherwise Rose's role is to react to the world around her. This becomes all the more so when, by the middle of the novel, Bender abandons Rose's predicament in favor of the far more intriguing story about Joseph. Misunderstood and unappreciated (aside from his mother), Joseph is a young scientific genius who prefers to be left alone rather than interact with other people. As Rose soon learns, he likewise has an unusual talent. This talent, along with Rose's, seems to run in the family, as we later learn about their father. Rose reacts primarily to her brother's troubles, is to first to notice his talent, and yet all she can do is react. Joseph's skill acts as a metaphor of sorts for his inability to cope and survive in the real world, much the way a drug addict would, and his family's reaction to his slow disintegration is generally with the same level of confusion and helplessness. Joseph's story is the most suspenseful and it gives The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake an intriguing pulse in a way that Rose's dilemma simply does not.

The novel is slender and Bender's style is both spare and observant. And the fabulist world that she creates within the realistic settings of Los Angeles is intriguing enough to be a page turner (I finished the book in two days). Yet she creates so many threads within the story (Rose, Joseph, her mother's infidelity, her father's lack of intimacy) that they rarely connect in any meaningful way. In the end I was left wondering what was the whole point. Despite its fabulist trappings, the novel treads territory that is already too familiar in most literary fiction; unfortunately too familiar to yield any new truths (to be honest, Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate uses magic realism and the culinary arts to deliver a tale that is far more passionate and larger-than-life). I did enjoy reading The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, but I wished Aimee Bender could have pushed the envelope and explored more dangerous territory.  

Simon & Schuster Releases New Book Trailer on YouTube

In the last couple of years, book trailers announcing the release of new novels have been huge. Jonathan Franzen and Gary Shteyngart, to name but two, have released one for their latest fiction. To be honest, I haven't paid much attention to them until now. Simon and Schuster released a trailer on Youtube recently for the fiction debut novel Bed by David Whitehouse, and I thought it looked intriguing. In fact, a little too intriguing, at least visually speaking. It fact it looks more like a music video. So it's a little disconcerting at the end when it announces the arrival of Whitehouse's debut later this August. Still it's pretty good, even if it doesn't tell you exactly what the novel is about. The story, by the way, deals with two brothers, one of whom decides not to leave his bed on his twenty-fifth birthday.

Book trailers are an inventive way to get readers interested, especially in a crowded field of TV, movies, video games, and the Internet vying for public attention. Hopefully this will pay out for Whitehouse. Check out the trailer below: