October book reviews
The Essential Mark Rothko - Klaus Ottmann (non-fiction, art history) (***)
Mark Rothko for dummies, basically.
The book includes reproductions of much of his artwork, along with some very basic art theory on Abstract Expressionism and interesting biographical information about Rothko.
(Did you know that, during the 1930s public works schemes, the US Government paid artists to produce paintings to hang in public buildings -- and Rothko was one of those artists? One always hears about the building works, but I'd never heard about that. If only such a scheme existed during this recession. Sigh, sigh.)
The book is nicely formatted, with bright yellow splashes, bullet points and inserts. I'm not sure I always want to be treated like I'm slightly slow, but sometimes it is a nice change from dry, academic blocks of text.
Definitely not a definitive guide, but this has piqued my interest enough to look for a more comprehensive guide to AbEx next time I'm in the library.
Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman - Jon Krakauer (non-fiction, journalism/biography) (****)
Although I consider Jon Krakauer one of the most thoughtful and engaging journalists currently writing, I planned to give his latest, Where Men Win Glory, a miss. A book about a football player who went to war didn’t sound like my thing. Of course, I’m a dummy and Glory isn’t just about a football player who went to war. I’m very glad I decided the pick up the book, because, like the rest of Krakauer’s bibliography, it’s incredibly moving.
Krakauer juxtaposes a biography of Pat Tillman, a charismatic and intelligent athlete who was drafted into the NFL, with a recent history of Afghanistan. The two halves of the story come together when, following 9/11, Tillman gives up a multi-million-dollar football contract to join the Army. When he’s killed in action, the US government rolls him out as a propaganda piece, deliberately obscuring the fact that he was killed by friendly fire.
Krakauer’s hardly the first author to use a single person’s story as a lens through which to view a wider situation, but the structure nonetheless works extremely well. The book feels less dense than a history of Afghanistan might. The army-related content is meticulously researched, but rarely exhaustive. And, when writing about Tillman, Krakauer draws heavily on interviews with his wife, Marie, which - fair warning - are gonna make you cry. A lot.
If the book had been brought out under the title, The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, this might be where my review ended. However, the choice to name it, Where Men Win Glory, I find quite problematic.
There’s a moment early on in the book when a death-defying jump by Tillman off some rocks and onto a tree below is breathlessly described by Krakauer. That prompted an ohhhh, I see moment from me. I almost felt like I was back reading Into the Wild, Krakauer’s biography of a man who gave up all his belongings and hiked into the wilderness of Alaska, a quest that Krakauer viewed as quintessentially linked to manhood. Krakauer is obviously interested in a very specific type of hyper-physical masculinity. What bothers me is that he seems reluctant to probe beneath the surface of this type of masculinity and examine its roots and implications.
I felt like Krakauer wanted to make A Statement about why men go to war, but I don’t think he ever really got there. A clumsy final few pages make a disappointing end to an otherwise wonderful book. Krakauer tries to draw some conclusions about men and the armed forces, but he chooses to ignore the myriad of academic work that’s been done on masculinity. As a result, it feels like a sentence that trails off.
Junk - Melvin Burgess (fiction, teen) (*****)
Junk is the drugs book against which I judge all drugs books, and so far nothing’s come close to matching Melvin Burgess’s unflinching portrayal of Bristol’s City Road in the 1980s through a heroin-addled lens.
Burgess has no time for either hushed, poetic contemplations on heroin or clumsy, moralistic incitements to Just Say No. Without pretension, he wades into his milieu - with its squats, street kids and punk music - and matter-of-factly delivers a taut, compelling drama. Two naive 14-year-olds (poor, abused Tar, the son of two alcoholics, and his restless, reckless girlfriend, Gemma) run away from home and, over the course of the novel, they drift into drug addiction and slowly dig themselves deeper and deeper into a hole out of which they can’t climb.
However miserable their comedown, Burgess doesn’t cheat and pretend there’s any black-and-white to be found in heroin addiction: the initial sense of freedom is intense, the good times are sweet and the friendships genuine. The characterisation is sharp and wonderful, which helps to stop the novel from devolving into either a morality tale or a dark fantasy sequence. The teenagers feel like teenagers - lofty know-it-alls - until, gradually, the reader realises they’ve been beaten down into adulthood.
Even peripheral characters like old codger Skolly or do-gooder Richard are nuanced, displaying both sympathetic quirks and hard-to-like weaknesses. Burgess skilfully uses first-person narrative to catch his characters in their lies and contradictions. It adds an important layer to what, at other times, feels like a straightforward teen novel.
I hadn’t read Junk for a few years and I wondered if some of its gleam might have worn off for me. But no. I’m still mesmerized by Lilly in her string vest; I still catch myself hoping that the perfection of the characters’ heroin highs can last forever; I still sob at the broken pieces that are left at the end.
