Faithful Place by Tana French

Ah, the cop with a traumatic past. It's a classic. Bonus points for having a dysfunctional family and a past relationship that has ruined his ability to connect with any other woman. Super double bonus points if he's a loose cannon at work.

Anyway, such a figure has been the basis for many a beloved thriller/crime novel, and Tana French's Faithful Place is no exception. The rogue cop in question is Frank Mackey, a minor character from French's second novel, The Likeness. Frank is an undercover specialist who has no fear of mingling with drug dealers and Dublin thugs, but is terrified of his own dysfunctional family. You can guess who, then, is the driving force behind his narrative.

Everything starts when Frank gets word from his sister (the one member of his family he hasn't completely shunned) that a suitcase was found in a crumbling house in the Old Neighborhood(tm). The suitcase just happens to belong to Rosie Daly, the girl with whom teenage Frank had made secret plans to run away from home in 1986. Rosie never showed up that night, and a wounded Frank moved on by trying to disappear (almost literally) into police work and an unhappy marriage. It's not an ideal life, but it kinda works for him, and he gets along on the thrills of his job and the genuine happiness his young daughter brings him. Then the suitcase turns up, and all hell (read: introspection) breaks loose when he's force to go back to his the neighborhood (Faithful Place) to figure out what the hell happened to Rosie. Did she ditch their plans and their ferry tickets to run off to London by herself? Was she a casualty of the ugly, booze-soaked underbelly of their blue-collar cul-de-sac?

The book moves back and forth between the ordinary love story of two blue-collar kids wanting to escape the Dublin projects (which makes it more Bono than Bon Jovi) and Frank's present-day struggle to accept the various possibilities of Rosie's abandonment. And looking into Rosie's disappearance means hanging around the old 'hood, which hasn't changed much--and his family, who have changed even less. At first, you think Frank might be exaggerating about the awfulness of the Mackeys--but then the obvious resentment they all feel (alternately shrieking and simmering) starts to create pressure in your own head by about a hundred pages in, and you start to understand why Frank would rather be punched in the face than go home for Sunday dinners. Drinking, emotional cruelty, neighborhood brawls, this crowd has it all.

As with her previous books, French's best work is in her characters. Frank is obnoxious, but likable (something I didn't think was possible after his first appearance in The Likeness). Even his collectively awful family has some positives as well, undercutting Frank's characterization of them as total savages. Rosie comes off as a little, well, rosy, but that's probably to be expected when she exists mostly as a flashback of first love.

And I still love her method of series-building--creating place and mood without confining her fictional world to a single voice/perspective. Of the three novels, I think Faithful Place is the best-written, start to finish. Frank's arc is most satisfying of all the protagonists', and French doesn't let the plot kind of sputter out like she does with the first two. This one does deal more in cliches (the aforementioned short-fused cop, the heavy-drinking Irish family, etc.), but the writing is layered, and constructed tight enough to distract from that. French works hard to refine familiar elements of crime/detective fiction, and mixes it all up so inextricably in her characters that it feels fresh. My biggest regret with this one is that now it'll be at least a year or two until her next one comes along.

One Day by David Nicholls

If you have a one-night stand with someone who becomes your best friend, is that a touching story of human connection, or a lesson in how not to have a one-night stand? Well, both.

One Day, a novel by David Nicholls, explores the twenty-ish-year relationship of Dexter and Emma, two young Brits who cross paths for the first time on the night they graduate from college in 1988. The book checks in on them every subsequent year on the same date, July 15 (St. Swithin's Day). (There's a reason behind this structure, which you find considerably later in the narrative.) After an exceptionally awkward--but cute--night together, they find they can't cut each other loose or make the decision to become lovers for real. So they take the platonic path by default.

Dexter, a charmed kid all around, heads out on postgrad travel to figure things out (read: spend his parents' money while "finding himself" in India, Dublin, Venice, etc.). Meanwhile, Emma, an earnest and practical suburban girl, is stuck with a more pedestrian self-discovery process in England. But they stay in touch--Dexter's brief, cheerful postcards cross paths with her long, self-consciously cute letters for that first year. And somehow, they end up as each other's de facto best friend.

The next few years find Dexter's life moving upward (he's got television career opportunities and more girls than he can handle), and Emma's settling in somewhere around "aimless despair." There are some painful near-misses, as they alternate being the one who contemplates pursuing something deeper (mostly on her part, though there's an especially cringe-inducing letter that Dexter decides not to send). But for the most part, they settle into a pattern: Dexter sleeps with anything attractive that crosses his path, and takes it for granted that "good old Em" will be there whenever he needs companionship (unless a better sex or party option comes up). Emma unintentionally keeps all her other relationships at arm-distance in case Dexter changes his mind. Once they're both settled in London, it becomes a form of "just friends" kabuki, with specific rules and expectations.

Over the years, their circumstances shift and their relationship shifts (spouses, baby, career success, career failure, an estrangement, etc.), but their codependence is such that you know that no matter how douchey Dexter gets (and it gets pretty heinous) or how neurotic Emma gets, there's no walking away from that shared history. It's an honest, sometimes brutal portrait of a relationship between two people who know on some level that they need to be together--but just can't verbalize it or push it to the next level. And the best thing that Nicholls does is make Dexter and Emma appealing and funny enough that even in their most unpleasant individual moments, you still want them to get together (or kill the other one once and for all) on the next July 15th. The ebbs and flows, like and dislike, lust and meh, feel awfully real as the advantage pings back and forth between them over the years.

Also entertaining is the time span: 1988 - 2007. It's basically a rousing game of "hey, remember the 90s"? Dexter becomes a VJ-type microcelebrity who hosts various loud pop culture shows on TV. Emma works at an obnoxious American Tex-Mex chain restaurant in London, and dates an aspiring stand-up comedian who bases his material on observational humor. From the clothes to the hair, the little touches are cute.

The writing itself is solid and Hornby-esque: engaging, full of self-amusing references, and extremely readable. The structure, the once-a-year check-in, keeps the narrative from getting too bunchy. And it lets Nicholls keep the sentimentality to a minimum (until the somewhat maudlin ending, which didn't thrill me). In fact, some of the cuts and revelations are flat-out merciless, because they have to be. I appreciated the fact that this forces the writer and reader to look at the long-term implications for both Dexter and Emma, not just the endless present that most novels would pick. And it'll translate well into its movie incarnation--especially because the story's not as predictable as you might expect.

Overall, a satisfying read.

Parts I liked:

"She had imagined this arrangement to be sophisticated, modern, a new design for living. But so much effort is required to pretend that they don't want to be together that it has recently seemed inevitable that one of them will crack. She just hadn't expected it to be Dexter."

"Sometimes, she thought, she missed the intensity....of the early days of their friendship. She remembered writing ten-page letters late into the night; insane, passionate things full of dopey sentiment and barely hidden meanings, exclamation marks and underlining. For a while she had written daily postcards too, on top of the hour-long phone calls just before bed. That time in the flat in Dalston when they had stayed up talking and listening to records, only stopping when the sun began to rise, or at his parents' house, swimming in the river on New Year's Day, or that afternoon drinking absinthe in the secret bar in Chinatown; all of these moments and more were recorded and stored in notebooks and letters and wads of photographs, endless photographs. there was a time, it must have been in the early nineties, when they were barely able to pass a photo-booth without cramming inside it, because they had yet to take each other's permanent presence for granted."

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

If you've ever wondered what keeps a friendship together over the years, I don't recommend going to an Ian McEwan book for answers--the response could be "banging the same chick" or "not much."

McEwan's Amsterdam, the latest Jacob-Katy book club novel, delves into issues like the nature of friendship, as mentioned, but also explores what happens when spite bubbles up through the veneer of civility and poisons everything. It's an interesting character study of what people do when petty disagreements are inflamed further by ego and self-justification.

The novel focuses on Clive (a composer working on a major piece to celebrate the upcoming millenium) and Vernon (an editor trying desperately to prop up a flailing newspaper), two old friends who come together for the funeral of Molly Lane. Molly wasn't just a mutual acquaintance--at various times in her life, she'd dated both men. But at some point their shared lust for (and ultimate loss of) Molly turned into a slightly bitchy, though apparently genuine friendship. They've also bonded over their joint contempt for two other guys connected to Molly: her last husband and another ex, a vaguely insufferable British politician. After Molly's death, the four men come together for one last show of (subdued) macho one-upsmanship, before returning to their lives.

