Like a lot of people who’ll be picking up this book soon, I came to Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things by way of the delightfully daffy film, and my main expectation was that I would find a book that had very little in common with the black comedy and sexual politics of the movie. Instead, it turns out that what I saw is, in some ways, a very faithful adaptation of the core narrative of Poor Things – that is, a feminist, off-kilter, funny retelling of Frankenstein in which a dead woman is given the brain of her unborn daughter and set loose in the world, resulting in a social satire with withering looks at class warfare, sexism, philosophical apathy, all while advocating for a way to find change in the world – oh, and a lot of focus on rejecting social norms around all sorts of things, including sex and sexuality. But what I wasn’t ready for is how meta and postmodern Poor Things get, as that tale is a nested narrative, one that lies within a fictional recounting of Glasgow historical papers and is countered by a lengthy rebuttal by a character who says that it’s all garbage – and even points to Frankenstein as the logical inspiration for the story. And did I mention that there are a slew of historical footnotes, some of which are real and some of which aren’t? So, yes, in some ways, if you’ve seen the film Poor Things, you know the broad strokes of Gray’s book, but you’re not ready for the playful ways that he toys with the reader, throwing into sharp relief commentary about society and women’s roles while also lamenting the state of Scottish history, mocking academics who are willing to go to bat for absurd beliefs, and even finding more of a melancholy core in the story than you realized was there before. It’s a complex high-wire act of a book, but one whose ambition pays off; it allows Gray to deliver his inventive spin on a classic while also interrogating it and his own beliefs, all while having fun with the audience at every step. I had a blast with it, and I hope that the film brings other people to the book as it did me. Rating: **** ½
I have become a pretty massive fan of the work of James Baldwin, but I have to concede that of his three writing mediums – essays, novels, and short stories – short stories tend to be his least effective overall (with my own preference leaning towards his essays). To be fair, a weak entry by James Baldwin is still a massive success by most metrics, and so it’s not as if I’m going to tell you that Going to Meet the Man, a collection of Baldwin’s short work, is a bad read. Indeed, it’s fascinating as a window into the writer’s process, as you can see his craft developing over the course of the stories, as well as seeing his interest return to works he’d already written. “The Rockpile” finds Baldwin returning to the characters of Go Tell It on the Mountain to another tale of favoritism and male relationships, while “The Outing” (written prior to the novel’s publication) feels like a dry run for some of the dynamics of that masterful novel. And as the stories progress – they’re more or less arranged chronologically – you can feel Baldwin’s comfort with prose increasing, as when his description of a musical performance in “Sonny’s Blues” floored me as the storytelling gave way to pure imagery and poetry. You can see so much of Baldwin here, in its tales of expats living in Paris, rejected sons, Black men and women struggling with the gulf between race relations in America and the relative freedom of Europe, and more, and it’s all as expertly crafted as you would expect from Baldwin, bringing nuance and complexity to every interaction and every person – it’s all just that the brevity cuts off Baldwin from the strength he has to evoke so much more scope and ambition. Mind you, the short story form also gives him the freedom to explore, as in the title story, which plunges him into the mind of a racist white sheriff whose own hatred might spring from a haunting childhood memory – a story you can’t really imagine Baldwin doing in longform, even as it reflects ideas and beliefs from his essays. Going to Meet the Man is far from bad – Baldwin is too talented, too literate, too humane and too human to write anything bad – but it feels like a medium that is less conducive to his prodigious talents than his novels and his essays. It’s still beautiful reading, though. Rating: **** ½
My only exposure to the work of Christopher Priest was his novel The Prestige. which I read – and thoroughly enjoyed – before the release of Christopher Nolan’s masterful adaptation. But with Priest’s recent passing, I thought it was time to try another book of his, and while I can totally see why Neil Gaiman would call The Glamour his favorite of Priest’s books, I can’t say I was able to fully love the book the way he and so many others have. The Glamour is – in the early stages, at least – the story of Richard Grey, a news/documentary cameraman who is recovering in a hospital after being caught in a terrorist explosion. Richard has little memory of the months leading up to the explosion, and so when a woman arrives claiming to be his girlfriend, he can’t remember her…but he can’t deny that he’s drawn to her, either. From there, things get odd, as the book starts to drift into the direction of magical realism and becomes an exploration of memory, identity, losing