What Stephen King’s first published novel lacks in literary merit, it makes up for in charm and originality. Carrie is not a long novel, and it’s not a particularly moving or emotional novel (though, the emotion of the menstruation metaphor may be lost on my male sensibilities). But it is an interesting novel, one that clearly shows the potential that King cashes in with his long, illustrious career.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Review: Get Down, by Asali Solomon
Get Down: Stories is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award-winning compilation from little-known author Asali Solomon. In Get Down, Solomon gives her readers fleshed out, unique characters set in the not-as-near-as-it-once-was past of the 1980s. As a book with an African-American author, whose characters all happen to be black, it would be easy to categorize this book as the cliche “exploration of what it means to be black in America.” And there is some of that, to be sure. But Solomon achieves something much greater. Her characters are not defined by their skin color or their culture, as seems to be the case in so many so-called “ethnic” novels. Instead, she creates her characters with specific quirks and goals, such that their blackness is just one part of their multifaceted identity.
The first story, Twelve Takes Thea, is probably the most focues on the “minority issues” in America. It features a twelve-year-old girl, the titular Thea, struggling with fitting in among her classmates, most of which are white. Her best friend is another young black girl, who happens to transfer to a different school soon after the story begins, and an Indian girl whom Thea cannot quite wrap her mind around. This story twists and turns toward an emotional ending, though Solomon uses a sort of strange flash-forward device that I feel is somewhat unnecessary. Twelve Takes Thea would be something I would highly recommend to younger (middle school) readers, both because of relevant reading level and subject matter (though, the rest of this book does not follow this trend at all).
That Golden Summer and Party on, Vorhees! are two of the book’s shortest stories, both checking in at around 10-15 pages. I’m lumping them together because they share a common theme and structure: an adolescent trying to embrace their approaching adulthood, and getting into a dangerous situation because of it. Both stories are somewhat lacking in plot — Vorhees in particular seems to just ramble on without any real goal — but they make up for it in character. While Golden Summer focuses mainly on the child, Vorhees has a group of children, as well as an older woman who recounts her days as a mischievous youth, hopping from party to party. Solomon is able to reveal a lot about her characters simply by the way this woman tells her story, the way the children react to it, and the way the main character, who has presumably heard it time and time again, recounts it to the audience.
William Is Telling A Story is quite a departure from the other pieces in the book. It features a young man named William who is apparently struggling with his sexuality — but not in a commonly seen way. He is comfortable relating to his friends that he had a sexual experience with a man named Kelly, and he still seems interested in chasing women. However, he can’t seem to get Kelly off of his mind. It’s an extremely complex tale — probably the best one in the book, though maybe not the most enjoyable — so I won’t try to do it justice here. Suffice it to say that Solomon takes a complicated and sensitive topic and draws it in a fresh, respectful light.
My favorite story has to be The Star of the Story. This story is unique among the others, in that it features the viewpoints of two character weaved in and out of each other. The mother, Akousa, is an older woman seeking to rekindle a flame she had in the past, while her son, Eduardo, is a large outgoing boy with an unhealthy obsession with his cousin. The story isn’t perfect — Solomon takes a risk putting the two largely unrelated narratives together, and I don’t think she treats the topic of child rape with the sensitivity it really deserves — but it’s engaging and thought-provoking.
I won’t talk about the other two stories, mostly because they are fairly simplistic, when compared to the other pieces. One is cute and enjoyable to read — the other, not so much.
Finally, I have to address the comment a woman in my reading group made. She said she thought the book was “crap,” not because of the writing, but because they weren’t “her type of stories.” I’m pretty sure I know what she means — she’s white, so she feels like she can’t connect with the characters and immediately turns herself off from the writing. That’s unfortunate. I’ll be blunt, and say that there are stories where a certain demographic is writing for that demographic, and they don’t expect or desire anyone outside of that to be a part of the readership; there are many examples of men-writing-for-men or women-writing-for-women where the opposite gender is not encouraged to participate. However, Get Down does not even approach that sort of genre. For all its flaws, Get Down shines brightly at its best moments, and its casual-yet-masterful style pulled me in and held me tight. Solomon does not put forth the idea that she prefers one type of reader to the other — if you have problems “relating” to her story, that is most certainly your problem.