In the funeral's aftermath, terrified of their own mortality, Vernon and Clive make a pact to be there for one another if things ever get as bad as they did for Molly, who died from a rapid and grotesque degenerative disease. Meanwhile, Molly's husband presents Vernon with a shocking memento from his wife's belongings: pictures of Julian, the politician, in a politically embarrassing position. Vernon struggles with the possibility of saving his career by publishing such a sensationalistic story--but at the cost of ruining a man's life. As Vernon tries to move ahead with the photos, against the nagging voices telling him otherwise, there are some interesting Julius Caesar-esque intrigues in his newspaper office. He looks for some guidance from his friend, but gets little except testy opposition from Clive, who is increasingly consumed by the symphony he's trying to compose.

As Vernon bumbles around trying to justify his decision, Clive starts sacrificing everything to create his musical masterpiece--and makes a few moral blunders of his own. The stressed-out crankiness of both men escalates into an overblown fight, which leads to regrettable decisions that undo pretty much all of the goodwill they'd built in their post-Molly lives.

The book is short, and very blunt. The story never ventures far from its central line, and McEwan doesn't waste time in pushing the narrative to a vicious and somewhat surprising (if a little underbaked) ending. I think he could have fleshed out the story a little more--and could have illustrated Molly a little better, too, before dropping her almost entirely from the story. McEwan's female characters tend to have a bit of a glossed-over appearance: doting, attractive, and game for the male chatacters' sexual whims. They're plot levers. But what I like most about McEwan's writing is in full effect: his sharp and perfectly-phrased sentences, as well as characters you can't shake right away.

Amsterdam is one of the shorter and less complicated books in the book club oeuvre, but was fairly successful. And the discussion had no friendship-ending arguments, so I don't think we need to worry about going the way of Clive and Vernon--at least not for a few years yet.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith

Some people think President Lincoln was gay. Some think he was a patronizer of prostitutes. Some think he was a Republican. Lots of theories, lots of dubiousness. But we can shut all the rest down, y'all, 'cause I think we have a winner: Abraham Lincoln was a vampire hunter, and that was the consuming issue of his life.

Okay, not really. (But this seems just as plausible as the idea that he was ever in the same general political room as Dick Cheney, no?) And it's the central idea of Seth Grahame-Smith's novel Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. The book essentially takes what Grahame-Smith started in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and applies it to a public domain life instead of a public domain Victorian novel.

As someone who would put Lincoln in her top five presidents, but isn't necessarily a presidential purist, I liked it. I think there are respectful ways to be playful and cheeky with historical content, and that's what Grahame-Smith does--he takes something you already know, tweaks it a little, and makes it seem fresh without undercutting the original. In P&P&Z's case, that means channeling Austen-style feminist rage through flesh-eating monsters. In Lincoln's case, it's pulling a context (vampire domination) over the crushing inhumanity of the slavery issue. (Slaves are essentially captive prey for vampires, leading Lincoln to conclude that African slavery ends up enslaving all Americans.)

The most successful part of the book is that Grahame-Smith weaves everything together so that you tend to forget where the real threads stop and the absurd new ones begin. Like, I know that Real Abe Lincoln suffered some heavy losses in his life (mother, sister, girlfriend, children, etc.). But I also don't stop to question it when I read that his mother's "milk sickness" was really the act of a malicious vampire. Or that Jefferson Davis was fighting the Union to serve evil vampire overlords who viewed Southern-style repression as the way to keep humans in check. I don't think twice when I think of Abe and his good buddy, Joshua Speed, fighting vampires side by side (though honestly, that one might be because I find their rumored real-life hooker-based shenanigans to be pretty icky).

The least successful part of the book is that it takes 300+ pages to hammer this singular "what if?" point. The book opens with a great set piece that explains how the author (or "biographer") came to possess Lincoln's secret journals and was chosen to spread this "truth" to the world. And the re-framing of Lincoln's childhood and young adulthood as a 19th century Buffy Summers has its charm (there's even an Edgar Allen Poe cameo!). But by the time the umpteenth Lincoln loved one is killed by a vampire, and the Civil War is raging, with supernatural-tinged casualties at Bull Run, you're kind of over it. And so is the author, I think. But such is the problem with taking existing material for your base: you have to run its predetermined course. And any purported Lincoln biography has to end at Ford's Theater, if you're really going to commit to your conceit.

Overall, I'd recommend, especially for summer reading. No one will mistake the the scholarship for Doris Kearns Goodwin, but at least now we know that one of our presidents was committed to saving us from the scourge of vampires (thanks for nothing, Millard Fillmore).

Better Know a Classic: The Great Gatsby

Every couple of years, I reread The Great Gatsby. It's my favorite book, but that's not really why I keep picking it up--I've had plenty of favorites over the years that I don't really turn back to, for fear that they won't hold up. (I've been avoiding the Memoirs of a Geisha reread for pretty much that reason.) But I know that Gatsby will. And it never disappoints--it's still as close to a perfect novel as I've ever read.

I didn't always feel that way. The first time I read it, in an "eh, it's a classic and I should do it" fit of self-improvement in high school, I wasn't enamored. But then it was taught in one of the craziest lit classes I ever took in college (American Lit with a certifiable professor), something clicked, and I fell in love. (That's kind of how I roll; it's always the second glance that gets me.) And each time I read it, I notice something different--a turn of phrase that sparkles, a subtlety of character, or some random little moment that never jumped out at me before.

I think the narrator, Nick Carraway, has benefited the most from these multiple looks. First I thought he was too reticent; then I thought he was using the Daisy-Gatsby drama to cover up his own latent crush on Gatsby; and eventually I just decided he was unreliable. But I don't think so anymore. Maybe it's because he's 30 and I'm pushing it as well, but now I think he just kind of patches things together as best he can, as the only sane person on Long Island. He's very efficient, that Nick. He keeps everything moving along at a good clip, hustling through back stories that would have been fifty pages of exposition in another author's book (cough*Faulkner*cough).

I also feel more lenient toward Daisy these days. She's still a jerk, don't get me wrong--having a voice "full of money" doesn't excuse pitting men against one another for sport, or mowing down your husband's mistress--but I don't think she's malicious. She's bored and unhappy and desperate, with childlike comprehension of consequences. And without actual stuff to do (how did people entertain themselves in 1925 when gin wasn't handy?), it's easier to see how and why she lets things get so far out of hand, so fast. There's also the fact that everyone's pretty much egging her on, something I never really noticed before. No one (even Nick, with his constant disapproval) really stops to say, "Hmm, maybe you shouldn't cheat on your husband with the rich guy with the crazy eyes."

And I think the part that amazes me most is how wall-to-wall good the writing is. Nearly every sentence is airtight and eloquent. There's no questionable extravagance in a book that's all about questionable extravagance. So this book is as much a triumph of editing (both Fitzgerald's and, presumably, Maxwell Perkins's) as it is of the writing. (And having dealt now with some...colorful authors myself as an editor, I appreciate the wrangling it must have taken to get Fitzgerald to turn in anything on time and in decent shape.)

All in all, very happy with the biennial visit to West Egg.

Some of my favorite parts, this round:

"The bar is in full swing and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names."

"She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented 'place' that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village--appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand."

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

When the shortlist for this round of book club came up, I picked The Day of the Locust because it's been lauded as one of the best novels of the 20th century, and even had blurbs from author Nathanael West's contemporaries, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Malcolm Cowley. So I figured that with the lavish praise and the book's 1930s Hollywood setting, it would be somewhat Fitzgeraldesque.

Not so much. It's really more of a novella than a full novel, and an underdeveloped one at that. It's the story of Tod Hackett, an artist-cum-set-painter who moves to Los Angeles for the same reasons presumably everyone else did in the 30s: to trade the hardship and tedium of Depression-era America for something more exciting and glamorous. West's Hollywood is filled with people who have "come here to die," and Tod is fascinated by the quiet, insistent subclass that has popped up--the extras, crew members, and various hangers-on who fill out the movie industry. So between the actual scenery and the human scenery, Tod is kept pretty busy with an unofficial "artistic" study of it all. (He doesn't seem to notice or care that he's one of them as well.)

