Category: Reviews

Jennifer Government by Max Barry

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I finished up Max Barry’s Company and decided I’d go back in time and re-read JG as well. I called Company “corporate cubicle fiction” so I guess JG is “corporate overthrow fiction,” for want of a better term. Barry takes the idea of the corporation as a world-changing force of nature and pursues it to a logical (and therefore, ironically, absurd) conclusion, where governments are pushed to the side as corporations and the countries they represent start to merge. Capitalism as nightmare, without any of that silly communism as an antidote.

You’ll want to take a few willing-suspension-of-disbelief vitamins before diving in, but you won’t be disappointed if you do. Barry’s economic structures take a little getting used to, but they’re just props for him to explore corporate partnerships run amuck, the dangerously pervasive nature of advertising, global-mob psychology, and a dog-eat-dog world. Is that too much for you to swallow? Never fear—it’s all part of an action-adventure. Murder! Violence! Guns! Guerilla Marketing!

And a twisted story line that will having you hopping around the globe from character to character, trying to keep track, although they all come together at the end for the final showdown. Allow me to repeat what I said about Company, which is even more true in JG: Barry’s style is a bit stark, a bit plain, matter-of-fact. He gives you just enough description to keep things straight, letting you fill in the rest. But, whereas in Company that forced the reader to paint with her own experiences, in JG it’s just stark—existentialism as advertised by Nike.

Another fast read; and what review would be complete with mentioning Nationstates.net, nation simulation game and a tie-in to the book that’s been online now since JG‘s publication in 2003.

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Company by Max Barry

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoy corporate cubicle fiction, for some reason. Books like Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, and I’ll even include Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball by Scott Spencer. Company is sort of a mix of these, in as much as there’s the petty politics of working in a cube farm, and a deeper conspiracy fueling the intrigue. Don’t read Company if you feel good about the corporation you work for and don’t want that feeling challenged. Calling Max Barry “cynical” is like calling Microsoft “profitable.”

Barry’s style is a bit stark, a bit plain, matter-of-fact. He gives you just enough description to keep things straight, but leaves the rest of it to yourself, and the reader will eventually fill in details from her own experiences. Again , this can have a devastating effect on someone otherwise sympathetic to working between four half-walls all day long. Barry is unrelenting, but not so harsh as make his fictions seem hateful or mean. I mentioned Ferris and Spencer, above, but the end of the novel was evocative of Neal Stephenson’s The Big U, although not quite as heavy or taxing.

Comparisons to Dilbert are inevitable, but whereas Scott Adams pitches withering sarcasm against smug incompetence, Barry’s Company is more about the corporate machine itself, the kind of synergies it fails to generate while wasting vast amounts of energy. Adams has a lock on irony; Barry has a lock on pathos. This is a quick read, and you’ll find yourself shaking your head throughout, not at the absurdity of how business operates in the Company, but instead at how familiar that absurdity is.

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Tokyo Suckerpunch by Isaac Adamson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

So it turns out Tokyo Suckerpunch is out of print, but I was lucky enough to find a copy in a used bookstore. Reading books made out of paper and ink is weird, but I managed, thanks to Adamson’s engaging style sense of humor. I was a little let down by a meandering plot and not much payoff at the end, but if books are for getting lost in on a rainy day, you could do worse than this one.

I got my copy at a Half Priced Books, one I’d never been to and visited on a whim. Didn’t find it in the sci-fi aisle (which was appropriate as TSP’s not sci-fi). Didn’t find it in the mystery aisle (which threw me, since this is clearly a take on the traditional detective story). It was in the mainstream fiction section… but that is where they stow magic realism, right? Looks like I should have taken that as a bit of forewarning.

Because on the one hand a mash-up of genres seems like it would be a lot of fun. A journalist in Japan covering a martial-arts competition for a teen rag published in Ohio, on the trail of a mystery woman, pursued by the Yakuza and a secretive religious organization, and all of it wrapped around a dead B-movie director. Oops, that sentence had no verb. And TSP had no point, either, I’m afraid. The genre-mash suffered from a lack of cohesiveness.

