My review of Norumbega Park by Anthony Giardina ran today in the Boston Globe

It tells the story about a family in suburban Massachusetts who… well, they don’t do a whole lot. There’s angst, and plenty of sexual anxiety (though very little consummation). At first, the story seems to be about the father, Richie Palumbo, moving his family to an idyllic, New England small town in the hopes that they would become part of a more refined segment of society. It’s set up to be about the hopes he’s invested in this town, and a particular house he sets his sights on. And then Giardina jumps ahead to tell the rather banal stories of the two Palumbo children.

I was pulling for this book till about halfway through, when the daughter, Joan, is tempted away from her life as cloistered nun by an attractive young man who Giardina, apparently in a fit of ludicrous unsubtlety, named Angel. It was a real throw-the-book-across-the-room moment. Nevertheless, I stuck with the novel all the way to its sluggish, unsatisfying ending. There’s just no sense of humor in this book, and never any compelling reason to care about the dull, emotionally-stunted characters. It’s a weak melodrama, and a real chore.

My review of Edna O’Brien’s James Joyce: A Life ran today at PopMatters.

A few years ago, I picked up Richard Ellmann’s massive biography of Joyce, which is considered to be the best literary biography ever written. I still haven’t read it. It’s so big, so imposing, I’ve yet to find an opportunity to fit it into my life. Someday.

Order James Joyce: A Life at Amazon

For now, Edna O’Brien’s compact, 179-page biography will be just fine. O’Brien’s slim book manages to traverse the entire life of this complicated, brilliant man, detailing his adolescent struggles, creative breakthroughs, and personal relationships, in particular his rocky marriage with Nora Barnacle. O’Brien sets out to help the reader understand and appreciate Joyce’s difficult, rewarding body of work, and does an admirable job of making Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake seem approachable without spoiling the mystique that surrounds and enhances them.

It’s a nice survey, slight but elevated by O’Brien’s fun, playful prose style. For a more specific look into Joyce, I’d recommend checking out Ulysses and Us, which is a great, down-to-earth walkthrough of Joyce’s magnum opus.

My review of Lou Beach’s 420 Characters ran today in the Boston Globe.

The book is a collection of short, micro fiction that Beach wrote as Facebook status updates back when the maximum character count for updates was 420. It was later raised to 500 and today it’s 5,000. While there were some fun moments in his stories, overall it seemed like a rather weak experiment. The stories make no use of Facebook’s unique social features; I would’ve liked to have seen Beach examine how instant publishing, instant feedback, and a direct, one-on-one relationship between and author and their audience affected his writing or shaped the project. There’s really nothing to distinguish the stories in 420 Characters from any other flash fiction project. It seems like a big missed opportunity, and the resulting stories just aren’t strong enough in total to stand on their own.

My review of Becoming Dickens by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst ran today in the Boston Globe.

Douglas-Fairhurst does an excellent job portraying the world young Charles Dickens grew up in, showing how the “novel” aspects of the Victorian era enabled the artistic and commercial viability of the literary novel, and thus provided an outlet for Dickens’s genius.

:: Order Becoming Dickens at Amazon ::

The economic expansion of that time created an upwardly-mobile middle class, which gave poor kids like Dickens an opportunity to raise his station in life. Art was no longer the province of the wealthy or those lucky enough to secure patrons. The new, middle-class jobs of the Victorian economy provided a respite from energy-sapping, working-class vocations like factory work; as a clerk, Dickens had free time to pursue his hobbies, a comfortable, adequate salary, and connections to people who could aid or facilitate his career as a writer.

Becoming Dickens shows that talent is not enough to achieve success. A stroke of bad luck like, say, having been born into a world with a shrinking economy where the divide between rich and poor is widening, could have destroyed any hope of young Dickens being able to put his talent to use.

My review of Saladin by Anne Marie Eddé ran today in the Boston Globe.

I’ve been looking for a good biography of Saladin ever since I read Richard and John: Kings at War. This one, however, did not really do it for me. Eddé deconstructs the very nature of biography, untangling fact from fiction and asking whether we can truly know or understand figures of the past. It’s an intriguing premise, and the work she does in detailing how the “legend” of Saladin was cultivated by the sultan himself, and then modified by subsequent generations (both Arab and European), is enlightening. But the disjointed, fractured nature of the book was frustrating. There was just no excitement, no sense of narrative. Saladin is dry, academic, and while full of fascinating detail, it’s not tied together in an entertaining manner.

