Girl Detective

For someone who claims not to like short stories, I’m reading a lot of them lately, and I’m liking them a lot. Coincidence that they’ve all been written by women? I think not. I suspect it’s because the books I’ve been reading lately delve more into emotional icky-wow factors than physical ones. I’m much more able to tolerate being haunted by emotional echoes than by gruesome word pictures, which, probably unfairly, I tend to associate with short stories by men.

The latest collection was After the Apocalypse by Maureen McHugh. My husband G. Grod and I had seen it praised in various corners of the web, he requested it from the library, then liked it so well he encouraged me to read it before the due date (no renewals). I crammed it into an already too full reading schedule, but am glad I did, because it was good. Really good.

McHugh writes stories that aren’t easily defined by genre. She’s science fiction-y, and fantastical, but not exactly either one of those. Her stories here are mostly set in a not-too-distant future where something has changed; most often they’re set in the aftermath of a dirty bomb, but there are other environmental mishaps as well. She is sure handed at setting a stage and peopling it quickly in diverse settings as China, Ohio and the West. With zombies, enclaves, artificial intelligence, and medical experiments gone awry, she ably captures an eerie, unsettling tone that makes me think and feel, but never want to wash my brain out.

To see if it’s your cuppa, one of my favorite of the stories, “Useless Things” is available online here.

As I Lay Dying was a recommendation from SFP of Pages Turned. I wrote to ask which she’d recommend for a book group*. She said As I Lay Dying, as it was more accessible than others of his works, due in part to its dark humor.

I began to read it, and floundered immediately. If this is his most accessible, I thought, I’m really glad we didn’t read The Sound and the Fury. Who were these people? How did they relate to one another? Why so many names? Welcome to a stream-of-consciousness multi-narrator novel with fifteen–FIFTEEN!–points of view. Also, I wondered, funny? This isn’t funny, I thought, this is HORRIBLE!

In my initial flailing, with all good intention, I looked for help online to out the characters. It did help, yet it was a mistake, one I warned others not to make. As soon as I looked up the book, about half a dozen things got spoiled, including the jaw-dropping last line. Stupid internet. I wish I had stuck with my original impulse, which was to keeping reading till things made sense, and assume a second reading.

As I read, then re-read the book, I was able to figure out who was who, how they were related, and what was going on. More importantly, I was able to see past the horrific particulars of the story to the humor that lay not far below the surface.

Two of my book groups read it. In the first, only one other person besides me had finished the book, and I hadn’t yet studied up on the book or re-read it. The discussion was necessarily short, and focused on how challenging and slow the book was to read. (A comment I don’t disagree with.) I liked this book, but hadn’t yet succumbed to its charms.

Then I spent a couple hours reading about the book on Schmoop, did some more online reading about Faulkner**, and then re-read the book. And was so stirred by one particular scene involving a bridge (SPOILERS: don’t click through if you haven’t read the book) that I kept imagining a diorama. Once I realized I possessed one of the key ingredients of my imaginary diorama, I had to make it. With the help of 6-year-old Guppy, I did. He helped me find particular Lego body parts, like shorter legs, matching hair, and grumpy faces, then colored in the cardboard base because we didn’t have enough blue, green and brown Legos to make it as big as I’d envisioned.

Armed with my diorama, a bottle of wine, leftover Easter candy and my newly bolstered background on the book, I went to my second book group, and we had a rousing discussion. We talked about life, death, family, pity, religion, spirituality, ESP, feminism, and much more.

It took a while, but I am now a huge fan of the work, and look forward to reading more Faulkner. No fear!

(If I had to do this again, though, I would probably start with the short stories, and THEN move to As I Lay Dying.)

*For one of my book groups, Faulkner became an obvious choice of an author we had to read, since so many of the authors we read already named him as an influence: Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, and Louise Erdrich, to name a few. And I loved the serendipity that I finally got around to reading Faulkner at the same time as I finally go around to reading Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, an early influence on Faulkner.

