RollnSmoke Reviews: LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN

LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN by Colum McCann (Random House, 2010)

Winner of the National Book Award, this novel is Colum McCann’s emotional response to the devastation of the 9/11 attacks. He achieves resolve, hope and rebuilding by harkening back to New York City as it was in 1974 when Viet Nam was raging, art was flourishing, liberation theology was emerging and technology was quickly developing. The novel reads like a thick braid of short stories that each describes different lives of average New Yorkers – hookers in The Bronx, a soul-searching man at odds with his vows to The Order, drug-addicted artists from The Village, a therapy group of grieving war mothers, an 18-year old computer hack prodigy, a grandmother in jail, a judge, a lover. This intricate maze of people – whose ordinary days are charged with life by the hand of an awesomely skilled writer -- are joined together the day Phillipe Petit walks a tightrope wire between the iconic World Trade Center Towers on August 7, 1974. A stunning, broad portrait of New York City, McCann’s seventh novel, rooted in belief and grief, love and healing, is a smashing, impossible-to-put-down read (9.5/10).

RollnSmoke Reviews: THE LAZARUS PROJECT

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon (Riverhead Books, 2008)

Author Aleksandar Hemon, born in Sarajevo and now living in Chicago, creates a strangely intertwined narrative that centers on a struggling writer named Brik (also a Bosnian native who lives in Chicago post-9/11) who is inspired by the story of an Eastern European Jewish immigrant who was shot to death in Chicago in 1908 amidst an ugly American obsession with anarchism. In his quest to write this immigrant story, Brik secures a grant, and with a thuggish childhood friend, travels to Ukraine, Moldova and ultimately to Sarejevo to realize the full story. During this strange, bleak journey, much is revealed about Brik, particularly about the nature of his strained marriage to an accomplished American neurosurgeon. But also, there are flashbacks to the surviving sister of the said unjustly murdered immigrant who is left alone to cope with abusive, crooked Chicago cops. Hemon is a skilled writer and manages to inject odd humor into weird predicaments, but ultimately details about pogroms and massacres, whore-houses and hateful murders, death and despair dominate this cinematic and complex narrative whose central mysteries are never fully resolved (7.5/10).

RollnSmoke Reviews: AT HOME IN THE WORLD

At Home in the World by Joyce Maynard (Picador, 1999)

The daughter of brilliant, academic and dysfunctional parents and herself a precocious and driven achiever, Joyce Maynard was one of the first handful of girls to attend Phillips Exeter Academy and published her first book at 18. Also at 18, Maynard dropped out of Yale to move in with her 53-year-old lover, J.D. Salinger, “America’s Most Private Citizen.”

In this riveting, clearly-written and often epistolary memoir, Ms. Maynard explores her life-long battle with eating disorders, her father’s alcoholism and her desperate fixation to please her parents as well as her oddly reclusive older lover. When Salinger suddenly dumps her after a year, she is able to collect herself, gets back on her feet, gets married and has a family, using all her various life experiences as fodder for her writing. It is the process of writing this very memoir that precipitates her return to Salinger, all these years later, to ask the intriguing question: “What was my purpose in your life?” In then end, Maynard seizes upon the right to tell her own story and what a compelling story it is (9.5/10).

RollnSmoke Reviews: A SPORT AND A PASTIME

A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967)

In one of the most erotic books I’ve ever read, James Salter, a trailblazer in erotic realism, describes explicit sex in a literary way. He develops a subtle though poignant mind-play between two lovers; Phillip Dean, a recent Yale drop-out and a plain, working girl named Anne-Marie who is from the French countryside and who Phillip picks up during a trust-funded romp through the French countryside.

