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Review: Domenica Ruta's With or Without You

Brittney McNamara — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 14:40:00 GMT

Domenica Ruta's With or Without You is the autobiographical tale of a junkie's daughter, who navigates her mother's needles and pills on the way to adulthood only to end up with an addiction of her own. It's like Roald Dahl's Matilda, but without the magic or happy ending.

Ruta writes about her childhood with detached sadness. Growing up in Danvers, Massachusetts, she lives with her mother, Kathi, in the basement apartment of the family house. Everyone knows Kathi as the town drug addict, and the memoir opens with Kathi trying - and failing - to smash a car's windshield with an iron poker. It tells you all you need to know about her: she's violent and passionate and very, very crazy. Outbursts like this came frequently between periods of extreme happiness. While Ruta waits in fear of her mother's next episode, she also encourages them. Ruta remains ominously addicted to her mother, barely able to escape Kathi's gravitational pull even when she moves across the country.

Although With or Without You has the telling bumps of a first book, it clearly conveys how addiction affects a family. Every town has a Kathi. Ruta gives readers a glimpse into the life of the girl with the crazy mom, the girl whose house you weren't allowed to go to.

With that background, Ruta's own downfall seems inevitable, as she follows in her mother's footsteps. She does pills with her mom and becomes a functioning addict, trudging her way toward an MFA in writing. Yet even while riding her own pill high, Ruta looks down upon her mother, promising herself never to be like her. It is often hard to stomach Ruta's hypocrisy, and hard to watch her justify her addictions. The book's saving grace comes when Ruta realizes she has a problem and heads for recovery.

Ruta often leaves the reader wondering what's happening and why it's happening. Jumping around in the narrative, she invites confusion. At times this seems unintentional, but it also replicates for the reader Ruta's own chaotic experiences of her mother's intense, passionate and confusing love. Kathi praises and holds her daughter one minute, and berates her the next. The family goes from inexplicable wealth to abject poverty without warning. As hard as it is for the reader to make sense of this, it was probably harder for Ruta to live it, and to sort it into a memoir. Just as she couldn't escape ending up like her mother at one point in her life, she couldn't help but make the memoir in Kathi's image.

Domenica Ruta will be at the Brookline Booksmith on March 13 for a With or Without You reading, Q&A and signing.

Name the Phoenix Literary Trivia Team, Win a Free T-Shirt

Eugenia Williamson — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 16:43:00 GMT

On Monday, August 6th, The Phoenix is going to trounce all comers at a literary trivia pub quiz sponsored by the Boston Books Festival. But first, we need a name to put on our t-shirts. What should Team Phoenix call ourselves? Submit your answer in the comments below. The winner will be selected by noon tomorrow. We'll send you one of the t-shirts we design, gratis, in the size of your choice.

BOSTON BOOK FESTIVAL SUMMER TRIVIA | Tommy Doyle's, 96 Winthrop St, Cambridge | August 6 | 6:30-8:30pm | http://www.bostonbookfest.org/ticketed_events

Extended interview with novelist Tana French

Cassandra Landry — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 19:36:00 GMT

Grisly-murder novelist Tana French has an infectious laugh and an easygoing cadence to her voice, something that might surprise you if you've read her novels. Her stories - set in her native Ireland - are filled with wrenching hairpin twists and turns conveyed in eloquent prose that somehow makes you feel better about being glued to graphic post mortems in bed at 3 am. French comes to Brookline Booksmith with her latest, Broken Harbor (Viking), on July 26. She spoke with me via Skype from Ireland.

REMIND ME HOW YOU CAME INTO WRITING AGAIN? I was in theater at the time, and theater gigs never line up nicely unless you're Judi Dench or something, which I never was. So, I had a few weeks off between jobs, and I had the good fortune to get on an archeological dig outside Dublin. I found myself thinking that the woods we were next to would be a nice place for kids to play, and then, instead of stopping there like a normal person would, I wondered, "What would happen if three kids went in and only one came out?" That of course, became the premise for [first novel] In the Woods.

DID YOU SET OUT TO WRITE A CRIME? I actually didn't realize I was writing crime until my Irish editor gently pointed it out to me. I thought I was just writing literary fiction with a mystery framework. I'm not big into the distinction or the boundaries, you know, the either-or. It's been really breaking down actually, over the last 10 or 20 years, this idea that it's crime, or it's a good book. There have always been brilliant books that happened to center around a crime or a mystery. I always loved reading crime fiction, but I never realized that's where I was headed.

THE TRADITIONAL DETECTIVE BOOK FORMAT NEVER SEEMS TO BE PRESENT IN YOUR BOOKS, WHICH IS WHY I FEEL LIKE THEY HAVE THAT WIDER RANGE TO THEM. Yeah, I'm so glad that comes across, because I do think that's what I wanted from them. I've always been fascinated with mysteries, ever since I was little kid, so I think if I was going to write, it was always going to end up being a mystery. The best books about mysteries aren't just about the concrete mystery, though. I think all of us are intrigues by mystery, but especially-if this doesn't sound too wanky-by the mystery of the human heart. So the best stories are the ones that take that into consideration, as well as the actual who-killed-whom. Those are the ones I've always loved, and they are the ones that straddle that borderline between "just a good book" and just a "good mystery book." That's what I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping I get to.