Review: Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, by David Foster Wallace
“The fuzzy Hensonian epiclette Ovid the Obtuse, syndicated chronicler of trans-human entertainment exchange in the low-cost organs across the land, mythologizes the origins of the ghostly double that always shadows human figures on UHF broadcast bands thus: …”
This is the opening line of one of the stories in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, written by the late David Foster Wallace. I wouldn’t say this line is at all representative of the work in and of itself, but it is a great example of what Wallace is* trying to do with this book. Regardless of what Wallace himself says in one of the stories, Interviews is experimental fiction, plain and simple. That’s not to say that there aren’t great themes or characters contained within — but I think one of Wallace’s main goals was to try some crazy shit and see what happened. When he opens his story with a overtly loquacious translation of “The muppet from the syndicated tv show was talking about shadows,” I’m not sure how he could argue with such a classification.
Just to let you know what I mean, here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of some of devices used in Interviews: Second-person narration, super-detached narration, beginning a story in the middle of a sentence, large pieces of stories contained in 5+ page spanning footnotes, a story in the form of dictionary entries, stories in the form of question-and-answer sessions, stories in the form on word problems, meta-meta-second-person narration, etc. This is maybe half of the unexpected, unique risks that Wallace takes.
Of course, a risk wouldn’t be a risk if it guaranteed success. Some of these devices work better than others. The extreme detachment of the narration (referring to the main character as “the depressed person” throughout the longest story of the book, for instance) becomes grating as Wallace uses it in at least half of the stories. Writing a short story in a footnote is cute at first, but annoying when it pops up two or three times. The dictionary story is, at best, boring and, at worst, pretentious.
But when Wallace hits, he hits big. The quiz section, entitled Octet, which starts to plod on a little too long, became on of my favorite sections when I was finished. The final pop-quiz of the cycle is written in a meta-fiction style that I loved. This quiz is written in second person, starting with the line “You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer,” which I laughed at for far too long. This quiz describes “your” (Wallace’s) thought process in writing Octet and considerations on what should go into this final quiz (which is great, because it leads to mind-bending turns of phrase such as “I would leave this unsaid if I were you”). Meta-fiction is a tricky subject; straight meta-fiction (“I’m the author!”) is sort of cliché and uninteresting by now, and even meta-meta-fiction (“I’m the author and I know I’m writing meta-fiction!”) isn’t completely original. But Wallace’s choice to write the piece in second-person (“You’re the author, and you’re writing meta-fiction!”) is something I’ve never seen before, which made up for some of the less enjoyable quizzes in the cycle. Stories like this serve to remind us why we need authors who will push boundaries rather than just emulate the masters.
The bulk of the book is made up of titular Brief Interviews With Hideous Men sections, which are presented as question-and-answer sessions between and interviewer and a so-called hideous man. Sometimes these interviews are presented as neutral; other times, I got the feeling that the two people knew each other personally (even though the questions are never written out, simply represented with a ‘Q’). I absolutely loved this part of the book. I can’t get enough of creepy, transgressional characters. Possibly realizing that a bunch of similar interviews with different characters could still get repetitive, Wallace chooses to break them up in different sections of the book. Even in the same section of Brief Interviews, many of the interviews are presented in slightly different formats, which was a great editorial choice. Ultimately, whenever a certain story falls a little bit flat, Wallace swoops in with an Interview to keep your trust and interest.
Another story I particularly liked, called Signifying Nothing, is a short, simple story about a man that, for no apparent reason, recalls a day that, as a child, his father wagged his penis at him. Wallace presents this possibly scarring situation with a hilarious absurdity. The main character is not angry or horrified, but simply confused about why such a thing would ever happen, which is an easily understandable position. There is nothing hugely distinctive or experimental in this story; just simple plot and great dialogue and characterization. The main character’s line upon confronting his dad made the story for me: “I sort of briefly described what I had remembered, and asked him, ‘What the fuck was up with that?’” Wallace’s dialogue is nearly always spot-on, and often incredibly funny. It’s actually sort of unfortunate that he doesn’t use as much of it, as the narration doesn’t benefit as much from the crazy situations, characters and devices that he applies.
