RollnSmoke Literary Cafe: November 2009

Sunday, November 29, 2009

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).

Saturday, November 21, 2009

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)

RollnSmokeRecords Recommends: BEST NEW BOOKS

...NONFICTION...

BATTLE HYMN OF THE TIGER MOTHER (Amy Chua, Penguin, 2011). An ambitious Professor of Law at Yale University, Amy Chua builds a defense for results and skills-oriented Chinese parenting – ruthless, where parents have “higher dreams and higher regard” for their children -- over Western parenting – which she presents as indulgent, choice-offering and overly-nurturing of self-esteem (8/10).

JUST KIDS (Patti Smith, Harper Collins, 2010). In spare, thoughtfully collected diction Patti Smith celebrates in memoir her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe that began one summer in New York City in 1968, two artists, in love (9/10).

LIFE (Keith Richards with James Fox, Little Brown, 2010).
The infamous guitar player for The Rolling Stones offers up an account of his own, spirited and adventurous life, very much in his own words – unliterary and British raw -- this is indeed, quite a Life (8.5/10).

UNBROKEN (Laura Hillenbrand, Random House, 2010).
A fascinating, non-fiction story that reads just like flowing fiction, featuring track Olympian, Louie Zamperini, who survives a wrenching Pacific bomber crash to float for weeks on a rubber raft until he is captured by the Japanese and held as a POW for years (9.5/10).

THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS (Rebecca Skloot, Crown, 2010) This debut book by a young, accomplished science writer tells the story of the infamous HeLa cell, which came from the ovarian cancer mass of a poor, young black woman who accessed John Hopkins University Hospital for medical care in the early 1950’s (9/10).

...FICTION...

FREEDOM: A NOVEL (Jonathan Franzen, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). A love story between two people who meet and marry young, grow up together and slowly learn the thresholds of wanting to be together vs. not wanting to lose each other (8.5/10).

STATE OF WONDER (Ann Patchett, HarperCollins, 2011)
Patchett’s sixth novel is a fast and fun summer read situated in the steamy Amazonian tropics of Brazil where a doctor named Marina is sent by her employer, the head of a drug company that is funding research for an emerging fertility drug, to uncover the circumstances of a dear colleague who recently disappeared there (8.5/10)

PRIVATE LIFE (Jane Smiley, Knopf, 2010). Smiley writes with a smart, keen eye, stringing her narrative like holiday lights among historical American icons – The St. Louis World’s Fair, the Great San Francisco Earthquake, two World Wars and the U.S. encampment of Japanese – while at the same time slowly revealing the sad and intimate details of an unraveling marriage (9/10).

THE IMPERFECTIONISTS (Tom Rachman, Random House, 2010). This engaging, fast-reading, debut novel centers on an English-speaking newspaper opened in Rome by American Cyrus Ott in 1954 and reveals the characters – primarily the editors and writers – who work there (9/10)

LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN (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 (9.5/10).

...Recently Read Old School …

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (Hachette Book Group, 1960)
Winner of The Pulitzer Prize, this debut novel is filled with sustained mystery & suspense and compelling misdeeds & murder. Told from the endearing and feisty point of view of 8-year-old Scout Finch and set in 1935 rural Alabama, this classic novel is loaded with timeless lessons about racism; good, honest parenting; the meaning of honor and conscience; and the importance of empathy: “… you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them” (10/10).

A MOVEABLE FEAST by Ernest Hemingway (1964)
Ernest Hemingway’s only memoir, published posthumously several years after his suicide, covers the years 1921-1926 when he was young and married to his first wife, Hadley. What rises in retrospect as most poignant and wise is Hemingway’s lasting love for her. “I wished I had died,” he writes in the end, “before I ever loved anyone but her.”

THE END OF THE AFFAIR by Graham Greene (Penguin, 2004)Greene’s provocative story about an affair that fails to disintegrate is considered one of his greatest “catholic novels” in its wide consideration of faith. What emerges in the wake of passionate and illicit relationship is a shared struggle with hatred, love, jealousy and ultimately, belief, which Sarah catches “like a disease” (9/10).