SINCE PEOPLE TEND TO LUMP YOU IN AS A CRIME WRITER, DO YOU SEE YOURSELF AS A PART OF THAT PD JAMES/AGATHA CHRISTIE CRIME NOVELIST PANTHEON? As a part of it? Definitely not. My acting teacher in drama school always said that it takes ten years to make an actor. He'd always say, "You're not done here. It takes another eight years of training out in the big bad world before you're actually an actor." I think I'm still in my training period here.

HELL OF A TRAINING PERIOD! I do feel enormously lucky in how these have gone, but I'm very much still learning. If I went back to rewrite In the Woods, I know there would be things where I would smack my forehead and say "I cannot believe I missed that!" This much I do think: I do think I've learned. I don't think I'm on the first step of the ladder anymore, I think I'm on the second, but there's a while yet before I've earned my stripes to say I'm a proper writer and I know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing.

WHAT IS THE PROCESS LIKE FOR YOU IN TERMS OF DESIGNING A MURDER? It always comes from just one image or hook, not necessarily with the actual murder. With Broken Harbor, I was already thinking about the characters and all that, but then we had mice in our house. I went into the kitchen one night, and I saw something small go scooting across the counter, doing a legger under the toaster and behind the cooker. My husband heard me yell, and came out to look, and of course there was nothing there. He kind of made noises about, you know, "Sweetie, it's lovely that you have such a good imagination and you get paid for it, but maybe nothing was there?" [Laughs.] He saw the mouse the next week, but something about it stuck with me. We're in a happy relationship, a strong relationship, and there was nothing else bugging me at the time, but what if that feeling, that sense of invasion that mice can give you, happened to somebody whose relationship wasn't happy and was already under pressure?

WHAT'S THE HARDEST PART OF THIS WORLD FOR YOU TO WRITE? Creating a character and creating a world is what I have tons of practice doing through acting, so it makes sense to me. Structure though, that's difficult. I've got absolutely no training for that, whereas I do think that acting is excellent training for writers. Structure doesn't come naturally to me at all, and trying to figure it all out is the hard bit. It's not always fun writing about nasty crimes, especially in Broken Harbor. With the other books, the setting was somewhere I wanted to be. I liked the house in The Likeness, and I like the neighborhoods in Faithful Place and In the Woods, but this, I found the ghost estates devastatingly sad. That in some ways was the hardest part, spending time in that location in my imagination all the time. It's not a cheerful or an easy place to be, because they should never have happened, these places, but there they are and people are stuck on them. Plus, it's all my generation, all the 30-something's who got stuck on these estates and but for a combination of different bits of luck, that could have been us.

ONE MIGHT ASSUME THAT IN ORDER TO ORGANIZE A COMPLEX MYSTERY AND DROP THE RIGHT HINTS IN THE RIGHT PLACES, ONE WOULD HAVE TO BE A PRETTY METICULOUS PERSON. BUT SINCE YOU SAY YOU HAVE NO CLUE WHERE ANYTHING IS GOING...Oh god, no! I am not organized, and that's putting it nicely, but the thing is that I have the luxury of rewriting as many times as I want. I can go back, and go back, and I do! I am kind of a perfectionist about this stuff though, and the combination of wanting it to be as good as it possibly can be and not being organized to begin with makes for a lot of rewriting. A lot. The bit that makes it easier though, is that your subconscious is working on the book at the same time. So a lot of the time, if I realize in chapter 8 that something needs to be seeded in back in chapter 2, I suddenly notice that it's already there. Before my conscious mind realized, "Oh, we need a red herring here," my subconscious mind already realized that these characters would do this certain thing. The character direction is pointing that way already, if that makes any sense. I get emails from readers pointing things out to me that I hadn't ever seen in my own writing before, and I love it. I'm a big believer in the fact that a book doesn't actually exist as long as it's just me and my computer. It only exists when you're reading it.

I FEEL LIKE THAT'S WHAT MAKES IT MORE OF A SUCCESSFUL READ. EVEN AFTER REWRITES, AS A READER YOU CAN ALMOST FEEL YOU TRYING TO FIGURE IT OUT AT THE SAME TIME WE ARE. I think that's a big part of what it is. With In the Woods, the only reason I was able to write that is because I really wanted to know what happened, and the only way to find out was to write it. It's the same thing with Broken Harbor. It takes me almost two years to write a book, so it needs to be something that I'm interested enough in that I need to want to find out, in order to keep writing for that length of time. I think if I outlined it all, and knew what was going to happen, then I would probably wander off and go to the pub or something. [laughs]

WHAT'S IT LIKE BEING IN YOUR HEAD FOR TWO YEARS? IT SEEMS LIKE A ROB [THE NARRATOR IN IN THE WOODS] TYPE OF THING, WHERE THE ANSWER IS IN HIS HEAD, BUT HE CAN'T QUITE GET AT IT. That's actually a really interesting way of putting it, because it's very much like that! A lot of time, it's like I know that there's something there, the story is there, if I could just pull it out. And it does sometimes feel like I'm not making it up. Interestingly, it does feel a bit like archeology as well, where you're slowly brushing and chipping away and hoping sooner or later that you'll end up seeing something there. The biggest difficulty for me is that it's not very social. Coming from acting, I'm used to working via collaborative process. If you're having a bad day, and your brain is absolutely coming up with nothing useful, then your scene partner might be having a good day, or the director might be, whereas now, if nothing's happening? All that happens is, I sit there, staring at my computer trying not to goof off on the Internet. That's the difficult bit for me. And of course, in acting, after rehearsal you all go over to the pub together. Now, there's none of that, and it's just sad going to the pub by yourself. [laughs]