But of course there's a girl, too. He falls in lust with one of his neighbors, the beautiful movie extra Faye Greener, who wants to be an It Girl. But Faye doesn't seem to have much working for her on that front, except a vague idea that she needs to be a star, and a knack for making men act like idiots in her presence. She manages to hook Tod, a hapless Midwestern dude named Homer Simpson (seriously!), and a couple of cowboy types who basically stand around doing nothing until there's a movie that needs, well, cowboy types. Faye flirts, teases, and manipulates her way through the group of men, getting what she needs for herself and her aging showbiz father. And the guys all put up with it--paying for cuckolded dates, jockeying for her attention, buying her things. The only one who's close to a decent human being is Homer 'cause he's sweet and clueless, and even he's on the far end of the "acceptable" spectrum. And if there's any point that the book approaches Fitzgeraldism, it's in the fact that none of the characters are especially likeable--but here, there's no amazing prose to back that up, or an especially compelling plot.

The plot feels episodic and a little random. The only real common thread is violence: in the book there's a subtext-heavy cockfight, an actual fight among Faye's suitors, a fight with a little person, a fight with a child, forced sex...you name the brutality, it's in here somewhere. And for all of the emphasis on Tod's chronicling all of this for his art, you don't actually get to see much of that happen. And after a few carefully thematic scenes, including a riot at a movie premiere, West relies on very little else to convey meaning and relevance.

And I think it's a shame, because this novella could have been so much better as a standalone work if it had just been fleshed out, and not reliant on the ennui/inertia of the characters to get the major points made.

Oh, well--not the favorite book club book (on either of our parts, unless Jacob has had a major revelation since last night), but at least it was brief. On to the next one! And to The Great Gatsby, because I realized that I would have been much happier doing the semi-annual reread.

The Likeness by Tana French

A few weeks ago I read In the Woods by Tana French, an absorbing mystery set in Dublin. I enjoyed French's style, and was enthusiastic to read what came next.

The Likeness picks up, plot-wise, where its predecessor left off. But instead of following the same narrator, it focuses on Cassie Maddox, the (now former) partner of the previous protagonist, Rob Ryan. Basically, after the events of the last novel, Cassie is left completely burned out. She has ditched her primo Murder job to join the much less glamorous Domestic Violence squad, and struggles to get through the day-to-day mundanities, despite a supportive boyfriend (Sam, who's still a Murder detective) and a job with much less pressure.

But lest we think Cassie is going to be left to wallow for long, a murder victim turns up stabbed in a cottage in the Irish countryside. And theoretically it's not Cassie's problem anymore. But not only is the victim a dead ringer (ha!) for Cassie, the girl's papers identify her as "Lexie Madison"--the identity that Cassie herself invented for an undercover assignment that began and ended years ago. But identity theft aside, it's not every day that you get a victim who happens to look exactly like a local detective with undercover experience, I'm guessing. But once you get past that awfully convenient set-up, things get interesting fast.

Cassie's former mentor, a gung-ho type who's frothing at the mouth to investigate a murder from the inside out, has a plan: they'll tell the dead girl's friends that hey, false alarm, the stabbing wasn't fatal. Cassie will undergo a crash course in Lexie's daily life, mannerisms, and known associates. Cassie will become the dead girl, figure out how the chick ended up with the fake identity in the first place, and suss out who wanted her dead. Of course. Detective-on-the-case Sam doesn't want Cassie to take the risk of a) pretending to be someone who generates stabby ill will; or b) putting herself in the position of becoming Lexie Madison a second time--'cause what if the killer was someone holding a grudge against Cassie's iteration of Lexie, and not the impostor's? However, in the grand tradition of mild-mannered boyfriend characters everywhere, Sam's objections are quashed pretty quickly, and Cassie agrees to go undercover as Lexie.

The most difficult part of the transition is that Lexie had been living with a small,extremely close group of friends from her literature PhD program. Because there's a good chance that one of them is the killer, none of them can know what Cassie's up to. So, much of the novel is Cassie assimilating into this tight-knit group--no small task when the group (three guys and two girls) is so codependent that menstrual calendars aren't even secret. It involves a good bit of disbelief suspension, but it's interesting to watch Cassie straddle her duties as a cop with her devotion to melding into Lexie's life, and becoming caught up in the quirks and appealing (if odd) structure of Lexie's life with this crew. At the same time, Cassie needs to figure out how the girl ended up with the Lexie Madison identity at all. So it's one big ball of potential clusterfuck. Cassie knows it, and starts caring less. The reader knows it, and that's what keeps the tension going throughout.

As with In the Woods, what French lacks in plausibility, she makes up for with good characters and solid writing. Cassie makes a better (and much more reliable) narrator than Rob, and the sequel is both tighter overall, and structured better than the first. And I like the way French is creating her series: keeping the setting, the sensibility, and the periphery, while switching out the voices. Commercially, people like a protagonist they can get behind for ten books (and however many movies)--but literarily (is that a word?), it's much richer to create an arc this way. Although I definitely got attached to Cassie, I'm looking forward to the third book this summer, with yet another narrator.

Parts I liked:

"I don't tell people this, it's nobody's business, but the job is the nearest thing I've got to a religion. The detective's god is truth, and you don't get much higher or more ruthless than that. The sacrifice, at least in Murder and Undercover--and those were always the ones I wanted, why go chasing diluted versions when you could have the breathtaking full-on thing?--is anything or everything you've got, your time, your dreams, your marriage, your sanity, your life. Those are the coldest and most capricious gods of the lot, and if they accept you into their service they take not what you want to offer but what they choose."

"Have you noticed how easily the very young die? They make the best martyrs for any cause, the best soldiers. It's because they're held here so lightly: they haven't yet accumulated loves and responsibilities and commitments and all the things that tie us securely to this world. They can let go of it as easily and simply as lifting a finger. But as you get older, you begin to find things that are worth holding onto, forever. It changes the very fabric of you."

Underworld by Don DeLillo

So the latest book club book was Don DeLillo's Underworld. Jacob already has this covered, but I felt guilty not holding up my end of the book club. (Especially since I was the one who proposed this round's short list.) And this one is significant because he's our first repeat author, after we did White Noise a couple of years ago. Neither of us liked it much, but I'd tackled Americana by myself and enjoyed it considerably more. So Underworld, the canonical one, was the true test.

And the verdict is: meh. I think I'm getting burned out on ultra-post-whatever-modern writers. A girl needs a plot that hangs together once in a while, y'know? I don't want an epic that shows me everything you can do. I don't want clever conversation; I never want to work that hard; I want you just the waaaaay you are....Oops.

So yeah. I do like challenging books. But I'm willing to expend less and less patience on books that shuffle you around, tell you everything's brilliant, you'll see, it's coming, and then...fin. And DeLillo is really good at that--possibly the best. His writing is solid enough to keep you hooked in on the promise of a revelation that never actually comes. I get that this puts the focus on the characters and the mini-arcs he creates. But unless those come together in a cohesive way, it's more of an ambitious collection of short fiction than a single novel. And Underworld has too many moving pieces (few of which are linked in anything more than a perfunctory way) to be a satisfying whole.

The novel ostensibly follows Nick Shay, an Arizona waste management executive struggling in middle age with an unsatisfying marriage and a juvenile delinquent past he doesn't really want to think about. But DeLillo does, and so 80% of the book is spent trying to tie Nick's past with the American 20th century landscape. This includes baseball (of course), the atomic bomb, the New York art scene, and Cold War anxieties. As separate pieces of fiction, they work. I especially liked the middle section, following an artist, Klara Sax, who struggles with her identities as a wife/mother and an artist in the 50s. But DeLillo needs to connect it to the whole, so he has her seduce a young Nick, cougar-style, so that she's joined with the rest of the book. It seems like a waste of a strong female character, to have her only real use to the main narrative be a single sexual encounter.

And I really did enjoy the book's opening set piece, the 1951 Dodgers-Yankees pennant game, featuring an unexpected cast: a young Harlem kid who'd snuck into the game and manages to come away with the mythic homerun ball; Frank Sinatra; Jackie Gleason; and J. Edgar Hoover. It's interesting and extremely well-written. I just wish the rest of it could have been more cohesive in its grandness.

