NW, by Zadie Smith

Oh, how I love a good London novel! Sure, we can and should include Dickens and Thackeray in the mix, but what I'm really talking about here are the novels that have introduced me to the London I've encountered myself. I think the first one was a mystery novel by P.D. James called Innocent Blood . I don't actually remember the book all that well--what I remember is the heroine's determination to get herself a flat in this very expensive city. Presumptuous and unheard of to a California girl's ears. More recently, An Equal Music by Vikram Seth, or Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd--not by all accounts, his best work, but a wonderfully vivid imagining of what it would be like to live rough in one of the greatest of cities. There are plenty more--you can probably name a few favorites yourself. Into this mix comes NW, the gifted Zadie's latest. I think sometimes these things are really a matter of timing--I had wanted to read it, and when there finally came time that I could read it, I had that readerly receptivity that only comes when you've been thwarted in getting to something for awhile. At any rate, I fell in step with it immediately and wanted to read little else.

The story begins with one of a pair of friends, a woman named Leah, who opens the door to someone from her neighborhood who is in distress. The woman is not of her class or her race and this non-meeting of minds has a tentative, ever shifting quality, where we don't really know who's on top even by the end of the meeting. As in E.M. Forster, who we know from On Beauty is one of Smith's lodestars, the inequality of status between the two people predicts a certain kind of outcome, and one which everyone else in the book subsequently forces upon Leah as the only probable one, but in the encounter itself, there lies the shimmering possibility of more than one interpretation.

NW, in case you don't know yet, is the designation for a certain northwestern section of London. This would have been a good book to have bound with some maps as endpapers, because unless you know London well, much better than I do, you may miss out on some of the magnificent joy of walking London's streets through the novel's eyes. Like it or hate it, or love it as I do, London is indisputably one of the world's greatest cities. I was thrilled, then, to have the characters, native Londoners, even with their overtones of Jamaican ancestry in some cases, come across the unknown in this, their native city. I suppose it's because I want some place in the world to be inexhaustible--or maybe all places in the world to be inexhaustible. In any event, Leah and her longtime friend Natalie eventually happen upon an ancient church in the middle of a roundabout, a place they had never noticed before. Many things are happening in the minds of these friends and between them as they wander this hallowed site, but for me, the fact that it happens in an English country church tucked away in the midst of the booming metropolis is quite wonderful.

Though we will hear the tale through both Leah's and Natalie's perspective, and in fact, in the third section will hear the entire story of that friendship from its beginning, there are a couple of other stories wandering through this tale. One of them is that of Felix, a Jamaican descended Englishman who wanders the city in his own segment. Some people have criticized this particular story for it's disconnectedness from the main narrative, but for me, there was an echo of Forster's secondary characters, who, try as they will, do not quite fit into the successful script of the main ones, as well as the Septimus Smith character of Mrs. Dalloway. In any good London novel, after all, there are the tracks and traces of other people living lives of purposes quite different than those of the protagonists, and yet in some way bound to theirs through the great metropolis all the same.

But then of course there are echoes of many other novels in this one, because Smith knows them well. She can't help including them in her frame of reference as a British novelist of the 21st century. They are part of her inheritance, they come with the territory. Joyce Carol Oates claims James Joyce for her, although I didn't think of him, but I'm sure there was some thought of him in writing about daily life in a metropolis--how could there not be? And her with her Irish husband...

In thinking about the book again, I listened to Smith read from the book, an experience you can replicate here. I was reminded again of the marvelous scene at the playground. The difference in speech between the parties that end up quarreling over an innocuous event on the children's roundabout comes through in the novel itself, but hearing her read it shows her mastery of the different speech patterns of a multitude of Londoners. I was surprised, in fact, to discover that her speaking voice retains so much of the Jamaican accents that I sometimes hear when I watch Eastenders. It is obvious from her reading that this is something of a conscious choice.

I am obviously not telling you much about the actual plot of the novel, because I want you to discover it for yourself. I will say that I read an interview Smith did once with the novelist Ian McEwan. (She was interviewing him.) She admitted that she hadn't quite figured out how to do endings, and complimented him on his success at that.

With NW, I'd say she figured that one out.  

