Literary

“& Sons” by David Gilbert (Fourth Estate/Random House)

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Royal.inddAn intriguing, engaging literary novel

The funeral of Charles Henry Topping on Manhattan’s Upper East Side would have been a minor affair (his two-hundred-word obit in The New York Times notwithstanding) but for the presence of one particular mourner: the notoriously reclusive author A.N. Dyer, whose novel Ampersand stands as a classic of American teenage angst. But as Andrew Newbold Dyer delivers the eulogy for his oldest friend, he suffers a breakdown over the life he’s led and the people he’s hurt and the novel that will forever endure as his legacy. He must gather his three sons for the first time in many years – before it’s too late.

So begins a wild, transformative, heartbreaking week, as witnessed by Philip Topping, who, like his late father, finds himself caught up in the swirl of the Dyer family. First there’s son Richard, a struggling screenwriter and father, returning from self-imposed exile in California. In the middle lingers Jamie, settled in Brooklyn after his twenty-year mission of making documentaries about human suffering. And last is Andy, the half-brother whose mysterious birth tore the Dyers apart seventeen years ago, now in New York on spring break, determined to lose his virginity before returning to the prestigious New England boarding school that inspired Ampersand.

But only when the real purpose of this reunion comes to light do these sons realize just how much is at stake, not only for their father but for themselves and three generations of their family.

& Sons is a very good novel. It’s a bit tricky to review, though. I was quickly drawn into the story, and the lives of the protagonists. It was by no means perfect, and sometimes downright weird, but Gilbert’s prose and characters were engaging throughout.

This is a peculiar novel, in many ways. Gilbert writes extremely well, but that didn’t stop the beginning from being a bit confusing – specifically, the narrative style wasn’t clear. I wasn’t sure who was narrating the tale. It is presented as if Philip Topping has written an account of the events, but bestowed upon himself omnipotence, able to write inside his subjects’ heads without really any way of knowing what was going on. A strange decision, but one that I quickly got used to and accepted.

It is the story of families, fathers and sons. Philip Topping, never particularly close with his father, was always enamoured of the Dyers – revering Andrew, idolising Richard and Jamie, glomming on to the family as an attempt to become a de facto member. For this desire, he has long been mocked and pranked by the elder two Dyer brothers. It was a strange and sometimes-creepy dynamic. Andrew Jr., the half-brother whose existence cratered A.N. Dyer’s marriage, is probably the best character in the novel, and I enjoyed seeing him navigate his world, and the strange dynamic he had with his father and brothers.

GilbertD-AndSonsLiterary fiction seems to require a peculiarity. I’m not sure why this trope has developed, but almost every literary fiction novel I’ve read contains a truly bizarre element or event, and this can often be the stumbling block that takes a great novel and almost ruins it. With & Sons, the peculiarity is the secret Andrew wishes to share with his sons. I’m not going to spoil it, but it kind of came out of nowhere, and we’re never sure if it’s real or a delusion of the fast-declining Andrew Dyer.

I’m not really sure what else to write about the book without spoiling the twists and turns, or delving too deeply or academically into its contents (which is not something CR has been doing in the past). Needless to say, I enjoyed reading & Sons. There’s a great deal of insight and shrewd observation about families – especially fathers and sons – presented in both remorseful and amusing ways. Despite the muddled narrative voice of the first couple of chapters, this grew to become a very strong novel and engaging read.

Recommended for fans of New York-based literary fiction – for example, Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch – and also authors such as Michael Chabon, Philip Roth and Richard Russo.

*

David Gilbert’s & Sons is published by Fourth Estate in the UK and Random House in the US. It is out now.

“Nate in Venice” by Richard Russo (Kindle Single)

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RussoR-NateInVeniceA short story from Pulitzer-prize winning author of Empire Falls

After a tragic incident with a student, Nate, a professor at a small New England college, retires from teaching and from life. He ends his self-imposed exile with a tour-group trip to Venice in the company of his overbearing, mostly estranged brother. Nate is unsure he’s equipped for the challenges of human contact, especially the fraternal kind. He tries to play along, keep up, mixing his antidepressants with expensive Chianti, but while navigating the labyrinthine streets of the ancient, sinking city, the past greets him around every corner, even in his dreams: There’s the stricken face of the young woman whose life he may have ruined, and there’s Julian, the older brother who has always derided and discounted him. Is Nate sunk? Is the trip, the chance to fall in love — in fact, his whole existence — merely water under the ponte?

