Book Reviews

Karen Thompson Walker

Random House

Coming of age amid global catastrophe

We didn’t notice right away. We couldn’t feel it. We did not sense at first the extra time, bulging from the smooth edge of each day like a tumor blooming beneath skin…There was no footage to show on television, no burning buildings or broken bridges, no twisted metal or scorched earth, no houses sliding off slabs. No one was wounded. No one was dead. It was, at the beginning, a quite invisible catastrophe.

In Karen Thompson Walker’s first novel the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow and the days are growing longer. The Age of Miracles is a mixing of genres, the coming-of-age novel with science fiction.

Eleven-year-old Julia watches as global catastrophe becomes the new normal. There is an initial panic when the news is announced. People jump in their cars and clog the freeways—“They scurried in every direction like small animals caught suddenly under a light. But, of course, there was nowhere on earth to go.”

The birds die first, affected by the changing gravity; soon some people begin to fall ill with “gravity sickness.” As the days grow longer, a teacher replaces 24 Hours with 25:37 above a world map in his classroom, but uses a Post-it note so it can be updated. Over the coming months as the earth continues its slowing, the days will eventually become 60 hours long.

Julia’s parents and teachers try to reassure the children—“but that was the thing: We kids were not as afraid as we should have been. We were too young to be scared, too immersed in our own small worlds, too convinced of our own permanence.”

And not only the kids. Most adults, too, adjust and carry on with their lives. They go to work, continue their little adulteries and other hobbies as if nothing major was happening. Facing the potential ending of life on earth, they continue to put out the garbage and recyclables.

Much of Julia’s life is focused on school and her first crush (“I had never spoken much to Seth Moreno, but I had perfected a way of watching him that didn’t look like I was watching.”), for she and her classmates are entering the “age of miracles”—puberty, and their concerns are primarily pubertal in nature (“That bra wasn’t supporting much. Michaela was as flat as I was. But she wore it anyway, a racy symbol of things to come.”)

Unfortunately, Walker provides us no scientific explanation to account for the earth’s slowing (My own theory is that it had something to do with the outcome of the 2012 U.S. Presidential election.)

The reader is left wondering at how ordinary catastrophe can become, and it can be reassuring to see how people adapt. Or maybe not reassuring.

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

David Mitchell

Random House

Souls bumping into each other across time

Cloud Atlas is an impressive book that was made into an impressive film. Worthy companion pieces, each can stand alone, yet each enhances and magnifies its artistic counterpart. I finished the novel at 11:00 on a Saturday night and saw the film on Sunday, which immediately sent me back into the book.

In his 2004 novel, David Mitchell (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Black Swan Green) tells six different yet interconnected stories, mixing genres and styles as he does so. There is a 19^th century journal of a passenger on a sailing ship; letters from a young composer working with a master; a modern day thriller about the nuclear industry; a comically outlandish narrative of being confined in a care institution; a science fiction tale about a humanoid “fabricant” discovering her humanity; and a post-apocalyptic fantasy written in a unique dialect (“Oh, bein’ young ain’t easy ‘cos ev’rythin’ you’re puzzlin’n’anxin’ you’re puzzlin’n’anxin’ it for the first time.”)

As Mitchell proceeds through these different stories, set in different time periods, we find connections between them that leave the reader with a sense of awe, as if we had turned over the fabric of time and can see the way the individual threads have been woven together.

Cloud Atlas, the film, is creatively faithful to the book. Lana and Andy Wachowski (The Matrix) adapted Mitchell’s novel and co-directed the film with Tom Tykwer (Run, Lola, Run.) The result has “Oscar” written all over it, in part because of the caliber of its actors (Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Jim Broadbent, Jim Sturgess, Ben Wishaw, Susan Sarandon, Hugh Grant), but also because the Wachowskis stretch the film beyond its filmic conventions, just as Mitchell did with the novel.

One can see the Oscar nominations coming. Like their original Matrix, or Christopher Nolan’s more recent Inception, Cloud Atlas is a cinematic mind bender that will send viewers back a second and third time to parse and piece together its possible meanings and connections [Best Adapted Screenplay.]

The filmmakers decided to convey Mitchell’s idea of eternal recurrence and interconnectedness by having each actor assume a number of different roles, “playing souls, not characters,” explained Tykwer. Mitchell, who appears briefly in the film, has written, “each role (is) a sort of way station on that soul’s karmic journey.” It is a bit of a stretch to see lovable Tom Hanks playing a London thug; but it’s a fun stretch. It is also refreshing to see Hugh Grant playing a role other than Hugh Grant.

