Book Reviews

Will Schwalbe

Alfred A. Knopf/Borzoi Books 

A son's tribute to his mother reflects transformational power of books

“Plenty of people are willing to talk about death but very few about dying.”

In 2007, Mary Anne Schwalbe was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Though resigned to her prognosis, she was also a fighter, determined to live as fully and as long as possible.

While waiting at Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s outpatient care center for her treatments, she and her son, Will, would read and discuss favorite books. Both had been lifelong readers; Will was a book editor, and herself, one of the founders of the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children.  Her work had often taken her to war-torn areas of Africa and Afghanistan, and during the remaining two years of her life she worked tirelessly to build a library in Kabul.

In this “book club” of two, they read broadly and eclectically, from Jane Austen and E. M. Forster to Ken Follett and Stieg Larsson. I was initially disappointed that there wasn’t more about the books they were reading—some barely receive a mention—but then realized that, like book clubs everywhere, the books themselves are often just the opportunities people create to come together and to share their lives, literary bridges that we use to cross over that gulf that separates us one from one another.

In spite of the mortal pall hanging over them, there are delightful moments of humor. Mary Anne had the habit of starting a book by reading its ending. “I was very surprised by the ending. Were you?” asks Will, referring to William Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey. She responds, “Of course not—I’d read it first. I don’t think I could have stood the suspense if I hadn’t known what was going to happen.”

They don’t so much talk about the books as talk around them, the book becoming the occasion for their time together, deepening their understanding and their love as mother and son, as one dying and the other one (temporarily) surviving. These become important times for both. Will reflects, “I was learning that when you’re with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time.”

The End of Your Life Book Club is one son’s loving tribute to his mother, and to books and their power to transform our minds, and thereby, our world. No doubt, Mary Anne Schwalbe would have enjoyed it, reading the ending first to see what was going to happen.

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

Yann Martel

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 

A story to make you believe in the truth of fiction

I have a story that will make you believe in God.

Yann Martel’s 2001 novel, Life of Pi, opens with a challenge. Winner of the Man Booker Prize, Britain’s top literary award, it tells the strange and fantastical story of a 16-year old Indian boy on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

Although raised by secular parents who dismissed religion as so much superstition, Pi is one of those souls who feel the urge toward the divine. Born a Hindu, he also explores Christianity (“I knew very little about the religion. It had a reputation for few gods and great violence. But good schools.”) and then later, Islam, which “had a reputation worse than Christianity’s—fewer gods, greater violence, and I had never heard anyone say good things about Muslim schools.” Sensing the spiritual reality lying behind each religion, Pi becomes a practicing Hindu, Christian and Muslim, seeing them as different paths toward the same destination.

With growing political unrest in India, his father decides to sell their zoo in Pondicherry and move the family and some of the animals to Canada. Caught in a Pacific storm, their ship sinks and Pi is the sole human survivor on a lifeboat he shares with a zebra, hyena, orang-utan, and Richard Parker (“Welcome to Pi’s ark.”) For reasons understandable, the survivors soon become reduced to the tiger and the boy.

The recently released film by director Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) is a wondrous visual spectacle, and remarkably faithful to the book. Martel’s novel is a fable wrapped within a true-to-life survival epic, and both book and film have a fantastical quality, mixing real and surreal.  Suraj Sharma, in his first acting role, endows Pi with the ingenious and ingenuous temperament of a teenage boy drawn to the spiritual while faced with the more practical concern of not being eaten today.

Elie Wiesel once said that God invented man because He loves stories. In perhaps much the same vein, the novelist in the opening narrative, muses, “That’s what fiction is about, isn’t it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?” Which is perhaps also what religion is truly about: finding the essence of reality.

At the end of the book and film, faced with the insurance investigator’s disbelief in his story, Pi gives them—and the reader—a second account of what happened, and we are left to choose between the fantastic and the horrific.

If the book doesn’t fully live up to its promise to make the reader believe in God, it will certainly make us believe in the power of fiction to transform our reality, and occasionally to reveal its essence.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (December 15, 2012-January 14, 2013.) Reprinted with permission.