**In my admittedly cursory research, I did not find any evidence that As I Lay Dying influenced Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, but I found the “white-trash road trip” theme too strikingly similar.

My entry on As I Lay Dying is forthcoming, but one scene in the book so stirred my imagination that I felt compelled to make a diorama. Just for fun. I don’t know that I’ve ever made one in my life. 6yo Guppy helped me out.

SPOILERS! Also, this diorama is not to scale. And we didn’t have enough blue Legos to make a big enough river, so we used a cardboard base and Guppy colored it with marker.

The bridge:

Anse was setting there, looking at the bridge where it was swagged down into the river with just the two ends in sight…The boy was watching the bridge where it was mid-sunk and logs and such drifted over it. (123-4)

The wagon:

Then the wagon tilted over and then it and Jewel and the horse was all mixed up together. Cash went outen sight, still holding the coffin braced, and then I couldn’t tell anything…(154)

The mules:

They roll up out of the water in succession, turning completely over, their legs stiffly extended as when they had lost contact with the earth. (149)

Anse:

Since he lost his teeth his mouth collapses…The stubble gives his lower face that appearance that old dogs have. (17)

Dewey Dell:

pa and Dewey Dell stand watching us (149),

Squatting, Dewey Dell’s wet dress shapes for the dead eyes of three blind men those mammalian ludicrosities which ar the horizons and the valleys of the earth. (164)

Vardaman:

Cash tried but she fell off and Darl jumped going under he went under and Cash holleringto catch her and I hollering running and hollering…

“Where is ma, Darl?” I said. You never got her. You knew she is a fish but you let her get away. You never got her. Darl. Darl. Darl.” I began to run along the bank, watching the mules dive up slow again and then down again. (150-1)

Darl:

[Darl] is looking at me. He dont say nothing; just looks at me with them queer eyes of hisn that makes folks talk. I always say it aint never been what he done so much or said or anything so much as how he looks at you. It’s like he had got into the inside of you, someway. Like somehow you was looking at yourself and your doings outen his eyes. (125)

Lego interpretation: Note his self-satisfied expression and arresting eyes.

Cash:

Cash lies on his back on the earth, his head raised on a rolled garment. His…face is gray, his hair plastered in a smooth smear across his forehead as though done with a paint brush. His face appears sunken a little, sagging from the bony ridges of eye sockets, nose, gums, as thought the wetting had slacked the firmness which had held the skin full….He lies pole-thin in his wet clothes, a little pool of vomit at his head. (156)

Dewey Dell has laid Cash’s head back on the folded coat, twisting his head a little to avoid the vomit. Beside him his tools lie. “A fellow might call it lucky it was the same leg he broke when he fell offen that church,” pa says. (163)

Lego interpretation: the grey spot to the right of his head is vomit and Dewey Dell attends to him. His tools are in the water and at his side. His injured leg is elevated, he’s pale from almost drowning, and he’s in a lot of pain.

Jewel:

Lego interpretation: he is taller than the others, has a different skin tone, black hair instead of brown, and has a cranky, man-of-action expression on his face. Note the circular bumps on the narrow end of the coffin, where Addie’s head would be, and where Vardaman drilled air holes, then Cash carefully filled them. Also note one of Cash’s tools in river and the dead mule in the background.

It took a great deal of time to sort through our Legos to find appropriate expressions and hair for the characters. I was quite surprised how easy it was to find coffin-shaped pieces. Discerning Lego enthusiasts may recognize many Star Wars elements.

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson was recommended to me originally in the mid ’90s by one of my first writing teachers, Diana Cavallo. I took a copy from my in-laws’ basement on my trip west from Philadelphia to Minneapolis in 1998. It sat on my shelves until this year, when the same friend’s author mentor recommended it to her and she recommended it to me as happened with Maile Meloy’s Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It.

Anderson’s name is barely recognized today, and his most famous book relatively obscure compared to those of some of the writers who came after and credited him as an influence, like Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck.

