A Visit from the Goon Squad

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of A Visit from the Goon Squad (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).


It's kind of a novel and kind of a collection of short stories, and A Visit from the Goon Squad is a really clever and entertaining book. The writer, Jennifer Egan, created a timeline of events for two characters. One is a music industry exec, Bernie Salazar, who in the 1990s has a comfortable job at a major record label, and the other is his assistant, Sasha, who struggles with kleptomania. Over the course of about 45 years, their stories cross paths with lots of other people, and, in thirteen chapters, Egan tells stories of these two, or some of the intersecting players in their lives.

So it's far more than just thirteen short stories about two characters. It's a low-key epic that won 2010's Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the way it tells incredibly interesting stories that have a deep but subtle link in the passage of time and aging. I found myself starting each new chapter very excited about who would lead the story: somebody we've met, somebody we've heard about in passing, or somebody brand new, their connection to Bernie or Sasha, or one of the other leads of a previous story, not yet apparent.

The only fumble is a pretty minor one. Egan set the final story a few years in the future, before Apple's iPhone and its autocorrect put an end to all that awful "l33t"-type of the 2000s. She gave the communication technology of this story an even further devolved use of abbreviations and random capitalization. Well, she loses a point for predictions, but she had plenty to spare in this heart-filled, sad, knowing, and very clever book. Happily recommended.

Freedom

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Freedom (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).

If you're in the market for a great big book about a modern, unhappy, midwestern marriage, boy, have I got the book for you! - said nobody, ever, probably. But that's okay, because Freedom is really terrific. I enjoyed this novel tremendously, but I can certainly understand why people have problems with it. At Amazon, the number of one-star reviews is almost equal to the number of five-star ones. Polarizing, you might say.

Patty and Walter met in college in the late 1970s. She was a basketball star with a stalker of a friend, and he was... well, kind of a nobody, really, but his best friend and roommate was the singer in a punk act who would go on to some notoriety and, eventually, success. After her career is ended with injury and he wins her over through nice-guy loyalty (one of those many problems people have with it), they finally hook up. By the late 2000s, their marriage has fallen apart, and life has taken them and their children in bizarre and unplanned directions.

The writer, Jonathan Franzen, was evidently attempting a modern take on one of Tolstoy's gigantic, decades-spanning stories of love, life, and disintegration. I confess that I find it really difficult to summarize, even in a quick way, what all goes on in this story, because it all does get a little outlandish, but I admire Franzen's moxie in tackling everything from the music world to arms profiteering with equal intensity and making it all believable.

It's a great story, equally sad and funny, and I absolutely loved Franzen's trick of writing a book-within-a-book from a different character's POV, and then introducing that book as an element in the plot, especially when he introduces it like a hand grenade. That's a bit of a spoiler - watch what you write about other people! - but it sure is fun. Recommended.

You Should Have Known

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of You Should Have Known (Grand Central, 2014).

This, however, is one of those books that can't be discussed without spoilers, so be aware.


Jean Hanff Korelitz's new novel, You Should Have Known, came with a warning that there was a twist coming. And for the first hundred pages, it seemed evident what that twist would be. Our protagonist is Grace Reinhart Sachs, a therapist whose first book, also entitled You Should Have Known, is just about to be released. Her premise is that women ignore the danger signs that spark that first instinct to not give a fellow a try. Forget about trying to "fix" them, just forget them entirely. Most men can't be fixed. And since Grace has a husband who works, selfessly, as a pediatric oncologist, and a dream marriage that includes a violin-playing son and her fellow socialite Manhattan moms at the private school, everything is set up splendidly for the inevitable betrayal. I even had the other woman pegged from her first appearance.

Korelitz's prose is good enough that I didn't mind reading what seemed to feel like something not entirely unique. I wasn't completely taken with Grace's character, well-drawn as it is, but the construction of everything just in time for it to collapse around the publication of a book about failed relationships was just too good to stop reading. Oh, what egg will be on our heroine's face when the world finds out about the other woman.

Then the other woman turns up dead. And the husband can't be found. That's how Grace learns. Well, now.

Detective fiction typically leaves a lot of supporting characters in the wake, wondering what in the hell just happened. You Should Have Known flips its premise and turns into the story of a player in somebody else's drama. Some other book entirely could be written about the murder, starring the two detectives who are investigating her death and are convinced that the wife of their suspect is just playing dumb and shielding him.

I've never run into a book like this, and I enjoyed the daylights out of it. I hit the hundred-pages-in-twist about the time of day when I needed to stop reading and leave it 'til the next day, and conspired to make time for it whenever I could, staying up quite late and through several more game-changing punches to the gut to finish it. It's a genuinely terrific novel and happily recommended.

Judge Dredd: The XXX Files

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Judge Dredd: The XXX Files (Rebellion / Simon & Schuster, 2014).