My review of Broken Irish by Edward J. Delaney ran today in the Boston Globe.

I was very pleased that Delaney managed to write a South Boston tragedy that didn’t lean too heavily on the genre-fiction standbys of organized crime or drug abuse. It’s not that those topics aren’t important or very real parts of South Boston’s history, it’s that writers and filmmakers seem disinterested in the actual human stories behind them and instead rely on them for cheap, lazy sensationalism. Really, after The Departed, what more is there to say about the South Boston mob in fiction?

:: Order Broken Irish at Amazon ::

He also doesn’t romanticize the struggles that poor Southie residents endured. I haven’t seen Good People, the Tony-award winning Broadway play about a struggling, South Boston single mother confronting a successful ex-boyfriend who made it out of the neighborhood, but the description alone gives me pause. There’s a habit in fiction of conflating deprivation with virtue, casting the poor as modern-day noble savages whose purpose is to teach more affluent, successful characters the important life lessons that their comfortable lifestyles have blinded them to. It’s patronizing and, again, lazy.

Broken Irish has enough respect for its characters that it’s willing to let them fail, and be stupid, and make bad choices. It’s willing to let them be real people, whose troubles have depth and are fraught with emotion. Delaney charts a bold course that addresses the issues of class, power, family, trust, and sexual exploitation, but never opts for the easy path, indulges in cliche, or does anything that leads the reader to believe he has no regard for his characters.

My review of Ben Loory’s Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day ran today in the Boston Globe.

It’s a lightweight collection of short stories, and a lot of fun. Loory’s writing is very spare, but loaded with meaning and portent. He’s a writer of crisp, surreal fables, each of which has a distinct undercurrent of dread just lurking beneath the surface. In the review, I call Loory a mix of Lydia Davis and H.P. Lovecraft, but he has a strong, humorous voice that is entirely his own. I think it’s telling that one of the laudatory blurbs on the back of the book comes from Edward Packard, creator of the Choose Your Own Adventure book series. I’m part of the generation that grew up reading those books, and I think that, to some extent, they probably shaped my expectations of literature and what I think is possible in writing: experimentation with form, structure, and the active engagement of the reader. Loory is smart to associate himself with Packard and his series, both for the cute nostalgia it evokes and the implications it makes about his own work.

My review of Heretics: The Creation of Christianity from the Gnostics to the Modern Church by Jonathan Wright ran today at PopMatters.

Heretics is a fine, focused survey of the religion’s history for readers who might find Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years too daunting. Wright employs a novel approach, telling the story of Christianity by highlighting pivotal moments in which it was challenged by potential offshoots. He shows how the reaction to these “heretics” clarified orthodoxy and, at times, paradoxically made Christianity a more open and inclusive religion. He also explores the origin and application of the title “heretic,” and how it was used, abused, and changed over the centuries. It’s not a comprehensive book, and at times can be a little ponderous, but the history is entertaining.

A few months back, in my post about John Nichols’s The S Word, I mentioned a brief, formal correspondence between Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx that the author had made reference to. I found the idea of these two men interacting to be fascinating, and was a little disappointed that Nichols didn’t explore it more in depth. Thankfully, author Robin Blackburn has it covered. His An Unfinished Revolution is entirely about the relationship (largely indirect) between Marx and Lincoln, particularly how they shared similar, if not exactly complimentary, views on the place of labor in society and the importance of abolishing slavery as a means to enriching the lives of all working people, white and black. My review of the book was published today at PopMatters.

Blackburn’s book is comprised of an original, 100-page analysis and an appendix, containing several excerpts from primary sources that are intended to give readers a deeper understanding of the characters involved and the times they lived in. The prose is crisp and entertaining yet still manages to pack in an amazing amount of high-quality, insightful information. As someone who’s recently done a lot of reading on both the Civil War and Marx, I was happy to find that An Unfinished Revolution never felt stale or overly familiar. Blackburn has produced a unique and powerful take on these well-worn subjects.

:: Buy An Unfinished Revolution at Amazon ::