In the Woods by Tana French

Having spent a fair bit of time lately reading books by writers more concerned with esoteric leaps of plot and logic than with with basic readability (looking at you, Underworld), I've come to appreciate stories that have a beginning, middle, and end. And they don't get much more beginning-middle-and-end-y than a mystery. So for that, I definitely appreciated Tana French's debut novel In the Woods.

In the Woods is the story of the investigation into the murder of Katy Devlin, a 12-year-old ballerina living in the Dublin suburbs. Her body is found on a controversial archeological site--and in the very same place where three neighborhood kids disappeared in 1984. Two of those kids were never found, but the third turned up the next day, covered in blood and so traumatized that he could never identify what had happened to him and his friends.

The primary detective on Katy Devlin's case just happens to be that third kid, grown up and one of Dublin's finest, under a changed name. Along with his partner, Cassie Maddox (with whom he has an intensely intimate but platonic relationship), Rob Ryan ends up with the case by virtue of being stuck in the squad room at the wrong time. Rob assures himself that it's okay that he works on Katy's murder because a) he's totally recovered emotionally (despite maintaining total amnesia of the event); and b) what if his unique insight can not only solve this new and tragic mystery, but the old cold case as well? The reader and Cassie are less sure that he's as sound as he says, but what choice is there but to go along?

The story is procedural but literary--the standard Law & Order stuff is balanced out by the device of being in Rob's head as he struggles to deal with new information, coax old information from his bruised subconscious, and come to terms with all of it while maintaining a professional veneer. The biggest problem with Rob as narrator and central figure is what he tells the reader early on: he's unreliable as hell. He lies, he equivocates, he skates around information you know he's hiding. He tells you he has no memory of his childhood, then produces oddly detailed and idealized scenes. You never really know whether he's going to have the necessary breakthrough in time, but you do know that he's going to break up on these rocks--it's inevitable. So this element keeps things interesting throughout the otherwise fairly straightforward murder investigation, though I think French relies a little too heavily on Rob's POV to bring about essential plot points.

Also interesting is Rob's relationship with Cassie. They have a stereotypically close partnership, these young cops who trust one another with their lives and share everything--except bodily fluids, which Rob works very hard to emphasize. He mentions the luckiness he feels at not falling prey to the curse of the straight man-straight woman sexual temptation, and spends a lot of time highlighting their jocular, familiar banter. But here, too, you get the feeling that he's very specifically not sharing information. It may seem like Harry and Sally, but an Ephron novel this is not, and so there are some major issues lying in wait.

While I enjoyed the overall writing and French's approach to the cliched detective genre, I was decidedly un-wowed by the ending. I'm not as furious about it as some of the Amazon reviewers, but I think it could have been handled with more resolution and less abrupt exposition. Not a dealbreaker, but not the best ending I've ever seen.

Parts I liked:

"Obviously, I have always wished I could remember what happened in that wood. The very few people who know about the whole Knocknaree thing invariably suggest, sooner or later, that I should try hypnotic regression, but for some reason I find the idea distasteful. I'm deeply suspicious of anything with a whiff of New Age about it--not becuase of the practices themselves...but because of the people who get involved, who always seem to be the kind who corner you at parties to explain how they discovered that they are survivors and they deserve to be happy. I worry that I might come out of hypnosis with a sugar-high glaze of self-satisfied enlightenment, like a seventeen-year-old who's just discovered Kerouac, and start proselytizing strangers in pubs."

"I am not good at noticing when I am happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart's desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities. I suppose you could say my real weakness is a kind of long-sightedness: usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can see the pattern."

The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris

I'm one of the many people who loved Joshua Ferris's debut novel, Then We Came to the End. But I had no idea how he'd follow that up. Would he do another first-person-plural book? Put out another book solidifying his status as the voice of cubicle ennui?

Nope on both counts. The Unnamed is his second, and it's completely different from the first--but similarly unsettling. It's the story of Tim, a middle-aged attorney who lives comfortably with a wife and teenage daughter. But since this is a novel and all, there has to be something wrong with him, right? Of course. He has a mysterious disease where one day, at a random time, he'll just start walking. He's awake, but he can't stop, can't slow down until he collapses in exhaustion--in a bus terminal, outside a fast food restaurant, in a park in Newark in the middle of the night. Tim's "spells" come and go; sometimes he's in remission for months or years at a time, but he accepts it as inevitable that at some point, he'll start walking jags again.

He and his wife, Jane, have a system for these flareups. Once he starts up with these spells, they get him ready: he sleeps in hiking gear and carries a pack of essentials with him at all times (even to his fancy Manhattan firm). And Jane will come get him, no matter where he is, no matter what else she has going on. She quits her job when he needs treatment, takes care of their daughter while he's either working long hours or wandering, and never questions his unwavering assertion that it's a physical illness, not a mental one.

The latter point becomes one of the major tensions of the book--is he crazy or isn't he? This moves into a question of whether he's doing all he can to figure that out for sure. After years of trying tests and various treatments (and an NEJM article starring him for his utterly unique and unidentifiable condition), he has more or less taken a "whatever happens, happens" approach. This is pretty much where the start of the book finds him, after a remission of a few years.

But the medical mystery of it all is almost beside the point, as the narrative focuses tightly on his partnership with Jane in their unusual situation. It's a fascinating glimpse into the limits of so-called unconditional love, and ponders just how far "in sickness and in health" goes. Tim's sickness transcends the diagnosis, and becomes relevant only insofar as it reveals a different facet of their marriage with every frustrating relapse, every small disintegration of an aspect of their lives. The interesting thing about Ferris's approach is that the good is not mutually exclusive with the bad--some of Jane and Tim's best and most heartfelt moments are also the most horrifying.

Like with Then We Came to the End, Ferris's writing is clear, unpretentious, and solidly constructed. He seems to know that with a somewhat out-there plot device at the heart of the book, the prose needs to be uncomplicated. And I just like his style. I definitely recommend this one for a well-paced, absorbing read.

Some of my favorite parts:

"Did she need him? She didn't think so. Was there really only one person for you, one man, the one? She didn't think so. She would sit with him if he were wasting from Parkinson's. If he was wasting from cancer or old age, she'd sit with him. If he just had an expiration date, of course she'd sit with him. But this thing, this could go on forever. Is that how she wanted to spend her life?"

"He realized he might have been doing it wrong for years. He might have seen interesting things had he been able to let go of the frustration and despair. He wondered what kind of life he might have had if he'd paid attention from the beginning."

"He discovered fourteen messages waiting for him. One was from Becka wishing him a happy birthday. The others were from Jane. He had meant to be self-preserving, not cruel, in not calling her back, but he understood now that he could not have it both ways."

Better Know a Classic - Little Women

Joey: Uh, Rach? These...these little women...
Rachel: Yeah?
Joey: How little are they? I mean, are they, like, scary little?

Louisa May Alcott's Little Women was one of my favorites as a kid. I knew it was kinda hokey even then, but I loved the sweet, wholesome New Englandness of it. Why didn't I have Lincoln-supporting, all-knowing parents who steered us through genteel poverty with a smile and life lessons? Where was my saintly and consumptive sister, sacrificing herself at home while the rest of us went gallivanting off into the world? And where the heck was the inexplicable houseservant, a remnant of our prewar glory (before Papa made that vaguely catastrophic investment we don't talk about)? Suburban, middle-class Connecticut seemed decidedly un-noble in comparison.

I read the book again in middle school (around the time the very good Gillian Armstrong adaptation came out)--but hadn't really touched it since. And I don't know that I would have any time soon, if I hadn't fooled around with the Kindle app on my iPod and downloaded it for free. But I did, and got engrossed, even on the tiny screen.

At this point, the sisters are the most compelling reason to read (and revisit) the book. Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy are basically tropes, but entertaining ones. Jo's the tomboy writer; Meg is the matronly sister ultimately fulfilled by husband and kids; Amy is the worldly, selfish one; and Beth is the Dead One. But it's easy to see how they would have been somewhat refreshing in the 1870s--all four get distinct personalities and are loved for their foibles, even if they're all ultimately validated by men in the long run.