This is only the second thing by Russo that I’ve read. I recently also read (and thoroughly enjoyed) Straight Man, which I hope to review at some point in the near future. I have also acquired his Pulitzer-prize-winning Empire Falls, which is very high on my TBR mountain. When this popped up on Amazon UK’s Kindle Singles page, I thought it would be a great, quick read to fill in a gap between full-length novels. I was not wrong.

The story follows Nate, who has come on this trip with his estranged brother. He is getting on in years, and has fled a strange event related to a student back home. As he tries to figure out why his brother is giving him such a hard time, while also considering his fellow travellers, we get to know what happened to him back home. As it turns out, it’s probably not what you were thinking. I thought it was a real good change from the norm, too. Interesting characters, a quick, engaging plot. What more can one want from a short story? This is, overall, a really well-written bit of fiction, very much focused on the characters.

What drew me to the story was not just because I enjoyed Russo’s novel – although, they do share some elements. I am really drawn to fiction set in or connected with universities. In this case, the protagonist is a professor, and as such the story contains some interesting (and familiar to me) commentary on universities and teaching. For no other reason than they interested me, and because I’ve experienced similar things as both a student and teaching assistant, here are a couple of examples.

First up, that somewhat depressing moment of marking the first round of essays for a class:

“… that first batch of essays was depressingly dismal. Their authors were not stupid — the lively classroom discussions had proved that much — but the writing they produced was breathtakingly incoherent. All their academic lives, they’d been cutting and pasting from the Internet — a phrase here, a sentence there—creating a pastiche of observations linked by little more than general subject matter. Individual sentences, lifted from their original context and plopped down in a foreign one, varied wildly in tone and style. Given a list of transitional phrases — but, rather, on the other hand, while, hence — the essay’s alleged authors would’ve been helpless to choose the one that correctly expressed the relationship between juxtaposed assertions, had such a relationship by chance occurred. Whole paragraphs were maddeningly free of both mistakes and meaning.”

The awkwardness of essay hand-back sessions, when hitherto spoon-fed and pampered students, not as brilliant as their parents have no doubt always told them, realise that completing the assignment is not enough to get an A…

“Handing back student essays, especially the first batch, was invariably an unpleasant duty, marking as it did the end of the academic honeymoon. Here they’d all been getting along so well, pretending to be the best of friends, and now this. A grade. Having briefly imagined that this class would be different, they now understood it wasn’t. Betrayed again.”

And the frustrating reality of students not realising that clarity is oh-so-very-important.

“… students, even the English majors, were content for their meaning to loiter in the shadows of their murky prose, as if clarity were a shared responsibility between writer and reader. His prose workshops flew in the face of their unshakable conviction that the essays they turned in were a private matter between them and him, sort of like therapy or confession.”

Anyway, back to the review. This is a short, well-written and well-constructed short story. Nate in Venice is a great introduction to Russo’s writing and style, and was a very enjoyable read. Very much recommended.

“The Circle” by Dave Eggers (Knopf)

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EggersD-TheCircleAn interesting, timely and disturbing novel

When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in America — even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public.

The Circle is the first novel I’ve read by Eggers. It is also one of the creepiest books I’ve ever read. The novel revolves around Mae Holland, a new hire at The Circle – a massive, Google-meets-Facebook-type social media goliath. We follow her story as she navigates the company, its quirks, and also its never-ending evolution. We see her life turned upside down as she strives to rise in the Circle’s ranks, to adopt and embrace its new innovations. Completing the Circle becomes an obsession, and despite clear signs of its negative impact on her life and those of her loved ones, the inexorable pull of the company, the sense of community, and compulsion to be a part of something proves too much for Mae to resist.

What made this novel so unsettling was how Eggers has extrapolated an all-too plausible (albeit slippery-slope) evolution of social media. The author’s not subtle, either, and it sometimes felt like he is trying to bludgeon the reader with his own negative feelings about social media and its ubiquitous place in contemporary life. At the same time, he has a point. As The Circle continues to evolve, and gobble up ever-more resources, technology and, above all else, access to its users’ private lives, we see an unprecedented erosion of privacy. More than that, though, is that this erosion is voluntarily embraced by Circle users.

Despite the anvil-from-the-sky approach to delivering his point, Eggers has written an accessible, engaging and above-all thought-provoking novel. It will make you analyse your own social media use, and probably make you adjust your habits, too…

An important, if unsubtle, novel, The Circle is certainly recommended reading for anyone who embraces a well-connected life.

