The Moibus strip of life

Book: Schrodinger’s Ball

Author: Adam Felber

Published: 2006 (Random House)

Pages: 241

If a young man accidentally shoots and kills himself while cleaning his dad’s old gun in his grandma’s basement with the door closed and no one else to find him, is he actually dead?

Or does he still go out on the town with his group of friends, feeling and acting even more spacey than usual as they all seize onto his weirdness as an excuse to fend off the unraveling of bonds they all feel between each other?

This book’s title might clue you in on the answer, which is both, and all of the below.

Does the young man only truly die when his grandma opens the basement door a few days later at the exact instance the young man throws himself in front of his friends to prevent them from getting squashed by a giant 18-wheeler? Yes.

Theoretical physics mixes really well with the absurdity of the human condition, especially when it’s applied lightly and with the cynical armor of post-grad oh-god-what-are-we-doing-with-our-lives-and-each-other sarcasm.

The story does not make a hell of a lot of sense, especially the bits where a collective voice talks about how the real (but somehow still dead) Dr. Schrodinger butts into and invades their real life, only to gradually reveal that part as the hallucinations of a single, modern-day science lecturer who’s having a really hard time getting over the loss of his wife. This, and the parts of the philosophizing bag lady’s revisionist history of the world, are revealingly funny, but they only trickle into the main flow and only make it, like, a bigger stream, not a lake or something.

But then, the parts of an atom are a gajillion measuring units apart and look how well they hold everything together. So this was a good read, and I will be giving it back to the library’s bookshelf because guys, I walked through the stacks instead of the staff exit a week or so ago and that gets me every time. 

Let's get it--no. No, let's not.

Book: Getting In
Author: Karen Stabiner
Published: 2010 (Voice New York)

I'm sort of obsessed with stories about high school kids busting their asses to get into the Ivy League, because I never went through any of that. I wanted the state school, the state school wanted me, the end. My senior spring semester of high school was way more worrying about whether I could pass calculus tests.

Anyway, no insight here. It's all high school politics as usual; nobody goes any deeper into why they want to go to Harvard or Stanford. I don't think they even say, like, "Oh, it's got an excellent marine biology program, and I totally want to work with whales," or something. It's all revealed to be pomp and tradition among a bunch of bright, pretty kids whose parents will all find a way to pay for it and a college counselor who makes this way more a business transaction than one should ever do to a job working with teenagers.  

And, you know, really good academics, like in general. But come on, people! More than that, please!

AND NO, I DON'T MEAN TRANSCRIBING AN ENTIRE BLACK-EYED PEAS SONG AS SPONTANEOUSLY PERFORMED BY A RESTLESS HIGH SCHOOL CLASS AT THEIR GRADUATION. That is when I completely lost this thing.

Donating. If I can scrape the "Only $3.97!" sticker off. 

Double the stories, double the fun

Books: The Best American Short Stories, 2006 and 2005
Authors: Various
Editors: Ann Patchett and Geraldine Brooks
Series editors: Katrina Kenison and Heidi Pitlor
Published: 2006 and 2011 (Houghton Mifflin)

Of course these are good books. They do the collective annual work of about $200 worth of lit mag subscriptions each year. Of course these aren't definitive collections of the best American short stories in any given year, but they're a damn good try.

Reading two volumes back-to-back did shine a rather glaring truth on one lit fic cliche, though - some of these stories just don't have endings. It's not even a question of whether there was a plot leading up to the last few pages or not, some of them just chopped off and left my brain early because there wasn't any last hook to hang my memory on.

Nevertheless! No stories in here were actually bad. Here are a list of ones that stuck: 

The Sleep: a town hibernates with unexpected success and consequences.
Housewifely Arts: a single mother travels to a wildlife preserve to hear a parent speak in her mother's voice one last time.
Phantoms: a town experiences phantom beings as part of their everyday life and start to wonder if they're normal or chosen.
Escape from Spiderhead: sci fi where prisoners are controlled by injected chemicals and thrown into moral quandaries to see how they react.
The Dungeon Master: a sociopathic teenager becomes a DD runner to get his revenge.
The Dog: a family goads a wife who can't cook into cooking a huge dinner to stop them from killing a dog.
Grandmother's Nose: a realistic take on Little Red Riding Hood
Mr. Nobody at All: an infamous artist gets eulogized by everyone he invited to his funeral, plus a few he told to stay the hell away.