Which is not to say it wasn’t fun to read, but only as a gaijin tourist in Adamson’s version of Japan. Some fun action scenes, some witty dialogue, some good moments straight out of your favorite noir library… but that’s about it.

The back-of-the-book blurb calls this a mix of The Big Sleep and Memoirs of Geisha, with some Chinatown thrown in. Can’t say I agree with that. The geisha parts of the novel are incidental, and have little or nothing to do with the plot. It’s an interesting choice for creating a femme fatale, but Adamson’s geisha might as well have been a faerie. And as for the Chandler reference—TSP’s main character, Billy Chaka, isn’t nearly as self-loathing as required for such a comparison.

Go ahead and read the book if you can find a copy. Or I’ll loan you mine. And if you find a copy of the sequels, let me know. It rains a lot in Seattle, so it’s nice to having something to curl up around when my e-reader is recharging.

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The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My goal is to read 52 books this year, and it turns out The Atrocity Archives is really two books, or maybe even three. But I had no idea, going in, that this was the case. Some other review said “Terry Pratchett mixed with Mark Leyner” and my response was “sold!” So I jumped in and halfway through, I was on the denouement, wondering how the heck this Stross guy was going to keep it going. I started in on the second story, and couldn’t figure out what it had to do with the first… and when I got to the end of that one, I realize the bulk that was leftover was an essay on the co-mingling of the horror and detective/spy story genres.

So, on the one hand, you get your money’s worth (in the e-book edition, anyway; can’t vouch for others) but on the other hand, I wish I had known all of this before going in. (Which is more a reflection of me than it is of this book.) Add to this that I do notagree with the assessment that this is Pratchett mixed with Leyner, and you can get a feel why I’m only giving this 3 stars instead of 5. I’m way too biased by a mild disappointment.

That said, These so-called “Laundry Files” stories have a lot of potential, so I willread more of them, the sequels and such. What I’m hoping to see is better development—the risk when mixing two genres is you get the boring, pedestrian parts of each and no synergy. That’s what I felt was going on here. I’m no Lovecraft expert, and I’ve only reads a handful of spy novels, so maybe, again, it’s just me. But I didn’t get a sense of either genre, really. I did like the inter-office politics that Stross plays up as a major plot point, so I’d love to see more of that.

I know Stross is getting raves for his more recent works, so if nothing else, reading this older stuff is prep-work to get a feel for his style. The Atrocity Archives is readable, funny in the right places, descriptive, and the actions scenes don’t get bogged down in details. Some of the reference to magic and the mathematics of quantum mechanics are a bit glib, but then if he got too specific, the book might become unreadable afterall, so credit goes to finding the right balance.

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Malice in Blunderland by Jonny Gibbings

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m guessing Johnny Gibbings read in a how-to-write book, or on a website someplace “try to abuse your main character as much as possible” and then he thought to himself “oh, I can do that.” And thus we have Malice in Blunderland, the story of a man riding the rails of unapologetic violence and humiliation. I’m thinking this might even be a genre of fiction. The kind of novel that would be enjoyed by those who go online to watch videos of guys wrecking on their skateboards. Part Irvine Welsh (Filth, not Trainspotting) part JG Ballard (the wince-worthy parts of Crash), a picaresque without any of that bothersome metaphor and theme.

Look, I’m not trying to slag the guy off here. Lots of people are going to love this book. Yeah, there’s clichéd characters, deux ex machina in spades, plot twists as predictable as anything you’d see in one of those 80’s mass-produced comedies… there’s typos and I’m even going to complain about how my particular e-reader didn’t like the formatting of the .mobi file I received. But Johnny can write. I swear, I’m not being facetious—plot, character, setting, who gives a damn—Gibbings’ prose style is good enough for me, good enough that if he writes another book, I’ll probably read it.

I say probably because there really where parts of Malice that made me cringe. And I think it’s fair that you, as a reader, should decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I read American Psycho, was glad I did, and swore I would never read it again. I saw Natural Born Killers, thought it was brilliant, and resolved I would never give it a second viewing. But I know there are people who reveled in the painful textures those pieces provided, and I think they’d love Malice in Blunderland.

