Category: Reviews

An Absolute Gentleman: A Novel by R.M. Kinder

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I came across this book in the library one day when I was searching for Geocaching for Dummies. I was in one of the situations where I felt like the drive to the library needed more justification than just one book that I was only going to flip through anyway. I found R.M. Kinder’s novel, opened it, read a few pages to get a sense of the prose style, liked it, read the front flap to see what the plot was about, liked that too, and added the book to my “to-read” list. Then, last week, on vacation, having finished two other novels in just a few days, I started in on An Absolute Gentleman, and finished it in about 24 hours.

It was that engaging. R.M. Kinder’s style is as gentle and stoic as her main character, choosing to titillate and horrify with what isn’t written, only pulling out the stops and giving you the gory details in a few choice places. And although Arthur Blume is a serial killer, you can’t help but root for him, a little.

I’m not going to give away the plot, because there isn’t much of one, but what follows are spoilers of a sort, so stop reading if you want. Arthur Blume is a misogynist, less in the sense of hating women than in the sense that he simply has no respect for them. And while I was reading this, I know this was fictional misogyny… but then, only after I was done with the book, did I realize that R.M. Kinder, the author, is a woman. Which changes the tenor of that fictional misogyny. When a man writes about misogyny, he may be expressing his own opinions, or he may be asking you to judge what he feels is a horrible point of view. But when a woman does it, surely she can’t be expressing her own opinion—is she describing her own experiences at the hand of a misogynist? Is she misinterpreting the experience, taking it more personally than it should have been taken?

I wish to cast no aspersion on Kinder, nor her intent, because it’s all mere speculation on my part and truly I detest this kind of analysis. But I bring it up because, for me, the book changed when I found out the sex of the writer. And I find this unsettling, and I am not a little ashamed of myself. But what can I do. I thought this was a man writing about a horrible man, and now I find myself, unfairly I admit, wondering if this a woman writing about horrible men.

Why say as much? This is my plea, to myself and to you, to find a way to ignore who or what the author is at all times, when reading any novel. An impossible task– I will read books just because they’re written by authors I’ve read before. After all, there’s so many books out there, how can we choose which one to read if we don’t, to some degree, judge them by their covers?

Nevertheless, we should try to ignore the author. I need to swallow my shame and recall what I thought of the book when I didn’t know who the writer was at all. Still a bit sexist of me (I thought it was a man) but at least I’m not trying to compliment Kinder by saying “she writes like a man!” She doesn’t. She writes like a writer. And a damned fine one at that.

View all my reviews

Plugged by Eoin Colfer
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Plugged started off so promising, in my opinion, and I wonder if that’s why I’m a bit more let down than I might otherwise have been. I read the sample of the book offered by Barnes and Noble, and when I got to the end of the free part, going ahead with the purchase was a no brainer. I liked the way the main character talked: sarcastic, bitter, old before his time but not so long before that he hadn’t earned his fatigue. I liked the setting: a dive casino in an otherwise affluent New Jersey bedroom community, gritty and dirty a seamy and all those other things so perfect for a crime novel. I liked where the plot was going: used-up ex-army doorman’s one-time fling gets a hole in her head, and he needs to know why. Clichés, all, but this is why we read genre fiction sometimes

But then it got silly. And maybe if I had known it was going to be silly, I would have been ready for it, and accepted it. I like a good farce. But this doesn’t read like satire at all: it reads like someone who read a satire, didn’t realize it was satire, and decided to write something “just as good.” It’s like all of the cliché’s that were acceptable in the first few chapters gave the writer license to keep adding in more and more nonsense. Yes, I said that’s why we read genre fiction, sometimes. But we really are hoping that the writer takes all of those tired old ideas and does something unique with them.

I almost said “unique or clever,” but I think I’m getting a little tired of clever. To his credit, Eoin Colfer maintains all of the tropes from the first few chapters throughout the novel, so it’s still readable. But I feel like “original” was sacrificed for “clever,” and the result may be readable, but hardly memorable.