Thrown into this sultry mix is the un-named, compulsively vicarious narrator who clearly admits “none of this is true” and so may possibly be dreaming the entire carnal tryst between his friend and the girl. While a bit redundant in its Sun Also Rises-like indulgent cycles of gluttony and sexual appetite, Salter is enviably skilled as writer, exacting evocative imagery with a spare, succinct use of words. By the end of the short novel, Phillip is consumed by a wicked boredom that contrasts dramatically with the novel’s tragic ending (8.5/10)

RollnSmoke Reviews: Ms. Hempel Chronicles

Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum (Mariner Book, 2009)

Impressively, Ms. Bynum was a National Book Award finalist for her debut novel called Madeleine is Sleeping. This quick and light read, her sophomore effort, features a single woman in her late-20’s who works as a (mediocre) middle school English teacher. The chapters are vignettes (“chronicles”) that capture the life of this rather plain woman – rooted in nostalgic flashbacks to her childhood with her younger brother, Calvin, and her now-deceased father, memories of her fiancée to whom she is no longer engaged and of her teaching career – that work together not as an arching narrative but more as a string of playful and provincial stories. A great deal of the novel focuses on Ms. Hempel’s young students – ever “on the verge of something, brimming” -- who supplant her life. While the effect is charming and often amusing and the diction is admirable, the novel falls short of delivering any sort of meaningful message as Ms. Hempel herself admits that she is “aware of her own oblivion and innocence” (7.5/10).

RollnSmoke Reviews: BICYCLE DIARIES

Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne (Penguin, 2009).

Since the early-1980’s Talking Heads front-man and visual artist David Byrne has been riding a bicycle as his primary means of transportation in New York City. His seventh book ( -- Renaissance Man! -- ) is a travelogue that goes back at least a dozen years and loosely chronicles his experience biking in various cities across the globe including Berlin, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Manila, Sydney, London, San Francisco and New York. From the vantage point of a bicycle, Byrne “catch[es] glimpses of the mind of [his] fellow man, as expressed in cities … [that] are physical manifestations of our deepest beliefs.” While his writing is clear and engaging, the subjects he covers are impersonal, random and often lack segues. In fact, the theme of bike-riding serves mainly as vessel for a jumbo-load of Byrne’s thoughts on politics, art, architecture, history, fashion, urban planning, cultural stereotypes, and, of course, music (8/10).

RollnSmoke Reviews: UNACCUSTOMED EARTH by Jhumpa Lahiri

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri (Vintage Contemporaries, 2009)

Pulitzer-Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri offers a magnificent collection of eight stories that was voted Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post and The LA Times (among numerous other publications). Most of the stories take place in and around (often academic) Boston, Massachusetts, but maintain cherished family connections and traditions from (Bengali) India. The stories explore poignant moments among intimates – family members, long-time friends, lovers -- that present essential life questions: What does it mean to be loyal? To be family? To be home? To be alive? Lahiri deftly probes the mysteries and complexities that fuel meaningful human relationships, eliciting surprising empathy and interest from the reader (9.5/10).

RollnSmoke Reviews: How Fiction Works

How Fiction Works by James Woods (Picador, 2008)

James woods, a prominent critic and staff writer at The New Yorker and visiting professor at Harvard, presents a highly-acclaimed short book packed with smart insights and judgments about the craft of fiction. His aim is to pose theoretical questions about novel-writing and to answer them practically. In addressing the importance of style, consciousness and characterization and the use of detail and metaphor, Woods draws exhaustively from the literary masters, which requires of his reader a near- encyclopedic knowledge of the history of literature. While no doubt intelligent, Woods’ brief but pedantic study of the novel verges on overbearing and without the benefit of his live instruction becomes boring (7/10).

RollnSmoke Reviews: SAG HARBOR

Sag Harbor (Doubleday, 2009) by Colson Whitehead

Sag Harbor is a Hampton vacation enclave for mostly black New York City families, many of whom have had homes on the shore for generations. Benji and his brother head out to Sag early each May to wile away their summer hours, mostly unsupervised, living lazy days that hinge on a “paradox of black boys with beach houses.” The novel focuses on the summer of 1985, when Benji is 15 and gets his first job at Joni Waffle, has BB gun fights and GoKart races with his long-time Sag friends, drinks beer and gets his braces off. A coming-of-age novel veined with amusing anecdotes and 80’s iconography, nothing important actually happens in the novel – it’s like a Seinfeld episode – funny, but lacking point and drama (7/10).