Felix J. Palma 
(Translated by Nick Caistor)

Atria Books 

A novel of smoke and mirrors

Felix J. Palma’s The Map of Time is a big, ripping yarn, a fantastical mix of history, science fiction, and metaphysical musings on the nature and meaning of time,

It is 1896, and London is a-buzz with the publication of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and the possibility of travel through the fourth dimension.

The book is not only set in the Victorian age, but resembles a Victorian novel, the story sprawling with a multitude of characters and plots and subplots and coincidences worthy of Dickens—characters accidentally bump into each other just at the right moment, London being such a small city after all. Actually, time travel is less implausible than a number of the plot’s twists and turns.

Yet this is a fun story where the author performs gymnastics of the imagination, playing with the idea of time and parallel universes and going into the past to alter the future, with unforeseen complications—One character receives a letter addressed to him from his future self!

Palma provides much historical detail about London at that time (pollution from thousands of cars may still be preferable to pollution from thousands of horses), and introduces into his story real people from the past: Jack the Ripper, once again dissecting prostitutes in Whitechapel; Bram Stoker, author of Dracula; Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, appearing in a very moving chapter that shows the “hideous monster” to have been an intelligent and gentle soul; and Palma plays with the friendly rivalry between Wells and Henry James (“If Wells recognized any merit in James, it was his undeniable talent for using very long sentences in order to say nothing at all.”)

There is also some quite beautiful writing  (“she had stepped with infinite care, almost reverentially, into the waves that looked like the ocean losing its petals.”)

Some may find the narrator almost too chummy at times, as he addresses the reader directly (“Yes, I know that when I began this tale I promised there would be a fabulous time machine, and there will be …”), but I enjoyed this style, as if the author was sitting right there, telling us his story.

Eventually, the reader discovers that much of the plot has been a trick conjured with smoke and mirrors, which, however, doesn’t lessen the enjoyment of the magic Palma has performed for us.

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

Justin Torres

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt  

Unhappy families, but great stories

Tolstoy began Anna Karenina with his famous observation on families: that all happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. He might have added that it’s from the unhappy families that we get our best stories.

Imagine Catcher in the Rye as the tale of a well-adjusted, happy teen who gets good grades, admires his parents, and all adults for that matter, because they’re such great role models; or The Sound and the Fury as the story of a down-to-earth, tightly knit and loving family more resembling The Waltons; or Henry VIII, where the kind and faithful monarch enjoys a life of matrimonial bliss with his one beloved wife (You choose which one of the six.)

We the Animals provides glimpses of another unhappy family being unhappy in its own way. Though half white, half Puerto Rican, this family’s life is comprised of events and experiences that could be from anyone’s story.

If you were sitting alone for an hour, without distractions, and asked to remember your childhood, this is the kind of book you would probably come up with, evoking moments—some painful, some humorous, some tender, others transcendent—that together are like pictures at an exhibition entitled Your Life, which, like the Smithsonian’s, is too vast to experience on any one visit.

The narrator of We is recalling when he was seven years old. He and his two brothers are little hellions exploring and having adventures in their own world. The brief episodic chapters reflect a meandering mind recollecting events from his past, unconnected except by the ephemeral string of memory (The final chapter explains the circumstances of the narrator’s remembering.)

The book also testifies to the resilience of young children who haven’t learned that violence and abuse and going hungry aren’t the norm.

Appearing on a number of Best Books of 2011 lists, We the Animals packs a wallop for such a slight work (125 pages), with moments that can be both visceral and profound (“What happens when you die?” I asked. “Nothing happens,” he said. “Nothing happens forever.”)

Contrary to Tolstoy’s observation, We suggests that all families are happy and unhappy, each dysfunctional in its own way, and each discovering its strengths in its own way.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (December 15 - January 14, 2011/2012). Reprinted with permission.