As for the writing itself, well....The saddest aspect of my reread is that it's now official: I can't digest purely sentimental writing anymore. Some may say it's because I'm dead inside; others may speculate it's because all I seem to read these days are cynical modern male writers. But either way, I now lack the necessary sense of whimsy you need to be enchanted by the idea of gentle Christian feminism/transcendentalism. And the loss of that sense makes me feel a little sad, and uncomfortably cynical. But I just don't have the patience anymore for Victorian ideals and games.

I was also a little surprised to find my sympathies realigned. Before, I'd always sided with Jo, and lamented her rejection of her best friend and would-be lover, Laurie. This time, I found myself bored by her "I'm an independent tomboy, whee!" character--and rooting for Amy, the sister I'd traditionally liked the least. Jo talks a good game, but Amy's the one who actually pursues her ambitions (first art, then marrying well--the girl has goals!). She's the one who evolves the most out of any of the characters, a point I'd never noticed before. So by the time Jo turned Laurie down, I was already over it and ready for him to hook up with her sister. (Spoiler alert!)

And Beth, well...she still dies. (Spoiler alert #2!) But her final moments are sweet and touchingly written, and illustrate why Little Women endures. It's hard to stay truly dead inside when Beth's running out the clock and being brave for her family. Alcott makes her gentle moralizing so easy to read--very insidious.

Anyway, the best reason to read Little Women is not the fact that Alcott was way ahead of the curve on many social issues of the day (though she was). It's not the idea that we need to return to an ironclad, Victorian system of goodness and grace and civility. It's the idea that a story of a family, simply told, is more powerful than even my cynicism.

U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton

Back when I was in middle school, I found Sue Grafton's "alphabet series" in the Mystery section of the local library, and fell in love. (A is for Alibi, B is for Burglar, etc. Though being the rebel that I am, I think I started with "C.") Somewhere in the binge, I decided to use one of the books for an oral book report for Reading class. It wasn't until halfway through my presentation that I realized that it was impossible to summarize the plot in a way that would a) hold my 13-year-old peers' interest; and b) do any justice to the book itself. And that's what Sue Grafton's mystery novels do--they create deft mazes of people, information, and red herrings.

Her 21st, U is for Undertow, is part of that tradition. Like all the other books, its primary voice is that of Kinsey Millhone, a California private investigator. Kinsey isn't really your hardboiled type--she hits the criteria of being fiercely independent and jaded, but her beachy town and wacky friends are more sitcom than noir. But she's smart, sneaky, and tenacious as hell, so she's definitely the person you want ferreting out information for your cold case murder or missing person.

Undertow takes place over a few weeks in April, 1988, when a twentysomething guy wanders into Kinsey's office and insists that a newspaper article about a long unsolved kidnapping case (a 4-year-old girl disappeared in 1967, never found) triggered a buried childhood memory of him stumbling upon two guys burying a bundle a few days after the girl disappeared. The guy, Michael, isn't the most stable or reliable dude around, and no one believes him. So he hires Kinsey for a day to try to figure out whether he could possibly have seen what he thinks he saw.

Of course, the plot mushrooms from there, but did you not see what I wrote earlier about summarizing? Lost cause. Rest assured that as with many of the other novels in the series, we get introduced to various members (savory and otherwise) of the Santa Teresa community, who have odd connections to the original kidnapping, the aftermath, and the present day investigation. The climax is a little unsatisfying--Grafton takes the unusual (for her and for mystery writers in general) approach of lining up pretty much everything early on, and using pure exposition to fill in the blanks. But overall, the mystery is a good and layered one.

There's also a B-plot involving Kinsey's own personal life, which I found more interesting. After 21 books, you feel pretty attached to someone, whether she's fictional or not. And Kinsey (despite her protestations that she needs nothing more than her spartan lifestyle and one or two token friends) has steadily grown from an orphan (by circumstance early on and then later by choice) to someone with actual obligations in life. In Undertow, that means possibly opening up to estranged family. And checking in with her hot (and unfortunately platonic) detective friend.

I also appreciate that Grafton has stayed within the 80s timeline. These books would be totally ruined by modern technology. There's something appealing about a detective who does her work by cross-referencing old directories and schlepping to a cat hospital to ask questions that Google would answer so easily today.

So overall, a very entertaining read. I'm starting to get nervous because there are only five novels left. But I probably have seven-ish years before I really need to worry about the end. In the meantime, I'll just wait impatiently for V.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

So there's this writer. He was brilliant, restless, and died young while trying to maintain both his creativity and a stable life. Sounds familiar, right?

Not so fast. The troubled writer in question here is the late Chilean writer Roberto Bolano. His novel The Savage Detectives (as translated by Natasha Wimmer) was the most recent book club book, chosen as much for its unique perspective on modern Latin American literature as for the hesitance that 2666, Belano's posthumous, 900-page opus, instilled in at least one of us.

The Savage Detectives is a novel that spans the 70s to the 90s, tracing two young poets (and co-founders of a poetry "movement," the Visceral Realists) from their early shenanigans in Mexico City to nomadic lives in Israel, Spain, and Mexico (again). The young Ulises Lima and Arturo Bolano gather a group of self-serious young poets to overthrow Mexico's reigning literary elite (mostly just Octavio Paz). And through them, we see the joys and pettinesses of poetic revolution--which happens to be high on drama here, and low on actual poetry and actual revolution. But they assemble a ragtag group of young writers who like the idea of literary godhood, even if they have no idea how to achieve it. So the group members mostly just drink, talk endlessly, sleep with each other and various hangers-on, and occasionally write poetry that no one publishes.

The first third of the book, which follows the group as it coalesces around Lima and Bolano, is written as a diary by Juan Madero, a 17-year-old who sees the Visceral Realists as his entry to sex, excitement, and more sex. Juan drops out of school to pursue poetry and waitresses, and sets his sights on becoming a Visceral Realist like Lima and Bolano. Juan doesn't really know what a Visceral Realist is, per se (and neither do we), but he knows he wants in. The section is a humorous, rather joyous coming-of-age set piece introducing us both to the Visceral Realists and 1976 Mexico City. The section ends on a bit of a dark note, though, as Lima, Bolano, Madero, and a prostitute named Lupe flee Mexico City in a borrowed car, trying to get Lupe away from her violent pimp.

The second section of the book is written in a completely different style--instead of one kid's journal, it's a series of documentary, first-person interviews with a parade of previously unintroduced characters. After a few pages, you realize each new speaker (whose recollections range from a page to several) is someone who came into contact with Ulises Lima, Arturo Bolano, or both, since their abrupt exit from Mexico City. The timeline unfolds more or less straightforwardly, giving episodic updates on the pair's travels. Ulises Lima becomes a drifter throughout the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America, seemingly content with a hard, very physical life of odd jobs and fleeting sexual encounters. Bolano is also a drifter, but he seems slightly more concerned with his intellectual and philosophical development. He moves around Europe for the most part (Spain especially), but ultimately becomes a freelance journalist with a penchant for African war zones. With both men, you get the impression from all of these different voices that they're haunted by something that changed them fundamentally, and that dimmed the youthful arrogance that held the Visceral Realists together in the first place.

The third section brings us back to Juan Madero's diary, and the poets' exodus into the Sonora desert with Lupe. The little group is not only hiding from the pimp, but also seeking out Cesarea Tinajero, a woman who had been considered the "mother of Visceral Realism" sixty years before. Cesarea left little (if any) poetry behind, and completely disappeared from the literary social scene. The traces followed by Lima and Bolano (with Madero and Lupe just kind of along for the ride) are increasingly sad, and the climax sheds light on why both men led such effed up adult lives after the fact.

This may be one of my favorites of the book club books--I loved Bolano's complexity of language and perspective, while he kept an unwieldy structure mostly under control. There were spots that could have been pruned (the middle section is approximately 400 pages, with some unnecessarily repeated speakers and themes), but overall I think he did an excellent job making about a hundred different speakers seem like unique voices and characters. And he does that while also developing Lima and Belano in a thoughtful and believable way. The language he uses is terse when it needs to be, lush and sensual when it needs to be, and absurd when he needs it to be. And one of the most interesting aspects of the novel is that for a book about poets, there's extremely little poetry in it, making the story about the Visceral Realists and the motives behind them much more than the words any of them put on paper.