THIS BOOK DEALS MORE DIRECTLY WITH HEAVY PSYCHOSIS, WHEREAS THE MOTIVES IN THE OTHER BOOKS WERE MUCH MORE TANGIBLE. WAS THAT A CONSCIOUS CHOICE? Everyone in this book is doing their best, but their minds are fragmenting, slowly. Again, I didn't even notice until someone pointed it out to me that this book is about madness. Every character is struggling to hold it together mentally at some point. Thankfully, mental illness has never played a part in my life, but I get the sense that most mental illnesses, if you pare them back, what is at the core of it, is a dislocation of the inner and outer reality. With Dina [Scorcher's sister], she knows that her reality is rubbing horribly against the outer one but she can't reconcile the two of them. I think all this for me had its origins in what was going on in Ireland at the time with the whole Celtic Tiger boom thing. We were living in this completely artificial property that had been churned up out of corruption and hot air. We were being told that if we believed in it hard enough, it would last forever. If anybody pointed out that this wasn't the reality, he was told that if everything went wrong, it would be his fault for saying it would go wrong. We were led into a national mood, where reality was not only irrelevant but unpatriotic. We were encouraged to disconnect ourselves from the outer reality and push it away as far as you could. I think that's what's led to a certain amount of the devastation, since Ireland came crashing down. People weren't just financially devastated, which is bad enough, they were also psychologically devastated. They had redefined their own reality to fit the standards that were being thrust on them, and now they're being confronted with the fact that the true reality is still there, and it's coming for you. That's terrifying, and that is a form of madness to me. It's almost a deliberately induced mental illness. So I think that seeped into the book on all different levels. With someone like Dina, the madness is coming from within her, but she's aware enough of it that she tries to work around it. With Pat and Jenny Spain [victims of Broken Harbor], they've almost deliberately induced it, and the reality just comes roaring up and hits them like a freight train. That's how I ended up going down that road, because that core facet of it is in the air in Ireland at the moment.

SO, AFTER FOUR BOOKS, DO YOU FEEL LIKE YOU'D BE REASONABLY ABLE TO CONDUCT YOUR OWN INVESTIGATION? I'M ALWAYS WONDERING THAT. [laughs] God no! They don't get to decide what they find like I do. The more I communicate with actual police officers and retired police officers, the more I know I could never do their job in a million years. The stakes! Me, I have a bad day at work when I get adjective overload. They have a bad day at work and you've got truth, justice, life and death on the line. I'm just goofing around! People always are asking if Cassie [Maddox, protagonist of The Likeness] is me, and she's definitely not. She's somebody I would like to have a pint with, but no way. She's out there dealing with this heavy stuff, and I'm hanging around wondering where to put the comma.

KIND OF LIKE HOW PEOPLE WOULD ASSUME ACTION STARS WOULDN'T TAKE SHIT FROM A MUGGER. BUT, IF THERE'S NO ONE ON THE OTHER SIDE DOING THE CHOREOGRAPHY, IT'S PROBABLY USELESS. Yes! People always assumed I'd be good at public speaking or being on panels because I was an actor, and I always told them no way. When I was an actor, people gave me a script! But that's the big difference, it's not imaginary. These people are dealing with a level of in-your-face reality. I think technique-wise, I know a fair bit about police investigative technique, but just the amount of reality that smashes you in the face every day...I'm in awe of them.

ALL OF YOUR CHARACTERS HAVE THAT PIVOTAL POINT IN THEIR PAST THAT DEFINES THEIR ACTIONS. IF YOU WERE TO WRITE ABOUT YOURSELF, IS THERE A PIVOTAL MOMENT YOU WOULD BE ABLE TO PICK OUT IN YOUR OWN LIFE? This comes up at the beginning of Faithful Place actually, where Frank [Mackey, protagonist] says that most people don't get to see these moments and recognize them for what they are. Maybe when I'm 80, I'll be able to look back and see it. Now, clearly, one that stands out is the decision to work on that dig for a few weeks. A good call! [Laughs.] You just never feel like you're diving into a big moment at the time.

IS THERE A CHARACTER THAT YOU FIND EASIEST TO WRITE, OR THAT YOU HAVE A NATURAL AFFINITY FOR? The easiest one to write was Frank Mackey [protagonist of Faithful Place]. That kind of hard, fast, very dark sense of humor makes everything easier to write. I'd most like to go for a pint with Cassie [protagonist of The Likeness]. The one I'm fondest of, though, is Rob [Ryan, protagonist of In the Woods], because that was my first. There I was, desperately broke and turning down acting jobs so I could finish In the Woods. I think putting that kind of investment into a book is going to make you feel very fond of that character forevermore. He's where it all started.