I wasn't completely sure I believed that a book like this would work, or read well. As part of their co-publishing strategy with Simon & Schuster, 2000 AD's publisher has assembled a really strange collection of Judge Dredd episodes. They basically identified either every story with a bare butt or breasts in it, along with a few others that deal with sex in the 22nd Century, and gave them this very fun and very neat presentation. It's a very nice and expansive 224 pages, and it doesn't drag in quite the way that I thought it might.

By that I mean, sure, there have been longer collections of Dredd before, but they're either linked by continuity, in which you get a long run of episodes from the same time period, or by artist, where you've still got a strong visual link. This book is just barely linked by anything. It has episodes from here and there across a quarter century stretch, with supporting players who were major points of interest for a few years making a single, somewhat strange appearance outside of their context.

The obvious example here is Judge Jura Edgar, the sinister head of Mega-City One's "Public Surveillance Unit," which turned out to be an ominous prediction of our own NSA. Edgar shows up in the triumphantly cool noir story "Sleaze," which was originally published during a curious time in 2000 AD's sister book Judge Dredd Megazine's life. Fleetway, then the publisher, was set to cancel that title for low sales in the wake of that boom that they expected in '95 and the movie with Sylvester Stallone that tanked. In a desperate move to cut costs and make it profitable, for a couple of years, there was only a single, 17-page Dredd episode in each issue, and reprints of "mature readers" comics, principally Vertigo's Preacher, bulking it up. So on the one hand, the creators - this one's written by John Wagner and painted by John Burns - had more freedom to explore darker and more mature stories, and on the other, there was a much greater public interest in government conspiracies at that time. Most of this book is silly, fun, and occasionally a little bawdy, but "Sleaze" is about the judges holding onto evidence of corruption and vice in order to keep the citizen councils under their thumbs. It really sticks out, and I really love that. It should remind readers that Judge Dredd is not a series that can be pigeonholed as an action strip or a comedy or a parody or a procedural. It evolves and changes all the time.

As for most of the book, it's very silly and fun. Most of it is written by Wagner, who has a ball dropping Dredd into situations where human lust and foolishness leads them to make bad decisions. The first three episodes are the three installments of "Love Story," drawn by Ian Gibson and published over a twenty-year stretch. Bella Bagley is an unfortunate, mentally ill woman who believes that Dredd is her boyfriend. Her desperation leads her into becoming increasingly unhinged and violent. I got the feeling that the brilliantly talented Gibson really loved working on these stories and gave them far more than his usual level of great detail, to the point that when Bella meets her inevitable end, he couldn't bear to draw the details of the bullet wounds.

Lots of other really terrific artists contribute to the book. Apart from Gibson and Burns, who does sterling work, Carlos Ezquerra, Greg Staples, Cliff Robinson, and Vince Locke are all here and they all have great stories. Ezquerra's "The Girlfriend" has always been a favorite, and Gibson gets to draw the blazes out of a hilarious story where Dredd is arresting people behind the scenes of a TV dating game. Lots of the stories here are really funny. Sex tends to be. That's the right attitude. I'd say recommended for everybody, but only if you're understanding that boys will be boys, and some of them are going to want to rush their new acquisition upstairs as soon as they get home. For older readers, then.

A PDF of this book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of review. If you'd like to see your books (typically comics or detective fiction) featured here, send me an email.

A Red Death

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of A Red Death (Thorndike, 1991).


Stepping back in time a bit, I've recently been rereading Walter Mosley's novels, and catching a few that I had missed previously. The second in the series is A Red Death, and it's set in 1953. Our hero, Easy Rawlins, has used the big payout from an earlier job to quietly buy a couple of apartment buildings off the books and avoid any scrutiny by keeping the ownership records very secret. He hires a manager and acts as that man's employee, spending his days doing janitor work in the buildings and just trying to stay off the radar and out of trouble.

Unfortunately for Easy, somebody leaks his ownership to the IRS, and a jerk of an agent wants to come down on him hard. Even more unfortunately, this puts him on the FBI's radar, as they could use a man on the ground to break up a union problem. Seems somebody's agitating labor at the aircraft plant where Easy used to work, somebody with possible communist leanings. The FBI agent suggests that he could make Easy's tax problems go away, but there's no guarantee he'll be rewarded for his off-the-book work. And even more unfortunately still, Easy's about to have troubles with his deeply violent friend Mouse, whose woman has come to town looking for Easy's company.

I've never read a book by Mosley that I didn't enjoy. I think that Easy is such a terrific character, and, while wincing, I love watching him always try to do the right thing but get shafted and stymied by the system, by people he trusts, by the city, and by the police. His troubles get worse when one of his tenants hangs herself and the cops seem, arbitrarily, to decide to treat it like a murder just to push Easy around - that's what you get for phoning in a body - and worse still when the trail of the leftist organizer takes Easy to a church, where more bodies get found. Happily recommended for anybody who enjoys hard-boiled detective fiction.