I think I'll still wait a while to tackle 2666, but in the meantime I'm glad to have finished out 2009 with this one.

The Song is You by Arthur Phillips

I believe in radio omens. Or these days, given that I rarely listen to the radio, iPod omens. Like, if I'm feeling nostalgic for the zaniness of college, my iPod turns up that song that happened to be playing in the background at Spring Weekend 2002. Even this morning, I was on the subway, thinking about how much has changed in the past few months, and the Whiny Frat Rock song that dominated my summer playlist came on.

Of course, they're not really omens. These songs are on my iPod because I've sought them out, and kept them in the rotation for their sentimental attachments. But part of me believes in the possibility that the universe knows what I really want to hear. (And sometimes, that's just gonna be Justin Timberlake--let's be honest.) And that's part of what made me so receptive to Arthur Phillips's novel The Song is You. Like Phillips, I'm happy to suspend logic and cynicism as long as there's a patina of pop music gloss.

The Song is You follows another iPod omen believer, Brooklynite Julian Donohue, a commercial director whose sense of self is largely defined by his music collection. (This isn't a Nick Hornby novel, I swear.) He sees his iPod as an extension of his old portable CD player, which was in itself an extension of his Walkman, which provided the soundtrack to his days as a young and soulful stud. But Julian hasn't just been pining for his youth--in the intervening years, he's gotten married, started a family, even given up his casual infidelities. But a family tragedy pushes all of that aside, and pretty much all he's left with is the music collection. This isn't to say he's a sad sack--just a more philosophical version of his younger self. Julian, like so many Modern Men (literary and otherwise), couches his shallowness and narcissism in existential hooey. He convinces himself that his aesthetic preferences are just so much more refined than everyone else's, and that's why he only sleeps with models.

This is about where he is when he wanders into a Brooklyn bar and scoffs at the hipsters assembled there to hear Cait O'Dwyer, spunky Irish lass (do we know any other kind?), perform with her backup band. Cait, we see, is upwardly mobile. Her demo CD has already been optioned by a label, the hipsters whisper over pitchers of PBR. Julian isn't really impressed, one way or another--but he does pick up her demo, which works its way into his iTunes rotation. Suddenly her poignant pop songs are getting to him like nothing else can, and he starts attending her shows around the city. At one, he leaves her a gift, which he doesn't really expect will get to her--but it does, and she, in turn, starts becoming fascinated with him as well.

Thus begins a game of stops and starts, of borderline stalking, of infatuation, of wistful song lyrics posted online. Both Julian and Cait get off on the thrill of their hidden Svengali relationship. They're both in love with the idea of a shared future of passionate love and creative fulfillment, but they can't figure out how to make the jump into physical reality--or at least they can't figure out how to do it without turning into the mundane. So they whip themselves into a frenzy of potential, as her career starts to flourish and he stokes it.

Both Julian and Cait come with entourages trying to pull them away. There's Ian, Cait's guitarist, who puts up with a more-than-friends-and-less-than-kind relationship with her, because their unconsummated co-dependency pushes their music further. Ian, suspicious of the stranger who leaves cryptic messages for Cait wherever they go, has a vested interest in taking the guy down--as does a has-been rockstar who sees Cait as his path back to the A-list. In Julian's corner, there's a sweet-but-neurotic estranged wife, and a socially inept brother--both of whom have strong (and valid) reasons for not wanting him to follow a cute pop star around the world.

The book follows both Julian and Cait pretty closely, but Julian is by far the more clearly defined. Cait is a little too perfect. By the middle of the book, you realize that's because Phillips himself is probably a little too in love with her. And because it's hard to get a real perspective on her, it's difficult to get 100% behind the Julian-Cait relationship--especially by the time things take a definite "Every Breath You Take" turn.

But as with Prague, what Phillips does well, he does exceptionally well. I do love his writing style. And the bonus point? A critical scene is set in a college bar in Storrs, Connecticut. Well played, Arthur Phillips. Brooklyn landmarks + UConn landmarks + pop songs = high score.

Some of my favorite parts:

"The choice was mutual but they had opposite reasons: he was a coward, she was ruthless. In his defense, he hadn't known the choice was going to be inscribed as eternally as grave marble law. That was her will, enforced from that moment on with flinchless discipline. If he'd known, he told himself, he would have chosen her over the music, over anything. He would have."

"When they wrote together, or when one presented the other with something prepared in private, with no audience to absorb the excess, he felt the room crowding with their other selves, lives unled and correspondences unwritten, happinesses opted against, and he could not believe she did not see it too."

"...He laughed at himself, and he laughed at Cait O'Dwyer's sorcery, and he wondered if, in real life, she required a steady diet of recent heartbreak in order to manufacture fresh emotion for her consumers. Two months ago, she was raw and unblended; tonight she was reasonably effective; someday very soon she would be in danger of marbling over into a slick cast impression of herself. The target was only mircons wide, and history's great singers may simply have been those who happened to make a record in the brief time between learning and forgetting how to manage their power."

Indignation by Philip Roth

So for the last three Philip Roth books, I've talked/written about the endangered author syndrome among the mid-20th century luminaries, where they're working on a long goodbye/capstone to seal the legacy. And when it came to proving my theory, Roth was the proviest of them all. The Plot Against America = meditation on his childhood. Everyman = dying New Jerseyan reflecting on his life. Exit Ghost = end of Zuckerman. Poignant, no?

Then I read one of his latest, Indignation. Way to prove my vague and untenable theory wrong, Philip Roth. Now he's just cranking out one-off books like he used to. Which also means that I don't have to worry about approaching the book with reverence, and can admit that I didn't love it.

Indignation is the story of Marcus Messner, a New Jersey kid who tries to slip his father's suffocating anxiety and the ankle-deep blood of the family's kosher butcher shop. His blind, groping efforts to get the hell out of Newark land him on the campus of Winesburg College, a WASP-y liberal arts school in Ohio. Marcus just wants to keep his head down, not talk to anyone, get straight A's, and avoid the Korean War draft. But people have a pesky habit of getting in the way. And rather than accept this with equanimity and get on with his life, Marcus's general reaction is to melt down, and either a) make immediate plans never to talk to the offending parties again; or b) say "f--- you" in the worst possible ways and at the worst possible times.

To be fair, he seems to come across the most obnoxious people on campus: the pompous Christian dean, unbalanced roommates, and your standard fictional unstable chick--who seems awesome at first, and then lets loose with every single piece of baggage she's ever had. Guys, let this be a lesson: when a girl says that she's "only done this once before," and the next minute has the Crazy Eyes? Shut. It. Down. I'm just sayin'.

But anyway, there's something halfhearted about the whole thing: from the smattering of anti-semitism suggestions (none of which really pan out in the plot) to the usual tortured romance, it's all very Roth, but very auto-pilot. There's no reason for this to be as small a book as it is--either in scope or in physical format (largest font ever). There was just so much more space and potential here than the "kid leaves home for college, doesn't fit in" narrative. And when the climax pretty much pops up out of nowhere and seals off the nebulous foreshadowing at the beginning of the book, it's awfully tidy and convenient. Kind of like a morbid version of the epilogue of Animal House.

I think what disappointed me most was the lack of the usual saving grace, Roth's amazing descriptive power. There just isn't much description going on in Indignation, and the novel suffers for it. What little there is, though, is good. There's a scene near the end where Roth manages to turn a frat-guy panty raid into a graphic, stomach-turning bachanal of douchebaggery. And that's the Roth I want more of. This one had the right Rothian elements (anger, sex, Newark), but they just didn't come together the way they usually do. Sad.

Evil at Heart by Chelsea Cain

Apparently I've been on a sex, drugs, and brutality kick lately--but only with the reading list, don't worry. After reading the first two Stieg Larsson thrillers (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire), I snuck Evil at Heart into the queue. Evil at Heart is Chelsea Cain's third book about Portland detective Archie Sheridan and serial killer Gretchen Lowell, after Heartsick and Sweetheart.