Ultimately, I wouldn’t call Brief Interviews With Hideous Men a masterpiece. It is somewhat inconsistent in quality, ranging from page-turn-a-minute brilliant, to page-turn-a-second-because-you-just-skipped-five-of-them boring. However, it is clear that David Foster Wallace is a literary mind to be reckoned with, and I look forward to reading more of his work. It’s a shame we lost him prematurely, as I could certainly see myself smiling with glee after finding the release date of his newest novel.
8/10
You are, unfortunately, Matt Borgard, and you’ve just finished your latest review…
*Is it appropriate to talk about a deceased writer in the present tense? I’ve always been told to speak about books as if they are happening in present time, but something about this just seems wrong. **
**Don’t include this in the blog.
Review: (NJO) Agents of Chaos I: Hero’s Trial by James Luceno
* Warning! Star Wars EU spoilers! *
I first attempted to read the New Jedi Order series in high school … and it didn’t go well. The reason, I’ve found out, is that the audiobook of the first novel, Vector Prime, is catastrophically abridged. Earlier this year, I got back into Star Wars, so I decided to try NJO again. I had better results — Vector Prime is readable, but not great. It serves as a setup for the rest of the series. The Dark Tide duology was much better, though it seemed to contain a little too much “monster-of-the-week” type adventures for the characters. So I went into Hero’s Trial — the first book in James Luceno’s Agents of Chaos duology — cautiously optimistic that the upward trend would continue.
Hero’s Trial gives us the first real glimpse of the NJO Han Solo, dealing with the aftermath of Chewbacca’s death. In the Dark Tide books, he’s almost unbearably emo; it’s understandable, but not necessarily ideal for a story. It’s good to see Han back in his element here. He’s upset and slightly more low-key in certain areas, but it works for the kind of characterization that Luceno uses here. Han is still too standoffish with his family for my tastes. I kind of wish that Luceno went in a different direction than the cliche middle-age crisis (though Han fiddling with having an affair would be interesting!), but there are only a few moments in the book where I found myself rolling my eyes.
The big picture seems to be fairly inconsequential until the very end. A Yuzhang Vong priestess, Elan, and her familiar, Vergere, decide to act as defectors to trick the Jedi into a meeting, where Elan can slaughter the lot of them. This defection eventually attracts some unsavory characters, who, of course, have connections to Han (what unsavory SW character doesnt?). This defection leads the Galactic Alliance and Han Solo to (separately) track the defectors and fend off Vong. There’s a pretty big conflict at the end, with about four or five separate groups fighting for different things. It’s exciting, but starts to strain credulity when the Vong begin fighting against their own fake defectors being returned to them.
One of the best new additions that Hero’s Trial introduces is Droma, a male Ryn (new species, looks a bit like an older, but not ancient, Dark Elf) . Droma, in Chewbacca’s absence, is the perfect foil for Han. He’s smart, slightly sarcastic (but not annoyingly so), and mystical if not superstitious. He doesn’t put up with Han’s crap, which is exactly what he needs at this point in the story. Of course, Leia would probably be even better in this position — but so far, NJO has been pretty unwilling to have her do anything of consequence.
Overall, Hero’s Trial is a good read — not great, but not bad either. I’m still waiting for that killer book: one that connects on every level, and makes me say wow. But for now, it’s entertaining and continues the SW story. I’ll give it a 3/5.
Review: Naked Empire by Terry Goodkind
First, a little history for the unenlightened.
You have to wonder what happened to Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series. The first book in the series, Wizard’s First Rule is one of my favorite fantasy novels of all time. Stone of Tears, the followup, was not perfect, but it was a great addition to the growing epic. The books that followed never achieved the enchantment of the first novel, but still managed to be entertaining.
