My review of With the Animals by Noëlle Revaz ran today in the Boston Globe.

There’s been an unintended similarity between the last few books I’ve reviewed lately. There was the desultory Norumbega Park and its focus on family and property in the suburbs, then the grim Wish You Were Here and its transfer of those themes to a rural English farm. Noëlle Revaz’s With the Animals is also rather grim, and also concerns the struggles of a farm family, but it’s utterly unique in its approach, a challenging, harrowing tale that is an incredibly rewarding read, if not an enjoyable one.

The narrator of the story (for he almost certainly cannot be described as a protagonist, or even an anti-hero) is Paul, a Swiss farmer who visits unconscionable violence and brutality on his wife and children. Such explosive means are all he has at his disposal; he seems incapable of processing emotion, showing empathy, or even understanding that the people around him are people. The story is told through his voice, a remarkable construction of slang and malformed words that gives insight into how Paul’s warped mind works (or doesn’t work). Reading in his voice is troubling, as the limitations of his thought begin to feel claustrophobic and oppressive; the roughly-hewn argot creeps into your mind and gums up the works. It’s a testament to Revaz’s skill as a writer and storyteller that she was able to use language in such an effective and disturbing way.

When Paul hires Georges, a Portuguese farmhand, the new arrival attempts to teach his boss some degree of decency and compassion, and their uneasy friendship drives the narrative. With the Animals is an unflinching portrayal of callous masculinity run amok, and Revaz never opts for easy characterization or neat plotting; the ambiguous nature and addled point-of-view of the narrative poses difficult questions to the reader, and I think when most people finish this book, they’ll discover that the book is not finished with them.

My review of Traveler of the Century by Andrés Neuman ran today in the Boston Globe.

As the review makes clear, I really loved this book. It’s a smart, well-crafted novel with rich characters and a great sense of humor. Set in the early-to-mid nineteenth century, on the boarder of Prussia and Saxony, Traveler of the Century is a novel of ideas, many of which are teased out through the lively, engrossing dialogue that takes place in the salon of a charming socialite and in the cave of a wise old organ grinder. It was nice to read this book in parallel with Swann’s Way, as it was reminiscent of the “Swann In Love” segment (not so much in prose style, but in sentiment and subject matter).

There’s a lot going on in the book, but one thread that stuck out to me was the subtle and barely-noticeable mystery surrounding the main character, Hans. I’ll try not to spoil it, but I want to draw some attention to it since I think it’s easy to overlook. Throughout the novel, small details crop up that seem to make Hans uneasy. He possesses very old books that someone of his age and station would be unlikely to have. He is very concerned that people might see what’s inside the trunk he keeps in his room. He stops short of revealing details about his past to his paramour, Sophie, which he seems to indicate would be difficult to accept. Toward the end of the novel, Sophie’s father reveals that the one solid bit of biography we have of Hans is false.

The key to this mystery lies in the novels epigraph, a brief quotation from Franz Schubert’s Die Winterreise, an adaptation of poems by Wilhelm Müller, that points toward another literary traveler.

Traveler of the Century is a rewarding and enjoyable read, and like all great stories, makes you wish you had more time to spend with its characters and its vibrant world.

My review of Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here ran in today’s Boston Globe.

What a gloomy, gloomy book, but one whose gloom is earned and makes for a compelling (if, at times, challenging) read. It actually bears some similarity to Norumbega Park, in that it concerns family legacies, the importance of heritage and property, and the often unspoken emotions that drive relationships. Unlike that book, it’s raw and emotional, with a story that deals with matters of consequence, rather than petty frivolities. The protagonist, Jack Luxton, is plummeting into despair, haunted by the deaths of his parents and loss of his ancestral farm in Devon, England; his brother’s death as a solider in the Iraq War; and the unraveling of his marriage to the strong-willed, but icy Ellie.

The book is largely an exploration of Jack’s memories and inner turmoil; a loose framing story provokes the reminiscence, but is of little interest. Swift is a capable writer, and his ability to create heartwrenching setpieces makes Wish You Were Here both an engaging read, and hard to stomach. It’s a brutally dark book, but just manages to escape being oppressive.

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.

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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.

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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?

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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.