Jussi Adler-Olsen

Dutton

Enjoying your mystery with a Danish

Jussi Adler-Olsen has been called “Denmark’s Stieg Larsson”—which you just know has to be irritating to Jussi Adler-Olsen.

Olsen is Denmark’s #1 crime writer and the author of a number of international bestsellers (I’m going off the book blurb here because how would I know?)

Full disclosure: Detective fiction is not my genre of choice. I think I am one of maybe five people in the northern hemisphere who were not absolutely enthralled with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Nagging questions of plausibility keep interrupting my involvement in these kinds of stories.

But I was drawn to The Keeper of Lost Causes by its title. Spending most of my life in social services, I suppose I identified with it.

Olsen’s detective is grumpy, grouchy, ill-humored Carl Mørck, recuperating from being shot in an incident that left one of his colleagues dead and the other paralyzed. We may wonder that his anti-social moods are the result of the trauma he suffered, but no, we learn Carl was like this before the shooting.

Mørck returns to duty and, due to his personality deficit, is given a do-nothing job in the basement by himself, responsible for closing dead cases, the “lost causes” of the title.

One of these cases is the mysterious disappearance five years ago of Merete Lyngaard, a member of parliament. Merete was bright, beautiful, vivacious and popular, so of course she had many enemies.

But she is not dead. She is being confined in some mysterious chamber (I am not giving anything away here. You learn this in the prologue—and in the blurb.)

Mørck is saved from being bland and boring through his assistant, Assad, an immigrant who has been assigned to clean up after him. Assad is lively, curious and hyper—everything Carl is not. Just as Larsson’s Girl trilogy was elevated above the norm by the fascinating character of its tattooed hacker Lisbeth Salander, what sets Keeper above the norm is Carl and Assad’s relationship.

While Keeper lacks the grisly murders and torture that so delighted Larsson’s readers, discovering where Merete is being held is good for at least a horrific shudder, maybe even a gasp.

As Lincoln diplomatically observed once when asked about a popular book of his day, people who enjoy this kind of book will probably like it.

And I highly recommend the title.

 This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (November 15 - December 14, 2011). Reprinted with permission.

 Erik Larson

Crown Publishing Group

The beast is always with(in) us

You know you’re on the other side of history when Dachau is referred to as “a charming village.” Within a few years, it would become one of the most infamous concentration camps in a chapter of appalling infamy.

Seattle author Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City) has written an account of what it was like to live in Germany just as Hitler was coming to power. For us, looking from this side of history, it’s like watching a train accident about to happen.

Larson builds his story primarily around William Dodd, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, and his lively, rather dashing daughter, Martha, who had a series of affairs with, well, whoever seemed to be available at the time.

The ambassador is not an especially appealing or noble figure (his enemies in the State Department called him “Ambassador Dud”), though he gains respect in the readers’ eyes as he tries in vain to halt the violence and warn his government about Hitler’s threat.

In 1933, the Dodds shared many of the prejudices common to that time (Martha notes in her diary: “We don’t like Jews too much.”) They arrive with a view of Germany that is all edelweiss, alpine villages, and blond children in lederhosen, something out of The Sound of Music—and we know how that ended. They seem naïve now when viewed from the self-righteous perspective that history affords. It’s easy to call a game after it’s over.

In the space of a year, the Dodds’ romantic view of Germans and Germany had changed to one of growing alarm as they watched a civilized and cultured society slipping into barbarism.

Perhaps the true hero in the book is George Messersmith, America’s consul general for Germany, who continued to try and convince the ambassador and the U.S. State Department that “all this violence represented more than a passing spasm of atrocity. Something fundamental had changed in Germany.”

Messersmith became an irritant with his frequent and lengthy dispatches warning of what he saw emerging: “With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.” Messersmith was eventually transferred.

If there is a lesson for our time here, perhaps it is to beware of demagogues, promising too much and playing to our fears and prejudices.

And as we approach an election year, they are everywhere.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (October 15 - November 14, 2011). Reprinted with permission. 