Wild Bill, by Dana King

When Gianni Bevilacqua dies a premature death from eating too many cannoli, an internecine war breaks out over who will succeed him as mob boss of the Outfit. Will it be his son, Gianni Junior, who takes a blood lineage succession for granted, or will it be old hand and former consiglieri Frank Ferraro's years of savvy and experience that will win the day?

From this question springs the whole of Wild Bill's wild ride, involving not just the two sides of the Chicago Outfit, but cops and Feds as well. This is a very accomplished debut novel, which keeps many plates adeptly spinning, and reminded me in this sense of novels by John McFetridge and Declan Burke, and from there inevitably hearkens back to the crime fiction of Elmore Leonard. There is quite a lot of understated humor in this book as well. I probably should have taken a few notes so that I could quote you a few lines, but maybe it's just as well, as you will run across them yourselves.

As I'm not normally a huge fan of the Goodfella kind of mentality, it's probably understandable that I would be a tad more interested in the Feds and cops, though you couldn't by any stretch of the imagination make this a black and white sort of issue. But I would have liked to see more of fed protagonist Will Hickox's sidekick Ray Fa'alepo, and definitely more of Madeline "Mad" Klimak, a strong female protagonist who shows that King has a range beyond the macho trope. Maybe they'll appear in a sequel?

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The Expendable Man, by Dorothy B. Hughes

More than most books, this novel is one you should just jump into without preamble. So don't read the back cover, don't read any reviews that reveal plot, and so on. What I thought I would do here is write around all that, and so encourage you to pick it up without specifically telling you the story.

I first discovered Hughes many years ago, probably the mid to late eighties, when she was already having a revival of sorts. It was a time when major publishing houses still quite frequently brought older, half forgotten works to the reading public's attention again and it was through these auspices that I discovered the likes of Josephine Tey, Mary Roberts Reinhart, Edmund Crispin, Margery Allingham and many more. I believe there were about four Hughes novels reissued together, the ones I remember best, because of the arresting titles, being The So Blue Marble and Ride a Pink Horse. I read these two and I may have read others; in fact, there were times as I read this one, that I thought I may have read it back then as well. I don't think so--I think it's because Hughes' protagonists share some similarities. For one reason or another, they are isolated people, forced into increasingly desperate circumstances.

Some writers would seem to be able to turn their hand to anything, and Hughes' writing life was more varied than most. Before she was a novelist, she was a journalist, but before that, she was a poet dazzling enough to have hard her first book, a poetry collection, published in the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

Her poetic gifts come through in this novel as well. This is a book of fairly terse prose, but in her descriptions of place and particularly of the Southwestern desert where much of this takes place, she reveals her poet's eye.

The time of the book is somewhere around 1963, when it was published. It is a very particular moment in American history, and Hughes gets this moment exactly right. It stood out to me because after watching so many episodes of the much vaunted Mad Men, it's very clear that there is a big difference between throwing in period detail, and chronicling the period in which you live. I am not sure that even Hughes herself could hope to get this particular story right, but the sense of what people believed and feared and felt possible is much truer to my own childhood memory of the era than our 21st century simulations of this.

It's funny that I thought at first that this novel was perhaps a bit derivative. It reminded me a bit of Red Lights, an American novel by the great Belgian writer, Simenon, which, like this edition, is another  reissue of the wonderful New York Review of Books imprint,  and which I wrote a brief review of HERE . And it also recalled the movie Kiss Me Deadly, a 1955 film that I only saw within the last few years. What all three share are a road trip and the hazards of the road.

Trust me, though. This one is different. 

Happy New Year and Happy Reading

I'm a couple of days late and more than a few dollars short, but I thought I'd give this blog a bit of a kick in the pants and talk about reading and reading projects for a bit. I'm in the middle of several things and not near the end of any of them, but for some reason the beginning of the year always makes me feel incredibly optimistic about my reading goals. It's probably the combination of the end of the holiday madness and the still short days that makes me feel like I'll now have a lot more time for the printed word. Somewhat delusional, but it's a nice delusion, and you never know.

I'm currently reading Dana King's Wild Bill, his contemporary Mafia story set in Chicago. Reminds me a bit of John McFetridge's Toronto crime fiction in it's ability to keep many plates spinning. I've also started Zadie Smith's NW, the new novel by a famous author that I perhaps most wanted to read. The reviews have been mixed, but I'm really enjoying it and I think it's one of those books that caught me at just the right time. I'm also well and truly absorbed in Expendable Man  by Dorothy Hughes. I'd read several of her novels of pyshological suspense before, but apparently missed this one, put out freshly under the New York Review of Books imprint. And I'm soon to start The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Anne Fadiman's wildly popular book about the healing philosophies of the Hmong culture, or so I gather. Have yet to open it, but as it's a book group selection, open it I shall.