Part of the film’s enjoyment is trying to identify the actor behind the make-up. The actors not only play different roles, but even different genders and races—Viewers will not be surprised to learn that Halle Berry is also stunningly beautiful as a white woman [Best Make Up.]

The filmmakers chose to forgo the novel’s narrative structure of telling the stories sequentially, and instead intermixed them, which gives a dizzying sense that all these stories—in the past, the present, and the future—are occurring simultaneously [Best editing.]

And as for the acting awards, it’s tantalizing to think that Cloud Atlas could make Academy Award history if, say, Tom Hanks receives the Oscars for Best Actor and for Best Supporting Actor…in the same film.

Mitchell is a daring writer and the Wachowskis are daring filmmakers. Here is a book and film that are worthy of each other, both striking the mystic chords of our collective memory.

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

Robert Harris

Alfred A. Knopf 

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

“Our conclusion is that fear is driving the world as never before,” Dr. Alexander Hoffmann tells his investors. A brilliant physicist who formerly worked for CERN (the European nuclear research agency in Switzerland), Hoffmann has learned to turn fear into money.

He did this did this by creating VIXAL-4, “an autonomous machine-learning algorithm”; more specifically, it is a cyber program that monitors the level of fear on the Internet and then makes lightning–speed hedge fund transactions based on its “fear index.” A small mid-European airline’s plane crashes and VIXAL-4 has traded its stock before the fireball is even extinguished.

Robert Harris, the author of a number of smart political and historical thrillers (The Ghost, Fatherland, Enigma, Pompeii) has written a novel that is as timely and prescient as tomorrow’s news.

The reader becomes immersed in the world of high finance and hedge fund trading where people talk blithely in terms of billions, even trillions of dollars (millions is just so yesterday.)

Yet, although having accumulated a fortune using his algorithm, Hoffmann himself cares little for money and openly despises his billionaire clients, the very rich who want to become even richer yet whine about the tax rates in Europe. It is his research into Autonomous Machine Reasoning (also called Artificial Intelligence) that is his passion.

Then, just as Hoffmann Investment Technologies is set to become the largest algorithmic hedge fund in the world, something begins to go awry. Instructions, invitations and expensive orders are sent from his email address that Hoffmann never sent. Or did he? We learn that he has a past history of mental instability.

He believes that the firm’s ultra-tech security system has been hacked into, and whoever is doing it is trying to sabotage his company, his career, and his marriage. Oh, yes—and they may also be causing a collapse of the global economy.

Deserving his bestseller status, Harris writes in a taut, fast-paced style that also presents ideas and issues that will cause the reader to think about the real-world implications of what he or she is reading.

The Fear Index is a thriller for thinking adults. And if you manage a stock portfolio, you may choose to sleep with the lights on after reading this book.

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

Daniel James Brown

Viking

Triumph of the spirit, rowing

If you liked the film, Chariots of Fire, you’re going to love The Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown’s riveting account of the U.S. rowing team who beat the German and Italian teams at Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics. Like fellow Seattle writer Erik Larson, Brown writes history as if it were a novel.

This saga is about nine youth from the University of Washington—“they were farm boys or lumberjacks or fishermen, the products of foggy coastal villages, damp dairy farms, and smoky lumber towns all over the state.”

They had come of age amid a crippling worldwide depression and Brown tells their stories, especially that of Joe Rantz, who Brown met as Rantz was dying 70 years after that moment in Berlin.

All the boys were poor, but Joe had had a particularly hardscrabble life. His mother died when he was four. Unfortunately, his stepmother didn’t like him, so Joe was sent to live by himself in their mining town’s one-room schoolhouse. He was ten years old.

Later, his father moved the family to Sequim and tried farming. Relations didn’t improve between Joe and his stepmother, and Joe returned home from school one day to find the family car packed with all their belongings. His father explained they were moving to California to find work; Joe would have to remain behind by himself. He was fifteen. It is hard to read these accounts and wonder at how callous parents could be, and certainly makes a strong case for CPS.

If Joe is the determined, self-reliant heart of the book, its spiritual center is George Pocock, who handcrafted the sleek 64-foot boats (“shells”) and became Joe’s mentor. He considered rowing less a sport than an art, “a symphony of motion. And when you’re rowing well, why it’s nearing perfection. And when you near perfection, you’re touching the Divine.”

The Washington underdogs began to take on the eastern elite schools who considered rowing to be their sport, setting up “a clash of eastern privilege and prestige on the one hand and western sincerity and brawn on the other. In financial terms, it was pretty starkly going to be a clash of old money versus no money at all.”

