Book Reviews

Graeme Simsion
Simon & Schuster

You can buy The Rosie Project on Amazon here.

Andrew Levy

Simon & Schuster

Cheryl Strayed

Alfred A. Knopf

Tana French

Viking

Jonathan Safran Foer

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Steven Pinker

Viking

Larry Colton

Crown

Hardwired to tell our stories

In Ridley Scott’s classic sci-fi film, Blade Runner, the dying leader of the replicants (androids programmed with built-in termination dates) recalls the extraordinary experiences he has had and sadly realizes “all those moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain.”

There seems to be something hardwired into us humans that makes us want to tell our stories. From prehistoric cave paintings to the current plethora of self-published memoirs, we seem to have this deep need to leave some kind of testament that we were here, and that what we personally experienced was significant and worth sharing.

Larry Colton, the featured writer at this year’s Word Catcher event and author of Goat Brothers and Counting Coup, tells the stories of four men in his most recent book, No Ordinary Joes.

Chuck Verhalin of Dundee, New York, Bob Palmer of Medford, Oregon, Tim McCoy of Dalhart, Texas, and Gordy Cox of Yakima, Washington were all serving on the submarine USS Grenadier when it was damaged fatally by an aerial torpedo on April 23, 1943, and sank to the bottom of the Strait of Malacca. Through a daring maneuver, the crew was able to float the sub slowly to the surface where they were met by a Japanese warship and became prisoners of war.

Had they known what was ahead of them, the crew might have chosen to remain on the ocean’s bottom. Like Dick Cheney, the Japanese military could not be bothered with the niceties of the Geneva Convention, and the brutality, even outright cruelty, the prisoners experienced from their guards is harrowing to read.

The majority of the book covers their experiences as sailors, then prisoners, each chapter written from one of the four men’s viewpoints. Eventually, with the war’s end, they were liberated and returned to a very different America than they had left. All settled into civilian life, finding wives, having children, and making a living.

We are then shuttled sixty years into the future where these young men are now old men in their eighties, “whose lives describe the lifetime burden of war.” Each has problems with alcohol, women, and with their sons.

They wanted their stories told, and Colton performed a tremendous service to them by writing this book. It’s perhaps unfortunate that none of the four lived to read it. But then, the stories we want to leave aren’t intended for us anyway.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (April 15-May 14, 2012.) Reprinted with permission.

Katherine Boo

Random House

Too poor to afford the luxury of guilt

Along the roadway leading to the Mumbai International Airport, there is a long concrete wall covered with sunshine-yellow advertisements for floor tiles with the running slogan, “Beautiful Forever.” On the other side of the wall is the vast sprawling slum of Annawadi.

Katherine Boo, Pulitzer-prize winning reporter and staff writer for The New Yorker, spent three years getting to know the inhabitants of Annawadi, and has written a powerful and moving account of their lives that resembles a Dickens novel more than a sociological study.

Certainly, many are characters worthy of Dickens: wily and cunning Asha, who aspires to become a slumlord; Fatima the One Leg, hysterical and bitter, whose desperate self-immolation will scorch many innocent lives; Corporator Subhash Sawant, elected official of the slum district, epitomizes the corrupt politician, dressed in his white safari suit with “enough oil in his hair to fry garlic.”

And, as in any good Dickens tale, there are the waifs: Abdul, a youth who works hard as a garbage trader, supporting his disabled father and mother and their large family; Manju, Asha’s lovely 18-year old daughter, who aspires to teach and help others out of their poverty, a rare beautiful flower in a fetid swamp; and Sunil, a twelve year old street urchin who looks nine due to malnourishment, living by his wits and continually dreaming of a better life.

Dickens wrote his popular stories against the backdrop of the social ills of his time, a lesson Boo has learned. She portrays corruption in India as a way of life, among the politicians (to be expected), but also in the hospitals, schools, and the so-called justice system. When Abdul is falsely accused of a terrible tragedy, the court has him examined to determine whether he, at five-foot-one and weighing 105 pounds, is a minor or an adult. If determined to be an adult, he goes to the notorious Arthur Road prison where he faces rape and brutality while awaiting trial. After examining him, the doctor tells Abdul that he is seventeen years old if he pays four thousand rupees, twenty years old if he doesn’t.

An economic pecking order exists in the slum where the destitute prey on those even more destitute than themselves, and life is reduced to its basics: a 2-year old whose chronic ill health is draining a family’s meager resources “accidentally” drowns in a basin of water. The people of Annawadi are so poor they can’t even afford the luxury of guilt. Human values, like dignity, compassion, honesty, are subordinated to the primary value of survival.