Solo

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Solo (Jonathan Cape, 2013).


I have to say that I don't quite understand the Ian Fleming estate's strategy with James Bond novels. Over the last six years, there have been three new ones, written by three authors, which are set in entirely different times and don't have anything to do with each other. It's almost like the way Toho keeps making Godzilla movies which pretend the only other Godzilla movie that ever happened was the very first one, or the way the Rolling Stones play three new songs and all the old, old hits, but studiously avoid playing any songs that were written after 1982.

This time out, William Boyd was selected to write a Bond book, and Solo is set in 1969. Bond, now 45, is sent to the west African nation of Zanzarim, where a rebel leader, Solomon Adeka, is carrying out a brutal civil war. Adeka is getting assistance from a billionaire who's running guns into the country and from a handful of mercenaries. Strangely, the arms and military supplies are coming in on airplanes bearing the logo of the charity that's supposed to helping the displaced children of the region.

Bond doesn't have to assassinate Adeka; he is in the final stages of terminal cancer when he finally makes it behind the lines under cover as a journalist and dies soon after he arrives, letting the civil war crumble. But he's betrayed all the same and, recuperating in Scotland, he concludes that he's going to have to follow the money back to America to find out who has hijacked the charity and track down that "philanthropist" without MI6 support...

It's a really fun book. I think that Boyd captured James Bond very well, and placed him in a believable world with a very unusual and interesting mission. He brought out Bond's brutality better than some writers wish to acknowledge, with one stunning example near the climax really surprising me. I was very satisfied with it, but I'm also left very curious about what would be happening next to the modern day Bond seen in 2011's Carte Blanche by Jeffrey Deaver. Why are we skipping around? What next, Fleming Estate? A Bond-at-Studio-54 novel by another new author for the 2015 title? Recommended.

Still Life With Bread Crumbs

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Still Life With Bread Crumbs (Random House, 2014).


Last year I made one of the best reading decisions that I've ever made: to just pay attention to contemporary fiction via the Books section of Entertainment Weekly. It's far from a perfect system and it reflects that magazine's editors' biases, but instead of waiting around for new fiction that fits my own biases and preconceived notions, I'm simply reading far more than I have in years. I've read authors I've found to be wearying and overrated (Donna Tartt), frustrating but promising (Marisha Pessl), and "where have they been my whole life" amazing (Meg Wollitzer) that I never would have experienced had I just confined myself to waiting for something new by Walter Mosley or some Ross MacDonald book I hadn't read before. (Or some Walter Mosley that I hadn't read before, about which, more in seven days.)

Anna Quindlen isn't quite in the top Wollitzer bracket, but Still Life With Bread Crumbs, her seventh novel, released earlier this year by Random House, was still an incredibly entertaining book and I'm so glad that I tried it. Actually, my skim reading of the review or "hot list" note just sang out "Your wife might like this one" and I insisted that she give it a try first. (She owed me that for giving up on Gone Girl, the introductory book in my experiment, before the first of the twists, just because she didn't like the husband. "You're not meant to" didn't sink in.) Happily, my wife loved it and wants to read more Quindlen. So do I.

This book is centered around a 60 year-old photographer named Rebecca Winter, who lived happily for years off the royalties from some of her work, but the money has dried up when she needs it most. To save some cash, she leases out her pony Manhattan apartment and takes a very cheap fixer-upper far in the countryside. She makes friends of some of the residents, and confides in a tea shop owner who seems just a little familiar. If this book had been written ten years ago, then a film adaptation would have cast Melissa McCarthy in the role, because she is totally Sookie from Gilmore Girls.

Rebecca is a beautifully young sixty. She still has all the energy and enthusiasm that I hope to have at her age, and she's still making artistic discoveries. She finds some strange little memorials in the huge forest around her house and begins photographing them. Then she realizes that the memorials never last very long; not only can she not discern who is leaving them and what they commemorate, she can't determine who is removing them. After she fires her grouchy agent over an argument about a photo of a dog that she sold in the tea shop, her new agent sees a tremendous opportunity for a new series and arranges a major gallery launch. Rebecca is reinventing herself after her ex-husband's betrayal, her son's bizarre romantic attachments, and the aging of her parents. Maybe a gallery show is exactly what she needs to kickstart her next act...

I enjoyed this tremendously. I loved the story and the characters, and I love Quindlen's breezy style. She has a fantastic, fun narrative voice, happily interjecting that details will come later, and using as-long-as-they-need-to-be parenthetical diversions to clarify minutiae on the story's sidelines. The result is a narration that feels like a comfortable storyteller settling in for a detailed and sometimes unstructured account of our heroine. She even tosses in some transcriptions of magazine articles and critical reviews for additional "understanding," in a knowing, cheeky way. It's a simple, upbeat, curious and gently mysterious story about growing up when you're old enough to count as a grown-up already. Tremendous fun, and happily recommended.