I have very ambitious plans about reading more books for the Europa Book Challenge, 2013, but probably the less said about that the better, until I actually have time to start one...

Good luck to us all.

The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes

I read this at the behest of my reading group, and then at the last minute didn't go, so I don't know what sort of reactions the group had to it, but I suspect that the group verdict was divided. I think this book probably appeals to certain kinds of readers more than others. I'd guess it appeals more to those who appreciate artful construction and stylistic gifts as much or more than they do character. After finishing the book, I've read a few people who have pointed out how well it is woven together, how the opening schoolboy class dialogue marks out the themes of sex and death throughout the book and so on.

Frankly, that's all a little above me. In some ways, I found the narrator too slight a character to be the center of even a short novella. In some ways, he represents the etiolated end of the line of a long, long line of British literature, a character turned in on himself even as he thinks he's investigating what happened to another. But I'm sure there are people who will give Barnes more credit for writing this than I do.

One thing that did not entirely ring true for me was the way that these memories of youth played out in the later years of the protagonist. Or perhaps people have different connections to the past, different senses of its importance. But having had one of those significant passages of my own life resurface in unexpected ways recently, I found that the similar reemergence of the unexpected in the book had an effect that I didn't quite buy. I think later in life, we tend to look at high moments of our past with interest and even nostalgia, but with more dispassion. Not without compassion for the people we all were then, but with a certain distance and understanding that life plays out differently than we think it will. I was a bit surprised really that then narrator had not been able to move beyond the past to any real degree.

That said, it is probably a book I should read again, as there were certain aspects of the timing and the significance of things I didn't really understand. Probably should, probably won't.

I came across this piece in the New York Times by Geoff Dyer that expresses my feelings a good bit better than I can.

For those who have read the book, and would like to delve into what it is all about, you might enjoy this piece over at Pechorin's Journal because the author enjoys the book, even while somewhat critical, and the bonus feature is that he links to a bunch of other people's blog reviews that he liked on the book in the last paragraph. I have to say that I didn't really find that I had missed anything major but I have a feeling that this is either a book that speaks to you or doesn't, and I wouldn't want to dissuade anyone from reading it who might get a bit more out of it than I did.

Slaughter's Hound, by Declan Burke

I think sometimes the form of the crime fiction series lulls us into thinking we know what to expect out of its novels. Indeed, this is usually half the intent. Drumming up a little business for the brand. Personally, I have nothing against this formulaic approach. When a series has gone on too long, I just stop reading it. No harm, no foul.

I suppose, then, I was looking forward to the second Harry Rigby book for the usual, but as it turns out, the wrong reasons. As anyone who read Eightball Boogie will know (and you really should read it first as this one has some spoilers for that earlier one), that story ends leaving Harry in some challenging straits, and a lot of time has passed since then as this book opens. So let's just say it's kind of the opposite of the Sue Grafton series, where Kinsey Millhone can remain the same age through several volumes of the alphabet series, or maybe even more.

Time, then, has passed, and it has not passed well for Harry Rigby. He is currently driving a cab and running various errands, not all of them on the licit side of the line. One of them involves bringing some grass to an old friend. It gives nothing away to say that that friend takes a fatal dive off a tall building, because it happens within the first two pages. The rest of the book concerns the whys and wherefores of this fateful fall. 

This is a dark tale, and it gets progressively darker as it goes along. In the middle, it reminded me a bit of Ross MacDonald, and also of his Irish literary descendent, Declan Hughes, with its tale of doomed families and the ruin that attends them. But there is a kind of go for broke quality to this book that I haven't really found in the aforementioned illustrious writers' work, and it took me till nearly the end of the book to realize that Burke has laid it all out for us in the very title of the work, and in a helpful author's epigram, in which he notes that the great warrior  Cú Chulainn's name really means Hound of Ulster and that he owned a number of war hounds called archú, who were known for their love of slaughter.  So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen--a quiet stroll by the river this is not. Instead, it is a tale steeped in the tradition of the Irish myth cycles, where deeds are great, but, well, bloody. So don't say I didn't give you fair warning.