RollnSmoke Reviews: A GATE AT THE STAIRS

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore (Knopf, 2009)

Lorrie Moore’s much-anticipated third novel features Tassie, a geeky, disconnected 20-year old from rural Wisconsin who, enrolled at a nearby college, lands a job as a nanny for a white family who is trying to adopt a black child, and a new world of “wordless racial experiences” thereby unfolds. The ensuing plot rides a strong undercurrent of local as well as national issues, tethered to a post-9/11 America wedged-in between wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. While Moore’s writing is still playful, some of her humor loses its subtlety, and the narrative isn’t jump-started until the last 1/3 of the book when a truckload of vicious backstory is finally unleashed, and a string of life traumas draws the story to a dreadful close. In the end the novel is not as spectacular as I hoped and ends hopeless, depressing and gray (8/10).

RollnSmoke Reviews: THE FOREVER WAR

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins (Vintage, June, 2009).

Dexter Filkins, a singular and brave foreign correspondent for The New York Times, offers an informed, insider’s glimpse to the chaotic war fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq. A fascinating study of contemporary war, Filkins achieves raw and riveting witness in his written portrayal of people, images, events and interviews. In Afghanistan he covers the strife and brutality of Talibani executions, wandering orphans in Kabul, landmines, competing war lords, hellish checkpoints overrun with rape and plunder. And in Iraq – which is the centerpiece of the book – he reports from the battlefront, embedded with American soldiers who are themselves children, waging war in a chaotic tribal culture where Sunnis and Shiites and hundreds of insurgent groups are entangled in a brutal battle of revenge. By becoming “part of the place, part of the despair, part of the death,” Filkins offers a plainly intelligent, non-political, non-preachy, horrifying portrait of war (9.5/10).

RollnSmoke Reviews: LOVING FRANK

Loving Frank by Nancy Horan (Ballantine Books, 2008).

Mamah Bothwick Cheney is an educated but unfulfilled mother and housewife living in early-20th century Oak Park, Illinois, when she meets and begins a romantic affair with the brilliant and legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright. At the expense of their marriages and families, they run off to Europe together and return to The States to commence a bucolic life, co-habitating “in sin” among the isolated fields of Wisconsin where Frank designs an idyllic farming homestead just for them called Taliesin. While this historical novel provides insights into the eccentric characters of both protagonists – they are “alive. Together” -- it is difficult for the reader to summon sympathy for their much-maligned and exposed romance because they’re unbearably narcissistic and comfortably privileged as each constantly indulges his and her artistic and intellectual whims, so that there is no preparation for the final, climaxing tragedy of the story (7/10).

RollnSmoke Reviews: LE DIVORCE

Le Divorce by Diane Johnson (Plume, 1998). An amusing, quick summer read features Isabel Walker, a young American from Santa Barbara, who has recently dropped out of USC Film School to head to Paris to live with her step-sister, Roxy, who is pregnant and separated from her French husband who has run off with a Czech sociologist named Magda. Because Isabel is young and fun and seemingly “indifferent to her future,” the reader experiences the high culture and sumptuous food and worldly sights of Paris from an unpretentious, newcomer’s point of view. It’s not long before Isabel begins a secret affair with one of Roxy’s in-laws, a seasoned and accomplished 70-year old French political figure. A string of somewhat far-fetched tragedies, including a suicide attempt, a kidnapping and a homicide, jars the frivolous vibe of the first half of the book, and Isabel’s response to these events reveals her to be deeply flawed, narcissistic and greedy (8/10).

RollnSmoke Reviews: THE SONG IS YOU

THE SONG IS YOU by Arthur Phillips (Random House, 2009).

Called a “dark comedy about obsession and loss,” this newest novel by acclaimed author Arthur Phillips is his least cohesive and absorbing. For recently-divorced and grieving protagonist Julian Donahue, longing and music go hand-in-hand. Living in New York and working as an advertising director, he fixates on an emerging club rocker Cait O’Dwyer, who is half his age, as a conduit out of deep despair. In the course of pursuit, his musical taste is revealed as dated (“the rock of aging”), his sexuality emerges as defeated and his stalking is creepy. The strategy of slowly revealing truths – about a dead son, a manic ex-wife -- doesn’t work here mainly because the present tense non-romance between this narrator and the young girl-rocker fails to compel. (6.5/10).

