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Pollock's first collection of 18 short stories is a blistering look

Knockemstiff

chronicles a series of characters who are violent, hopeless, and addicted to self-destruction ranging from bactine addicts to sexual predators.  He's being compared to Flannery O'Connor, though it's a God-less O'Connor.  He explores the depths the individual can sink to in a forgotten place.  In the story "Holler," Porter loses his girl Sandy and still has to make it back to her mom's house to give her cigarettes because it's the only place he can stay. He laments, "forgetting our lives might be the best we ever do" (155).  Pollock is sympathetic, but draws the characters in harsh, fatalistic lines.  In "Discipline" Del's wife Geraldine goes out on the town leaving him with their baby.  "Looking at his daughter Del suddenly felt a great sorrow well up inside him. Falling to his knees, he was just beginning to ask the baby for her forgivness when he heard his wife tromp back down the hall and slam the bedroom door shut. Both daughter and father jumped at the sound, one still flush with innocence, the other guilty of a thousand trespasses" (130).  This encapsulates Pollock: his characters are always acutely aware of their needs, sins, and shortcomings, but oblivious to any solutions.  The dialogue is raw and the stories ring true. 

2008
Rating: 4/5
Genre: short story collection

People of the Book: A Novel

Geraldine Brooks

The follow-up to Brooks’ 2006 Pulitzer-winning March traces a holy manuscript and the people affected by it over the course of 600 years.  Brooks cleverly makes the manuscript central to the sprawling story, which is not character or plot-driven.  Instead, the focus is, as the title suggests, on the people whose lives become intertwined with the haggadah, an ancient Hebrew text which contains singular illustrations.  By keeping the manuscript’s story central, Brooks sheds light on the plight of Jews which transcends time and place from Holocaust to Inquisition.  The stories from the past feel surprisingly fresh, as they touch on the blending and boundaries which faiths like Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam have struggled over.  In one poignant scene, a rabbi pleads with a priest to not burn their holy books.  “So, my good father, you go and write the order to burn that book, as your church requires of you. And I will say nothing to the printing house, as my conscience requires of me. Censura praevia or censura repressive, the effect is the same. Either way, a book is destroyed. Better you do it than have us so intellectually enslaved that we do it for you” (156).  Here Brooks brilliantly shows the true evil of censorship—that it creates an environment of self-censorship that stifles thinking and change.  This stifling is another of Brooks’s post-modern concerns—how pluralistic cultures come to embrace divisiveness.  At one point, Hannah, the narrator who is called upon to investigate the haggadah and through whom the book finds it main narrative line, describes the book’s unique history this way:  “…the book has survived the same human disaster over and over again.  Think about it. You’ve got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in the Convivencia, and everything’s humming along: creative, prosperous. Then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize ‘the other’—it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists…same old, same old. It seems to me the book, at this point, bears witness to all that” (195).  The book and the evidence it collects sends Hannah on a historical odyssey that she reconstructs.  As she writes, she notes,  “I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it…I wanted to convey fire and shipwreck and fear” (265).  The book is full of tension, mainly as Jews are hiding, escaping, or suffering punishment in the sections set in the past.  The present narrative lacks this same punch and edginess, and once a segment of the past is complete Brooks never revisits it.  This isolation makes each section a sort of “fire” that blazes quickly, brightly, and destructively, and is gone. The book itself, though, smolders and its embers are slow to fade.

2008
Rating: 4/5
Genre: historical fiction

Clark’s novel is the best kind of funny—it’s honest and poignant, even self-deprecating, without edgy bitterness or weak sarcasm.  The protagonist, Sam Pulsifer, inadvertently burned down the home of Emily Dickinson when he was 18, and two people died in the fire.  He landed in prison for 10 years, re-emerged, and his past found him.  Clark deftly weaves together themes of family, reading, detectives, and loneliness into a story that is part mystery, part self-analysis, part memoir.  The irony is rich and exaggerated without feeling forced, and Pulsifer’s commentary on life hits just the right notes.

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England: A Novel

2007
Rating: 4/5
Genre: Literary Fiction (humorous mystery-memoirish)

The Shadow Catcher: A Novel

Tracing the life of photographer Edward Curtis, Wiggins weaves herself as a character in the present peddling a screenplay about Curtis.  She then receives a call about her father being in the hospital, but he had committed suicide long ago so she is pulled into an intriguing quest about identity.  Wiggins masterfully crafts a story with a long arc in compact fashion, though the rapid pace causes the ending to suffer.  She evokes the West in poetic terms, and includes sections that feel like essays about identity and place and America (like Route 66).  She also includes a section about Huck Finn and lighting out, bringing around the theme of men who leave women in search of something else.  It’s a novel about searching, and Wiggins searches for a form, jumping from past to present, including photographs, blending novel, memoir, and essay.  A fun read, though I wanted to read more of the frontier life of Curtis and Clara. 