I was excited for this one--I really liked the the first two. Fun reads, but also challenging enough to be worthwhile. This one was just kind of...easy. It follows the same universe of characters (the Portland cops and reporter trying to bring down Gretchen, the most attractive serial killer this side of Ted Bundy), and a similar plot line. Gretchen is back on the loose, after manipulating Archie Sheridan from her prison cell for two novels and ultimately using him to escape. Archie, for his part, is still royally effed up by her, but is trying to push past it. He's in rehab for the pill addiction he developed after she carved him up and brought him back to life, and has finally started to break her psychosexual hold over him. But not much actually happens in the book, except a series of copycat murders that may or may not be Gretchen's handiwork.

There's also the world's slowest love interest development going on, between Archie and crime reporter Susan Ward. It took him one book to get rid of his wife, 2.5 to stop fantasizing about Gretchen, and now finally Archie and Susan are both admitting there might be a mutual crush. Who do they think they are, me? I don't know how many books Cain is planning, but jeez. Just get there already. Not that there's no romance going on in this installment--there's a touching scene of self-mutilation fetishization.

The most interesting part of the book is Cain's characterization of America's relationship to sensational crime stories. The newly escaped Gretchen is an object of obsession for the country, with TV specials like America's Hottest Serial Killers and "Run, Gretchen, run" t-shirts. There's also a cult of Gretchen-obsessed psychos who convene on an online message board (surprise, surprise) and meet up in spots where previous victims were found. The social commentary gets a little heavy-handed (the TV show in particular is a bit too on-the-nose), but I think Cain's pretty spot-on about the terror-to-fascination ratio.

The book also suffers from Dan Brown Syndrome, where the author uses chapter breaks to create artificial movement and action. The first fifty pages have about twelve chapters. And it's not a long book. I still really enjoy Cain's style and writing--and I would have been fine waiting longer, for a deeper and more substantial read. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the next one will be a little more satisfying. I bought this book knowing it'd be quick and dirty, but it turns out I needed a little more conversation first.

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Americans like Swedish things. Those little meatballs with gravy and jam. Incomprehensible Muppets. Our Ektorp sofas from IKEA. And now, possibly the year's unlikeliest bestseller, the English translation of late Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson's book Män som hatar kvinnor.

Written as the first book in a trilogy of brutal suspense thrillers, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo starts with Mikael Blomkvist, a magazine journalist/publisher who's been disgraced by a recent libel case against one of Sweden's most prominent businessmen. On his way to a light prison sentence and licking his ego wounds, Blomqvist becomes involved in an old missing persons case. Harriet Vanger, the sixteen-year-old heiress to a large corporate fortune, disappeared years ago--and everyone except her great-uncle, Henrik, thinks she's dead. The case is Henrik's white whale, and as he gets older and more frail, he wants definitive answers. Knowing that Blomqvist is a good journalist (pesky libel conviction aside) with some time on his hands, he hires the writer to come out to his tiny town, which is populated by his eccentric, hostile, and just plain awful relatives. Pretty much everyone involved has a motive to have wanted Harriet gone, and Mikael is tasked with finding out which one of them is responsible for the girl's disappearance back in the 60s (under the guise of writing a biography of the Vanger family).

Blomqvist takes the case, 'cause he needs the truckloads of cash that Vanger promises--as well as the super-secret evidence that Vanger supposedly has that proves Blomqvist's innocence in the libel case. Blomqvist hires an unlikely partner, Lisbeth Salander, to help. Lisbeth is a young woman who has zero social skills, but some kind of ninja ability to uncover top secret information. The two dig deeper into the Vanger family secrets, and discover that--surprise!--someone in the Vanger family really doesn't want them finding out what happened to Harriet. It's kind of like Clue, but with 100% more shady blond people.

While Blomqvist and Salander are struggling with ugly revelations of murder, double identities, and horrific sexual practices, the B-plot follows the fate of Blomqvist's magazine, Millenium, as he and his best friend/f-buddy/editor-in-chief Erika Berger try to keep everything afloat.

Overall, I liked the book quite a bit. I don't read many thrillers these days, and this one reminded me of how compelling they can be when done well. And Larsson makes his social justice agenda clear. The Swedish title of the book translates into "Men Who Hate Women." (Something tells me this book wouldn't have been the subway-reading hit it was, if the American publisher had kept that on the cover.) And Larsson is not squeamish about hitting the reader with all sorts of male-on-female violence. Pretty much any way a modern woman can be used and abused by the worst of men is in the book somewhere. And I also liked the way he created the female characters--bold, sexual, and not apologetic at all. For example, the female lead, Lisbeth, is not a pleasant person. She's blunt, probably on the autism spectrum, and unable to trust anyone. But she's extremely good at what she does, and draws attraction and respect (from non-evil dudes, anyway).

The plot has a few too many deus-ex-machina moments, but they're not so clunky that they don't fit in. And given that the writer dropped dead of a heart attack before the book even came out, I don't really fault the lack of polish/editing. The characters are interesting enough to make it worthwhile, and the writing (whether through translation or by design) is straightforward. I enjoyed it enough to rush out and get my hands on the sequel, to see what those zany Swedes will get up to next.

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

So the dirty little secret of the Jacob & Katy book club is that occasionally, we read books that are popular for timely reasons. Most of the time, we go out of our way to pick either unusual or uncommon books. But it doesn't always work out that way. We did Light in August around the same time Oprah picked it, and Infinite Jest right after David Foster Wallace died. Because when is Faulkner ever a bad idea? And if we weren't going to do Infinite Jest then, it never would have happened ("Infinite Summer" would have been waaaaaay out of the question). And this time around, President Obama just happened to endorse Netherland right after Jacob decided he wanted to read it. But despite the urge to ditch the choice as it gained popularity among the bookier Americans, it squeaked onto the short list for this round, and into the finals.

Netherland is a novel by Joseph O'Neill, set mostly in New York shortly after 9/11. Hans, a Dutchman by way of London (where he acquired a wife and a stable career in finance) moves to New York at the insistence of his wife. She freaks out and return to London shortly thereafter with their infant son and Hans's testicles firmly in hand. He flounders around in a sort of bleak comfort--he makes plenty of money at his Wall Street job, but can't really think of a way to spend it, except on an overpriced apartment in the Chelsea Hotel. The only thing that tethers him to--well, anything, really, is his love for cricket. He joins a weekly cricket game in Staten Island, populated by guys from India, the West Indies, and various other former British protectorates. There, he meets Chuck Ramkissoon, a gregarious Trinidadian dude who knows what he wants from life: sex, money, and a world-class cricket stadium in Brooklyn.

While dealing with his various losses (his mother, his sweetly ordinary Dutch childhood, his wife and kid), Hans lets Chuck pull him into his orbit. This involves a lot of random-ish errands out to Brooklyn, where Chuck describes (in increasingly alarming detail) his plans to finance a cricket mecca in East Flatbush. It becomes clear that Chuck is doing some seriously shady stuff to finance his dream: iffy Russian friends, a gambling ring among local West Indians, schmoozing hazy international donors. Hans is both curious enough to go along for the ride, and bored enough to disregard any potential illegality on his own part. He idolizes Chuck a little without sentimentalizing him--both men, as modern immigrants to the country, are seeking the American prize, whatever that might be. For Chuck, it's American capitalism with an extra helping of jingoism. For Hans, it's owning the potential for freedom--his obsession becomes getting a driver's license and buying a car, even though a) no one needs a car in NYC; and 2) he seems to have no plans to go anywhere outside the metro area. But they're both looking for a piece of the action, and appear to respect that in one another. That they both love a sport that 99.9% of the American population couldn't care less about, that's just cake.

As Hans starts pulling his own life together, he starts to have less use for Chuck--and the way O'Neill juxtaposes their trajectories is interesting. In a review blurb, NY Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani suggests that there are "echoes of the Great Gatsby." And I can see that (though my partner in bookish crime begged to differ). There's a similar sense of melancholy over both books, and Chuck is a bit of a Gatsby--the faux-naive, cheerfully sociopathic part, anyway. Both novels are about finding the sacred in American life.

I also really enjoyed O'Neill's writing. At times he's a little too sentimental, but that may have been just a function of his mopey, nostalgic narrator. I liked the complex, streaming language:

"I came to step around in a murk of my own making, and to be drifted away from my native place, and in due course to rely on Rachel as a human flashlight.... To give an example, she was the one, all those years ago, who brought cinema and food to my attention. Undoubtedly I had already watched movies and eaten lunch; but I hadn't located them in the so-called scheme of things."