DO YOU EVER REVISIT ANY OF THESE CHARACTERS OR THEIR STORIES IN YOUR OFF-HOURS? No, once it's out there, it's done. Plus, after the edits, and the copy edits and all that, you're more than ready to let go. Plus, I'm in the middle of writing a new one, so I have to be fully invested in them so I don't screw them up. I can't even think about the last one, and that's because I write in character so much. I've got to be focused on the one I'm writing, otherwise I completely wander off.

YOU'RE ALREADY ONTO THE NEXT? YOU'RE A MACHINE! Yep! I'm about halfway through, unless it ends up being even longer...[laughs]

WHO'S THE NARRATOR FOR YOUR NEXT BOOK? It's Stephen Moran from Faithful Place, the young sidekick. The whole idea is that Frank's daughter Holly is 16 now, and at her private boarding school they've got a bulletin board where the girls can stick up secrets that they want to reveal anonymously. She has found on this board, and brought to Stephen, a postcard that has a photograph of a teenage boy who was murdered a year ago, and a caption that reads, "I know who killed him." So, Stephen has to team up with the detective and work the case. So, I'm about halfway through, and I think I know whodunit, but that could all change. I had no clue whodunit in [Broken Harbor], to the point where, I was writing the first few chapters, and the whole family was dead, and then after four or five chapters, I realized, "Ah, crap, one of them needs to be left alive." Then I had to go back and rewrite the first three bloody chapters. There's a lot of rewriting in doing it my way, and I really never have a clue.

JUST FOR KICKS: IF YOU HAD TO PARTNER WITH ROB, CASSIE, FRANK, OR SCORCHER, WHO WOULD YOU CHOOSE? Definitely not Scorcher, definitely not Rob. Both Frank and Cassie would be good to have at your back, but overall, you'd probably be safer around Frank, but he would mess you around if he felt like it.

[the book rat project] Week 18: Submitted for your approval . . .

Will Delman — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 15:45:00 GMT

This time around Eugenia picked Sorry Please Thank You by Charles Yu. She picked this one based on my love of Kurt Vonnegut and some solid blurbs from the IO9 community (she knows I’m a fan of the site). So how did she do?

She knocked it out of the park.

In Sorry Please Thank You, any unpleasant experience can be avoided, for a price; two night-shift workers at a big-box store—post zombie outbreak—manage to overcome their fear of intimacy; a band of MMORPG players discover what they’re willing to sacrifice for each other, and for enlightenment. These are some of the tamer adventures; there’s also a prose-poem instructing would-be users on a machine that grants wishes, and what might be best described as a meditation on the fictional implications of the Incompleteness Theorem.

And while the concepts drew me in, it was the characters that kept me reading. From the man that’s paid to experience the grief of others, to the author of a manual on dealing with immediate family members, to the yeomen whose only job is to die so the captain will have something to report, every character is confronting an unvarnished, chaotic, and often, heart-breaking universe that would make little sense if not for the people that inhabit and endure its odd landscapes. Some have compared Yu to Douglas Adams, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Yu’s universe, while just as strange and subject to improbabilities, is ultimately a darker place to visit, more Twilight Zone than Doctor Who.

The best comparisons, though it feels a little hyperbolic to say, might be made with Vonnegut’s more pessimistic novels, books like Cat’s Cradle, Deadeye Dick, and Timequake. With Sorry Please Thank You, Yu has achieved something rare: an aggressively imagined work of fiction in which the concepts (mostly) serve the characters. Pick it up and kiss your weekend good-bye.

The Book Rat Letter Grade: A-

-- Charles Yu will be reading at Brookline Booksmith on Wednesday, August 1st

[the book rat project] Week 17: Very, very good, but not quite a miracle.

Will Delman — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 17:51:00 GMT

This time around Eugenia picked The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker. She based her pick on my general love of speculative fiction, and the flood of fantastic blurbs Walker has received for her freshman effort.

On a Saturday morning, a few months before her thirteenth birthday, Julia and her friend Hanna awake after a sleepover. It seems like just another ordinary weekend; Julia’s mother takes the car and goes out for bagels while her father puts on the coffee pot. Moments later, Julia’s mother returns in a state of panic, storms into the house and turns on the television. There are no images of burning buildings, no riots or floods, and this somehow makes the news all the more ominous: during the night the rotation of the Earth has inexplicably slowed; the day has grown by fifty-six minutes, no one knows why, and the slowing is only expected to get worse.

While it might be characterized by some as another entry into the genre of apocalyptic fiction, that fact is that this novel is more than that. The narrative is conveyed as one long, sustained flashback, a record being left behind by a lonely woman that came of age on a mysteriously dying planet, a woman that has spent her life confronting questions without definitive answers and problems with, at best, temporary solutions.

At its core The Age of Miracles is about confronting the unknown. It is a novel of less science—though Walker has done an admirable job on that front—and more fiction.

In many ways The Age of Miracles is a more character driven, more elegant version of Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson (also worth a read); Wilson gives his readers a grand--if overwritten--tome, filled with brilliant scientists, new-age theologians, and powers that are, temporarily, beyond human understanding. In contrast, Thompson’s The Age of Miracles feels microcosmic, efficiant , stripped down; there are no answers or reprieves, just the voice of Julia as she struggles to find her place in a changing world that makes very little sense.

It’s a voice that, while not pitch perfect, is well worth hearing and enjoying.