yourself in society, how we repaint our own lives, and even authorial intent, all in the guise of a story that defies easy categorization. I found myself oddly compelled by The Glamour and its ideas, but as the book came to an end, I felt less and less satisfied – I felt as though I read a book that was full of concepts and musings, but never coalesced into anything that made cohesive and cumulative sense. Each of the sections of the book feels (intentionally, I’d argue) disconnected from each other, and while that makes narrative sense, those connections never quite came together by the end, making me feel like the book was throwing a lot of things at the wall without worrying about whether they stuck. I didn’t dislike the book, to be sure, but I left it a little befuddled and frustrated, feeling like I read something that should have been more than it was. I have one other Priest in my TBR pile, and I’m still going to check it out, but I can’t help but wonder if this or The Prestige is going to be my more typical reaction to his works. Rating: *** ½
Most of my exposure to Ray Bradbury has been via his more genre-oriented fare – an area which I tend to prefer to nostalgia and overly poetic prose about small-town America – and so I’ve been putting off Dandelion Wine for a bit now, expecting to bounce off of it given my aforementioned aversion to its topics and mood. And yet, despite those misgivings, I couldn’t help but find myself caught up in Dandelion Wine, which has an odder spirit to it than I expected, mixing its sepia-toned memories of a long-forgotten summer with glimpses of magic and even some horror, as Bradbury makes use of a lot of his previous written stories (including “The Ravine,” which I always liked) to create a vivid summer via a collage effect of interrelated – and unrelated – tales. I didn’t know that Dandelion Wine was a fix-up novel when I picked it up, and oddly, that would have made me more inclined to pick it up; what it means is that Bradbury is ever drifting here, mixing and matching stories without worry about pigeonholing himself beyond “summer through the eyes of children in the early 20th century.” Maybe that means memories of the past through an elderly general; maybe that means an unlikely romance separated by a generation; maybe that means a serial killer in the outskirts of town; and maybe it just means the departure of a close friend without warning. Somehow, it all works, and while the prose is a little heavy-handed when it comes to the poetry, it all works and creates something (to steal a descriptor from a friend) “utterly lovely.” Nostalgia may be a toxic impulse, as John Hodgman says, but there’s also something beautiful about being reminded about the limitless possibilities of youth, and if Bradbury is a little syrupy at times, it all still works and gives you something whose charm and simplicity is hard to not be won over by. Rating: **** ½
I remember hearing the “hook” for Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman when I was much younger as part of Paul Harvey’s “The Rest of the Story” series – that one of the leading contributors to the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was eventually revealed to be a patient in an asylum, given what amounted to a life sentence by reason of insanity for the murder he committed. It’s a story that always intrigued me, and The Professor and the Madman does it justice, essentially taking a dual-threaded approach not unlike The Devil in the White City, diving into the origins of and work on the dictionary, while also telling the story of Dr. Minor and his illness and delusions. Winchester handles both halves the books adroitly and capably, humanizing all involved, helping to establish just what a massive undertaking the OED really was, working to understand Dr. Minor, and never forgetting that for all of the accomplishments of the book, there is a murder victim at its core. That he does all of these things in such a relatively tight, lean book is really pretty astonishing, but somehow he manages, and the result is a rich piece of historical nonfiction. As a word lover, his insights into the history of dictionaries, the struggles that came with the scope of the OED, the details of the tasks and the difficulties – all of that is genuinely compelling and interesting, and turns a dictionary from something we take for granted into something far more incredible. And with Minor, Winchester works equally well, digging beyond the sensationalism of the time to try to understand his illness as well as possible, giving us sympathy for him while never ignoring what he had done. It all works remarkably well and never overstays its welcome; while I had simply hoped for more understanding of this famous tale, what I got was a genuinely great piece of nonfiction that reminds me why I love books like this. Rating: **** ½