"I was taken by lightheaded yearning for an interlude of togetherness, a time-out, as it were, during which my still-wife and I might lie together in a Four Seasons suite, say, and work idly through a complimentary fruit basket and fuck at leisure and, most important, have hours-long, disinterested, beans-spilling, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may conversations in which we'd examine each other's unknown nooks and crannies in the best of humor and faith."

"...I began to dream in all seriousness of a stadium, and black and brown and even a few white faces crowded in bleachers, and Chuck and me laughing over drinks in the members' enclosure and waving to people we know, and stiff flags on the pavilion roof, and fresh white sight-screens, and the captains in blazers looking up at a quarter spinning in the air, and a stadium-wide flutter of expectancy as the two umpires walk onto the turf square and its omelette-colored batting track, whereupon, with clouds scrambling in from the west, there is a roar as the cricket stars trot down the pavilion steps onto this impossible field in America, and everything is suddenly clear, and I am at last naturalized."

So popularity aside, this was a book chosen in good taste, and I'm glad to have read it.

Prague by Arthur Phillips

Ah, to be young, American, and idealistic in...Budapest. Wait. Is that right? Probably not. Anyway, that's the basic premise of Arthur Phillips's novel Prague. (You might think said novel would take place in the titular city, but you'd be wrong.)

The book follows five young expats in Budapest in the early 90s, right after the Velvet Revolution, and right before Czech shed Oslovakia. There's Mark, a Canadian grad student who devotes every minute of his existence to studying nostalgia. It's every bit as circular as you might think. There's Emily, a somewhat bland midwesterner indulging an Electra complex by working as an American embassy assistant to impress her civil servant father. There's Charles, a Hungarian-American who shifts between the cultures according to whichever one he disdains less at the moment. And then there are the Californian brothers, Scott and John--one of whom has a love-hate relationship with his brother, while the other has a hate-hate one. John, who follows Scott to Prague for foolishly optimistic bonding reasons, becomes the ostensible protagonist of the book 'cause he's young, and can talk earnestly about how the MTV generation coming of age in the late 80s is going to fix everything. The five are friends more or less due to proximity and shared American-ness, but become entangled despite always seeming annoyed with one another. They do share, however, the nagging feeling that everything would be more interesting if only they were living in Prague instead.

The novel follows them (particularly John) as they move throughout Budapest, glib and hopelessly American despite their deepening interactions with the locals. It's kind of like a slightly downer L'Auberge Espagnole. Phillips does a good job of contrasting the promise of a new Hungarian culture (McDonalds! American t-shirts!) in 1990 with the gray, lingering vestiges of Communist-era thinking. The twentysomething characters become involved with old guard figures, like a septaugenarian lounge singer with crazy war stories to spare, and Horvath, the heir of a Hungarian publisher whose fortunes fluctuated with the country's.

Phillips devotes almost half of the book to the story of that press (the Horvath Kiado), and Horvath's eventual ruin at the hands of one of the young protagonists. I think this was a risky choice--I found the movement back and forth from the history to the present too jarring. The structure of the book was my biggest issue with it. Also, probably due to being a first-time novelist at the time, Phillips seemed unsure of what to do with the characters past a certain point, letting them devolve into soapy plots and odd endings.

I did like the overall Phillips style, though, and am willing to forgive a lot in a first novel.

Parts I liked especially:

"Whatever safety precautions Mark Payton had taken in graduate school while clinically investigating the toxins of nostalgia, they had been insufficient."

"Of course, vegetarian cooking was elusive, and the air quality left a lot to be desired, but the city was good-looking, and you could breathe fine if you stayed in shape, avoided hostility and fat, ate three garlic cloves each morning, absorbed plenty of antioxidants, avoided yeast bread within three hours of a scheduled elimination, lived up in the Buda hills, and avoided rigidity in your attitudes."

"As the band tuned up underneath the blue sky, white clouds, and long-gone heroes, the saxophonist introduced the first number, " 'Beatrice,' a lovely tune written by the saxman Sam Rivers for his wife."
Nadja listened in silence for seveal minutes. 'It is a pretty tune, no? And a time-honored tradition, I think: Write something pretty, name it for your wife or lover, and vow it will make her immortal. A familiar lie, yes? You men all do that, John Price."

"In business school, you know, the phrase had a distinct meaning. 'I'm going into publishing' meant something very specific. Like when you came out of an exam and someone asked you how you did and you knew you blew it, you just said, 'It looks like I'm going into publishing.' Or someone gets nailed with a professor's question on a case study, unprepared, and they fumble it, you can hear other students in the class singsonging: 'Looks like somoene's going into publishing!'"

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

The other day, I told someone that I don't cry when I read something sad. That's mostly true--but as with just about everything else, there's an exception. Lorrie Moore has managed to beat my heartlessness twice. First was her short story "People Like That Are the Only People Here." Next was her new, upcoming novel A Gate at the Stairs (thanks, BEA!). Moore is great, better than any author I've come across, at getting to my weakest spots, and doing it so deftly that I don't even notice the piercing until it's too late. It's like the sweetest sucker punch ever.

A Gate at the Stairs follows Tassie Keltjin, a midwestern farm girl trying hard to push back her ordinary roots in favor of something more urbane. This lands her at an unnamed liberal arts college in her home state, a dot of blue surrounded by provincial red politics around 9/11. The book's events start just after the World Trade Center bombing, and I appreciate that Moore made it essentially a footnote as she moved into the bigger themes of love and loss.

But Tassie's main path is less historical. Looking for a basic babysitting job, she ends up on the doorstep of Sarah and Edward, a couple seeking a nanny for the baby they're trying to adopt. Tassie is sucked into this family, which represents the liberal/academic/foodie pretension she seems to want, and its attendant drama. At the same time, she distances herself from her actual family, which has more timely things going on: shifting farm economics, and a son joining the army just in time to be shipped off to the early days of war in the Middle East. Both families erupt into chaos soon enough, and in the middle Tassie finds herself in college lust with a super-sketchy guy. (This plot line is the weakest, but has some interesting meditations on the nature of love.)

The part that actually made me cry wasn't any of the somewhat soapy twists of the plot, but rather a quick, devastating moment involving Tassie and her brother. I can't spoil it, but it was just so unexpected that it hit me hard in the solar plexus. That's how Moore got me with her short story too--taking a sad moment, but writing it so unsentimentally and perfectly that it smacks you in the face.

But don't let the mention of tears fool you: the book is sweetly funny. Tassie has a cute, pun-filled way of viewing the world, and Moore's language is always spot-on. I feel extremely lucky to have scored an advance copy (after waiting several years for this book), and like Jacob, I'm quite sad that it'll be a long time before the next one.

For anyone interested, the book is excerpted in this week's New Yorker.

It's hard to narrow down specific passages for this one, but here are some I liked especially:

"I did not have any good solid plans for the long-term--no bad plans either, no plans at all--and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my friends (marriage, children, law school) sometimes shamed me. Other times in my mind I defended such a condition as morally and intellectually superior--my life was open and ready and free--but that did not make it any less lonely."

"Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around. They were like the poor that way, perhaps. What sense did anything they were being told possibly make, given the scarcity of their world?"

"'Hello,' he said, unsmilingly and as if from a great bleak distance. He glanced at my face and then away....I had seen this exact same expression and movement before--where? (Edward. I'd seen it the first day I met him.) In the future I would come to know that look as the beginning of the end of love--the death of a man's trying. It read as Haughty Fatigue. Like the name of a stripper. There was the sacredness, immersion, intrusion, and violence to the ordinary that preceded romantic love. And then there was Haughty Fatigue, the stripper, who stole it away."

"I guessed that only at the last possible minute did the soul in a determined fashion flee the dying flesh. Who could blame it for its reluctance? We loved our lives more than we ever knew, and at the end felt the bounty of them, as one would say in church, felt even the richness of their missed opportunities, or just understood that they were more than we had realized during the living of them."

"I had never eaten such intricately prepared food before, and doing so in this kind of mournful, prayerful solitude, in a public place, where no one but I was seated without a companion, made each bite sing and roar in my mouth. Still, it was an odd experience for me, alone in the darkening evening, to have the palate so cared for and the spirit so untouched. It was a condition of prayerless worship. Endless communion. Gospel-less church."