Upcoming: “The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair” by Joël Dicker (Maclehose Press)

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DickerJ-TruthAboutTheHarryQuebertAffairUKI’ve been seeing a lot of buzz surrounding Joël Dicker’s latest novel, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair. Last year, I started reading more (literary) fiction, and I’ve become as keen on finding new novels in all genres, and not just SFF, to feature on here. I’ve become particularly interested in American literary fiction – author such as Michael Chabon, Donna Tartt, Richard Russo, and Claire Messud to name but four (all but one of whom have featured on the blog already). It was therefore interesting to me that Dicker’s novel has created such a storm (it has sold over two million copies on the continent) and that it has even been hailed as having “all the elements of the Great American novel” (La Croix), despite Dicker actually being Swiss. Now that Maclehose Press has unveiled the UK artwork for the novel, I thought it a good time to post a quick something about it.

The novel is translated by Sam Taylor, who also translated HHhH. Here’s the synopsis…

Who killed Nola Kellergan?

Marcus Goldman, the toast of the New York literary scene, is at his wit’s end after being struck by writer’s block. Desperate not to lose his new found fame and in search of inspiration he decides to spend a few weeks in New Hampshire at the home of Harry Quebert, world famous author and his mentor from university.

During his stay, Marcus discovers that in 1975, aged 34, Harry had an affair with 15 year old Nola Kellergan. The summer of their affair, Nola disappeared after she was seen running through the woods, covered in blood. No one has seen Nola since and no one knows what happened.

Then the unthinkable happens, 33 years after her disappearance, the body of Nola Kellergan is found in Harry’s garden. Determined to prove Harry’s innocence, Marcus gets embroiled in the murder case of the century, while everywhere in America people are asking: Who Killed Nola Kellergan?

Not just a book about an unsolved murder case, The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair explores the price of fame and the seduction of success, the ferocity of the publishing industry and the power of the media, love in all its forms and what it means to be a truly great writer.

The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair is published in the UK by Maclehose Press, in May 2014.

“Wonder Boys” by Michael Chabon (Harper Collins / Random House / Open Road)

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Chabon-WonderBoysA University Professor’s Crippling Writer’s Block and Drug-Fuelled Self-Destruction

Grady Tripp is a pot-smoking middle aged novelist who has stalled on a 2611-page opus titled Wonder Boys. His student James Leer is a troubled young writer obsessed by Hollywood suicides and at work on his own first novel. Grady’s bizarre editor Terry Crabtree and another student, Hannah Green, come together in his wildly comic, moving, and finally profound search for an ending to his book and a purpose to his life.

This is the second of Michael Chabon’s novels that I’ve read – and in a very short time, too. I still have no idea how to review The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which may rank as one of my all-time favourite novels. (Needless to say, it’s not difficult for me to see why it won the Pulitzer Prize.) Wonder Boys, the novel Chabon wrote before Kavalier & Clay, is a rather different novel. It’s nowhere near as long, for one thing – and yet, strangely, it feels far more rambling and unfocused. I enjoyed it a great deal, and zipped through it in just a couple of days. Chabon has a wonderful way with words that can make even the mundane a pleasure to read about.

The main character is almost archetypical, struggling author with writer’s block. Wonder Boys is basically the story of his long-time spiral of self-destruction coming to a head. Over the course of a single weekend, his wife leaves him, his affair takes a shocking turn, lots of people realise that he’s a nightmare and kind of feckless. He also has to attempt to keep his rather predatory editor away from one of his potentially-suicidal students. Along the way, there is a dead dog, one of Marilyn Monroe’s jackets, a shoot-out in an alley, and also a massive dead snake. And some Korean Jews. And a heavy amount of drug consumption.

Chabon-WonderBoysORI haven’t read much literary fiction (or whatever genre this is meant to be in), but there are some tropes that are popping up. They seem to be predictable in their unpredictability. Strange things happen. People do really weird things (see, for example, the bacchanal in The Secret History). They react in slightly melodramatic ways. And yet… there is a way that Chabon writes these little weirdnesses that feels very natural. Realistic, and not actually forced or jarring.

Without walking through the whole plot, it’s tricky to know what to write for this review. I am not aiming for a review in the style of the New Yorker, The New Republic, or Harper’s, so I’m not going to attempt to deconstruct this in any intellectual or academic manner. That’s not what the blog is for. What I will say, though, is that if you’re after a slightly strange, well-written novel about a writing professor at a small Ohio University going crazy, then this is for you. It’s witty, engaging, rather addictive, and very quirky.

“The Secret History” by Donna Tartt (Vintage/Penguin)

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TarttD-SecretHistoryI finally get around to reading the mega-hit novel of a mysterious group of college friends

Richard Papen arrived at Hampden College in New England and was quickly seduced by an elite group of five students, all Greek scholars, all worldly, self-assured, and, at first glance, all highly unapproachable. As Richard is drawn into their inner circle, he learns a terrifying secret that binds them to one another…a secret about an incident in the woods in the dead of night where an ancient rite was brought to brutal life…and led to a gruesome death. And that was just the beginning….