I know that sometimes writers write just to find out what happens. They’re as much slaves to the plot as the readers are. Maybe Colfer just kept writing himself into corners, so he took the goofy way out. But he’s allegedly an experienced writer—he wrote the Artemis Fowl novels, after all, and was commissioned to write the 6th Hitchhiker’s book. So I don’t know what his excuse is. Maybe it’s all my fault, going in with high expectations. Maybe genre fiction is just genre fiction sometimes. Oh well.

View all my reviews

The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Family Fang is about a functional family. One might be tempted to call them dysfunctional, but that hardly reveals anything: all families are dysfunctional, to a degree, and certainly all fictional families are dysfunctional. What would be the point of writing about a non-dysfunctional family? And note that functional is not the same as non-dysfunctional: The Family Fang is about how a dysfunctional family functions, and if by now the word “functional” has been said too many times to have any meaning anymore, then I’ve done my job of capturing the essence of the Fang Family (the people, not the novel).

Caleb and Camille have two children, Annie and Buster. I don’t want to give the author too much authority here, but in as much as naming the kids A and B was quite purposeful (for that is how they’re referred to by their parents, as child A and child B) it seems obvious that the parents are C and the Fang Family is F. Letter grades or merely a list from most to least important? If letter grades, that begs the question: who/what is D? Is it the movie Annie made, Date Due, the only thing she’s proud of? If a list, what or who is E? I/m probably reading too much into this. Indeed, there’s another double F, Annie’s other good move, Favor Fire… which is also about a dysfunctional family…

The Fang Family are performance artists, to a degree, which comes across as silly as one expects at first, even as the nature of these performances becomes more and more horrible as the novel develops. But what at first seems almost satirical turns out to be all too real. Caleb is the visionary, and for him, nothing is more important than art. Nothing. His pieces are meant to evoke reactions from strangers, and at first you may think he fails to realize what a terrible toll these performances take on his offspring. Strangers react to uncomfortable situations, and are recorded on camera. The film freezes these reactions and documents them, but how long will the memory of the event stay with the audience? Only later does it become apparent that Caleb is all too aware of the scars he’s left on his children, themselves living documents to his art.

Which is why he cannot fathom art without them, once they leave home, and attempt to become their own people, wholly removed from the Fangs. Child A and B manage to lift themselves up enough to make their fall the more painful, although by the end of the novel, they find a way to finally achieve some level of independence in artistic success– ironically, by finally drawing on their pain and suffering to create new art altogether.

This is how the Fang Family functions, and as novels go, I found this one much more satisfying than a lot of the Franzen and Sedaris stuff out there. Wilson’s prose style is easy, managing to capture, in third person, Annie’s angst in her chapters, Buster’s depression, and Caleb and Camille’s weirdness in flashbacks describing performances from the children’s childhood. It’s subtle, transparent, and allows the reader to fall into the book enough to understand without falling in so far as to identify with them or even sympathize. The Family Fang is a kind of performance piece, and the moral of the performance is: there are weirdos out there, they have families, and as much as we might want to point and laugh, our experience is ephemeral– we cannot possible know how terrible it is to live like that every day. Or maybe we can, once we start looking back at ourselves and listen for the laughter.

View all my reviews

Assumption by Percival Everett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Assumption is three short stories featuring the same setting and characters, and the ending of the third story casts enough of a shadow over the main character as to make you rethink what happened in the first two stories. This last feature, I guess, is what makes this a novel. If you like. Or just call it three stories. Or look to the title and realize Percival Everett is messing with you.

Percival Everett likes to mess with you. Go read Erasure, or American Desert. I normally don’t approve of that kind of extra-textual criticism, but I’ll be honest, Assumption left me scratching my head. So I’m looking at Everett’s other characters to try and figure out what’s going on. He likes to write about Invisible Men (the Ellison kind) and while I apologize for lumping together two writers who are both black, I can at least tell you that for Everett it’s not just a matter of race. It might be a matter of class, or profession, or even location. And race, too. People who are pigeonholed just as soon as they’re regarded, and everything they do contextualized by that label.

For what it’s worth, Thomas Berger does that too in the aptly titled Being Invisible, but in Assumption, the main character does not, in the end, play to type. It’s an abrupt revelation, and like I said, it forces the reader to reconsider everything that’s been read up to that point.