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Good To Be God by Tibor Fischer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you’ve seen the movie Slacker then you know it’s not about a bunch of lazy people sitting around in puddles of their own apathy; everyone in the film is more or less actively engaged in some pursuit or interest. Maybe none of them are trying to cure cancer, but the film’s title forces you to reconsider the context of your assumptions. I only mention this after meditating on the title of Tibor Fischer’s Good to be God for a week after reading it.

Tyndale Corbett decides, after giving up on hope, to become God. Fair enough; it’s as good a scam as any, and not unprecedented: Buddha didn’t just wake up one day to enlightenment, but had to suffer from some extremes before he deduced that extremisms just wasn’t where it was at. But what kind of God will Tyndale become? What is his understanding of God?

That’s what this book is about: taking a fish out of water (dirty polluted water) and seeing how it flops. Tyndale flops just fine, and finally discovers his true God-given gift: the gift of failure. It’s mediocrity, that curse of the middle class, taken to the extreme. Tyndale is no Job, suffering, nor is he a Christ figure, self-sacrificing. He’s almost, but not quite, a cooler, a guy who’s very good at making sure nothing very good ever happens.

And that’s Godlike, if your God is a God of mediocrity, middle-class hopelessness. What would the God of faithlessness be like? Tyndale is surrounded by slackers (in the sense of the film I mentioned above), apostles and witnesses to his ascension through inertia.

And (here’s the review part, finally) it’s all told via Fischer’s wit, his flowing style, his playfulness with the written word that at times keeps you guessing (was that really a monkey spinning discs) and other times punches you right in your soul. He gives you enough stuff that you can read into the story if you want and hang symbols all over the place; or if you just want to read a mildly amusing tale about a fat Britisher living in Miami, there’s that too.

Too often rich people say money isn’t everything, or beautiful people say beauty is only skin deep. A middle-class guy telling us that struggling for happiness is depressing can come across as “don’t know how good you got it.” But feeling sorry for oneself, here, is balanced by just the right amount of thankfulness. Angels can have tattoos too, you see.

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Barney’s Version by Mordecai Richler

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Came to this book as penitence for shame: was talking to a friend who’d either seen the movie or listened to the book on tape, and I made some dismissive, derisive comment about it, to the tune of “Oh, I don’t much care for characters like that.” I had based that summation entirely on a clip of the movie I’d seen, I think on The Daily Show. My fellow interlocutor pointed out that I was being hasty in my judgment, so I agreed I’d get over myself and read it.

And so I read it. It took a long time. I was coming back from a not-reading-anything-jag and while at first Barney’s Version was compelling and fun, It seemed to drag a bit. But that might just have been me. I did very much like the character, after all—-not that I respect him, or feel that initial judgment of him (from the film clip) was off-base. I’m saying I enjoyed his confessions.

For that is what Barney’s Version amounts to: an aging man gives you his side to the various stories that make up the biography of his life: as an expatriate, as a repatriated TV producer, as a Canadian, as a Jew, as a husband, widower, husband, two-timer, husband, divorcee, accused murderer, smoker of montecristos and drinker of congnacs. Barney’s Version is a modern picaresque, a rich Canadian Jewish Confederacy of Dunces.

Mordecai Richler’s story-telling style is subtle without being obscure, entertaining without being (too) silly. Barney manages to tell not only his own version but his enemies’ version as well, and couches it all in the poor old man’s encroaching dementia and his son’s compilation footnotes. The reader is left to wonder what’s fact and what’s fiction, what’s real and what’s fantasy. Barney doesn’t just make things up to cover his guilt, he gets things confused because that’s how memory works.

And in the end, the life you led is not what you did or even what you remember of it but how you remember it all. A terrible life can be lensed by a happy regard, and those torturous years on earth where maybe not so bad. Barney seems keen to find the right balance between “I got better than I deserved” and “but I made the most of it.”

Your interpretation may vary: sign of a deep, complex, good read. For myself, I’m looking forward to trying out some other Richler novels.

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John Dies at the End by David Wong

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The (somewhat obtuse) review will begin by talking about Britney Spears, who has nothing whatsoever to do with this book. I only mention it in case it chases some people away. Bye!

