RollnSmoke Literary Cafe: October 2010

Sunday, October 24, 2010

RollnSmoke Reviews: By NIghtfall by Michael Cunningham

By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

Unlike his heady, popular novel The Hours, Michael Cunningham’s sixth book offers his readers the chance to eavesdrop on contemporary urbanites entrenched in the daily grind of New York City living. Chelsea Gallery owner and art dealer, Peter Harris, is married, with an uneasy, “diminishing” and grown child living in Boston, and is caught in the throes of angsty middle life. When his much younger, drug addicted brother-in-law – who somehow comes to embody beauty itself – moves in with him and his wife in their Soho loft, Peter’s life is suddenly charged with a deep homo-eroticism that threatens to unfurl the professional and marital life he has so carefully wrought. While the reader may not be convinced of this sudden change in his sexuality, Peter is, and ultimately he feels “stupid and sad and pathetic” for being seduced by a shameless, beautiful boy (8/10).

Saturday, October 16, 2010

RollnSmoke Reviews: Tinkers by Paul Harding

Tinkers by Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary Press, 2009)

The 2009 winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Literature and Harding’s debut novel features an old man, George – a collector of old clocks -- who is dying at home, among his family, slipping in and out of consciousness. In the final eight days of his life, his hallucinations fix on memories of his early childhood, especially on his “mad father whom he loved and pitied and adored” who tinkers about New England in a wagon loaded with household goods, who suffers from grand mal epileptic seizures and who disappears one day when George is still a boy. Finally, George’s memories – a respite from his dying -- somehow meld with his father’s memories of his own mentally ill father, and family truths are revealed in the final moments of George’s life. The diction is precise and poetic and the New England landscape is itself a character, the writing like Robert Frost in novel form. The pace is quiet and plodding, requiring a reader’s patience and keen attention (8/10).

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

RollnSmoke Reviews: FINDING THE CENTER by V.S. Naipaul

Finding the Center: Two Narratives by V.S. Naipaul (Knopf, 1984)

In these two contemplative narratives, Naipual reveals the process of writing as personal exploration. The first and more interesting narrative is an account of his literary beginnings, filled as they were with anxiety and ambition, as the son of a journalist growing up on the Caribbean island of Trinidad. The second narrative – regarding a visit to Ivory Coast motivated by its being an “African Success” and influenced by the French -- forwards the notion of Naipaul’s wanderlust as a means of discovering “other states of mind” to further his knowledge of people and the world (8/10).

Friday, October 8, 2010

RollnSmoke Reviews: LET'S TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME by Gail Caldwell

Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell (Random House, 2010)

Gail Caldwell, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and former chief book critic for The Boston Globe, has written a near-worshipful memoir of her friendship with Caroline Knapp that begins “It’s an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.” In a short amount of time, these two well-matched women, each single writers and recovered alcoholics – “the merry recluse and the cheery depressive”-- who live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and love to swim and row on The Charles River and walk their dogs together, develop a deep and trusting bond of need. While contemplative in tone and simple in diction, Caldwell’s narrative at times verges on self-help and ultimately, she doesn’t bring anything truly new to the “old, old story” of loss and grief where, in the wake of Caroline’s tragic death from lung cancer, Caldwell emerges “sober, heartsore and still alive” (7/10).

Monday, October 4, 2010

RollnSmoke Reviews: LIT by Mary Karr

Lit by Mary Karr (Harper, 2009)

The third memoir in a fascinating autobiographical trifecta and voted one of last year’s 10 Best Books by the NYT, Lit connects the dots among Mary Karr’s dysfunctional childhood, her struggle with alcoholism and a feral depression, her eventual divorce and her path to prayer and survival. Karr firmly establishes her genius at the genre of memoir by presenting real and self-effacing anecdotes wherein the reader is privy to her reliance on various academic and spiritual mentors, to the essential relationships she builds through therapy and group sessions and to how she copes with the devastating deaths of her eccentric her parents. While the ending is a bit fractured, through self-nurture Karr finally learns to sustain a sober life through prayer. Inspired by her young son, Dev, she finally stops intellectualizing God and jumps into life without self-deceit and with faith entire (9/10).

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).