But now that I have, don't be scared off. This is also a smart, and funny--yes, funny--tale of contemporary Ireland, and Harry is down and out partly because a lot of people are. It's just that he reaches a deeper level of loss than most, which propels him on a grim trajectory that in retrospect seems fated, as that of mythic heroes always do.

Burke is also a writer of gorgeous sentences, and just so I don't leave you the impression that the book is all havoc, let me end with the beginning...

(filched from his website)
"It was  a rare fine night for a stroll down by the docks, the moon plump as a new pillow in an old-fashioned hotel and the undertow in the turning tide swushing its ripples silvery-green and a bird you’ve never heard before chirring its homesick tale of a place you might once have known and most likely now will never see, mid-June and almost midnight and balmy yet, the kind of evening built for a long walk with a woman who likes to take long walks and not say very much, and that little in a murmur you have to strain to catch, her laughter low and throaty, her humour dry and favouring lewd, eyes like smoky mirrors of the vast night sky and in them twinkles that might be stars reflecting or the first sparks of intentions that you’d better fan with soft words and a gentle touch in just the right place or spend the rest of your life and maybe forever wondering what might have been, all for the want of a soft word and a touch gentle and true.
It was that kind of evening, alright. That kind of place.
You ever find yourself there, say something soft, and be gentle, and true.
Me, I found myself hunched over the charred dwarf that had once been Finn Hamilton, parts of him still sizzling in a marinade of oily flesh and melting tar, and all around the rank stench of singing hair and burnt petrol, seared pork.
Midnight, and balmy yet."

Now do yourself a favor and go out and find the rest.
    

Land of the Blind, by Jess Walter

I work in an indie bookstore, and we're always looking for ways to stay open and to change with the times simultaneously. So as of this month, we as well as a host of other indies will actually be selling ereaders, as well as offering ebooks, which was the last phase of this sort of transition.

At this point, I don't think there's much value in debating the presence of ereaders in our lives. As a reader and a writer, I mostly just hope that people will keep reading, rather than using their increasingly sophisticated devices for more distracting, alluring things.

But I do sometimes wonder if people understand what they might be losing in being willing to give over physical books entirely. Here's a small example. I'm already a fan of Jess Walter. I loved Citizen Vince, his interesting spin on what a gangster in witness protection would do when for the first time he tries to figure out how to vote in a presidential election (not this one, by the way), and thought The Zero was one of the more thoughtful novels to come in the aftermath of 9/11. I haven't gotten around to his later works yet, though I hear he moves from strength to strength and hope to get to them soon.

But it was an earlier work that called to me a couple of weeks ago. It was just spined in the used book box, and of course I got on to it partly because it was Walter, but there was something more to it than that. I don't know why an individual book can suddenly command our, or at least my attention. But I have found this to be the case many times over my life. There's just a sense that now is the moment.

Like I say, this is an early work of Walter's, and maybe it isn't even the best place to start if you haven't read him already. But maybe it is. The story revolves around several characters and is told through two lenses. One is a world weary police detective, a woman, who is going through something a little bit more than job burnout. A man, who she initially thinks is just another crazy, is taken in because he has been found wandering around in a derelict but soon to renovated hotel in downtown Spokane, Washington. Largely because she too is at a sort of crisis point in her life, she resists just sending him on his way, and allows him to stay at the station writing his confession. Not sure what this 'confession' is really about, she conducts her own investigation in the meantime.

Through the confession, the story soon veers back to childhood. I resisted this a bit at first, because I wanted to stay in the present story, but such is Walter's skill that he can suck you into any story he wants to tell you. This backstory of  childhood hierarchies and friendships and betrayals is plotted perfectly to keep you reading. It is also and incidentally a portrait of what life is like in the other cities of our country. Spokane is always positioned in the minds of the characters as 'not Seattle', and in the midst of the nineties high tech boom, this is not insignificant. One of the many virtues of the book is the evocation of eastern Washington.

Looking through some reader reviews before I wrote this, I'm reminded that there are parts that are hard to take when it comes to scapegoating and bullying of children by their peers. I'll only say that there are people who forget their childhoods and people who reflect back on them. I'm willing to bet that Walter is one of the latter.