The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes - Janet Malcolm (non-fiction, biography) (unfinished)
When I started reading this book, I found that it made me irrationally angry. I assumed it was because my life was a little stressful, which was skewing my reaction to the book. So, upon coming back to it two weeks later, in a better frame of mind, I was surprised to find… it still made me irrationally angry.
I think Janet Malcolm is trying to write a critique of the biography genre, using much-martyred/much-maligned Sylvia Plath as an example. But The Silent Woman is not a well-argued essay. It’s a meandering, overly-personal, pretentiously-indulgent stream of consciousness that skirts around the issue without ever getting there. It’s… it’s… a blog post.
(I guess I should cut Malcolm some slack. This was published in the 90s, before blogs claimed their rightful place as the appropriate forum for “here are my thoughts on yaoi”-type essays.)
Yes, of course, Malcolm is quite correct in her assertion that no biography can ever tell the complete truth about a person’s life; we are all drawn to neat (fictional) narratives that (falsely) shape chaos into order. And, yes, someone being dead doesn’t make it any less icky (or essentially libellous) to paw over details of their personal life and dash off a deliberately-provocative biography.
But all of this is common sense, surely. Maybe Malcolm makes some other, truly revelatory point later in her book, but I couldn’t tell you, because I gave up reading halfway through.
In a word: tedious.
The End of Mr. Y - Scarlett Thomas (fiction, fantasy) (unfinished)
The numerous fawning reviews on the cover of The End of Mr Y can attest to the fact that others have found it “delightful”. I, on the other hand, found it “pretentious as fuck”. A fairly simplistic story about a cursed book that allows an academic to unlock the key to teleportation is couched in endless philosophical discussions. Scarlett Thomas may think she is showing how terribly erudite she is, but I began to doubt the novel’s high-brow credibility when the teleportation was described in terms of a video game. Mr Y is, upon reflection, less a piece of clever postmodern literature and more Alex Rider, Boy’s Own Adventure.
Or rather, Girl’s Own Adventure, because Mr Y offers us the treat of spending time with narrator Ariel. Ah, Ariel, who moans endlessly about how terribly poor she is, but it never occurs to her to get a job. (Her only income apparently comes from writing a monthly magazine column.) We’re also treated to tedious accounts of her sex life. I love all kinds of gratuity, but Mr Y contains some cringey sex scenes. I didn’t bother to finish the book, but I assume Ariel ends up in the sexual health clinic, since she never asks her (married, philandering) partner to wear a condom.
Mark Rothko for dummies, basically.
The book includes reproductions of much of his artwork, along with some very basic art theory on Abstract Expressionism and interesting biographical information about Rothko.
(Did you know that, during the 1930s public works schemes, the US Government paid artists to produce paintings to hang in public buildings -- and Rothko was one of those artists? One always hears about the building works, but I'd never heard about that. If only such a scheme existed during this recession. Sigh, sigh.)
The book is nicely formatted, with bright yellow splashes, bullet points and inserts. I'm not sure I always want to be treated like I'm slightly slow, but sometimes it is a nice change from dry, academic blocks of text.
Definitely not a definitive guide, but this has piqued my interest enough to look for a more comprehensive guide to AbEx next time I'm in the library.
Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman - Jon Krakauer (non-fiction, journalism/biography) (****)
Although I consider Jon Krakauer one of the most thoughtful and engaging journalists currently writing, I planned to give his latest, Where Men Win Glory, a miss. A book about a football player who went to war didn’t sound like my thing. Of course, I’m a dummy and Glory isn’t just about a football player who went to war. I’m very glad I decided the pick up the book, because, like the rest of Krakauer’s bibliography, it’s incredibly moving.
Krakauer juxtaposes a biography of Pat Tillman, a charismatic and intelligent athlete who was drafted into the NFL, with a recent history of Afghanistan. The two halves of the story come together when, following 9/11, Tillman gives up a multi-million-dollar football contract to join the Army. When he’s killed in action, the US government rolls him out as a propaganda piece, deliberately obscuring the fact that he was killed by friendly fire.
Krakauer’s hardly the first author to use a single person’s story as a lens through which to view a wider situation, but the structure nonetheless works extremely well. The book feels less dense than a history of Afghanistan might. The army-related content is meticulously researched, but rarely exhaustive. And, when writing about Tillman, Krakauer draws heavily on interviews with his wife, Marie, which - fair warning - are gonna make you cry. A lot.
If the book had been brought out under the title, The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, this might be where my review ended. However, the choice to name it, Where Men Win Glory, I find quite problematic.
There’s a moment early on in the book when a death-defying jump by Tillman off some rocks and onto a tree below is breathlessly described by Krakauer. That prompted an ohhhh, I see moment from me. I almost felt like I was back reading Into the Wild, Krakauer’s biography of a man who gave up all his belongings and hiked into the wilderness of Alaska, a quest that Krakauer viewed as quintessentially linked to manhood. Krakauer is obviously interested in a very specific type of hyper-physical masculinity. What bothers me is that he seems reluctant to probe beneath the surface of this type of masculinity and examine its roots and implications.