The book is a novel in linked stories. Even though each story was about different people in the town, they all orbited one young man, George Willard, a reporter at the small town’s paper. His story is the anchor at the end.

The town is full of complex people leading quiet lives. They have painful pasts and often long for a lost love, or present sexual shenanigans. For a book from 1919, it’s quite sexually frank, I thought. I found it tough to get into but once the stories began to accumulate, I became involved in the town and its people, even when they thought and behaved badly, just as real people do.

The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor is one of the classics that I’m kicking myself I only got around to now. She’s emotionally brutal, her titles are brilliant, and the stories make me think and feel. This is the end to my self-education on O’Connor that started with Wise Blood, then Brad Gooch’s Flannery and now this. Not all the works from her tragically short life, but plenty to see her themes of pain, alienation, fear of change, and religious struggle.

In the weeks after I read this, I found connections again and again in real life, in what I was reading, and in what I was watching on TV.

These stories will stick with me. Even if I forget which title goes with which story, I bet I’ll be able to recall these as long as I’m able to recall things: the surprise ending of The Barber, the car trip in A Good Man is Hard to Find, the general in A Late Encounter with the Enemy, the tractor scene in The Displaced Person, the Bible salesman in Good Country People, Mary Fortune and her grandfather in A View of the Woods, the invalid Asbury in The Enduring Chill, the bus trip in Everything that Rises Must Converge, the asylum visit of The Partidge Festival, the well-meaning father who tries to take in a troubled boy in The Lame Shall Enter First, the doctor’s office in Revelation, the tattoo of Parker’s Back, and the reworking of The Geranium in Judgment Day, her last complete story.

While the book works terrifically as a whole, from its first story, The Geranium, to its last, Judgment Day, I don’t recommend reading it all at once. I started this way, and had to stop. The stories have a lot of similarity, so run together if read together, but stand apart when read over a period of time, as I did, a story at a time between other books.

Stuff White People like is Christian Lander’s collection of 150 of the blog entries from his popular blog of the same name. It’s been sitting around for years, and finally graduated to bathroom book, for which it’s ideal. Short, funny. But the funny is also a little painful for me. As my dad often jokes, I resemble those remarks in my earnest white well-meaning but often less-than-world-changing actions. Funny, disposable. Will make you think self-deprecating things (#103), rather than just saying them or writing them. Also, hasn’t aged appreciably. All these things seem still to be true of aspiring regular folks masquerading as hipsters and vice versa. Plus many more. Which is why there is a sequel.

Here’s a sampling of those I’m guilty of:

1. Coffee
5. Farmer’s Markets
6. Organic Food
7. Diversity
8. Barack Obama
9. Making You Feel Bad for Not Going Outside (a Minnesota pastime)
13. Tea
15. Yoga
21. Writers Workshops
41. Indie Music
42. Sushi
44. Public Radio
48. Whole Foods and Grocery Co-ops (I bet I get extra white-people points for disliking the former along with Trader Joe’s and loving the latter.)
54. Kitchen Gadgets
61. Bicycles
63. Expensive Sandwiches
70. Difficult Breakups
81. Graduate School
82. Hating Corporations
83. Bad Memories of High School.
85. The Wire
96. Having Children in Their Late 30’s

and on through 150. I come in at about 75%. Sigh. The unique taste of millions, indeed.

Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It was an indirect recommendation. A friend of mine is in a mentor program with a local author, who recommended it to her. She in turn recommended it to me.

It’s a collection of short stories, linked by the common theme of the title–the pushes and pulls of life, and the compromises we make as we go along. They exemplify the meaning of ambivalence–not the commonly mistaken conception of not caring, but being pulled to multiple opposing options. The stories are tight as drums. They pulled me through, with economic yet devastating characterizations, each taking me to an ending that was surprising, yet satisfying.

I often don’t enjoy short stories because they tend to go for an icky-wow factor that lingers unpleasantly. Meloy’s stories contain some people behaving badly, yet they made me think and feel, not recoil. I both enjoyed and was impressed by this collection. Highly recommended.