Then, somewhere between the fifth and sixth books of the series, Goodkind read Atlas Shrugged decided he’d rather be writing political allegory than fantasy. The sixth book, Faith of the Fallen, was a diatrabe of sorts againt Communism. Yes, Communism, the economic structure that hasn’t really existed since the mid-eighties. Way to be current.
Anyway, that book managed to be entertaining despite the proselytization. Richard’s (that is, the protagonist’s) struggles against against an ideal rather than a discrete enemy actually helped FotF become one of my favorites of the series.
The next book, Pillars of Creation, took a detour from this train of thought to tell the story of Richard’s long lost sister. Again, mildly entertaining in the league of some of the middle novels of the series.
Then comes the topic of today’s review: Naked Empire. Ho-ly crap. This is easily Goodkind’s worst book. As easily as one can tell Goodkind was introduced to Objectivism before writing FotF, one can see the author’s intentions and train of thought in writing this pile of scum. Goodkind, evidently, saw some war protestors (presumably against the Afghanistan invasion or the very start of the Iraq War, given the time period), was enranged, had a fantasy of murdering them all, and then made that into a book.
The novel concerns a new race of people, the Bandakar, who are discovered hiding away in some remote part of enemy territory. The Bandakar, to put it simply, are idiots of the highest degree. They are complete pacifists, sort of, and so refuse violence of any kind, believing that it leads to more violence. Of course, this society has now been taken over by Richard’s enemy, the Imperial Order, and they beg Richard to save him.
Of course, Richard needs their help to do so, so he must convince them of their evil ways. What follows are pages upon pages of excruciating sermon: “You must fight back!” “We can’t.” “You have to!” “We can’t!” “You have to!” I’ve essentially summed up half the book with those quotations.
The funniest part, however, is how tyrannical and scary Richard starts to sound. All the Bushisms about destroying evil instead of letting it destroy you are there, but Richard spouts it with such merciless cruelty that you could really see it coming from some dictator. Richard believes that the only moral course of action is to utterly destroy “evil” by any means necessary– the irony seems lost on Richard and the author that the enemy, the Order, believes the exact same thing.
Deeper in the discussion, Richard attempts to define the world as black and white and rail against Nihilism (again, way to fight against something relevant, Terry!). Essentially, Goodkind wants to have his cake and eat it to. He wants interesting, motivated villains, such as the leader of the Order, Jagang, and a sorceress, Nicci, who recently defected to Richard’s side. But at the same time, he wants his villains to be absolutely, unabashedly evil, with no hope of redemption. Goodkind seems to oscillate between these points of view at will.
Beyond the political discussion, the basic plot is pretty lame. Richard is poisioned, and has to go on a fetch quest to retrieve three antidotes from three different towns in the Bandakar “empire” (and no, we never really get a good reason why the antidotes are separated and hidden). On the way to get his antidotes, Richard and a small army of Bandakar drive the Order out of their villages. The rest of Richard’s group is completely tangential to the storyline — his sister is completely irritating, and his wife Kahlan, who until now has been a shining example of a strong female lead, is, in the end, relegated to the damsel-in-distress.
Oh, I can’t end without going back to the protester slaughter I mentioned earlier. Near the end of the book, a large group of pacifist protesters try to prevent Richard from killing the Order soldiers. Fine, I can dig that. But instead of making them real or giving them anything relevant to say, they shout stock phrases like “NO WAR! NO WAR!” Yeah. You can see the peace signs and flower power, and feel the RAGE in Terry Goodkind’s heart at these hippies. The lesson here is, apparently, any kind of protesting against war or violence is wrong, protesting war amounts to protecting pure evil, and such protesters deserve to be violently slaughtered. Man, isn’t Objectivism just the CHEERIEST little belief structure?
I’m not so sure if I want to give books scores, or just let the review speak for itself. But since this marks the 8th book in the series, and also the worst book in the series, I’ll go ahead and give it a 1/8.
Matt Borgard is praying to Ayn Rand that this series redeems itself in the final trilogy.