The Book Rat Letter Grade: A-

Tom Cruise is Not a Condom Filled with Walnuts: Reacher Creatures Freak

Eugenia Williamson — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 17:53:00 GMT

This week wasn't terrible only for Republicans forced to move to Canada: Hollywood dealt Lee Child fans an awful blow. On Wednesday, Entertainment Weekly published the first look at the upcoming film Jack Reacher (pictured above), based on Child's thriller One Shot, named after its protagonist, starring Tom Cruise.

"Cruise doesn’t physically match the hulking Reacher described in Child’s books, which has irked some fans. . ." EW reports. No duh. Last October, I explored the resistance to Cruise in my appreciation of Child's hero and his fans, known as Reacher Creatures. And in January, The Wall Street Journal followed suit with an article about the controversy.

When the Lee Child Official Facebook page linked to the image on Wednesday afternoon, the fur started to fly--and kept flying. To date, there are over 2,700 responses to the post, most of them overwhelmingly negative. To follow are the reasons why the Reacher Creatures are mad as hell and not taking it anymore.

1. They feel betrayed.

Some Reacher Creatures feel like Lee Child "sold out" for allowing the wee couch-jumper to play Jack Reacher.

2. Tom Cruise is short.

Mary Anne isn't alone--in addition to "midget," Creatures called Cruise a "dwarf," a "gnome," and a whole host of other short-dude slurs. As far as I know, nobody's yet called him an imp, but it's only a matter of time.

3. Tom Cruise is a weenie.

Some are mad that Cruise isn't as tough as the real Reacher, who Child has described, as a commenter on deadline.com points out, as "a condom filled with walnuts."

4. Tom Cruise is a Scientologist.

'Nuff said, Nathan Pegg. And I'm not touching this one:

6. Christopher McQuarrie has a terrible track record.

Yikes, I had forgotten about this movie, and it was, indeed, terrible. OT, but Mr. Sommersby had another winning point:

7. ???

People even hate this movie in OTHER LANGUAGES.

"Liam Nissen ehhhh" indeed!

As for me, I agree with them. I'm pretty bummed that Tom Cruise is playing Jack Reacher, when Jack Reacher could be played by the rougher, FAR hotter Clive Owen (sorry, Roddy). Then again, I can't understand why all the Creatures are being so cavalier with their insults--look what happened to Oprah.

Perhaps because they fear Ole Lightning Fingers, a few Creatures came to the film's defense:

I don't want to shut my fricken hole, but I will. Before I do, I'd be remiss not to mention my favorite comment (presumably addressed to Lee Child himself):

[the book rat project] Week 15: A Beautiful Bolero

Will Delman — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 01:37:00 GMT

It's time for another installment of the Book Rat Project, the sustained experiment in which a book critic (my Phoenix colleague Eugenia Williamson) attempts to act as a human algorithm for a willing subject (me). This time around Eugenia picked Cubop City Blues by Pablo Medina. She based her pick on two simple facts: I’m a fan of Paul Auster (this book is set in fictionalized New York), and the author is a professor at Emerson College. So how did she do?

Very, very well.

Cubop City is New York seen through the eyes of a blind Storyteller: an urban landscape of jazz, alienated romantics, displaced souls and broken stories. At twenty-five our narrator— home-schooled on Arabian Nights, The Bible and Encyclopedia Britannica—is forced to care for his bedridden and cancer-stricken parents. With no knowledge of the outside world, beyond the stories he’s heard and read, the Storyteller creates a history for places he can only imagine. Through his stories he eases the suffering of his parents and eventually discovers the strength to explore the shadow world outside his door.

Cubop City Blues ultimately reminded me more of Diaz’s Drown, or even Calvino’s brilliant If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler than of anything by Auster. For Auster, New York is forever tinged with noir sepia; any street, apartment, or ally might unravel a comfortable life. In Cubop Medina gives readers something very different: a colorful, if somewhat mysterious, land of jazz and immigrant families scrambling to build new lives while missing their old ones.

Structurally Cubop City Blues is composed of stories and fragments populated by characters fractured by loss, immigration, adultery and love. Some of the Storyteller’s meta-yarns are a few pages in length, while others are parceled out episodically across the length of the novel—though not always with brilliant results. Several feel unnecessarily, even unnaturally truncated, while others are broken at almost arbitrary points only to be resumed at other equally random moments. But despite its somewhat jarring construction, Cubop City Blues succeeds more often than not. Occasionally Medina even manages to approach the dizzyingly lyrical with

powerful broad-stroke sentences desperate to capture the world all at once.

But this leads to what became, over time, my greatest complaint: when Medina failed to overwhelm me lyrically, or connect with me emotionally, it’s was often due to an overwhelming sense of artifice—in Cubop City even the stories of the wounded and destitute are proffered with the veneer of a power-ballad. Tragedy is defanged by the relentlessly beautiful.

The Book Rat Letter Grade: A-

[CORRECTION: The original review stated that this is Pablo Medina's debut novel. He has, in fact, writtten twelve works of fiction.]

Pee-you! Twafflish Times Post Makes Case for Smelly Books

Eugenia Williamson — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 13:06:00 GMT

Nick Bilton, the Times "Bits" blogger, wrote an odious post this morning about the nostalgia induced by paper books. While wandering aimelessly around Manhattan, Bilton stumbles into a moldering used bookstore straight out of Gremlins and is overcome with feeling:

The scent of physical books — the paper, the ink, the glue — can conjure up memories of a summer day spent reading on a beach, a fall afternoon in a coffee shop, or an overstuffed chair by a fireplace as rain patters on a windowsill.
IPads and Kindles, in comparison, don’t necessarily smell like anything.