Tana French’s The Witch Elm was her first step away from the “Dublin Murder Squad” books, and somewhere along the way, I had gotten it in my head that it wasn’t a particularly loved book by her standards. (I think a lot of this comes back to a conversation with a friend whose opinions I trust, maybe?) So I went into The Witch Elm prepared to be let down for the first time in my experiences with French…and instead, found something that’s as good as anything else she’s written, giving me a murder mystery that also becomes a meditation on memory and how we see ourselves – and the realization that sometimes we might be the villain in other people’s stories without realizing it. The Witch Elm follows a young man named Toby, who finds himself deeply damaged – physically, psychologically, and mentally – after a brutal beating received during a burglary. He retreats to his uncle’s house, there to give his uncle company and support as he copes with a terminal illness…but the discovery of a human skeleton behind the house turns all of that upside down. There’s a lot going on in The Witch Elm (maybe slightly too much; the final act gets a little busy at times), but French anchors it all with Toby, who’s never quite as sympathetic as he hopes he is; he’s a spoiled kid who’s never really suffered, and the subtext of the book – which soon becomes text – is Toby’s memory gaps slowly giving way to a re-evaluation of the person he always thought that he was in high school and in his family. French has always loved an unreliable narrator, but Toby might be the best use of that to date, with even our narrator himself realizing that his assumptions are built on sand. The murder at the center of the book is compelling (with a satisfying resolution), the characters three-dimensional and human across the board, and French’s revelations all feel right by the end, tying the book into thematic conclusions as well as plot ones. Yes, it gets maybe a little busy by the end, but that’s far from a book ruiner; instead, it’s just another brilliant book by French, who has never let me down in any of her eight books- and I’m more than excited to get to number nine. Rating: **** ½
From what I’ve read, Elmore Leonard frequently points to Tishomingo Blues as one of his personal favorites of his books, saying that it was one of the most fun books to write. And I can definitely see that aspect of the book; Tishomingo Blues is filled with colorful characters, from a champion stunt diver to a slew of overly committed Civil War re-enactors to a former baseball player capable of making every conversation about his own career – and those don’t even touch on the hyper-confident figure who strolls into the middle of all the chaos to play his own game. So, yeah, the dialogue and the banter was a lot of fun here…but I am not sure that I ever quite made sense of Tishomingo Blues‘s plot, which throws together all of those elements into…something, I guess, but I am not sure I managed to keep all of the threads separate. At his best, Leonard has always been more about character and dialogue than story, but he has a way of making those plots work anyways, feeling like a natural evolution of all the characters in play and their own needs. Tishomingo Blues feels more contrived and self-consciously “colorful,” with a lot of elements that feel like they’re in here because Leonard thought they would be fun. I didn’t hate the book, but I found myself thinking of it a lot like you would an entertaining sitcom episode – sure, I laughed and had a good time, but nothing there really felt consequential, and it certainly didn’t feel particularly memorable. Rating: *** ½
I first read A Prayer for Owen Meany in high school, and for many years after, I would call it my favorite book of all time. But now it’s been more than 25 years since I read it, and I couldn’t help but worry about how well it would hold up after all this time. Luckily, Owen Meany is every bit as rich, humane, thoughtful, funny, and thoughtful as I remember it being; while I could see some of the knocks people might have against it as an adult reader, I can’t deny that I forgot how lush and dense its world was, and what a pleasure it was to meet its characters – not just the diminutive title character, but rebellious cousin Hester, a pair of wholly opposite religious leaders, a controlling headmaster, a kind stepfather, and so many more. Owen Meany is a book about a lot of things – about America’s involvement in Vietnam, about the Reagan years and what happens once we as a nation lost our innocent belief in things, about childhood friendships, about grief and loss – but more than anything else, it’s a book about faith and how we deal with it: how a miracle doesn’t always lead to a conversation, how destiny isn’t always welcome, how God might give us a purpose we never understand, and how we wrestle with all of those things in the face of a world that’s fundamentally unfair and frequently awful. John Irving handles those heavy matters carefully and adroitly, thinking about all of it and wrangling with complex questions without an answer, and giving a book that feels both religious and agnostic, that believes in an order to the universe and also feels despair and abandonment at a world that never really makes sense. That he somehow turns this into a frequently laugh-out-loud book (the Christmas pageant scene alone, just to name one of so many highlights) that never neglects its melancholy leanings is a hell of an accomplishment, but what really makes Owen Meany so memorable is its characters – and, to be sure, its ending, which pulls all of the book together so effortlessly that all you can focus on is the tragedy of it all. I don’t know that it’s still my favorite book, but it’s still one that I really love after all this time. Rating: *****
Umney's Alley 