One of the first contenders in last month’s Morning News Tournament of Books, Nathacha Appanah’s The Last Brother was also one of the shortest waits at the library. It went down in the first match to Murakami’s IQ84. My reading schedule got so crowded I didn’t get to it before the match, but since both Amy of New Century Reading and Pat of O Canada, Y’all, liked it, I figured I’d give it a try.

I wasn’t surprised it lost to Murakami, as it’s a short work by a younger author versus a sprawling-idea-filled work by one of the greats. It tells the story in flashback of Raj, a boy during WWII on the island of Mauritius, which housed a secret prison camp for an exiled ship. The history is fascinating, Raj’s bond with his mother, his friendship with a prisoner, and his story of poverty and abuse are all touching, yet something about the book distanced me, in spite of its first-person narration. Perhaps my heart is two sizes too small, but this didn’t impress me as it did many others.

Hype plus a slot in this year’s Tournament of Books put Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder on my TBR list. Years ago, a writer friend recommended Patchett’s Magician’s Assistant, which I loved. After I read Bel Canto, which everyone I knew loved (but I found a bit remote and chilly) I talked with my friend about it. She and I agreed that we admired Bel Canto, but didn’t love it in the way we did Magician’s Assistant.

In the meantime, Patchett lost some credibility with me with her piece on travel writing “Did I Kill Gourmet Magazine?”, which came off to me as snobby rather than tongue in cheek. Nonetheless, when the good reviews poured out on State of Wonder, I hoped for another Magician’s Assistant. Alas, no.

Marina Singh is a 42yo scientist employed by a big pharmaceutical company. In the first sentence, we learn her co-worker, Anders Eckman, has died, and soon learn that he was in the remote jungle trying to persuade a crotchety researcher to come in from the field. Marina is asked by both Eckman’s wife and the head of the company to go down and find out what happened. Things are complicated because Marina is having an affair with the much older head of the company, and she was a student of the missing researcher.

One of my pet peeves is characters who don’t grow and learn. While people like that exist in real life, I don’t care to spend time with them fictionally, either. To me, Marina was a dud of a main character, flat and uninteresting. Ditto for the plot, which seemed like it would be full of thrilling plot development. Instead, to me, it plodded, and by the time I got to this or that reveal, I was so exhausted from getting there that I didn’t care much. Or, in a few cases, the reveal had been expected by me so long that I no longer felt any satisfaction from having called it. Marina does some strange things at the end, and some other plot points are left unresolved. But again, I didn’t care that much. I neither liked nor admired this book. I experienced schadenfreude when Wil Wheaton slammed it during the Tournament of Books as:

a story that demands so much suspension of disbelief it may as well have asked us to accept sailing down a river flowing with unicorn tears.

For a character-driven medical thriller, I’d recommend Intuition by Allegra Goodman instead.

One of my three books groups, the one I run, focuses loosely on novels with themes of myth or religion. It is not a religious book group, but I find these books I read that I really want to discuss and chew over. A few friends had requested we read something by Annie Proulx. In researching her many books I found little that was overtly mythic/spiritual (though there is a short story written about hell). I finally decided on The Shipping News. I remembered liking it a good deal when I read it for my Book Group of Sacred Memory in Philadelphia, and it would be easy for people to obtain an inexpensive copy, borrow one from the library, or just take it off their shelf.

The story of Quoyle, a “large damp loaf of a man” takes us to Newfoundland, where he tries to begin a new life with his aunt and two daughters. The adults are haunted by ghosts of their pasts, as are many of those they meet. Most chapters begin with a picture of a knot and definition, which foreshadows the events of the chapters and reflects the boat-centric life of the Newfoundlanders.