Let's ignore the fact that iPads and Kindles smell like the blood of the exploited workers who manufacture them; this is just a silly argument easily dispatched. Perhaps Bilton is trying to further his tech agenda by making the lamest case for paper imaginable. Lamer than his argument: after sniffing around the shop some more, he leaves without buying anything.

"Yes, I miss physical books. I miss bookstores, too," he writes. "I miss them a lot." (We get it! You miss them! But why not, like, support them?) "I only hope that someone figures out how to give their digital counterparts a little more feeling." (Ohhh, that's why.)

While Bilton waits for the children of Shenzen to install Smell-O-Vision onto his Kindle, bookseller Kevin Elliott reacts on his blog:

[Bilton's post] infuriates me as a bookseller. It infuriates me as someone who reads both ebooks and print books. It infuriates me as someone who suffers from mold and pollen allergies, yet still reaches for a physical book 90% of the time. It is no wonder that booksellers across the country are resistant to change and progress. Most of them don’t want to read in the same library as someone so condescending and precious.

Someone should tell Bilton that every time you infuriate a bookseller, a kitten dies. And dead kittens stink even worse than his post. (Just barely.)

Chuck Palahniuk: Lazy, or Lazy Like a Fox?

Eugenia Williamson — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 19:34:00 GMT

A finished copy of Chuck Palahniuk Invisible Monsters Remix ended up on my desk. From the jacket copy:

In this revised edition, with a new introduction, the reader is invited to jump throughtout the book to read the chapters in different arrangements. Intertwined are new chapters: some featuring the characters in the book, others recounting events in the author's life. As Palahniuk knows, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

Let's get this straight: Chuck Palahniuk added a few new chapters to an old book. Norton published this book. Norton is charging good money ($25.95!!!) for this book. People are buying the book. No lie: at the time of this writing, it ranks at a respectable #1950 on Amazon and has five five-star reviews. Raves one: "Anyway this is a must have book, the cover is a red embossed cover with the word REMIX pressed over and over in different fonts, some backwards!"

While my feelings about Palahniuk are certifiably tortured, this book definitively pushes them back over to "fuck this guy." This is lazy even by record-industry standards, the literary equivalent of yet another Beatles box set. Need I even mention the thousands of worthy manuscripts that remain unpublished? Need I mention the existential horror the word "remix" incites in me, the almost visceral return to grad school in the mid-2000s, of humanities lecturers trying ever-so-desperately to be cool and edgy? How did Norton manage to combine all my least favorite things in under 300 pages? I am horrified, yet also awed.

Invisible Monsters Remix is either a) the biggest indictment of the publishing industry to date b) the biggest indictment of the taste of the American reading public to date c) a brilliant decision to sell shit to idiots d) all of the above. As the book world crumbles around him, Chuck Palahniuk reclines on a gilded chaise lounge and laughs at his good fortune. Cheers, asshole.

Alien vs. Predator: Michael Robbins's poetry collection chestbursts and facehugs the poetry scene

Neil Patch — Sat, 09 Jun 2012 11:37:00 GMT

Michael Robbins' first poetry collection, Alien vs. Predator, shares only a passing reference with Ridley Scott's Alien universe (the last 30 years of which we recap here). Still, Robbins' verse has latched onto audiences, sales charts, and contemporary American poetry at large like a facehugger - and it shows no sign of letting go any time soon. Since it was published just over two months ago, Alien vs. Predator has since shot to the top of Amazon's sales charts for American poetry, where it currently reigns over works by the likes of Maya Angelou, Charles Bukowski, and Allen Ginsberg. In a recent profile, the Chicago Tribune's Christopher Borrelli declared Robbins a "poetry world phenom," while Dwight Garner of the New York Times offered: "This man can write."

Robbins seems pretty cool and normal. In his Poetry Foundation headshot, the bespectacled, balding, stubbled face of a 40-year old sits atop a black Slayer t-shirt and neck-rested audiophile headphones. Sometimes, he says, he watches too many episodes of Justified in one sitting, and his apartment features a poster that asks "What Would Neil Young Do?"

The effortless interlacing of artistic references - past and present, high and low - is Robbins' greatest weapon, but it's not just a neat trick. From Joyce to Jay-Z, Robbins moves in and out of literature and pop culture, combining both in his lines so as to provide little hierarchical distinction between two often disparate worlds. In "Sway", Robbins puts 16th-century metaphysical poetry and Brit rock riffs into one unbroken perspective: "Mick Taylor's solos and Prefab Sprout / taught me more than John Donne did about / how to do within and do without."

And yet, like NBC's criminally-underrated-yet-brilliant comedy Community, the importance and value of Robbins' work is not merely directly proportional to how many references fit in each serving of content. Rather, such allusions serve to bring the audience closer into Robbins' mind by drawing upon points of correspondence that make the true feeling of his poetry all the stronger. The bleak "Use Your Illusion" engages with what the Boston Globe's (and former Phoenix editor) Michael Brodeur calls the "spirituality of branding" as Robbins shares his cutting and sardonic vision: "It's a gorgeous day, not a bat in the sky. / The topography's square with the recon. / Contents may have shifted during rapture. / Let's put the Christ back in Xbox."