Bookshelf!

Slow spiral into - what, exactly?

Book: The Other Typist

Author: Suzanne Rindell

Published: May 2013 (Amy Einhorn Books)

Pages: 354

I loved the premise of this story – a good-girl typist at a New York police precinct is excellent at her job and faithful to the truth as she records and transcribes confessions, until prohibition hits and the police station hires another typist to handle the workload. The new typist slowly reveals herself to be a modern gal and newly minted criminal as she even more slowly seduces the good girl over to the wrong side of propriety and law through an obsessive friendship that ends in more than one innocent person getting hurt.

It’s a coming-of-age story where the protagonist has no intention of or idea that she still had desires to change, set in a unique workplace juxtaposed against more familiar New York set pieces that were yet completely new to her (fancy apartment, underground speakeasies, house at the Hamptons) that throws her off kilter so hard she eventually falls off balance and discovers her best friend is not there to pick her up.

OR IS SHE?

I’ve got two major problems with the execution:

•  It’s so overwritten. Oh my god. I understand that the protagonist is an orphan who was educated by nuns and probably overcompensates for what was considered a bare-bones education, but seriously, she talks like a Victorian graduate student. And since this is told in first person with interior monologues and exposition, you can’t get away from it. By about a third of the way through – once I’d gotten past the setup – I’d gotten used to it, and it’s not like it was super unbelievable, but I never really liked it.
•  The ending. I’ve been harping on endings more than usual lately (and that will continue), but this story’s central mystery depends on a strong resolution to the unreliable narrator hints that build up nicely throughout the rest of the book. Well, we don’t get that. It doesn’t go Shutter Island at the end, and apparently there’s ample evidence either way, so without spoiling a book that hasn’t officially come out yet, I’ll just complain that even in the 1920s police could’ve totally and easily patched some of the bigger holes presented here (especially about their own employee).

It was a good read, and I might catch it when it goes mass market in May to see what’s changed from the uncorrected publicity proof. The character details are really good, and this is ultimately intrigue driven directly by character development and discovery, so I will put it back in the library break room from whence it came, but I’ll be reluctant about it.   

Jane Austen on steroids

Book: Vanity Fair

Author: William Makepeace Thackray

Published: 1848 (original; 2004 Penguin this edition)

Pages: 809

Let me preface this review with something you should keep in mind throughout, because I’m going to sound like I’m contradicting this a couple times: I liked this book.

So let’s tear it apart! Well, that might be difficult given the softback-brick size – I bet you could use this edition to test the same sort of strength ripping a phone book in half requires. But I did digest this in chunks with several other books (in other reviews I post with this one) between the adventures of 19^th-century people who like wealth too much to actually keep any of it and pure-hearted soles who by the tragicomic turnings of fate find themselves falling into the same poverty state as the people who got there dishonestly.

It’s basically three or four Jane Austen books together about the same two families. It covers roughly the same-ish time period, same sort of society manners, same sort of inheritance and scandal drama, same sort of scheming and emphasis on society and how that, more than private decisions, determines how a life will play out.

It’s also got the time’s same decorative, winking prose, although Thackeray is more ironic and pointed and fourth-wall-crashing when revealing hypocrisies that are widely known and still taken as givens in society circles. He also brings in more peripheral details that can be wickedly hilarious but don’t have bearings on anything except the general atmosphere. These all make you laugh and gain insight at unexpected points and understand even the characters he writes as completely unrepentant.

But it was a terrible lunchtime read, because it takes like twenty minutes to get back into (especially if you’ve been dealing with other readings that are modern and just as difficult, like legal decisions or software manuals) and then a few pages after I got going at a good clip I had to stop. And then pick it back up after work when I had to remind myself where I was again. 

Plus everyone’s referred to by like three different names, like their Christian name (okay – none of those repeat), their last name (oh…kay, we’ve got like three generation of men in the same family so…is she flirting with the dad or the—oh right, the son!), or their married name (is that a Mrs.? That’s a Mrs. Okay. This is the wifey. Gotcha). Stylistically, it’s not the easiest thing to keep straight.

Jane Austen anti-fans and people who don’t like society-driven plots in general probably won’t enjoy this, but please do believe me when I say I had a good time getting through it, especially since I didn’t pressure myself to push through the difficult bits. Sometimes absence really does make the reader grow fonder. Bookshelf.  