2007
Rating: 3.5/5
Genre: literary fiction

The Namesake

Lahiri's strength lies in themes of identity struggle.  The novel centers on Gogol Ganguli's attempt to reconcile his desire to be American and distance himself from his Bengali family and the deep need he eventually uncovers to be close to them.  Gogol is the hub of the novel, and a host of characters are spokes.  Lahiri traces their backstories as well, sometimes at the cost of a unifying narrative thread.  That said, the prose is stark and scenes like Gogol's father revealing the origins of his name are poignant. Lahiri is a Pulitzer winner for her short stories, and this novel feels like a patchwork of stories shifting from Gogol's parents' trials to his love interests' love interests. 

2003
Rating: 4/5
Genre: literary fiction

Finn — A Novel by Jon Clinch

Jon Clinch’s prequel to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn traces the life of Pap, Huck’s drunken, abusive father.  Clinch details the forces that create Pap, an odd confluence of racism, arrogance, and elitism.  His father is a judge, a world removed from the outdoor savage survival that Pap must endure.  The novel’s most titillating premise, that Huck is actually a mulatto, is not really very interesting.  Pap’s indulgence in his desire for a black woman is, though, considering his racial rants in Twain’s novel.  They reveal some of the shame and self-abasement that lead him to tear Huck down.  Unlike Twain, Clinch has no large societal targets, no lofty agenda, no need for humor.  The book a swirling undercurrent nonetheless, like the river Pap lives on and raises Huck to love.  Clinch doesn’t overreach in his handling of Twain, seamlessly weaving in events from Huck like cameos by the Duke and Widow Douglas.  Clinch doesn’t seek to extend Twain’s work or style so much as offer a glimpse of what’s happening in the shadows.

2007
Rating: 4/5
Genre: literary fiction

The Good German

Kanon's novel is set in Berlin at the close of World War II as Jake Geismar returns to his homeland from America as a reporter searching for a story.  His true search is for his lost lover, and he gets entangled in solving a murder.  The novel plods in places, entangled itself in paper work instead of dialogue and confrontation.  Kanon does offer some though-provoking scenarios about guilt for what happened in Germany and the problems that peace poses.  Renate's plight as a greifer (a Jew who would turn in other Jews for money) is especially heart-rending.  But it's harder to empathize with Emil Brandt, or even with Geismar who is stealing Brandt's wife. But Kanon reflects the chaos of war and the way it shatters and fragments ethics.

Kanon interview: http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0797/kanon/interview.html

2001
Rating: 2/5
Genre: mystery; historical fiction

The Road (rough cut)

Set in post-apocolypse America, Cormac McCarthy's The Road follows a father and son who are eluding terrors without and within.  It is a heart-breaking novel that is sparsely populated, but the people the father and son meet create an even more grisly backdrop than the lifeless America.  Unnamed cannibals roam from town-to-town wielding random blunt instruments of fear, and everyone is in a survival mode that throws ethics overboard. In Jennifer Egan's review for Slate she likens this novel to "Big Two-Hearted River" where Nick Adams returned to a burned out town and finds solace in nature.  Unlike Hemingway, the boy and his father can't find refuge in nature and must find it in themselves, and Egan points to the struggle of "raising a child in a world without hope."  This bleariness is what makes the masculine figures endearing: knowing defeat is eminent, the father's passion or "flame" never wavers.  Like George Milton caring for Lennie Small in Of Mice and Men, the father casts the vision and has the son repeat various elements of the dream with him.  The son constantly asks if "we are the good guys," a question whose answer becomes murkier with each human encounter they have.  The son repeats, as though to convince himself and his father, that we "carry the flame," and McCarthy makes evident by the end that there is a spark of goodness left even in a world that has been torched and rendered ash.  The love of a father for a son transcends, and McCarthy gets away with it, Egan says, because his unsentimental masculinity. The road itself becomes a new symbol, replacing the river seen in works like Huck Finn.  On the road is safety and some sure-footing; all else is wilderness.  Even the sea, once they arrive, is blackened, and we feel the disappointment through the boy's eyes who longs to swim in it anyway.  The final scene and passage for the novel are worth the price of admission:

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow … On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back."

2006
Rating: 5/5
Genre: literary fiction 

Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

Miller depicts “Christian Spirituality” as a true living-out of the message of Christ, taking to task

Don Rabbit