I felt like Krakauer wanted to make A Statement about why men go to war, but I don’t think he ever really got there. A clumsy final few pages make a disappointing end to an otherwise wonderful book. Krakauer tries to draw some conclusions about men and the armed forces, but he chooses to ignore the myriad of academic work that’s been done on masculinity. As a result, it feels like a sentence that trails off.
Junk - Melvin Burgess (fiction, teen) (*****)
Junk is the drugs book against which I judge all drugs books, and so far nothing’s come close to matching Melvin Burgess’s unflinching portrayal of Bristol’s City Road in the 1980s through a heroin-addled lens.
Burgess has no time for either hushed, poetic contemplations on heroin or clumsy, moralistic incitements to Just Say No. Without pretension, he wades into his milieu - with its squats, street kids and punk music - and matter-of-factly delivers a taut, compelling drama. Two naive 14-year-olds (poor, abused Tar, the son of two alcoholics, and his restless, reckless girlfriend, Gemma) run away from home and, over the course of the novel, they drift into drug addiction and slowly dig themselves deeper and deeper into a hole out of which they can’t climb.
However miserable their comedown, Burgess doesn’t cheat and pretend there’s any black-and-white to be found in heroin addiction: the initial sense of freedom is intense, the good times are sweet and the friendships genuine. The characterisation is sharp and wonderful, which helps to stop the novel from devolving into either a morality tale or a dark fantasy sequence. The teenagers feel like teenagers - lofty know-it-alls - until, gradually, the reader realises they’ve been beaten down into adulthood.
Even peripheral characters like old codger Skolly or do-gooder Richard are nuanced, displaying both sympathetic quirks and hard-to-like weaknesses. Burgess skilfully uses first-person narrative to catch his characters in their lies and contradictions. It adds an important layer to what, at other times, feels like a straightforward teen novel.
I hadn’t read Junk for a few years and I wondered if some of its gleam might have worn off for me. But no. I’m still mesmerized by Lilly in her string vest; I still catch myself hoping that the perfection of the characters’ heroin highs can last forever; I still sob at the broken pieces that are left at the end.
The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes - Janet Malcolm (non-fiction, biography) (unfinished)
When I started reading this book, I found that it made me irrationally angry. I assumed it was because my life was a little stressful, which was skewing my reaction to the book. So, upon coming back to it two weeks later, in a better frame of mind, I was surprised to find… it still made me irrationally angry.
I think Janet Malcolm is trying to write a critique of the biography genre, using much-martyred/much-maligned Sylvia Plath as an example. But The Silent Woman is not a well-argued essay. It’s a meandering, overly-personal, pretentiously-indulgent stream of consciousness that skirts around the issue without ever getting there. It’s… it’s… a blog post.
(I guess I should cut Malcolm some slack. This was published in the 90s, before blogs claimed their rightful place as the appropriate forum for “here are my thoughts on yaoi”-type essays.)
Yes, of course, Malcolm is quite correct in her assertion that no biography can ever tell the complete truth about a person’s life; we are all drawn to neat (fictional) narratives that (falsely) shape chaos into order. And, yes, someone being dead doesn’t make it any less icky (or essentially libellous) to paw over details of their personal life and dash off a deliberately-provocative biography.
But all of this is common sense, surely. Maybe Malcolm makes some other, truly revelatory point later in her book, but I couldn’t tell you, because I gave up reading halfway through.
In a word: tedious.
The End of Mr. Y - Scarlett Thomas (fiction, fantasy) (unfinished)
The numerous fawning reviews on the cover of The End of Mr Y can attest to the fact that others have found it “delightful”. I, on the other hand, found it “pretentious as fuck”. A fairly simplistic story about a cursed book that allows an academic to unlock the key to teleportation is couched in endless philosophical discussions. Scarlett Thomas may think she is showing how terribly erudite she is, but I began to doubt the novel’s high-brow credibility when the teleportation was described in terms of a video game. Mr Y is, upon reflection, less a piece of clever postmodern literature and more Alex Rider, Boy’s Own Adventure.
Or rather, Girl’s Own Adventure, because Mr Y offers us the treat of spending time with narrator Ariel. Ah, Ariel, who moans endlessly about how terribly poor she is, but it never occurs to her to get a job. (Her only income apparently comes from writing a monthly magazine column.) We’re also treated to tedious accounts of her sex life. I love all kinds of gratuity, but Mr Y contains some cringey sex scenes. I didn’t bother to finish the book, but I assume Ariel ends up in the sexual health clinic, since she never asks her (married, philandering) partner to wear a condom.