Another quick review, this (I’m still trying to figure out how best to review literary fiction). The Secret History has been an international mega-hit, and is frequently listed on Must Read books of the decade, your life, and so forth. As a result, it has been on my radar for years. But, because I am never lacking in reading material, I just never got around to buying it. After a particularly acute bout of book-restlessness, I decided it was time for a change from the SFF genres, and picked this up. I read it over a few very satisfying days, evenings and one night (I ended up finishing it at around 3am). It’s not perfect, but it is certainly engrossing and well-written.

The Secret History is a great novel, in many ways. It’s excellently written, and engagingly told. The characters are varied, quirky, and fun to read about (or, as is the case a coupleof times, uncomfortable to spend time with). This characterisation of college students is rather cliché, but I suppose it suits the story – I refer to the peripheral characters, here (drunks, drug-taking, not particularly bright or upstanding). The wild debauchery of Hampden College is merely a backdrop to the main attraction, despite them partaking in it as well. The focus of the novel are the five students in the exclusive Greek classes, and also our narrator, Richard.

There was something that didn’t ring true for me with this group, though: that everybody liked Bunny. Throughout the novel, he is an obnoxious, irritating presence, and I could never quite put my finger on why any of these characters professed to like him. Not a thing he did or said was redeeming or remotely attractive. It does, however, make it easier to believe how quickly our protagonists could turn on him (as we’re informed in the prologue). There were some affectations that didn’t ring true at all – although, because it was difficult to place the novel in a specific time/decade, I may have misunderstood the occasional thing.

The novel is pretty long, but it rarely felt like it was rambling or bloated. I appreciated Tartt’s attention to detail, and the way she realised the world and characters on the page. It is sometimes self-consciously intelligent and pretentious, but that can be forgiven, as it’s perhaps meant as a reflection of her characters (they are a group of young people who are oh-so-prone to affectations and pretentions). The narrative is sometimes disconnected, but always gripping. The final half of the novel, in particular, was riveting, and I stayed up well into the night to finish it off – thinking “one more chapter” at the end of each and every one.

This is a story of betrayal, loyalty and ultimate sacrifice. The way the characters must hide and tip-toe around what they have done, to hide it from their peers, the police and their mentor is plotted very well. Their tension and anxieties felt realistic and palpable. The ending was a tad melodramatic, and I’m pretty sure it didn’t have to end so. I can’t fault Tartt’s ‘world-building’, though.

I’m extremely glad I read this. It’s not the best novel I’ve ever read, but it has certainly added another author to my must-read list. As soon as I finished this, I bought the eBook of The Goldfinch, Tartt’s latest novel. I’m not sure exactly when I’ll have the time to read it, but I hope it is very soon.

Recommended.

An Interview with DAVID TOWSEY

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TowseyD-AuthorPicCropDavid Towsey’s debut novel, Your Brother’s Blood caught my attention a few months ago, and ever since I have been eagerly awaiting my chance to read it. Thankfully, I recently got my mitts on a copy, so I hope to start it sometime next week. In the meantime, his publisher has set up this interview, in which I quiz David on his writing, how he got into genre fiction, and more. If you wanted to check out the novel for yourself, be sure to read this excerpt.

Let’s start with an introduction: Who is David Towsey?

I’m twenty-eight. I’m finishing a PhD in Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University – where I’ll start lecturing full-time in September. I guess you could say I’m a geek or nerd – if such labels are helpful. I play computer games, specifically MMOs, which I’ve been a regular player of since I was fourteen and first got hold of Ultima Online. I also enjoy playing Magic: the Gathering at a fairly competitive level. But between all that gaming and writing I try and keep active by playing squash and swimming at least twice a week.

Your latest novel, Your Brother’s Blood, was recently published by Jo Fletcher Books. How would you introduce the novel to a potential reader? Is it intended as part of a series?

When people ask me about the book I tend to see if they’ve read or seen The Road. If they have, I say it’s a lot like that. Except Your Brother’s Blood follows a father and daughter. And the the father is a “zombie”. If they haven’t, it becomes more difficult. It’s a novel that sits somewhere between a road-movie and a zombie-western. For me, it focuses on family relationships that come under strain – sometimes through normal situations and sometimes because of more extreme circumstances. Your Brother’s Blood is the first part of a trilogy that follows a central family, the McDermotts. Continue reading →