Outwardly gauche and slow, Quoyle nonetheless was easy for me to love, as was his aunt and other characters in the book. Many parts made me laugh aloud (”poor Nutbeem”) and others made me recoil in horror. Some would say the setting is a character, I’d say it’s more the rich background that imbues the story to such an extent it couldn’t happen anywhere else. Crazy, huge, horrible things happen, and somehow, one of the words to describe how I feel about this book is “sweet”. Also, what I found about the book–that crazy huge horrible things happen and the characters and life go on–felt similarly to the aspect of myth and belief in this book–they’re in there but not obvious, and not made a big deal of. I was glad to revisit this book.

I have not seen the movie, and don’t intend to. Kevin Spacey is a fine actor, but he is so far from the picture of giant-chinned Quoyle in my head that I don’t want them to jockey for space.

I’m reading Bleak House by Dickens in chunks along with the group at Unputdownables. I continue to wish that the schedule would have been divided in the same chunks as it was originally released–Dickens knew what he was doing, and wrote beginnings and endings with a purpose, and I’ve been sad as I’ve passed them, coming and going, seeing their merits but not going along with them.

I found this week’s segment, Chapters 10 to 14, (serial break was at 13) something of a slog, perhaps because life is overflowing with should’s given the early spring, but likely because of the 20 page chapter 14, which took me several attempts to get through. I might have done better had I had a week of rest after 13. In any case, I found this section to be full of Dickensian maunderings, where I could just imagine him sitting at his desk, counting the words. I empathize with this, yet it didn’t make it any less difficult to read the beginning of Chapter 10 about Snagsby, the end of Chapter 11 about the inquest, the middle of Chapter 12 on Boodle and Duffy et al. Chapter 13 was quite good, filled with character and plot development. Alas, ponderous 14, with its overlong excoriation of the elder Turveydrop, had me, literally, dozing more than once.

These said, I think I can say with some confidence who the unfortunate Nemo was, and surmise that Mrs. Flite is waiting for the Jardyce judgment, not an imaginary one. Richard is weak willed and uninteresting to me, but I did love how chapters 13 and 14 ended with Esther’s unreliable narration of “oh, by the way, there was this nice guy hanging about.” How I do hope Esther grows a spine by the end of this. I continue to be enamored of the name Peepy and wish I had something to name after him.

“It’s a tough read” is what I heard, over and over, about Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, about a poor black family outside of New Orleans in the days before during and after Katrina. Yet the impression I got was also one of admiration. Plus I loved the cover, with its mismatched type, and rough sketched dog on the swampy green background. When it become a contender in The Morning News Tournament of Books I had yet another reason to read it.

It’s narrated by 15 year old Esch, the only female in her family. She has two older brothers, a hard-drinking father, and a younger brother born just before their mother died. Esch has an extended family in her brothers’ friends, one of whom, Manny, she’s in love with. Her brother Skeet has a pit bull named China, who births puppies as the novel opens.

China’s turned on herself. If I didn’t know, I would think she was trying to eat her paws. I would think that she was crazy. Which she is, in a way. Won’t let nobody touch her but Skeet.

The story goes forward day by day, ratcheting up the tension both with the events on the page, and what readers know is coming, though we don’t know exactly how it will affect them.

There is tragedy and violence in this book. Skeet has trained China to fight, and a long scene of a dog fight was difficult to read. But throughout, over and under all the “tough” stuff, there is a brightness to Esch’s voice, and a fierce love among all these characters (including the bond between Skeet and China) that made me feel lifted up, not beaten down, by this book. I feel it gets a bad rap, and that people will avoid it if all they hear is what a tough book it is. It’s rewarding and insightful with a tenderness and sweetness throughout that are resilient in the face of so much. I was sad to see it lose to Lightning Rods, but am so very glad to have finally read it.

A friend lent me her copy of Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, which was in the first round of this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books. I found it a surprisingly non-fast read for such a short book; it’s only 163 pages. This isn’t, however, a criticism, merely a description. The few pages are not packed with words, but what words there are, are packed with meaning and provocation. An ongoing meditation on truth, memory, history, identity, and age, I was still ruminating on what I thought was its ending when I read this spoiler-ful excellent analysis by SFP at Pages Turned.

at the moment, I think the sense I had of the ending was a false one. The new ambiguity makes the book all the more interesting. And it was pretty fascinating to begin with. I may need to read it again.