Robbins' work is awash with unconventional accessibility that perhaps finds its origin in the desolate locales of his Kansas-Colorado upbringing. As Michael H. Miller of the New York Observer writes, "The settings of his poems are towns that could be off any highway exit in America, populated by Pizza Huts and American Apparel catalogs and lit by the glow of television sets playing CSI: Miami. The poems are haunted by these banal images even as they poke fun at them." By filling his verses with signs of contemporary normalcy, Robbins simultaneously fills a void with shared meaning and notes its existence. In this light, the critical acclaim and explosive popularity of Michael Robbins' poetry derives from a unique form of horror found only in the American suburbs - a horror perhaps far more terrifying than anything Ridley Scott can dream for the journey of his Prometheus.

[the book rat project] Week 13: A Gothic Success

Will Delman — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 20:29:00 GMT

After last week’s qualified disappointment, Eugenia decided to go in a very different direction and chose David Vann’s newest literary horror story, Dirt.

I had a hard time getting Dirt; in the first 48-hours I don’t think I made it through 15 pages. But then something clicked and before I knew it I was turning the pages so quickly I didn’t have time to tweet any excerpts.

Galen, a 22-year-old, new age obsessed, emotionally stunted young man and his mother live on an old family estate, subsisting off a thinning trust fund—money that his Aunt Helen and cousin, Jennifer, are desperate to get their hands on. One night, while lashing out at his mother for holding back his spiritual growth, Galen unexpectedly gives his Aunt and Cousin the opportunity they’ve been waiting for, and not long after he finds himself caught in an act that will destroy his last hope for freedom.

Dirt might not take off like a race horse, but it rapidly turns into a dark meditation on multi-generational violence, before transforming into a kind of literary horror novel of the sort that Steven King could only dream of writing. Every page of manages a rare act of acrobatic brilliance; the story twists, turns, prods and pokes until the last few brutalizing paragraphs and I found myself thinking about these characters for days after I’d finished.

But what I found most impressive was that Dirt managed to preserve a very real sense of humor—granted it’s the humor of Kafka’s The Trial and Gogol’s Dead Souls, which is to say it’s a brutal humor that won’t be for everyone. Vann’s newest offering moves from the rhetoric of the cheaply sublime to the authentically traumatized with grace without shying away from the absurd. The combination had me laughing in self-defense on more than one occasion.

So while I might not have managed to tweet very much this week—apologies to followers of The_Book_Rat—it wasn’t for lack of interest. On the contrary, this was another case of a book sucking me in so completely that I lost track of time.

Given everything I’ve written so far, it seems like I should be giving this book an A, and yet I can’t bring myself to go that far; while I found Dirt deeply enjoyable I felt let down by an ending that, while arguably inevitable, could have been more deeply explored. Too often this was a flaw in the narrative in total: Vann hinted at shadows and stories I would have been happier to read, but don’t let these minor complaints deter you from picking up this fantastic example of literary horror.

The Book Rat Letter Grade: A-

An truly week has kept Eugenia from settling on my next assignment, but have no fear Book Rat fans! I'll announce the next book via twitter as soon as I have it in my hands. Stay tuned!

Rainy Day Discount Books

Eugenia Williamson — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 19:32:00 GMT

I just found out that Lorem Ipsum has a rainy day discount of fifteen percent. This is the best idea I've ever heard. (Other proposed rainy day discounts: tomato soup, bourbon.) This weekend was so crappy I finished Charles Portis's The Dog of the South (amazing). Then I walked over to Lorem Ipsum and picked up not one but two Michel Houellebecq novels I've been meaning to read forever: Whatever and Atomised. I'd like to think that the selection at Lorem Ipsum is so boss because Inman Square residents are extremely well-read, but that might be neighborhood jingoism. In any case, now nobody has an excuse not to read at least one book this week.

LOREM IPSUM | 1299 Cambridge Street, Cambridge | 617-497-7669 | loremipsumbooks.com

[the book rat project] Week 12: Plenty of signs, not much wonder

Will Delman — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 13:29:00 GMT

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After another strong selection last week Eugenia went out on a limb and handed me Signs and Wonders, Alix Ohlin’s newest collection of 16 stories. I wish I could say the risk worked out better.

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Ohlin has nearly mastered the art of economy, but not quite. Highly adept at placing deeply imagined individuals in stressful situations, Ohlin teases out uncomfortable, recognizable truths. To be certain there are repetitions—as there are in most collections—but these memes are obscured by Ohlin’s steady command of plot and language. A couple desperate for a child destroys and rediscovers their relationship; a man is forced to reconnect with his teenaged son; a stepmother has a precognitive experience that saves a child—these high-concept distillations fail to capture Ohlin's persuasive verve, but I think they get the idea across: these are stories about the unexpected ways that people, and our relationships, can suddenly shift and evolve without warning.

Unfortunately all good things must end, and in Signs and Wonders the endings are the problem. It’s hard to expand on this criticism without including some spoilers, but I’ll try. In one story a woman watches her second marriage unexpectedly implode, and dies; we’re only left to guess how, or even if, her death affects the other characters; an unlikely relationship is born, and ends silently. Two other pieces revolve around coma patients and the people that care for them; both stories end with weak-tea codas. I wish I could say these were the exceptions, but they’re not.

