REVIEW: Zone One by Colson Whitehead

Every age seems to get the monsters that reflect its deepest anxieties.

In the Late Victorian era, an age of sexual repression and widespread, often fatal sexual diseases, it was the vampire and the werewolf. In the Fifties , when our  two biggest fears were nuclear annihilation and Communist takeover there were body snatchers and a series of monsters created by atomic radiation. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, at a time when it seemed like our society was abandoning traditional religion and losing its moral compass, it was the devil (Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen).

In the new millennium, teenagers may be vampire-crazy, but the monster of choice seems to be the zombie. In the last ten years, we have had remakes of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later, zombie comedies like Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland, even erotic zombie movies. The biggest hit on cable is The Walking Dead. And now Colson Whitehead, the author of rarefied novels like The Intuitionist and John Henry Days, tries his hand at the genre with the novel Zone One.

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REVIEW: Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet

Ghost Lights
Lydia Millet
W.W. Norton & Co.
256 pp / $24.95

A question for the gentlemen – what would you do if your wife was cheating on you?  Would you confront her, raising a domestic scene worthy of COPS? Or, would you keep quiet, letting the betrayal turn into a lifetime of passive aggression?  If your name is Hal Lindley, and you’re the protagonist of Lydia Millet’s new novel Ghost Lights, your reaction would fall somewhere in between: a drunken offer to rescue your unfaithful partner’s obnoxious boss from a tropical jungle.

Let’s take a few steps back.  Hal works for the IRS and has settled into a complacent suburban life with Susan, his ex-hippie of a wife.  She works for Thomas Stern, or “T.” as he prefers to be called, who vanished during a trip to Belize.  Since T.’s disappearance, things start to fall apart for Hal, particularly after he catches Susan sleeping with the young sexy paralegal at her office.  Later, Hal gets a little too libation-happy at his daughter’s dinner party, and as the conversation moves to the subject of T., he blurts out that he will fly to Belize in search of the mercurial businessman.

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REVIEW: Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Pulphead by John Jeremiah SullivanPulphead
John Jeremiah Sullivan
FSG
384 pp / $16

About once a year, you find a book that you can unimpeachably recommend to everyone, like Cloud Atlas or Beat the Reaper. This year, and just in time for holiday gifts and small talk, John Jeremiah Sullivan has given us that book in Pulphead.

A collection of essays and long-form journalism published, over the years, in GQ, The Paris Review, Oxford American, Ecotone, and Harper’s, the book touches on topics as diverse as these publications: Axl Rose’s best dance, the unexplained giant ocean noise known as the Bloop, a tragedy in Sullivan’s family, the Tea Party, and the quintessential Real World bro, among others.

But there’s a common thread connecting the touching personal essays for The Paris Review with the sexy, weed-soaked assignments for GQ: Each is a lesson in generosity.

To be a great magazine journalist, you have to be likeable, both in person and in print. The former because you have to convince strangers to spend long hours with you and share their stories. And you’re starting out at a deficit—everyone knows journalists have a knack for making decent people look stupid. Some journalists overcome this by stealth, like Joan Didion; Sullivan does it by being a good guy.

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REVIEW: Luminous Airplanes by Paul La Farge

Luminous Airplanes
Paul La Farge
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
242 pp / $25

 

Located at the intersection of memory and imagination, nostalgia is something that defines linear narrative, the same way a datebook, no matter how accurate, never really recreates the sensory memory of how it felt to live one particular day. In Luminous Airplanes, Paul LaFarge’s inventive new book, nostalgia is a device that allows for both an accurate rendering of the dot-com boom years as well as a compelling narrative drive. LaFarge knows that nostalgia crosses boundaries of time and place and that this, in some sense, is the strength of combining the written text with an “immersive text” online, which allows the reader to experience non-linear time and reinterprets nostalgia for the modern age.

Luminous Airplanes is essentially a coming-of-age tale that moves fluidly from past to present, from San Francisco to New York City to Thebes (a sleepy town in upstate New York). The narrator himself is a failed historian-slash-computer programmer – both professions concerned with reconstructions of a sort – during the halcyon years before 9/11, a time when nostalgia feels particularly piercing. He returns to Thebes to clean out his grandparents’ house, which leads him to seek out testimonial and documentary evidence about his father, whom he never knew, and rekindle a flame with his childhood crush, Yesim. The book itself is presented as a written document produced by the narrator in an attempt to reclaim and rewrite part of his personal history.

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REVIEW: Mule by Tony D’Souza

Mule: A Novel of Moving Weight
Tony D’Souza
Mariner Books
304 pp / $14.95

A common narrative of this recession is the “unlikely criminal:” A middle-class person, usually white, turns to crime to survive hard times. Most of these stories are on cable: Weeds, Hung, Breaking Bad. But Mule, a compulsively-readable new novel from Tony D’Souza, takes the genre down to the nitty-gritty: How do you actually go about building a criminal empire?

Mule is Scarface for readers of The New Yorker: It plots all the emotional points on a man’s rise and downfall, while explaining everything you need to know to avoid getting caught while driving $50,000 worth of marijuana from California to Tennessee.

D’Souza’s book is the most satisfying in answering the details that cable skims over. Our hero, James, is an out-of-work freelance journalist with a new family and no safety net. When he gets an opportunity to make some quick cash, he researches the business of driving drugs like a long-form journalist: How do you convince a bank teller to hand over your $7,000 savings account in hundreds? What are your rights if a cop pulls you over in Texas versus Nevada? And, as James asks of a buyer he meets on his first run: “How much does an ounce weigh?”