Generally, I am not a fan of the Best American Series. While I did enjoy the 2002 Non Required Reading, the 1995 Best American Short Stories collection lives on in my memory like a bad smell. When I worked at a used book store, I can’t remember how many times that particular volume came in and then sat on the shelves till it was clearanced. NOT a keeper.

So I had some trepidation when one of by book group colleagues picked The Best American Comics 2011. Because while I love the medium of comics, I often don’t care for the type of comics I see as often gathered in these anthologies, which I think of–derogatorily, reductively, and unfairly I’ll admit–as the weird ones.

So I prepared myself for some weird stuff. And it was in there–one entry truly repulsed me with its art, a couple others with their subject matter. But I noticed that even in some stories I disliked, there was some element of visual storytelling that impressed me or made me think, as in Kevin Mutch’s “Blue Note”, Gabby Schulz’s “New Year’s Eve 2004″, and Chris Ware’s “Jordan W. Lint to the Age of 65.”

The majority left me cold. Some of the selections were excerpts of larger works, and hard to process because of this. Unlike a short story, they were not meant to stand alone.

More positively, in one case, a comic that I’d previously not loved–Ganges–utterly charmed me. A handful made me interested enough to look into their artists’ other works, like Gabrielle Bell’s “Manifestation”, Peter and Maria Hoey’s “Anatomy of a Pratfall”, Jillian Tamaki’s “Domestic Men of Mystery” (and her lovely wraparound cover), Kate Beaton’s “Great Gatsby”, and Joey Allison Sayers’ “Pet Cat”. Paul Pope and Joe Sacco’s work I’ve admired before, even if I’m not a regular reader.

There was a long list in the back of other notable books that the editor urged readers to seek out, as the book selections were her admittedly subjective choices. One thing my book group noticed was that 9 of 27 included sex of some sort. For what it’s worth, 7 of those were on my dislike list.

In the end:

Liked: 8
Didn’t move me:11
Disliked: 8

So, on balance it was only OK. Borrow this one, don’t buy it.

From the list at the back, some recommendations I echo: The Unwritten, Criminal, Mercury by Hope Larson, Scott Pilgrim by Bryan Lee O’Malley, any of the multiple permutations of Gaiman’s The Dream Hunters, and David Small’s Stitches.

I wrote last week about how I read a Shakespeare play, since I was about to see a production of As You Like It, and wanted to read the play in advance, to have a cushion of understanding to underpin my viewing experience, though a good production will make the Shakespearean prose accessible by the acting.

We saw a show by the group Ten Thousand Things, which we love for several reasons. They offer ticketed performances, but also offer free community shows for low-income, rehab, and prison populations. They feel Shakespeare and live drama shouldn’t be a privilege. Back in Shakespeare’s day there were cheap seats, but those are hard to come by today, and easy to see why in the audience, where my husband and I, 40 and 45 respectively, were in the tiny minority of “young” people.

Ten Thousand Things also performs in the round in a big room, so there’s a square of seats around the central play area, which was in a big room, not a “proper” theater. The lights are up, the actors regularly break the fourth wall, and the audience is not just up close, but often IN the performance. They also use a minimum of creative props, which really differentiates the experience from seeing a movie, urging me to use my imagination to bring closure to the settings.

So, the text of As You Like It, then. The play has a lot of similarities to other comedies, especially Twelfth Night: cross dressing, banished Duke, pastoral setting. And of course, a bunch of marriages at the end.

Here are the lines you already know that you might not remember came from THIS play:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players. (2.7.140-1)

Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love. (4.1.97-9)

An interesting exploration of women, and gender roles, plus it’s fun and funny to boot.