I realized one day that when people buy a BS album, they’re not just getting a collection of songs, they’re also purchasing permission to participate in the whole BS zeitgeist. They get to talk BS and read BS online and at the grocery store checkstand. They get to enjoy BS movies on a whole different level, get to watch BS videos and think about not just the BS song they heard but also the BS life they’ve been watching and talking about.

Sure, there’s a real Britney Spears who sings songs. But BS is more than that. BS is all of the everything, the stuff that a person could make into a hobby or even a career. Britney Spears makes money, but BS makes money for other people too.

Same’s true for some book experiences. I was a little more than halfway through John Dies at the End, and I knew nothing except that it was a book. I took a friend to the airport, and was telling her about it. But all I could manage to do was say it reminded me of Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Nothing about the two books are the same: different writing style, different story-telling method, different mood, different everything. But both books are very weird. And House of Leaves has all of that BS-esqueness going for it. It’s not just a book, but a manuscript that was online for a while, cobbled together, shared via word-of-mouth. There’s music about it and discussion boards and this whole cult-like following.

Just finished JDitE, and it turns out my comparison was spot-on. David Wong’s “novel” was cobbled together, shared via the internet, and now there’s a film version, and a sequal. Turn’s our David Wong’s a pseudonym. Turns out there’s an ARG associated with the next book. You see what I’m saying? You read this book, and you get to participate in a whole big thing.

Not interested? Just want to know if it’s a good read or not? It’s not bad. Competent writer, interesting characters, funny in places, clever in places. Mostly it’s just very very weird. Remarkably creative, imagery that will make you real, deus ex machina abused to the point of being respectable, but in the end, mostly just very very weird.

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The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the novel I wish I had read, a few weeks ago when I was binging and I read three books in one week, as opposed to taking almost two weeks to read this one book. It was good, and would have been better, I think, if I had torn into it and taken vicious sloppy bites instead of the nibbling I did, barely nutritious. Maybe I’ll get off my high horse and read it again someday. One can only hope.

Which as screeds go is not very compelling, I know: we live in a nation where propaganda decries/lionizes extremes, and books that are good are supposed to be so good that we can’t put them down (insert several sophomoric exclamation points here). So ask yourself if a work is separate from the viewer. My position in the past on the whole “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” thing has been that nothing exists that we don’t internalize, but let me temper that stance, as it were, by suggesting that self-awareness can warp the eye that beholds.

Look, what I’m trying to say is I really liked The Book of Air and Shadows. It’s part Da Vinci Code, part Maltese Falcon (one character won’t stop talking about how life is a movie, and makes many self-references to how what he’s going through is very Maltese Falcon– or Chinatown– like). It’s about a manuscript, and old letters, and book binding, and Shakespeare and scholarship. It’s not about books, per se, but the title can’t help remind one of Zafron’s The Shadow of the Wind, and there’s similarities there, too. Hell, toss in some similarities to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (the research bits) and while you’re at it, The Name of the Rose.

This is not to say the book is a “tour de force,” no. I’m the one beholding all those other books in here, my own experiences and takes on them, and I’m not trying to say Michael Gruber was trying to cram them all into one novel. He’s basically written a mystery, a twisted plot, flawed heroes, femme fatales, Madonna figures, the mafia, and some existential angst in the guise of reformed religion and the meaning of art. It’s juicy stuff, I tell you. Please, don’t do what I did and take your time. Read it all at once.

The novel’s divided along three character lines: epistolary sections from a 17th century soldier-turned-spy, third-person narration over the shoulder of a book-shop clerk/wannabe filmmaker, and first-person narration of a philandering lawyer/weightlifter. There’s an intriguing mix of styles in there, including what I’ve come to call, lately, the Jonathan Franzen tell-don’t-show style (and that’s a compliment, by the way.) You know what I mean- the way people tell stories to each other without trying to get all poetic and descriptive. Actually, the last quarter of the novel takes on that mien almost to a fault, but like I said, I took too damn long to read the book, so maybe my beholding eye was just weary at that point.

And it turns out the writer is from Seattle. I have no idea of that sways your wanting to read this in the least—if it does, please ignore this last paragraph.

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