And it’s told in Everett’s easy style. The prose is plain, almost sparse, and it flows without any apparent effort, matching Assumption‘s setting in the New Mexico countryside and the (alleged) simple way of life out there. This, too, is part of Everett’s oeuvre, these tales told in a place we city folk would call out in the middle of nowhere. Horses and pick-up trucks, shotguns and rattlesnakes. What westerns would be if no one bothered to label books with genres at all.

The thing is, I read a book by Percival Everett by random chance a long time ago, and since then I’ve been hooked. As soon as I saw Assumption on the shelves, I picked it up without question. And once again he’s satisfied. I’d like to encourage you to read Assumption, but I’m only doing so because I think you should try all of what Everett’s written. Even if you’re not into any kind of meta-textual analysis, I think you’ll enjoy his stuff.

View all my reviews

The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I came to read The Meaning of Night via the recommendation of a friend, someone I respect but would not have guessed liked this sort of thing. Which just goes to show you how shallow I am. The guy’s a Harvard MBA, and yet I would not have picked a modern novel set in and written in the style of mid-nineteenth century England. And on that same tack, I would not have otherwise chosen this book to read on my own. That I earned a degree in English only goes to show you nothing can be taken for granted; I just don’t much care for books of that era. They’re readable, in their way, but usually drawn out and dull. If there’s going to be several chapters in a row of people sitting in gardens worrying about how someone’s whispering will sully their name, I need the prose style to be a little bit better than readable. At least chuck in a murder or something.

Which is where Michael Cox is an improvement, in my opinion, on the books he’s emulating. He starts us off, first sentence, with a murder, and then spends the rest of the book justifying the murder. And it’s not what you think. I used the word “justify,” but truth be told, there’s no justice in it, and the narrator is well aware of this. As anguish goes, this murder’s got more for a reader to sink his or her teeth into than the anguish of wondering if Miss so-and-so is going to marry beneath her station

Folks who like bibliographical novels (I abuse the term) such as Shadow of the Wind and Ex Libris will enjoy a tale steeped in book love– and I do mean “book,” not just stories and literature, but paper and cardboard and leather. I tend to read into things too much, and I couldn’t help identifying with the narrator, the murder he commits, in that I read this book on an e-reader and so confounded pretty much everything the narrator held dear. Which is as much a note to myself as it is fit for this review, so forgive me this additional digression.

I mentioned “readable” prose stlyes, and Cox’s writing is exactly that. Nothing too scintillating or evocative here. I don’t know if he could have written this otherwise, however, in as much as the book is very immersive, and dazzling the reader with a brilliant prose style might have been a little too removed from the heart of the text. So it sounds like I am making excuses, but I’d like to give credit to author for sticking true to the voice of the middle nineteenth century.

There were bits of the novel I could do without, and I’m sort of ambivalent towards any explanation that these, too, were true to late Victorian novels. Dream sequences, opium-induced and otherwise, which are always so tiresome, in my opinion. Can’t stand them, really, but at least they were few and far between, and not overlong. Maybe Cox hid some symbols in there, but at least he didn’t hinge the plot on them, some sort of “aha!” moment that helps solve the mystery.

Because this does read, in parts, like a mystery novel, with the narrator chasing down clues, conducting interviews, and finding secrets hidden in the tombs. This is also, as I said, one of those “great expectations” type novels, borrowing the phrase from Dickens to name stories about humble, hard-working young men brought into a higher station in life to see what they can accomplish. It’s also partly a romance, which I could have otherwise done without, except this time the romance does hinge the plot, so I muddled through.

And it’s also, as befits the murder at the beginning, a revenge novel, and while I don’t want to give anything away, I can at least tell you I was glancing down at the page numbers every once in a while, knowing the narrator needed to get on with it, wondering when he would, and then, desperately, wondering if he would. He was a bit of a Hamlet in that sense, and, again, don’t know if Cox meant it to be so, but I was on pins and needles through certain passages.

