Book Reviews

Certain books cast light on our future selves: think 1984, Brave New World, Infinite Jest even, and usually in doing so, forewarn us of what dire circumstances we could be muddling our way into. Often times these tomes are moralistic in nature: stray too far this way and look at what could be in store.

This novel is short, concise and packs a serious punch. It’s like a nasty bar fight that ends before you realize you were the one right in the thick of it. Written in four parts (originally printed in Playboy as a series), not a sentence is wasted. It’s full of guns, frauds, sex and liquor. Jimmy Luntz is an obsessive gambler, and a quartet singer.

Read this book on a nice day, in hammock. The story is subtle. It begins in small-town Ireland, circa 1950, and moves to the bustling streets of Brooklyn. Eilis Lacey lives a quaint life, working in the grocery, thinking about boys and dancing; but when a priest proposes that—with his help—she travel to America, it’s like her life starts anew.

Think what you will about John Updike (that he was sexist, a chauvinist even), but it remains that he was a writer with quite a bit of living in his bag. Sure he makes old-man notes about the changing world, he mockingly blames Monica for her stint with Bill, but he also reflects gently on the cycle of age.

There’s something about the sound of truth: that small whisper-mantra that this really happened. Billed as a “novel based on a true story,” Bondurant traces the passed-down stories of his grandfather, Jack, and two granduncles, Forrest and Howard. Bondurant also uses Sherwood Anderson, to shift back and forth from 1928 and 1929 to 1935, when Anderson makes a trip

Olive Kitteridge is fleshy. She eats doughnuts everyday. She offends and is offended easily, and yet she is fragile and sympathetic. This novel, composed of 13 connected stories, presents Crosby, Maine: the accumulation of scars that come with small-town life.

Meet Chay Sump, Lightning Willy, Dixon Forkenbrocks, Hi Alcorn, Shaina Lister and the Devil. Annie Proulx’s characters are wild and creepy, poor and isolated. These are hard lives: they “saddle up, ride, rope, cut, herd, unsaddle, eat sleep and do it again.” Proulx’s humor is morbid and relentless. Laugh and cringe within a sentence.

These stories span from anonymous sex games in the after-hours clubs of Paris, to Kennedy wannabe politicians trying to avoid scandal, to hostage negotiation in war-torn Kabul, but these characters seem connected.

In a sick and wonderful way, Lowboy notices the details in everything: temperature, sound, light, weight. In just 24 hours, 16-year-old, schizophrenic William Heller (Lowboy) escapes from his asylum, has a near-sexual encounter with a street-woman, sneaks his ex-girlfriend out of school, eludes detectives and tramps all over Manhattan, mostly underground.