FullReviews Index
Reading Infinite Jest With a Few Thousand of Your Closest Friends
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel of addiction and recovery, popular entertainment, and tennis has been hailed as a work of genius, one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. It is a long and complex work bearing the labyrinthine threads of plot and stylistic intricacies for which Wallace was famous, and certainly one of the most engrossing novel I have ever read.
Little Bee
'Little Bee' is the story of a tenuous friendship that emerges between a Nigerian refuge girl and a white British magazine editor.
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet
Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet is a 12-year-old cartographer living on the Coppertop Ranch just 4.73 miles North of the tiny town of Divide, Montana. His middle name is in honor of the bird that met its demise against the Spivet kitchen window at the exact moment of the boy's birth. T.S. keeps the skeletal remains of that sparrow on his drafting table, in a bedroom flanked by shelves crammed with the notebooks in which he maps his world. This is no ordinary Montana ranch boy.
The Great Perhaps
In the weeks leading up to the 2004 presidential election, the Caspers are a family in decline, each member watching helplessly as the ties that bind them unravel despite utter devotion to the simple tenets they believe will save them. In 'The Great Perhaps,' Joe Meno dashes the efficacy of simple answers with a story woven together in intricately structured five part harmony, each part with its own distinct voice.
Out of My Skin
In 'Out of My Skin' John Haskell's narrator-protagonist moves to Los Angeles to write movie reviews and, in an act of self-transformation, ends up a Steve Martin impersonator.
The Ten-Year Nap
As one of the endorsements points out, Meg Wolitzer is a social observer of Tom Wolfe-ian status, and her writing style mimics his to a tee. 'The Ten-Year Nap' includes both deliciously pointed observations and annoying, too-clever remarks. Despite the promise of this unflinching and sharp-eyed look at career women who return home to raise their children, I ended up disappointed. Read more.
Drop City
It is 1970, and a California commune devoted to peace, free love, and the simple life has decided to relocate to the last frontier - the unforgiving landscape of interior Alaska. Armed with the spirit of adventure and naive optimism, the inhabitants of "Drop City" arrive in the wilderness of Alaska only to find their utopia already populated by other homesteaders. T.C. Boyle's ninth novel is a tour de force infused with the lyricism and take-no-prisoners storytelling for which he is famous.
Lowboy
John Wray's novel 'Lowboy' is about a schizophrenic teenager who has stopped taking his medication and escaped the asylum into the New York subway. The novel follows William Heller, aka "Lowboy," below ground and above, as he pursues what he perceives as his quest to save the world.
Terrorist
John Updike's twenty-second novel tells of eighteen-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, the son of an Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when he was three, and his devotion to Allah and the words of the Holy Qur'an, as expounded to him by a local mosque's imam. Ahmad is pulled by two forces: that of a guidance counselor who strives to steer Ahmad from fundamentalist influences, and of a Lebanese jihadist, whose guidance would lead Ahmad in a more dangerous direction.
The Mermaid Chair
Sue Monk Kidd, author of the bestselling 'Secret Life of Bees,' is back with her second novel, 'The Mermaid Chair.' Jessie Sullivan returns to Egret Island,off the coast of South Carolina, to care for her mother and finds herself attracted to a young monk at a Benedictine Monastery where "resides a beautiful and mysterious chair ornately carved with mermaids and dedicated to a saint who, legend claims, was a mermaid before her conversion."
Testimony
'Testimony' opens with a shocking description of child pornography that may leave Anita Shreve's regular audience gasping for air, and perhaps even reaching for one of her previous novels to make sure she is the same author that they remember. As the story progresses, however, it becomes clear that this was in fact the author's intention, and not merely an unfortunate miscalculation by a normally perceptive writer.
Family Planning
As this comic tour de force says, "A family of thirteen in modern-day India was a disaster, a game of marbles that had lost its marbles ... a pack of wolves with no Mowgli to raise, a team of jihadis so bored they'd declared holy war on one another." The family that Mahajan so succinctly chronicles is a disaster before it even becomes a family.
My Revolutions
Hari Kunzru's "My Revolutions" is a thrilling novel with a plot that readers will find more than relevant in today's political climate. Idealism, anger, and social ambition fuel the fictional Michael Frame's involvement with a group of radical activists who protest the Vietnam War in 1960s London. The main character's turn to terrorism runs a recognizable course and offers striking insight into the modern tensions between individual and family, nation and state.