While her emotional intelligence is admirable, and her knack for surprise enviable, Ohlin’s apparently capacity for the pitch-perfect ending left the bulk of these skits feeling hollow, as though they were questionably--if admirably--connected bits.

The Book Rat Letter Grade: C

From Eugenia:

Last week, you read some (unintentionally) mediocre literary fiction. This week, you’ll be reading Dirt, the third book from David Vann, whom the Economist calls “a man to watch carefully.” (Why do we need to watch him so carefully? Is he going to shoot people from the top of a clock tower?) I chose this book on the basis of back-cover blurbs, one that called his last book “disturbing” (NPR), “darker…than the daylight world (NYT) and “full of our darkest currents.” Literary horror, if it works, is super fun.

So tune in next week Book Rat fans, and we'll see if Eugenia has managed to pick a winner!

[the book rat project] Week 11: Hardly a Ruin

Will Delman — Sat, 26 May 2012 01:02:00 GMT

After hitting a bump or two in the road, it's time for another installment in the Book Rat Project, the sustained experiment in which a book critic (Eugenia Williamson) attempts to act as a human algorithm for a willing subject (your humble neighborhood book rat, Will Delman).

After Eugenia handed me Chris Adrian's The Great Night (an unqualified success if ever there was one), she attempted to follow it with Jess Walter's new novel Beautiful Ruins (perhaps hoping to take advantage of my recent trip to Italy?). So how did she do? Here's my review:

Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter, is a Hollywood novel with a Hollywood feel. The story begins in 1962 with the arrival of Dee Moray at a beautiful and rundown pensione on a minor island off the Italian coast. The beautiful actress, ostensibly suffering from stomach cancer, on leave from her role in the disaster that was Cleopatra, alights from a small boat and immediately changes the life of the young proprietor, Pasquale Tursi, returned from Florence to care for his dying mother.

Fast forward to 2012: Clair Silver, chief development assistant for the Hollywood producer and relic Michael Deane, wakes up in the LA dawn and makes a deal with Fate: bring me a pitch that makes me believe in moves again or I’ll burn my life to the ground, today. That afternoon she’s confronted by a would-be screenwriter obsessed with physical hunger and an elderly Italian gentleman, sporting the most ancient Michael Dean business card she’s ever seen, desperate to reconcile with the lost love of his life.

If Beautiful Ruins sounds interesting and enjoyable, well, it is. But I’ve come to terms with the fact that I have an odd taste when it comes to judging fiction, and thus I found my enjoyment almost constantly tempered. I never fell in love with the abundance of coincidence this narrative seems to rely on. Not to give anything away, but by the time I reached the end of Beautiful Ruins I felt like I’d read a very well constructed Rube Goldburg machine. I was also a bit put off by its string-along structure—this is a book that favors cliffhangers over resolutions until the very end—I like a little more variety in my narratives.

But on to what worked for me: everything else.

The sentences are strong, varied, entertaining, and fluid. The themes are solid and greater than the characters. Each setting and occasion was treated with extraordinary care. It was possible to imagine myself in every room at every stage. Perhaps most impressive, all of these characters own a voice that they alone seem to control.

Unfortunately, reading about this cast of flawed and messy people, I never felt as though I couldn’t guess how the story would end.

By the time I had finished Beautiful Ruins I felt like I’d just watched a season of Californication, satisfied but saddened by how much pleasure we can take in watching each other struggle.

The Book Rat Letter Grade: A-

So there you have it; while Eugenia didn't knock this one out of the park she came admirably close. In response to the few criticisms I was able to muster she assigned me Alix Ohlin's Signs and Wonders. How'd she do? Tune in next week to find out!

Ads on Kindles: Total Bullshit

Eugenia Williamson — Mon, 21 May 2012 17:53:00 GMT

Amazon has announced that it plans to sell ad space on the Kindle welcome screen. This makes me so insensibly angry I'd punch my Kindle if I hadn't left it at home.

In 2012, the notion that Americans can quibble with an increasingly corporatized landscape feels hopelessly recherche. George Saunders hasn't even published anything in half a decade! In the age of Occupy, it seems both quaint and indulgent for those who can afford a Kindle to worry about a screen saver. But for god's sake, how much are readers expected to take?

Product placement in books is, sadly, nothing new. But if you are a sensible person who likes decent books, you can easily avoid reading anything with product placement. Soon enough, when you download that copy of No Logo, you'll be prone to some advertisement. And this is so, so wrong! Reading should be an exchange between author and reader, not author, reader and advertiser. Sure, publishers and devices mediate the reading experience, but this is much worse.

Imagine ads based on the books you download. Imagine buying Infinite Jest and getting an ad for Depend Adult Undergarments based on an algorithm. Or maybe they'll be more astute -- as my friend wrote on Facebook,"Cialis Presents: 50 Shades of Grey." How is this acceptable?

First they came for the independent bookstores. Then they came for Borders because Amazon gave bigger discounts. Then they came for the publishers because publishers were charging too much for ebooks. And now they're coming for books themselves. How much more are readers expected to put up with?