Review: Nobody Move by Denis Johnson
Denis Johnson has written a crime novel. It’s fast-paced, journalistic even, which may be explained by it’s four-part serialization last year in Playboy magazine. Johnson has accomplished a hell of a lot in his career—I’ve been picking my way through some of his early collected poetry for the better part of the last month—and now he’s traded in his drug-addled keening for genre fiction. << MORE >>
Interview: Micheline Aharonian Marcom
Bookworm's pitch:
Micheline Marcom's works squeeze themselves between uncomfortable alternatives: Is her new novel, The Mirror in the Well, erotic or pornographic? Is the unnamed woman who narrates it obsessive or masochistic? Is she redeemed or degraded? How do the poles of transgression relate to Marcom's aesthetic?
Review: and Let the Earth Tremble at Its Centers by Gonzalo Celorio
I’m not inebriated…the buildings are. They’re barely standing up. They were about to sink into the streets that undulated chaotically, as if dark subterranean god moved them at their leisure. Santa Teresa is drunk….The archdiocese is drunk out of its gourd. The cathedral is high as a kite. The Metropolitan Chapel is inebriated. The churches are looped, and the civil buildings and convents are wasted. The city is drunk—-the entire city, the bells, the clocks, the staircases, the domes, the belfries, the streetlights, the crosses, absolutely everything…The only one who is sober is me.
When you’re drunk, everything and nothing makes sense. It’s a wonderful/horrible state of forgetting the world and remembering every bad and good thing that has come before. Part of the University of Texas’ Pan American Literature in Translation Series, And Let the Earth Tremble at Its Center is Gonzalo Celorio’s second novel. Originally written in 1999 this newly translated version from Dick Gerdes brings Celario's works to English-speaking audiences for the first time. Simultaneously brainy and sunk into the muck and grime of contemporary urban life it’s about alcoholism and lost chances and, oh hell, sit back and have a drink, there's a whole lot more....<< MORE >>
Review: The One Marvelous Thing by Rikki Ducornet
I may be wrong about my history, but I believe this is Rikki Ducornet’s first story collection in around ten years. So I was kind of pumped when I picked up the advance copy. I’ve been able to follow some of her work in the pages of literary journals. The first story in One Marvelous Thing, “Wild Child,” I recall appeared in AGNI, a very solid biannual out of Boston University. When another of the stories, “The Dickmare,” turned up in Tin House, I became pretty sure there would be a collection in stores before long, but it was still a while longer before Dalkey Archive announced it would be putting The One Marvelous Thing into print. All of this is a way of saying that Ms. Ducornet’s stories were pretty well road-tested before hitting the market.
If I had to pull together a list of my favorite short story writers from the last ten years, all of whom I’ve learned about through journals and quarterlies (stop reading the New Yorker if you want to find greatness), the names would be mostly women. Here goes, in no particular order: Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Lydia Davis, and Rikki Ducornet.
The common thread here is that these women all write sublimely inventive stuff, and Rikki Ducornet is the veteran of the pack. The rock star, if you will.<< MORE >>
Review: The Disappearance By Efrem Sigel
Pulp thrillers, procedural dramas, and cable news have steeped most stories of missing children in sensationalism and suspense. Not having any personal experience with such a tragedy, I’ve always just taken this version of events as reality. Efrem Sigel, in his second novel, explores the disappearance of a child by keeping a tight focus on character psychology but still giving us a whodunit. This approach is interesting and took me in a direction I wasn’t anticipating but in the end he isn’t fully able to deliver a strong plot when it’s wrapped in a even stronger character study.
The book "The Disappearance” centers on Joshua and Nathalie, New York transplants to a small town, whose son Daniel vanishes without a trace on a clear beautiful day. This is plot territory that numerous books have trod in the past but it's the turmoil and agony into which Daniel's disappearance thrusts the marriage that becomes the focus of Sigel's narrative...<< MORE >>
New in Paperback: "Wrack and Ruin" by Don Lee
Farce may be the easiest literary theme to conceptualize and the most difficult to carry out. As an idea, Don Lee's "Wrack and Ruin" sounds like a zippy little cut on Northern California life: Lyndon Song used to be a celebrated sculptor in New York, but is now laying low in the fictional town of Rosarita Bay, growing Brussels sprouts and living the kind of outcast/burnout life that California makes so appealing. Enter Lyndon's brother Woody, an indicted financial player who has come to cajole Lyndon to sell his land for a huge golf resort—the kind of development that is wiping the charm off coastal California. "Wrack and Ruin" takes place over one Labor Day weekend and is packed with oddball NorCal townies, pot, middle-age angst, and the kind of awkward situations that cause publicists to use words like "madcap" when describing a novel.
(Rather large aside: Rosarita Bay is clearly Half Moon Bay, a coastside town south of San Francisco where I lived for two years that has large Brussels sprouts fields and a fairly new, fairly controversial, fairly grotesque Ritz Carleton golf resort.)
Seems like a plot ripe with comic promise right? The problem is, and I've seen this in novels too many times to count, that the effort to make "madcap" situations, shows like panty lines in all but the best comic writing and the more middling-quality works, such as "Wrack and Ruin" end up seeming so forced and unrealistic that the "That would never happen" reaction of the reader overshadows any chance of "That's hilarious."
"Wrack and Ruin" just never seems believable. And, without believing the characters would act the way they are acting, the reader never really buys any of the plot turns and therefore the farce is deflated. But, to be kind, there is nothing disagreeable or off-putting about "Wrack and Ruin". Though Lee's attempt to use humor to make some sort of commentary on modern life never gets off the ground, a certain relaxing, enjoy-the-scenery satisfaction can be had from reading the novel.
Review: "The Brightest Moon of the Century" by Christopher Meeks
Here's a link to my Star Tribune review.
Review: "Doghead" by Morten Ramsland
This book took longer than it should have to read. I'm not blaming Ramsland; I'll admit to being a little burned out on intense stories about drunken, herring-eating Scandinavians. I enjoyed "Doghead". More, though, I enjoyed my two-year-old holding it up and bellowing "DOOOOOGGGGHEAD!"
Here's my Minneapolis Star Tribune review.
Review: The Mirror in the Well by Micheline Aharonian Marcom
knew nothing about Micheline Marcom before picking up The Mirror in the Well. I confess that I read her newest novel for no better reason than it carried the Dalkey Archive seal, a simple right-angled spiral that rests at the base of the spine, a conjuration of Jarry’s Ubu Roi, the first few turns of a hedge maze, an icon that’s synonymous with quality fiction. Ms. Marcom’s work validates and revalidates my claim about the press. 
The Mirror in the Well is a tightrope walk through the erotic dream life of a contemporary Emma Bovary. Ms. Marcom is not as baroque to the ear as Flaubert, but she employs language as obsessively. I imagine this author is kept up at night by semicolon terrors, patiently retracing her written words, spinning dials until the lock clicks in place. This is exactly the breed of writer I like to champion...<< MORE >>
New in Paperback: "Knockemstiff" by Donald Ray Pollock
This is a dark, creepy and exciting book set in the real-life town of Knockemstiff, Ohio, and featuring some real-life deadbeats/dirtbags/hardcases. Check out the review I did for the Star Tribune last year.
Here's a great display Posman's Books in Grand Central Station did when "Knockemstiff" first came out.
And here's the Donald Ray Pollock website.