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
In 'The Story of Edgar Sawtelle' (2008), far and away the best debut novel of the year, David Wroblewski creates a beautifully imagined world filled with people who grapple with real issues. There is even a dog, Almondine, who shares her thoughts with us. This may be fiction, but it has the feel and punch of Life.
Indignation
Philip Roth's 'Indignation' is narrated by a young Jewish man from New Jersey and follows him as he escapes his overly-protective father by transferring to a college in Winesburg, Ohio for his sophomore year, having spent his freshman year a little too close to home at a local college. Although he comes from a long line of kosher butchers, he is determined to work hard to improve his social status, and to avoid being drafted by the armed forces for service in the Korean War.
Everyman
Philip Roth turns his attention to one man's confrontation with mortality. Roth's Everyman is a hero whose youthful sense of independence and confidence begins to be challenged when illness commences its attack in middle age. A successful commercial advertising artist, he is the father of two sons who despise him and a daughter who adores him. He is the lonely ex-husband of three very different women. Inevitably, he discovers that he has become what he does not want to be.
The Bible Salesman
In Clyde Edgerton's 'The Bible Salesman,' Preston Clearwater, a criminal, picks up hitch-hiking Henry Dampier, an innocent nineteen-year-old Bible salesman. Clearwater immediately recognizes Henry as just the associate he needs--one who will believe Clearwater is working as an F.B.I. spy; one who will drive the cars Clearwater steals as Clearwater follows along in another car at a safe distance. Henry joyfully sees a chance to lead a dual life as Bible salesman and a G-man.
The Butt
In 'The Butt,' Will Self's main character, Tom Brodzinski, is vacationing in a tropical, sunbaked land with his family when he sets off an absurd and horrible chain of events by carelessly flicking a cigarette butt from his hotel terrace.
The Brooklyn Follies
A retired insurance salesman, estranged from his family and diagnosed with lung cancer, returns to Brooklyn to die. Instead, he reacquaints himself with his long-lost nephew, a spiritual seeker working in a used bookstore. Despair is swept away in favor of discovery, in Brooklynite, Paul Auster's "hymn to the glories and mysteries of ordinary human life."
Oracle Night
Paul Auster is one author who likes to write novels about novelists, and continues to be consistently entertaining and provocative in doing so. Auster's latest novel, Oracle Night, is another exploration on why we write, and what kind of power that writing actually holds.
Man in the Dark
Paul Auster's newest book, 'Man in the Dark,' creates an alternate universe in which the twin towers never toppled, the war in Iraq never began, and instead the United States wages against itself, divided in civil war. More than a compelling what-if, Auster's book confronts the most important questions of our times in a way that is gut-wrenchingly real.
God Is Dead
God has inhabited the body of a young Dinka woman in the Sudan. When she is killed in the Darfur desert, he dies along with her, and word of his death soon begins to spread. Faced with the hard proof that there is no supreme being in charge, the world is irrevocably transformed, yet remains oddly recognizable.
Out Backward
"Out Backward" is a riveting debut from English author, Ross Raisin. Expelled from the school in town after having been accused of attempted rape, Sam Marsdyke keeps to his parents' Yorkshire sheep farm and steers clear of the outside world, that is until she moves in. What follows is a tale of obsession with a dark turn, as told through Sam's own Yorkshire dialect and disturbed inner life.
The Garden of Last Days
'The Garden of Last Days' is the best novel of the year. Instantly interesting and engaging, it grabs one's attention and holds it to the last page. It is compelling, thought-provoking reading that requires the reader to bring a "willing suspension of disbelief" for full appreciation. Strippers are human, too. Hijackers are human also. It is this last characterization that causes the most dis-ease as we read, but the effort is well worth the journey.
Divisadero
Michael Ondaatje's novel, 'Divisadero,' is sensuous, languid, filled with images, both sublime and earthy. It is a story of separation, division, that feeling of not belonging quite any place or to any relationship. Every character seems to be alone, abandoned, fading in and out of the movie of Life. Concurrently, each character seems to be seeking a place to be, a partner to be with.