A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara

“If I were a different kind of person, I might say that this whole incident is a metaphor for life in general: things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”




A novel that may well be purposely frustrating - the subject matter is horrifically grim and the writing doesn't offer much escape.  There are several spots where your impulse is to scream at some of the characters to do something, yet you know they won't.  Often, this is a problem with novels (or possibly more often, movies.  Roger Ebert referred to it as the "idiot plot."), where you have to withstand people following an indefensible line of action that could be fixed with one simple action.  While you could definitely make that argument here, where several of the characters seem to be enablers despite their best intentions.  But this is a book of extremes - a character so scarred by a childhood that is one horrible situation peopled

by evil men after another. The author's intent is to force you with this as the reader by essentially giving you no options otherwise.  I was willing to do that, I imagine others will not.


This all starts off as a story of four young men, recent graduates of an unnamed college in the northeast.  They are close friends despite their disparate backgrounds.  In an unusual flip, it is the two white kids who come from more economically disadvantaged backgrounds (to be fair, we never know the racial background of Jude, as he has no idea himself; the book is rather vague on this point, but I, rightly or wrongly, put him in the white camp).  They are living in New York and just starting out in the careers (and life).  JB wants to be an artist, Willem an actor, Malcolm an architect and Jude is interested in both theoretical math and the law.  They will all be wildly successful in their chosen endeavors.  One of the potentially irritating things about this book is everyone's success - this is not a book that dwells on the travails of common life - everyone, eventually, is wealthy and spends much of their time eating at fine restaurants, going to the theater, or a gallery opening, or whatever else it is that the privileged of New York do.  We never get a sense of time here either - no external events that root the story in a particular time, other than its "current" (there are cell phones and some other things that at least give us that). Again, though, I think these are just ways of focusing on the real horror story that is here.


The focus of that horror is Jude.  Jude has a limp; Jude is careful to never show his body to anyone; Jude cuts himself, repeatedly, in scenes that are difficult to read.  His friends will become gradually aware of these things, and the causes, as the novel progresses. But Jude is extraordinarily reluctant to reveal his past, and even when he does, fanatically unwilling to do anything about it.


We learn first of the monastery he lived, beginning soon after he was born (and found in or near a trash bin as a baby). While the monks there do provide for his care, they also prey on him emotionally and physically.  Jude's recollections are at their most guarded here - what is happening is obvious from his retelling, but the descriptions are not that (compared to later) graphic.  Jude eventually befriends the seemingly kind Brother Luke, and they run away together when Jude is around 10.  Brother Luke turns out to be a methodical predator, using Jude for financial support and for his own gratification.  These are hard sections to read - child abuse gone hyper. 


Jude will manage to get away from this, but not to anywhere better - his story has a long way to go before he manages to break free.  But of course he doesn't really ever break free.  The time that was supposed to be his childhood will always be with him.  It is Brother Luke that teaches him to cut himself, and this is often his only release decades after.


Jude does derive support from those around him, particularly his 3 college friends.  One of his law professors ends up legally adopting him at age 30, and event of profound importance to Jude.  But all this only soothes the pain inside, it can never make it completely go away.  Interestingly, Jude becomes a highly respected (and feared) corporate attorney, known for being tough both in the courtroom and with his fellow employees.  Which is in marked contrast to his behavior around his friends, where he is apologetic to a fault.  The one exception, though, is in letting them into his past - in that respect, he is the take no prisoners lawyer.  One of the faults I had early on was the inability of any of his friends to be able to get him to go to a psychologist or other mental health specialist.  There are a few attempts early on, but are given up quickly.  The author answers this somewhat later on in a an at least somewhat satisfactory manner (and to be fair, Jude does eventually end up seeing a psychiatrist, but only of necessity and not in a manner that leaves much room for success).


The other odd thing about the book is the nature of the relationship between Jude and Willem.  For a good part of the book they are best friends, but they become lovers (sorta, kinda) later on.  On the one hand, it isn't that surprising, but both characters claim to not be gay.  Willem, who spends much of the early novel going from girlfriend to girlfriend, does own up to having had male lovers, but is quite adamant in explaining that he's not gay once he is in a relationship with Jude, he just happens to be in love with Jude.  Jude, whose attitude toward sex is to difficult to discuss here, is apparently not attracted to men in the least, but seems to just stick with what he knows. 


This is a book worth reading - its not pleasant, at times its suffocating, but it goes places few novels ever will.  Days after finishing, I still do not know what to make of Jude's life; if you add and subtract the various pieces, where do you come out?


 

Motherless Brooklyn - Jonathan Lethem

“He’s just a big mouse, Daddy, a vigorous louse, big as a house, a couch, a man, a plan, a canal, apocalypse."