Ann Patchett

Harper Collins

Different heart, different darkness

“It is a tale that leads the reader into the very heart of darkness,” trumpets the blurb on the book cover.

I suppose the comparison to Heart of Darkness was inevitable. Any story that has the hero go up a jungle river and encounter an eccentric character living among the natives must, almost by edict, be compared to Conrad’s masterpiece.

But although Ann Patchett, author of the bestselling Bel Canto, uses a similar jungle setting, her story has a different heart and suggests a different darkness.

When Dr. Marina Singh receives news of the death of her research colleague, last heard from in the depths of the Amazon, the pharmaceutical company they work for sends her to find out what happened to him, and to complete his mission: locating the reclusive and elusive Dr. Annick Swenson, whose research project the company has been bankrolling for a number of years.

Dr. Swenson is working on a wonder drug that will allow women to bear children even into their sixties (For some reason this is seen as a good thing.)

The book momentarily lags when Marina is stuck for several weeks in a Brazilian outpost, waiting for Dr. Swenson to return from upriver, and we feel stuck with her. But the story finds its pace once she at last meets Dr. Swenson, a truly memorable character—brilliant, imperious, almost monomaniacal in her dedication to the project, and who has little regard for society and social conventions (“Society is nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to one’s partner on both the left and the right.”)

Unlike Marlow’s encounter with Kurtz and the horror his madness created, Marina discovers a world of incredible beauty as well as danger, an indigenous people who both intrigue and bewilder her, and humor and tenderness in a twelve-year old deaf orphan who becomes a guide into her own heart.

And finally, very much unlike Conrad’s work, State of Wonder’s ending leaves the reader not with a sense of horror at our humanity, but with a strange mix of joy and sadness, for what has been found, and for what has been lost; much like life.

 This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (September 15 - October 14, 2011). Reprinted with permission.

 Dan Simmons

Little, Brown & Co.

Like the Titanic, the Battle of the Little Bighorn (Custer’s Last Stand) continues to fascinate and maintain a hold on the popular imagination. New books keep coming out about it—most recently Nathaniel Philbrick's The Last Stand and James Donovan's A Terrible Glory—until we wonder what else is there to say that hasn’t already been said.

However, novels are another matter. As E. L. Doctorow (Ragtime) noted, “The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.”

Dan Simmons' latest novel, Black Hills, tells us what it felt like at the Little Bighorn ... for a Lakota Sioux. On that hot June day in 1876, Paha Sapa, a youth out to prove his bravery, rushes in amid the clutch of blue coats firing at the surrounding Indians to “count coup”—touch one without harming him. But just as he touches a soldier, the man is killed by a bullet to his temple. And in that touch, the dying soldier’s spirit transfers to the Indian boy. The dead soldier is George Armstrong Custer.

Whoa! What a premise for a novel! I just had to see what Simmons did with that.

Well respected for his science fiction (Hyperion Cantos), Simmons charted new ground in 2007 by mixing actual history, Eskimo mythology, and horror in his novel, The Terror, about Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition that disappeared in the arctic. Here again Simmons mixes history with his formidable imagination (In the epilogue, we learn that Paha Sapa was a real person.)

The book unfolds like the wandering memory of an old man—in the first chapter he's an eleven year old boy at the Little Bighorn; in the second chapter, he's a 69 year old man working on the Mt. Rushmore project—and we begin to piece together his life, finally seeing it whole.

Playing key roles in that life are Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Wild Bill Cody, and Gutzon Borglum, sculptor of the Mt. Rushmore giants, who like his creations was larger than life.

From time to time, Custer’s spirit breaks in, often with impassioned—even graphic—love letters to his adored wife, Libbie, belying the common belief that no one had sex during the Victorian age.

Although Simmons’ intriguing premise was not as developed as I’d hoped, the novel tells the compelling story of a man who lived through a significant period in American history, and what it felt like.

 This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (August 15 - September 14, 2011). Reprinted with permission.