RollnSmoke Reviews: THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul

THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul (Patrick French, Knopf, 2008). When I chose this fat book from the shelf, I had a vague idea of who V.S. Naipaul is – I’d read A Bend in the River – and knew that he’d won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, but I had no idea I would find his life story so irresistibly – I couldn’t put this book down!

Naipaul was born to a poor East Indian Brahmin family in colonial Trinidad in 1932 and rose to become a great writer, at once outrageous, funny and offensive. Vividly written to reveal the truth of an imperfect life, biographer Patrick French shows how Naipaul struggles in constant exile – neither Indian nor British nor islander – a writer of the world without a homeland – to achieve a writing style that is a combination of travel, fiction, history, politics, literary criticism and autobiography.

What is most interesting about Naipaul’s life, however, is his fascinating relationships with women: His mother, always poor and at home in Trinidad, whom he refuses to see towards the end of her life; his tragic, literary spouse, Pat, whom he relentlessly taps for deep and comforting loyalty; his own claim to once “being a great prostitute man”; his lover, Margaret, an Anglo-Argentine, with whom he has a torrid and twisted affair for 24 years; his sister, Kamla, to whom he is devoted during his lifetime; and his second wife, Nadira, a divorced journalist from Kenya and Pakistan, whom he marries directly after Pat’s death from cancer. Indeed it is his relationships with these women that bring his full writing character to the fore: “His scope, irascibility, outsider status, rudeness, Pat’s silent presence.” (9.5/10).

RollnSmoke Reviews: THE ENTHUSIAST

THE ENTHUSIAST (Charlie Haas, Harper Collins, 2009).

Loaded with Americana, this debut novel is a coming-of-age story about a young, unattached Californian named Henry who “associate edits” his way across the country. Working for many and various “enthusiast” magazines, Henry visits obscure towns and encounters strange people in his work. The entire novel is undershot with a humorist sensibility, but the reader only gains empathy for Henry in Part II of the novel when he finally commits himself to marriage and is also forced to provide emotional support for his much idealized, geek-genius brother, a stem cell researcher, who endures a debilitating head injury (7.5/10).

RollnSmoke Reviews: STERN MEN

STERN MEN by Elizabeth Gilbert (Penguin, 2009).

Before there was EAT, PRAY, LOVE, there was STERN MEN, Elizabeth's Gilbert's debut novel, originally published in 2000, about lobster fishermen living and working on the isolated islands off The Maine Coast. (Over-) loaded with fishing lore and history, the story centers on a young girl, Ruth Thomas, who grows up during the 1970’s and 80’s as an only child, living with her lobster-fishing father and without her mysterious and estranged mother. While Gilbert’s writing is lively and compelling, the story’s timeline is choppy with oddly placed backstory and burdened with distracting details, especially regarding the Courne-Haven-Fort Niles Lobster Wars. Gilbert does a much better job crafting female-female relationships (i.e. Ruth’s connection with her generous and loving neighbor, Mrs. Pommeroy) than she does with the male-female relationships (i.e. her relationship with her father which is unnatural). Even so, Gilbert keeps the reader onboard until Ruth Thomas finally exacts restitution of her family’s honor (6.5/10).

RollnSmoke Reviews: THE BOSTONIANS

THE BOSTONIANS by Henry James (MacMillan, 1886).

Written during James’ “Middle Period,” this story centers on an unlikely love triangle between Olive Chancellor – a spinster Bostonian “nihilist radical” -- who befriends young and charming Verena Tarrant who sports a “mystic faculty” to speak on behalf of the cause of Women’s Emancipation. Along comes Basil Ransom, a Post-Civil War Mississippian without means, who moves to NYC and interferes with Olive’s plan to keep Verena “in the single sisterhood; to keep her, above all, for herself.” Told from a vague first person omniscient narrator, the story is dated, the language often drawn-out (“farinaceous,” “lucubrations,” “pusillanimous”) and the drama somewhat redundant. Ultimately, given Verena’s independent nature and Basil’s chauvinism, the pairing is improbable (6.5/10).

