intermittent book review post
After Claude by Iris Owens. Really dark and really funny. Unreliable narrator with full-blown Narcissistic Personality Disorder which does not prevent her from being really sharp about everything except herself. Early 1970s New York setting, bonus for the last section of the book being set at the Chelsea Hotel.
The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky. This is funny-actually when I was reading this, the narrator (unreliable, with a full-blown NPD) reminded me of the narrator of After Claude, which I assumed was just because I had read them one right after the other, but then I saw someone else make the same connection on Goodreads. This book was kind of insane to read, for me, because on one hand, everything that goes on in it is so horribly fucked up, but on the other hand, it is so familiar-the behavioral pathologies and the horribly abusive family patterns are so much part of the Soviet/post-Soviet cultural textures that it is like reading about the family that lived next door (I had the same reaction to the Russian movie “Bury Me Behind the Baseboard” where the neurotic grandmother character is very similar in terms of her narcissism and hysteria, and the vocabulary, the ways of manipulating and controlling situations and people, the symbolic universe of it all is recognizable and familiar in the way that it can only be when you grew up in that culture). By the way, if anyone has read it , I think that the whole part at the end of the book, after she is “dying” in the hospital and then miraculously gets better is her fantasy reality (well more so than usual)--I think all the stuff that happens after that, with the British man moving her into his house, and seeing her granddaughter on the reality TV show-that is all some kind of pre-dying fantasy; I don't know if other people agree...
Broken Glass Park by Alina Bronsky. After reading The Hottest Dishes I was interested to read her first book. It was okay but not nearly as good. Sort of an overdone bildunsgroman/Russian Immigrant Catcher in the German Rye. I was drawn in at first but then it just became kind of eh.
The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes by Diane Chamberlain. I've been reading novels by Diane Chamberlain intermittently even though that's totally not my genre, but I keep becoming intrigued by the plot blurbs and then the books are interesting enough to keep reading, although they make no lasting impact on me. Anyway, this book is about a woman living underground after an radical activist action gone very wrong, but it's very schmaltzy. Basically it's like a Lifetime Television for Women version of Marge Piercy's Vida.
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. This was SO good. I loved it. Pretty much all the characters were so awful and tragic but also so compelling. Also I loved the whole nature conservancy/open pit mining plot, it has weird resonances with an academic project I am working on now, where reality is becoming more and more like Franzen's satire about that...
The Astral by Kate Christensen. I think this is my favorite novel of hers since her first, In The Drink which will probably be my favorite forever, since in addition to it being really good I also read it at an age where it really pierced me. I definitely liked this more than Trouble which seemed a bit half-baked and rushed to me. I also love how her books are love letters to the the New York that I experience and identify as "mine" (both in terms of its geography and the prism of her emotional affect); this one to Greenpoint, which book-ended my time in New York, as my first and last years in the city were spent there.
Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close-another “The Group” type book but more lighter with a whimsical fragmented structure and tone that reminded me of The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing I breezed through it and enjoyed it more than I thought I would.
The Help by Kathryn Stockett-racist in the way that a million critiques in reviews and blog posts have already pointed out. Total “good” white ally self-actualizing through “giving voice” to black women who are alternately sassy or go to church.
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett-I really, really enjoyed it, sort of to my surprise, as I imagined a novel about bioprospecting in the Amazon with the main character working for a pharmaceutical company would make me agitated, but I actually couldn't put it down and thought it was pretty great-the only thing is, I think it's part of this particular representational trend in fiction about the Amazon but I can't decide whether this book perpetuates this trend or critiques it-I keep going back and forth.
The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky. This is funny-actually when I was reading this, the narrator (unreliable, with a full-blown NPD) reminded me of the narrator of After Claude, which I assumed was just because I had read them one right after the other, but then I saw someone else make the same connection on Goodreads. This book was kind of insane to read, for me, because on one hand, everything that goes on in it is so horribly fucked up, but on the other hand, it is so familiar-the behavioral pathologies and the horribly abusive family patterns are so much part of the Soviet/post-Soviet cultural textures that it is like reading about the family that lived next door (I had the same reaction to the Russian movie “Bury Me Behind the Baseboard” where the neurotic grandmother character is very similar in terms of her narcissism and hysteria, and the vocabulary, the ways of manipulating and controlling situations and people, the symbolic universe of it all is recognizable and familiar in the way that it can only be when you grew up in that culture). By the way, if anyone has read it , I think that the whole part at the end of the book, after she is “dying” in the hospital and then miraculously gets better is her fantasy reality (well more so than usual)--I think all the stuff that happens after that, with the British man moving her into his house, and seeing her granddaughter on the reality TV show-that is all some kind of pre-dying fantasy; I don't know if other people agree...
Broken Glass Park by Alina Bronsky. After reading The Hottest Dishes I was interested to read her first book. It was okay but not nearly as good. Sort of an overdone bildunsgroman/Russian Immigrant Catcher in the German Rye. I was drawn in at first but then it just became kind of eh.
The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes by Diane Chamberlain. I've been reading novels by Diane Chamberlain intermittently even though that's totally not my genre, but I keep becoming intrigued by the plot blurbs and then the books are interesting enough to keep reading, although they make no lasting impact on me. Anyway, this book is about a woman living underground after an radical activist action gone very wrong, but it's very schmaltzy. Basically it's like a Lifetime Television for Women version of Marge Piercy's Vida.
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. This was SO good. I loved it. Pretty much all the characters were so awful and tragic but also so compelling. Also I loved the whole nature conservancy/open pit mining plot, it has weird resonances with an academic project I am working on now, where reality is becoming more and more like Franzen's satire about that...
The Astral by Kate Christensen. I think this is my favorite novel of hers since her first, In The Drink which will probably be my favorite forever, since in addition to it being really good I also read it at an age where it really pierced me. I definitely liked this more than Trouble which seemed a bit half-baked and rushed to me. I also love how her books are love letters to the the New York that I experience and identify as "mine" (both in terms of its geography and the prism of her emotional affect); this one to Greenpoint, which book-ended my time in New York, as my first and last years in the city were spent there.
Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close-another “The Group” type book but more lighter with a whimsical fragmented structure and tone that reminded me of The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing I breezed through it and enjoyed it more than I thought I would.
The Help by Kathryn Stockett-racist in the way that a million critiques in reviews and blog posts have already pointed out. Total “good” white ally self-actualizing through “giving voice” to black women who are alternately sassy or go to church.
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett-I really, really enjoyed it, sort of to my surprise, as I imagined a novel about bioprospecting in the Amazon with the main character working for a pharmaceutical company would make me agitated, but I actually couldn't put it down and thought it was pretty great-the only thing is, I think it's part of this particular representational trend in fiction about the Amazon but I can't decide whether this book perpetuates this trend or critiques it-I keep going back and forth.