Probably one of the few books featuring a lead character with Tourette's.  Lionel Essrog also has OCD.  Lethem doesn't try too much to mimic Lionel on the page as go into Lionel's head and explore what it means to Lionel, how it impacts his daily existence.  Lionel is one of four orphans who all grew up together and now work for Frank Minna, supposedly as detectives.  Lionel and his pals are not the brightest bulbs, but they are loyal to Frank.  When Frank turns up dead, things start to fall apart.  It becomes apparent that Frank was working on the dark side of things, and its up to Lionel to figure it all out.




This is standard detective fiction framework, but it is also about growing up - while Lionel's childhood is glimpsed mainly through a few flashbacks, even as an adult he is a bit of a man child.  The extent to which Frank has sheltered (and manipulated) his boys slowly becomes apparent to Lionel over the course of the novel.  Also, the complexity of people and situations becomes more apparent to him as well.  Lionel's tics set him apart early on as the fool of the group, but it hides his intelligence and sensitivity, two things he's never called upon to use while Frank is alive.  But after his death, they give Lionel the cover he needs to unravel the complex chain of events that have occurred.  There's a femme fatale (of course), odd old Italian mobsters, Zen masters (and an attractive and somewhat goofy Zen student), Japanese businessmen and old family relationships gone bad.


The choice of tile is something I have often wondered about.  obviously all the orphans are motherless and Frank would is their father figure, but that seems a bit too easy.  Perhaps it is also the lack of any nurturing available to any of the characters in this hard boiled world. The female characters are few to be found at all, and the ones that do show up aren't there to provide any support.


I did enjoy The Fortress of Solitude more than this, but this is definitely worth every minute spent with it.

Suspects - David Thomson

What if movie characters and storylines were actually all interconnected? 




That's the basic premise of Suspects, a slim book that isn't really a novel as much as a collection of short retellings and embellishments of several dozen film noir (and film noirish) classics from the 30's up to around 1980.  But there is an overarching story here that only becomes apparent near the end - the family tree at the beginning is a bit of a teaser.  There's a narrator for all this, and who it is eventually (and surprisingly) becomes clear. 


Thomson is a film reviewer, and he knows his stuff.  The films he includes were almost all full of innuendo, which Thomsen is able to utilize and fill in the blanks, and go beyond them.  its a book where Mary Ann Simpson and Noah Cross have a past, and we find out who Travis Bickle's parents to whom he was always writing, were.


This is an interesting concept for a book in that audiences tend to identify quite closely with film characters.  By focusing on the more shady characters, who often seem to reinvent themselves (and Thomson gives them even more opportunities to do so here), he breaks down the barriers among characters, the actors who play them, and the audience even more.

Pure - Andrew Miller

Pre - Revolution France, 1785.  A young engineer, Jean-Baptiste Baratte is hired by the government  of Louis XIV to clear out the cemetery at Les Innocents, which has been active for centuries and is now filled beyond capacity to the point that the bodies no longer decompose properly, resulting in a horrid stench that reaches far beyond the cemetery walls - the weight of the corpses has destroyed the wall of a nearby building and bodies ended up in its cellar.  It is not hard to figure out the most literal meaning of the title. Baratte's job is to exhume the corpses and then move them to a new site far outside of town, as well as demolish the now closed church.  The job will prove to be much grander in scope than Baratte or anyone else could imagine (there's a LOT of people buried there.  A team of miners is employed to do the exhuming, constructing rickety retaining walls as they dig deeper and deeper, and still find more remains.  Essentially the poor have begun to be noticed and are invading the lives of others.


The inhabitants of the area are split on the project; some are happy to see the cemetery and all its foulness go, but others are not;  this has been part of their life for as long as anyone can remember - this would seem to be a reference to the coming turbulent times, when large scale death would once again be a source of division.  Baratte is renting a room from a local family and their teen age daughter attacks Baratte at night with a hammer while he is sleeping.  Dr Guillotin has a small part in the book. 


Just the character names are enough to give you a sense of things.  The protagonist, John the Baptist Churn - a precursor to the more serious agitation to come.  His friend from the village, Lecouer, who with Baratte, has designed a vision of  utopia, translates to "heart."  The project will have great impact on both of their lives, leading Baratte to question his vision of the future in a country that will soon see changes beyond which anyone can imagine.


Miller is a fantastic writer - his novel Ingenious Pain is one of my favorites and Pure isn't much behind that.

The Luminaries – Eleanor Catton

 

It’s a gimmick book.  If that sort of thing annoys you, then don’t read it.  While I would fall on the side of generally avoiding such things, assuming that it is there to hide what’s lacking, that’s not always so.  House of Leaves would be a prime example of a gimmick book, but it was definitely worth reading, even all those pages with one word on them.  What is going on here is a book of twelve chapters, each half as long as the previous and built around the phases of the moon.  There’s also the characters, twelve of them, representing the various astrological signs.  None of this really intruded on the story to me, and the ever shortening chapters helped give the book momentum as it moves to its end.  It _does_ make the first chapter a long one – this is a hefty book (800 and some pages), and chapter 1 is half of it, but get through that (and it’s not hard) and it’s all downhill.