I organize a local book group, and while researching our January book, Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor, I came across this blog entry by author Marlon James. I’d heard of him the year before when his Book of Night Women was a contender in the Tournament of Books and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at Macalester, near where I live, and one of my writing friends is working with him in a writing program through the Loft. So picking one of his books to follow O’Connor’s Wise Blood seemed an obvious choice, and John Crow’s Devil, with its dueling preachers in 50’s Jamaica, made an excellent contrast.

No living thing flew over the village of Gibbeah, neither fowl, nor dove, nor crow. Yet few looked above, terrified should an omen come in a shriek or flutter. Nothing flew but dust. It slipped through window blades, door cracks, and the lifting clay of rooftops. Dust coated house and ground, shed and tree, machine and vehicle with a blanket of gray. Dust hid blood, but not remembrance.

Gibbeah, named after a town in the book of Joshua from the Bible, is a tiny town on a small island, ridden with poverty and secrets. Two men occupy the foreground of the book, while two women support them in the background.

Pastor Bligh is also known as the Rum Preacher, though his drink of choice is whiskey. Yet they were “relieved by Pastor Bligh’s behavior…So tormented was he by his own sin that he could never convict them of theirs.” The pastor is a drunk, but not a bad man. “In a town that preferred things black or white, grayness such as his was not welcome.”

It’s no surprise, then, when the villagers are swayed by the appearance of Apostle York, “the other, who led them instead to a light blacker than the thickest darkness” and who “came like a thief on a night colored silver.” He preaches fire and brimstone, and literally kicks Bligh out of his own church.

York is abetted by Lucinda, whose history of abuse and ill treatment makes her worship of the Apostle easier to understand. Bligh is taken in by a widow who feeds him and nurses him as he detoxes from alcohol.

Mr Garvey is the town’s owner, “new kind of Massa”, a “black bastard” who “still had a birthright to money.” Prior to the conflict, Garvey appeared at the church, five mornings a year plus at “funerals of those of stature or those who died under tragic circumstances. Funeral was spectacle in Gibbeah.” Once York appears, Garvey is nowhere to be seen. Is he awaiting the outcome of the clash between York and a soon-rejuvenated Bligh?

Throughout, there is a chorus of town voices, written in a challenging-to-parse Jamaican patois. This shows the town’s point of view, while also injecting the grim narrative with some much-needed humor. Also throughout are birds that are not what they seem. John Crows are vultures, not crows, and its hard to know whose leadership they support. Doves, too, defy expectations in this violent and surprising story.

This is an extraordinary violent story set in Jamaica, which has one of the highest murder rates and is known as one of the most homophobic places on earth. Any redemption in the story comes at great and terrible cost, likely a result of the prejudice and poverty that pervade the fictional Gibbeah of the 50’s and, it could be argued, the Jamaica of the present.

Reaction to the book in our reading group was split, with most disliking it and criticizing it for its unrelenting violence. Yet I appreciated reading such an in-my-face novel of racism and religion after O’Connor’s different take on similar themes of leadership, religion, sin, and redemption.

Released to tremendous reviews last year, Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife is a contender in this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books and was nominated for the National Book Award, which went to another ToB contender, Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward.

The Tiger’s Wife is narrated by Natalia, a young female doctor on an aid mission in the still contentious area of the Balkans in former Yugoslavia. She is informed over the phone by her grandmother that her beloved grandfather is dead, somewhat mysteriously in a small town not far from where Natalia will be working. The narrative is split in many directions. We have Natalia’s memory of her grandfather, her present situation as a scientist dealing with local superstitions, a girl-detective aspect as she tries to learn the details of her grandfather’s death, and two stories from her grandfather’s past, one of a deathless, the other of the titular character. It’s ambitious, and intriguing in its contrasts of modern/historic, scientific/mythic, young/old, all grounded in a country ravaged by war and conflict. But in the end, I don’t think the book succeeded.