Boo concludes, “It is easy, from a safe distance, to overlook the fact that in undercities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good. The astonishment is that some people are good, and that many people try to be…”

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (June15-July 14, 2012.) Reprinted with permission.

Charlotte Rogan

Little, Brown and Company

Three weeks adrift in a metaphor

I first read Lord of the Flies when I was in seventh grade. When I read it several years later in high school, I was surprised that it was the same book. Instead of a simple boys adventure story, the novel had become something much deeper and darker, and layered with meanings.

I had this same sense when reading Charlotte Rogan’s The Lifeboat; that it was a metaphor for humanity.

The story is set in 1914. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife have just been assassinated and the world is rapidly moving toward global war. But it could just as well be 2014, as the planet teeters toward ecological cataclysm.

Like many of us, the passengers on the ocean liner, Empress Alexandra, choose to remain oblivious to the disaster coming. “Imagine, all that fuss about one dead duke,” says Grace Winter, the 22-year old narrator. Newly wed, she is more concerned about how her husband’s mother will accept her.

Following a mysterious explosion, the ship sinks, and Grace joins an overcrowded lifeboat (It seems a requirement in survival literature that the lifeboat must be overcrowded).

Mr. Hardie, one of the ship’s crew, takes charge; he knows what needs to be done. He beats away the swimmers with an oar, since they would sink the boat. Civilization depends upon its Hardies (hard versus soft?) to do the ugly things that must be done and that most of us wouldn’t have the nerve to do. They leave a small child in the water, clinging to its dead mother.

Opposing Mr. Hardie is the formidable Mrs. Grant, “holding the higher moral ground,” who will come to challenge his authority. She would have saved the child; she would have probably tried to save the desperate swimmers who would then have capsized the lifeboat and all would have drowned. Grace is caught between the two of them.

Like most survival stories, the novel may be taken as an allegory for what happens when life is reduced to its basics. The news is not encouraging. It was three weeks before the survivors were rescued, and Grace, now on trial for murder, realizes that “The bare bones of our natures were showing…I couldn’t see that there was anything good or noble left once food and shelter were taken away.”

The story can be enjoyed (if that’s the right word) purely as a survival epic, or as a metaphor for humanity. There are the strong, the weak, the self-sacrificing, and the majority who just cling to their life(boat) each day.

The good news is that most are rescued; but they now must live with “survivor’s guilt”—the suspicion that one’s survival perhaps wasn’t worth the cost.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (August 15-September 14, 2012.) Reprinted with permission.

Gillian Flynn

Crown Publishers

Anatomy of a marriage, and maybe murder

In my university philosophy class, we were told that, in addition to the partners, any relationship also contains each partner’s projection of the other person—how we see him or her—so that when two people go to bed together, there are actually four people in that bed. I suspect Professor Canning’s more profound point was lost on our group of college sophomores, fantasizing with glazed eyes being part of a foursome.

Who we are and who we seem is key to Gillian Flynn’s mystery thriller, Gone Girl. We are reminded that things are not always as they appear. In fact, things rarely are.

Amy Elliot Dunne is missing; there are signs that she was abducted, possibly killed, and her husband, Nick Dunne, looks like the prime suspect.

The novel is narrated by Nick and Amy in alternating chapters, Amy through her diary, providing the anatomy of a marriage, and possibly a murder. We learn of their previously happy marriage in New York City (“We do silly things, like last weekend we drove to Delaware because neither of us ever had sex in Delaware”) but everything changes when they lose their jobs in the 2008 recession (“His and her lay-offs, isn’t that sweet?”)

They move back to Nick’s hometown in Missouri—“a quaint little 1950s town that bloated itself into a basic midsize suburb and dubbed it progress.” Nick and his twin sister, Margo, buy a bar with Amy’s inherited money to ride out the recession, but Amy, coming from a sophisticated, well-to-do East coast family, becomes increasingly unhappy stuck in the Midwest, and their marriage begins to buckle under the strain (“There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.”)

Aside from the mystery of what happened to Amy Dunne, there is some clever and insightful writing about relationships. Nick realizes his wife is “only remotely like the woman I fell in love with.” Amy wonders “if that is at the root of his distaste for me: He’s let me see his shortcomings, and he hates me for knowing them.” Nick confides, “Amy likes to play God when she’s not happy. Old Testament God.”

“Isn’t that what every marriage is, anyway?” concludes Amy. “Just a lengthy game of he-said, she-said?”

He-said, she-said, indeed! As we read their chapters, our sympathies slide back and forth between the two of them. The revelations keep coming, and with each one, marriage seems less and less like a good idea. Even for avid readers of thrillers, this is probably not the best book to give as a wedding present.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (September 15-October 14, 2012.) Reprinted with permission.