Cheap redemption!

Book: Sharp Objects

Author: Gillian Flynn

Published: Thompson Gale (2006)

Pages: 413

OH MY GOD THIS IS SO MUCH BETTER.

Seriously. All the random snark and hostility from Gone Girl? Here it builds actual character, and it cracks to show vulnerability, and the main character has secrets that she totally hints at the whole time and that all builds into a nice giant snowball of a Mommy Dearest sort of ending, and WHY DID EVERYONE MAKE HER SHITTY BOOK HER FAMOUS ONE?

There’s this mid-tier newspaper reporter living her shabby, lonely life in Chicago who gets an assignment to go cover the start of a serial murder in her hometown. She doesn’t especially want to dive back into the place she left for a reason, but she likes her editor enough to half-heartedly want to keep him happy, and she figures maybe her old scares have healed. Boy was she wrong!

And yes, it gets batshit crazy by the end, but dammit, this narrative earns that batshit crazy ending like a champ. Her past trauma is slowly pulled out of her and put to good use, and even as she frankly acknowledges and cringes at her faults, the protagonist shows she’s at least trying to grow out of the bad habits that kept her demons at bay, and when she fails it’s because she’s human and not because the plot needed her to trip up. Yay!

I’m so excited that this second chance has paid off. That doesn’t happen a hell of a lot; I don’t take second chances on authors when I read something shitty of theirs first, but I put all three of Flynn’s novels on hold at my library at the same time because I was something ridiculous like 50^th in line for Gone Girl so I figured I’d read whatever came first.

And then Sharp Objects came along and I figured I’d try it anyway because it just seems rude to ignore my holds. Library etiquette wins the day. 

Flocks of good words

Book: Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories

Author: Lauren Groff

Published: 2009 (Hyperion)

Pages: 304

You guys, I’ve been burying myself in short stories because they’re awesome and I’m also trying to write good ones myself. This collection was a good place to dive in, because it has a story about a famous swimmer who coaches an invalid girl during the WWI flu epidemic and they mess around and fall in love and get separated from each other and their love child and then the swim coach becomes a famous poet and the girl becomes a famous lady-swimmer and they keep running into each other’s achievements without ever meeting in person again.

Groff tends to tell the entire lives of her characters, from where they are at the start of their stories to the ends of their lives whether or not that end puts a relevant end to the incident at hand. That works better in some narratives than others:

• “L. DeBard and Aliette” (the swimmer story), “Sir Fleeting,” and “Blythe” are all about the protagonists meeting and getting tangled up with another person for life and exploring that tangle with a wide-tooth comb. I especially liked how “Blythe” showed the day-to-day drain of how always being there for a melodramatic friend only ever made that friend worse, and how even though it’s after decades of this, the protagonist can still decide she doesn’t have time for this shit anymore. Only classier. I think there was a cocktail party involved in this realization.
• But like in “Majorette” and “Lucky Chow Fun,” both about scandalous community shake-ups that happen in the protagonists’ high school years and reshaped their towns forever, the ending goes on too long after the actual event has affected everyone.
• “The Wife of the Dictator” was a collective-first person story about the rise and fall of a dictator’s regime as told through gossip about the dictator’s wife, and “Delicate Edible Birds” was about a group of WWII reporters trying to out-drive Nazis who ended up staying the night in a Nazi-sympathizer’s barn with no food or shelter until their woman reporter slept with the Nazi farmer.

Those were my favorite because their opposite use of voice fit each narrative perfectly: collective gave the gossip a dreamy air so I kept wondering what was actually true until the truth started folding itself and its own wives into cars to get the hell out of the country before the dictator crashed and burned; the tight-knit anxious camaraderie between the reporters made their gang-up on the woman reporter all the more devastating a betrayal when they put their pressure on her. 

Good stuff; goes back to the library by the 26^th, but two upcoming teasers: Ann Patchett says read more short stories (yes, ma’am!), and Groff’s novel was less than $4 at Books-a-Million today when an overeager clerk gave me excellent excuse to saunter to the opposite end of the store when he was snagged by another customer. (Hello, bargain books, my old friends. I shall use some real money on you this time!) Stay tuned, dear Reader.