RollnSmoke Recommends: Best New Non-Fiction

DREAMS FROM MY FATHER (Barack Obama, Three Rivers, 2004). Not at all new -- but at-the-moment essential for a momentous present. Obama’s memoir was originally published in 1995 -- before Obama was a father, a senator or the 44th President of the United States and was written in “the belief that the story of [his] family, and [his] efforts to understand that story, might speak in some way to the fissures of race that have characterized the American experience.” (9.5/10 – See full review at RollnSmokeRecords.blogspot.com).

THE NINE: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court (Jeffrey Toobin, Anchor Books, 2008). A fascinating and educational primer about the longest-seated Supreme Court in American history. 9/10.

THE POST-AMERICAN WORLD (Fareed Zakaria, Norton, 2008) A direct and clear rendering of the forthcoming Post American World whereby the glorious sheen that U.S. has enjoyed for hundreds of years gives way to “the rise of the rest.” 8.5/10.

SERVICE INCLUDED: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter (Phoebe Damrosch, Harper, 2008). An entertaining (debut) account of an 18 month stint as a waiter at a newly-opened, ultra-swanky Manhattan restaurant. (9/10 – See full review at RollnSmokeRecords.blogspot.com).

OUTLIERS: The Story of Success (Malcom Gladwell, Little Brown, 2008). This nifty study of why geniuses who are successful become successful (right time, right place, right conditions and practice, practice, practice!) reads like a long, engaging magazine feature. 8/10.

BEAUTIFUL BOY (David Sheff, Houghton Mifflin, 2008) along with TWEAK (Nic Sheff, Atheneum, 2007) An interesting side-by-side analysis of a father-son relationship where the father looks back and sees his part in the evolution of his son’s full-fledged addiction and where the son navigates his spiral. 9/10.

RollnSmoke Recommends: Best New Fiction

THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE (Andrew Sean Greer, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008). “We think we know the ones we love” is how this story of a marriage, set in 1953 San Francisco, kicks-out. Pearlie marries Holland Cooke, a loyal, decent soldier whose truths are revealed when, one day, a stranger appears at her doorstep, a conscientious objector whom Holland knows from days spent in wartime “mental deferral.” (8/10 – See full review at RollnSmokeRecords.blogspot.com).


THE MAYTREES (Annie Dillard, Harper Perennial, 2008). This portrait of an abiding marriage lived in P-Town, Cape Cod – a varying patchwork of glimpses into a long-lived relationship -- is old school, its words poetic and often formal. (8/10 – See full review at RollnSmokeRecords.blogspot.com).

THE WHITE TIGER (Aravind Adiga, Free Press, 2008). A provocative debut novel short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, this is the sardonic, epistolary narrative of a “1/2-baked”who resists his ingrained sense of servitude and refuses to live his life in the Great Indian Rooster Coop and ultimately moves from hunted criminal to pillar of Bangalore Society, treading a fine line between loyalty and betrayal. ( 9/10 – See full review at RollnSmokeRecords.blogspot.com).

A GOLDEN AGE (Tahmima Anam, Harper Perennial, 2009). This brilliant debut novel explores the exotic landscape and gritty realities of the war for Bangladeshi Independence from (West) Pakistan in 1971 and the strained divisions across generations and disintegrating family. (9/10 -- See full review at RollnSmokeRecords.blogspot.com). 9/10.

NETHERLAND (Joseph O’Neill, Pantheon, 2008). In the uncertain wake of 9/11 and during the subsequent separation between the protagonist, a big Dutchman named Hans, and his British wife, Hans develops an unusual love for the game of cricket and carves an unlikely social niche for himself among West Indians in New York. 8.5/10.

BRIGHT SHINY MORNING (James Frey, Harper Collins, 2008) At once a history of Los Angeles and a cat’s cradle weaving of its varied personifications, (controversial author) Frey draws his readers into a narrative web that satisfies. 8.5/10.

THE CONDITION (Jennifer Haigh, 2008) Centering the reader in the midst of a dysfunctional family, Haigh astutely explores the natural truths of challenged family relationships. 8.5/10.

THE TEN YEAR NAP (Meg Wolitzer, Riverhead, 2008) In her witty and insightful way, Wolitzer hits a rings-true funny bone in her portrayal of smart and educated women who leave the work force to forge family-centered lives but want to return at age 40. 8/10.