In the prologue, Brown relates how, when interviewing Joe Rantz at the end of his life, the only times the old man became emotional and would weep was when he talked about “the boat.” We understand. It had been the shining and defining moment of his life.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (October 15-November 14, 2013.) Reprinted with permission.

Max Barry

The Penguin Press

Perhaps some poetry with your paranoia?

Wil Parke has been abducted for some important information that he possesses, though he has no idea what it is. He and his abductors are being pursued by a vast and powerful organization that also wants him and this knowledge. Along with the reader, Wil tries to make some sense of all this: What is this information that he supposedly possesses? Why can’t he remember it? Who are his abductors—and, by the way, are they the good guys or the bad guys?

Meanwhile…

Sixteen-year old Emily Ruff is a youth living by her exceptionally sharp wits on the streets of San Francisco. Smart, independent and gutsy, Emily is recruited to attend a school for exceptional kids, but a school like none other, where the students are trained to control other people’s minds through the skillful application of words. Those who oversee the school are called Poets, and they and the instructors have adopted names like Yeats, Brontë, and Eliot.

Emily is at first intrigued by this school and enjoys its benefits, and she excels at the curriculum; but being a natural rebel, she begins to chafe at the rules and limitations imposed on the students. Eventually, she is expelled…with some dangerous skills.

The narrative seesaws between these two seemingly unrelated stories, going down parallel tracks, until they suddenly converge.

Lexicon is being touted as a “cerebral thriller”, and it certainly has all the requisite thrills, chills and implausible situations of the thriller genre.

The dialogue is crisp and fast-moving:

“Persuade them to stop chasing us…Offer them something. Make a deal. Give them something they want.”

“But what they want is you.”

“Something else.”

This is one of those books whose reading induces paranoia and makes you regret ever having given out your social security number and mother’s maiden name. Or even having a social security number.

We’re talking mind control here, far more sophisticated than Orwell ever imagined in 1984, with its clunky totalitarian attempts at suppressing individual thoughts and desires. But then we have gone far beyond 1984 in so many ways.

The message we are left with is that words are powerful. Words are magical. Words can be dangerous. But then, we already knew that.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (August 15-September 14, 2013.) Reprinted with permission.

Jamie Ford

Ballantine Books

 
Book captures indelible imprint of first love

Those novels that entertain us, we like; those that move us, we love. Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet will be loved by many.

The story opens in 1986, when the new owner of the Panama Hotel in Seattle’s International District discovers suitcases and boxes that have been stored in the basement for more than 40 years. They were left there by Japanese-Americans who were interned during the Second World War. A crowd assembles outside the hotel as the owner holds a press conference in an attempt to return the belongings to the descendants of those families. In the crowd is Henry Lee, a Chinese-American and recent widower. As the hotel owner displays some of the items, Henry is transported back to 1942, when he was a twelve-year old boy, living in Seattle’s Chinatown, and where he fell in love with Keiko, a Japanese-American girl.

On one level this is a star-crossed lovers’ tale with an ethnic twist, for there is centuries-old enmity between the Chinese and the Japanese communities, made deeper now by Japan’s brutal conquest of China.

Ford’s story slides smoothly between 1942 and 1986 with the fluidity of memory. He captures what it was like to live in that time in small, telling details: Henry’s father makes him wear a button to his all-white elementary school, declaring “I am Chinese.” (This is several months after Pearl Harbor.) In Nihonmachi (Japantown), Henry notices American flags decorating every home and storefront. His father also forbids him to speak their native Cantonese, even in their own home. He must now speak only English—which his parents do not understand.

There are some very sweet moments in the book (on the whole, it is more sweet than bitter): Henry practices a Japanese phrase to tell Keiko that she is beautiful, only to discover that she doesn’t speak Japanese. She's American.

It may be a little too sweet for some readers’ literary palates, and there are some coincidences that may strain readers’ credulity, but Henry’s story will move people.

Hotel has been chosen as the “Community Reads” book for this year’s Celebration of Literacy, and the organizers are to be commended for their choice, for this is a book that will speak to middle school students as well as senior citizens, capturing first love's indelible imprint on the soul that can last and color a lifetime.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (February 15-March 14, 2010). Reprinted with permission.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (February 15-March 14, 2010.) Reprinted with permission.

You can buy Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet on Amazon here.

Gabrielle Zevin

Algonquin Books

Benjamin Alire Saenz

Simon & Schuster

Garth Stein

Simon & Schuster

Christina Baker Kline

Harper Collins Publishers