Jennifer Egan

Anchor Books

Just ignore the title and you'll be fine

One shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but I think titles are fair game. So, based on its title, I probably would never have read A Visit from the Goon Squad if it hadn’t won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

But then, based on their original titles, I probably would never have read a number of favorite books: The Red Badge of Courage (“Private Fleming, His Various Battles”), Pride and Prejudice (“First Impressions”), The Great Gatsby (“Trimalchio in West Egg” —What was F. Scott Fitzgerald thinking!), and I remind myself that Egan did not receive the Pulitzer Prize for Titles.

This is one of those books that one remembers less for the story it tells than how it is told. And the telling is a virtuoso performance.

[Woodward and Bernstein’s title, “At This Point in Time,” was changed to All the President’s Men.]

Egan’s inventive, shifting narrative styles are dazzling, with an ensemble cast of characters whose stories link together as in a Robert Altman film: Bennie, a former punk rocker turned middle aged record producer; Lou, an almost-celebrity and one-time lady’s man gone to seed; Dolly, a down-on-her-luck PR agent, who has a genocidal dictator for a client (how does one make a monster presentable?); and others.

[Alex Haley’s title, “Before This Anger,” was changed to the simpler—and more powerful— Roots.]

Less a story than a web of interwoven stories, people’s lives flow back and forth across time, as fluid as memory. Each of the main characters has a different narrative style, some written in present tense, some in past tense; and some shuttle you into the future, looking back. One chapter is presented as a series of Powerpoint slides, which will strike some readers as daring and unconventional, while others may find it gimmicky.

[The title for Margaret Mitchell’s novel was changed to Gone With The Wind. Good call. It’s hard to imagine Max Steiner’s sweeping musical score opening that Civil War epic … “Pansy”?]

I enjoyed this book, but still don’t care for the title. It sounds like something a marketing committee came up with and, except for one reference to time as a “goon,” I still can’t figure out how it relates. So what would I have suggested to that merry band of Madison Avenue Marketeers? I don’t know—Maybe Trimalchio in East Egg?

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (July 15 - August 14, 2011). Reprinted with permission.

Willy Vlautin

Harper Perennial

Spare, bleak tale deepens, touches to the core

From the first chapter, you know you’re in Steinbeck country, and I don’t mean the Salinas Valley.

Charley Thompson is a lonely and alone fifteen-year old who, traveling around with his father, never stays anywhere long enough to finish a school year. When they show up in Portland, Charley hangs out at the nearby Portland Meadows racetrack and begins working for Del Montgomery.

Through Charley’s eyes, we are introduced to the seamy, underside of horse racing, of drugged horses, and owners like Del who runs them into the ground until they can’t run anymore, then sells them for dog food. One of his horses, Lean on Pete, becomes Charley’s only friend.

When his dad is badly beaten and taken to the hospital, Charley is truly on his own, and,  stealing Pete, he sets out for Wyoming to find his only aunt.

This is a bleak, gritty novel, deeply moving, at times heartbreaking. One longs for a grace note of humor, a glimmer of hope, a touch of kindness, something to redeem humanity. Like Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, or McCarthy Cormac’s The Road, such bleak, cheerless tales deepen us and touch us to the core. This, too, is life, they seem to say.

Vlautin, a Scappoose singer and songwriter as well as author of three books, has a lean, spare prose style reminiscent of Raymond Carver, which is not an accident. He describes the impact on him of discovering Carver: “I started writing as hard as I could from that moment on. The stories just started pouring out. I had all this sadness and darkness on my back, and I didn’t know what it was. I was just a kid. But Carver opened it all up.”

Charley’s seeking a home could be a metaphor for the journey each of us is on: crossing a desert, essentially alone, where hope remains forever a faint figure—possibly a mirage—on the horizon.

It may sound like an odd recommendation (You got to read this book! It’s really bleak!) but when we read writers like Steinbeck, Carver, Cormac, and Vlautin, they open us up to the sadness and darkness on our own backs. And perhaps that’s why we read them.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (May 15-June 14, 2011). Reprinted with permission.