Despite many characters and countless sad circumstance, I never felt greatly moved. There were myriad characters, many of whom got pages of backstory, yet I didn’t feel particularly engaged by any of them, even the narrator. As I read through the book, I found myself reading to finish, not reading to read. The stories were fine, and I was mildly curious about the details of the grandfather’s death, but that was about it. My impression by the end was that it is a book by a talented, ambitious author who does not yet have the sophistication and maturity to pull off a work of satisfying depth. In this, it reminded me of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, in which a violent history is retold through the modern young narrator by a modern young author.

I suspect that the hype over this book makes my disappointment in it a bit more keen, and I wonder, as I did with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, how much the youth and beauty of the author contributed to the hoo-ha.

A fixture on many of last year’s Best-of lists, Swamplandia! was going to get read sooner or later. But when it was picked by both Books and Bars and The Mornings News, well, that just made it jump the queue.

Swamplandia! is a Florida novelty park owned by the Bigtree family. The park’s star is the mother, Hilola, who swims with and wrestles alligators. When she dies, the rest of the family falls apart in various and interesting ways. The chapters alternate between 1st person by thirteen-year-old Ava, the youngest daughter, and 3rd person about Kiwi, the seventeen-year-old son. A large section in the middle of the book had me anxious for a long time to see what would happen. It took some strength of will to accede to the intervening alternating chapters, and not to groan when chapters ended but the suspense was sustained. I was impressed with that continuity of tension, as well as the fully engaging characters. I also appreciated that Russell left many interesting questions open for the reader to decide.

Swamplandia! goes up against Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table in round 1 of The Morning News Tournament of Books, to be judged by Haven Kimmel. Now I’m on to The Tiger’s Wife, which my friend Amy lent me. I’m going to try not to go crazy about the Tournament of Books this year, but I really enjoyed The Sisters Brothers and Swamplandia!.

I put The Sisters Brothers on my request list at the library even before it was picked as one of the contenders for The Morning News Tournament of Books 2012. (I think it was recommended at Good Reads by trusted reading friends Kate and Patricia.) So I was doubly glad when it finally came into the library. (Especially as the library has now cut off my crazy requesting at the knees by limiting the number of requests to 30, down from 100. Stupid budget cuts.)

Two brothers, Eli and Charley, are on a mission in the mid-1800s Pacific Northwest. This is a western, though one blurber called it cowboy noir. Aren’t all westerns kind of cowboy noir? In any case, it has shooting, crime, horses, weird people, and only a few women. Not too different in those respects from Lonesome Dove. But where that was an epic, this is a ripping yarn, pulling me through from beginning to end at a breakneck pace. One brother, Eli, is the narrator, and for all the bad things he does, is a tremendously endearing character. This was a ripping, tragi-comic yarn. I look forward to seeing how it plays in the Tournament of Books. It’s going up against critical darling Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, judged by geek icon Wil Wheaton. (Yes, _that_ Wil Wheaton, aka Wesley Crusher and now on Big Bang Theory.) It’ll be an interesting match.

Two things: I hate the new TPB cover. I really liked the HC one. Also, by searching at Amazon for Sisters Brothers, I got the book I was looking for, and then a lot of unpleasant other books. Yikes. Don’t let the kids try this at home.

In addition to Sweet Tooth, one of my favorite comic book series in The Unwritten, a twisty take on literature and pop culture that has gone from meta to hyper meta in the latest volume 5, The Unwritten: On To Genesis.

Tom Taylor is the real human (or is he?) who inspired his father to pen a Harry Potter-esque series of novels about Tommy Taylor. Along with sidekicks Lizzie Hexam and Richie Savoy, they try to dodge the bad guys (a meta-literary cabal, enforced by a guy named Pullman, who can turn things into fiction with his touch) while attempting to figure out who the bad guys are, why they’re after them, and well, quite a lot of things. This volume takes a detour into comics history (pleasantly reminding me of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) and noir.

It’s engaging, thought-provoking, and I really hope the author, Mike Carey is going to be able to pull these many fascinating strings together, but even if not, it’s a grand ride.