My understanding is that Cox took a long time to compile notes and outlines for The Meaning of Night, and only under the influence of disease-fighting drugs did he get a sudden burst of energy and finish the darn thing off. There are some parts where intrigue is high, only to have it all explained away at the end, which makes me wonder how much if this was “invented” as he wrote and how much was planned. But I’m going to give Cox the benefit of the doubt again, and let it be explained that he was emulating the serial novels of the time, drawing things out as much as he could and then stitching them up at the end to the best of his abilities. After all, who reads a novel just for the plot?

Then again, when the first sentence describes a murder, sometimes, that’s plot is the only reason to read it. And so, finally, this is why I’m rounding the 3.5 stars down to 3. But really, this is a 7 out of 10.

View all my reviews

Goldfinger by Ian Fleming

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Took me a long time to get through this, much much longer than needed. You decide if that’s good or bad– I was able to put it down for long periods of time, but always able to come back to it. All things considered, a pretty straight-forward read.

This is the only Fleming I’ve read, so I can’t compare this one with other Bond novels. I can compare it with the films, I suppose, though I’ve never seen the film version of Goldfinger (although I have seen A View to a Kill, which was based on Goldfinger). To say the book Bond is different from the film Bond is a huge understatement. The book Bond goes in for the finer things, cars, wines, delicacies, exotic women. But otherwise he’s nowhere near as slick. Full of doubt, not nearly as cocksure and confident. Less of a McGyver, and not at all equipped with cool gadgets.

The book includes unabashed sexism, which we might claim to see in the films. But the racism is almost reason to not read the book at all. Other than that, the plot itself is simply ridiculous. And Bond doesn’t really do much at all except follow Goldfinger around Europe. There are a few “spy” scenes with the sneaking around and the intel-gathering, but they’re meager– or, at least, not at all what I expected. Sort of boring, really, which is the opposite of what spy-work should be, in my opinion.

That said, I’m sure Fleming fans are just as satisfied with Godlfinger as they are with other Bond novels. This is not a book that’s going to change one’s status as a reader or non-reader of Ian Fleming. I only started it myself because I wanted to write a spy novel myself and I felt I should look at the archetype. Turns out what I wanted to write was the book version of the movie versions, not the original books themselves. Lesson learned.

View all my reviews

The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World by David Kirkpatrick

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

One of the bad things about my trying to review a non-fiction book is that I’ll wind up complaining about writing style and pacing, things that are more relevant to fiction (in my opinion). So forgive me if 2 stars seems like a harsh rating for this one. I was just not impressed with Kirpatrick’s book. He tends to repeat himself, and maybe it’s a journalistic tone, or an attempt to get away from a strictly journalistic tone, that makes The Facebook Effect a real yawner.

Kirkpatrick mentions the Mark Zuckerberg wardrobe at least at least half a dozen times, if not more, making sure we’re aware that the irreverent young CEO likes to wear t-shirts and rubber Adidas sandals. The book is simply too long for what it tells us, and I feel it tries too hard to paint a nice human picture of Facebooks’s creator and CEO. And please note that I am not simply decrying a false huminazation of Zuckerberg: Before I read this, I was not aware I was even supposed to be afraid of him (I never watched that that silly David Fincher movie). As apologetics go, this one was a little over the top. Kirpatrick says, at the back of the book, that no one at Facebook had any reading or editing rights to the final draft. That just makes him seem more like a kiss-ass, in my opinion.

You don’t need this much book to say: Zuckerberg had an idea, there was some controversy over ownership of the idea, he worked hard, got lucky, and founded a paradigm shift. In fact, take Zuckerberg out of this book, and it might even be readable. The history of the development of the Facebook vision IS interesting. And Kirkpatrick does an excellent job of describing that. I did learn things about Facebook that I didn’t know before– so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

But I do wish there was an abridged version. One that isn’t so obviously aimed at “telling the other side of the story.” One that isn’t written to show Zuckerberg how well Kirkpatrick “gets it.” I really don’t care if he gets it. I do care that there’s more to Facebook than just Farmville and pokes, so I’ll at least give Kirkpatrick credit for showing me that.

View all my reviews