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REVIEW: badbadbad by Jesus Angel Garcia

badbadbad
Jesus Angel Garcia
New Pulp Press
240 pp / $14.95

Taking after the old pulp tradition, badbadbad starts off on a sharp note: A man has been left by his wife, taking their son along with her. The prose is as razor sharp as you’d expect in old hardboiled paperbacks, with the same juxtaposition of opposites creating the same tension we’ve come to love from the genre, and the cover is designed with the same campy grittiness in mind. badbadbad, however, isn’t a pulp novel, but a taut psychological examination, a blueprint into madness, all wrapped up in a nice pulp package. This is an important distinction to note because the novel is shot through with this sentiment, this idea of covertness, of hidden layers, of people masquerading as things they’re not.

The Artifice of Media

Jesus Angel Garcia, the narrator, has just been left by his wife, who took their son with her. Looking for money in order to hire a divorce lawyer, he’s hired by the Reverend Puck to be webmaster for the First Church Before Church, helping build their online presence. The community grows so large that he’s picked up by other area churches. Around this time, he meets Cyrus, the ex-communicated son of Rev Puck. Cyrus and JAG bond over music on almost a molecular level. They are fluent in punk, jazz, soul and communicate through in the innate language of aesthetes. He also introduces JAG to fallenangels, a website forum created as a safe haven for fetishists. It’s this site that triggers a revelation for Jesus, that it is his calling to be a sexual messiah for these broken women, fulfilling their needs.

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REVIEW: Noon by Aatish Taseer

Noon
Aatish Taseer
Faber & Faber
300 pp / $25

In January 2011, Salman Taseer, governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province, was assassinated in Islamabad by his own bodyguard.  As the world took stock of this brutal killing, passed off as an act of patriotism, so too did Salman’s estranged half-Indian son Aatish.

Aatish Taseer is the author of two already notable works.  The Temple-Goers is his debut novel, a tense political thriller full of bribery, betrayal, and murder.  His sophomore effort, Stranger to History, is a memoir analyzing the Muslim world, and its scathing critiques strained his already distant relationship with his father.  Taseer was all set to climb out of polemics and delve back into the world of fiction when his father was surprisingly murdered.  This tragedy adds palpable urgency to Noon, a sprawling account of moral degradation in late 20th/early 21st century India and Pakistan.

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REVIEW: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach


The Art of Fielding
Chad Harbach
Little, Brown
512 pages/$25.99

 

In the middle of Chad Harbach’s debut novel, a character wonders why anybody should care about Henry Skrimshander, “a silly kid with a silly problem” and the character around which the book’s plot revolves. Henry’s problem is silly. A college shortstop who’s hustled and sweated himself into a legitimate draft prospect, he finds himself incapable of consistently tossing a baseball to first base after his throwing error severely injured his bench-riding roommate. Had the game not been called on account of player hospitalization, the misfire would have gone into the annals and officially ended Henry’s record-tying streak of errorless innings.

The Art of Fielding‘s 500 pages are focused on life at Wisconsin liberal arts college, seen largely through the eyes and minds of two ballplayers, the institution’s president, and his daughter. While Henry is the centerpiece, this ensemble gives the book breadth and breath. The narrative unfolds in the third-person, but Harbach tucks the reader comfortably inside one of those four characters’ heads for a chapter at a time. Because it’s superbly written, a reader does care about Henry Skrimshander and his problems, and the same is true for each of Harbach’s characters and each of their problems, silly or not.

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REVIEW: Lamb by Bonnie Nadzam


Lamb
Bonnie Nadzam
Other Press
228 pp / $15.95

 

Been Everywhere, Seen Nothing

This time last year I was driving—or, more accurately, being driven—down California’s Highway 1 by a man I had had a disastrous relationship with some years prior, followed by three years of radio silence. I, a recent MFA graduate, was looking for work and he, a perennially unemployed artist, was awaiting his big break, but financial concerns didn’t stop us from slinging back cocktail after cocktail in San Francisco, and the future was no hurdle in the promises we made each other on the way to LAX. A few months later things would fall apart in a way I should have predicted, but that evening, as the sun sank into the ocean and the sky outside the passenger-side window turned black we could have been anything—together, or as individuals—the world seemed poised, waiting for us to make our next move.

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REVIEW: Train Dreams by Denis Johnson


Train Dreams
Denis Johnson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
128 pp / $18

According to the jacket copy of my edition of Train Dreams, Denis Johnson’s book “captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life.”  That’s true, but the lost era this novella mourns isn’t the frontier life of our hero, Robert Grainier, in the early twentieth century. It’s 2006, or maybe 1998 or 1981, when we still believed in cowboys (and even called one President).

Train Dreams is a gorgeous, rich book about the classic American myth, but written for a country that’s lost faith in its own mythology. It’s a portrait of the West when we were rich, cocky, and our destiny had manifested, but told through the eyes of Grainier, who is humble, ungreedy, and unsure of himself. The first time he kisses any woman is the day he proposes to his wife. When he becomes a capitalist, it’s the result of an act of charity.  He’s not John Wayne or even John Grady Cole; while capable, he’s not the kind of goal-oriented man we’re used to seeing out West.

He isn’t even a cowboy; he’s a train worker, and a conflicted one at that. Here he is, watching the first trip of a train crossing a 60-foot-deep gorge on a bridge he’s helped build:

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