The story.   New Zealand.  1866.  Frontier gold mining town.  12 men of the town of Hokitika have gathered together to discuss the strange events – a missing young man who has made his fortune, a prostitute who has attempted suicide, a recluse found dead in his remote cabin, and of course, a fortune in gold. Each of the men has his own special relationships to the events and the people involved (particularly Anna, the prostitute).  The newest man in town, Walter Moody, trained as a lawyer but trying his hand at prospecting for gold, stumbles upon the meeting and realizes he has his own part of the story to tell. 

This is a big, complex story, involving old grudges and betrayals, greed, lust, and some nicer aspects of humanity as well.  Much like Dickens, there is a young, innocent hero who is more swept up in the book’s events than driving them, an intrepid detective who may or may not be a step or two behind, mixed in with shipping, prospecting, banking and local political life.  This can be an odd read at times – I thought that Walter would be the main focus of the story, yet he essentially disappears for a long stretch in the middle of the book (he does eventually find his place), and there are some odd plot points that seemed neglected, but were eventually picked up.  It even makes sense why later on, if again, you are willing to go along with some of the more metaphysical aspects of the plot.

Catton is a seriously good writer; she adopts the style of the time and it was pretty seamless to me.  Having read The Crimson Petal and the White at about the same time, comparing the two is a lot of fun – Catton stays squarely in the time in an absolute mode, while Michael Faber slaps modern sexual mores into his novel.

Iceland - Jim Krusoe

Finding an odd book is not that hard; many I have read are at least somewhat out of the ordinary. Much like the country is far away from pretty much everything else, the novel is nowhere approaching ordinary.


Iceland was published in 2002.  The protagonist, Paul, repairs typewriters.  While it isn't clear exactly when this novel takes place, other than it seems to be relatively modern day, which would make the typewriter repair business not a particularly lucrative one.  Paul, though, has more pressing concerns.  He needs an organ transplant (which organ is never made clear, nor what exactly is wrong with his), so he goes to an organ facility, in which available organs are kept floating in a swimming pool.  The organ caretaker, Emily, swims in the pool to keep the organs functional.


It will get even more weird from here.


Paul and Emily end up having sex on the diving board (and apparently elsewhere around the pool, although this only becomes apparent in later sections of the novel).  Unfortunately, Paul, now in love with Emily,  loses contact with her and ends up on an adventure that will take him to Iceland, see him lose a family in a volcano, spend time in prison and a piano bar, and a lot else, in what is a pretty slim novel.


Krusoe spends little time with what we would normally consider the big events in life; they don't seem to interest him as much as the details.  Paul is mostly a passenger in his life, but he does have desires, and in his own way, finds a path to them, even if it takes him years.  This is kind of comic, alt-universe Murakami - weird stuff happens that no one seems to notice is weird, and its never very clear where things are headed, but eventually it gets there. 

John Henry Days - Colson Whitehead

A small town has a festival honoring John Henry, who may have existed, and who may have entered into a duel with a machine near this town long ago.  While the ending is always the same, the actual story seems to exist in infinite versions.  Many of those are presented here with someone obsessed with all the versions of John Henry in song; someone else has a fascination with railroad stamps; another is trying to win a contest of his own and survive off junketing expenses a long as he possibly can.


Whitehead writes from several different viewpoints in this book, alternating from chapter to chapter.  While the expense account loving magazine writer J Sutter is the main character, he often rides on the periphery of the story, which really, is about John Henry.  We even get a few chapters from Mr Henry's point of view, a mythical (?) black man looking for recognition in a white world.  Race is outwardly a minor component here, but J Sutter is an African American as well, and lives with problems associated with that day in and out.  John Henry died in a race against a technology that if it didn't get him that day, would surely come back soon after and be better than before, until it would defeat him.  Sutter's problems are more subtle, and he ultimately figures out that he, unlike, Henry, has a bit of a way out.  Not that all the foreshadowing is wrong about how this ends;  like most mythology, there has to be something tragic.  But it might not be quite as expected.


There is a lot to like in this book.  If you are looking to identify, or become familiar with a character, this isn't for you - even J Sutter is hard to define by the end - he's too worn out to give much of himself, and he disappears for large chunks of the novel.  But the other characters who fill in are endlessly interesting, from the various fanatics, to his colleagues and the various town members whom all are involved in the goings on.  For a book that hangs on postage stamps, it is unique take on American mythology and its effects on us all in defining who and what we are.