The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky and Death
By Colson Whitehead
(Doubleday, $24.95, 234 pages)
Who is this author?
Colson Whitehead has published best-selling novels, an essay collection and memoir: he excels at each genre. He’s written about subjects as diverse as zombies and the arcane profession of creating brand names that perfectly capture the essence of a product; about being a kid in Sag Harbor and loving New York City. His efforts have been rewarded: Whitehead has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist and has won a prestigious Whiting Writers’ Award and a hotly coveted MacArthur Fellowship.
What is this book about?
Feature writers for newspapers and magazines never know where their next assignment may take them. For Colson Whitehead, it was to Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker, for an article to be published by Grantland, an online magazine. Grantland paid his way in, a $10,000 fee. If he won anything, he could keep it. And he had just six weeks to hone his thoroughly amateur poker-playing skills — and to balance the demands of the assignment with his new role as a single divorced dad of a young daughter. He did the Grantland assignment, ate a lot of terrible food (hence the beef jerky title reference) and doubled-down on the experience, turning the article into a very funny yet often disturbing memoir. No, he did not walk away from the tables a millionaire, but he did learn some valuable things about poker, competition and himself.
Why you’ll like it:
Whitehead is a master of dry, cool humor and never hesitates to make fun of himself. His descriptions are memorable and often can be painfully insightful. In this memoir, he takes two seemingly incompatible subjects: the weird world of professional poker and his own personal striving to be a good dad despite the failure of his marriage, and compare and contrasts one against the other to good effect. Grantland dealt him a challenging hand. This book shows how well he played it.
What others are saying:
From a Barnes & Noble Review Interview with Whitehead: “The Noble Hustle centers on Whitehead’s time competing at the World Series of Poker, an experience funded by the website Grantland, for which he wrote a series of dispatches. The book is about being thrown from a regular friendly home game into the most major of the poker tournaments with only six weeks to prepare. It’s about his badass poker coach, Helen Ellis, a novelist who in contrast to us Annie Oakley types identifies herself as a housewife when she competes. (“The dudes flirted and condescended, and then this prim creature in a black sweater and pearls walloped them. . . . A lot of people don’t think women will bluff,’ Helen said. She was bluffing the minute she walked into the room.”) It’s about cramming: reading strategy, playing at low- stakes tables in Atlantic City, and consulting a physical trainer steeped in the Alexander Technique. It’s about major poker tournaments and the ways computer gamers are changing them. But The Noble Hustle was written after Whitehead’s divorce, and it’s also about loneliness and longing, our attachment to our children and the ways we try to distance and distract ourselves from emotional pain. (At one tournament table, “I hadn’t been glared at with such hate by two people since couples therapy.”)
Booklist’s starred review says: “This is not one of those poker books about a gang of math whizzes from Harvard who go to Vegas and win a gazillion dollars… A self-described citizen of the Republic of Anhedonia, whose residents are unable to experience pleasure, Whitehead, author of Zone One and other novels, agrees to enter the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas and see how far his half-dead poker face and a $10,000 stake can take him… Whitehead’s account may seem at first like just another ‘sad story about a pair of Jacks,’ but it’s really something very different, much sadder and much, much funnier. He calls his book ‘Eat, Pray, Love for depressed shut-ins,’ and that pretty much says it, if you remember that the eating part is mostly about beef jerky and the praying is for a pair of aces.”
Says Library Journal: “ . . . he had never before played in a casino tournament. Having only six weeks to prepare, the author began to hone his skills in the casinos of Atlantic City while trying to maintain some semblance of a home life. Hilarity ensued. Whitehead quickly developed a rhythm of dropping off and picking up his kid from school; riding the Greyhound bus to New Jersey with the “day-trippers, day-workers, and hollow-eyed freaks”; gambling; and then returning home to sleep. The author’s satirical descriptions and observations of his days spent preparing, filled with playing cards, eating at artery-clogging all-you-can-eat buffets, and his interactions with the people who haunt the casinos there are only prolog for the grand finale of the Leisure-Industrial Complex (LIC) of Vegas. VERDICT Entertaining and absorbing, Whitehead’s look at the subculture of gambling and casino tournaments will appeal even to nongambling readers. Also recommended for those who enjoy memoir.”
Publishers Weekly’s starred review says: “The eternal tension between good luck and remorseless odds animates this loose-limbed jaunt through the world of high-stakes poker…, a mission for which he frankly declares himself unqualified, owing to his rather desultory pick-up games, haphazard training regimen featuring yoga lessons, deep and semi-baffled immersion in the arcana of poker-playing manuals, and bus trips to Atlantic City for seedy practice tournaments. His journey unfolds in a series of jazzy, jokey riffs on the cultural detritus of poker: the take-over of the game by young “Robotrons” honed by online gaming; Vegas’s “Leisure-Industrial Complex,” a terrain of soulful soullessness where “your true self is laid bare with all its hungers and flaws and grubby aspirations.” Along the way, poker emerges as the national sport of “the Republic of Anhedonia,” his habitually depressive, fatalistic State of mind that recognizes that “eventually, you will lose it all”—and that playing it safe is therefore the ultimate sucker’s strategy. Whitehead serves up an engrossing mix of casual yet astute reportage and hang-dog philosophizing, showing us that, for all of poker’s intricate calculations and shrewd stratagems, everything still hangs on the turn of a card.”
“Whitehead proves a brilliant sociologist of the poker world. He evokes the physical atmosphere vividly, ‘the sleek whisper of laminated paper jetting across the table,’ as the dealer shuffles. But he also conjures the human terrain, laying bare his own psychology and imagining his way into the minds of others. His book affirms what David Foster Wallace’s best nonfiction pieces made so clear: It’s a great idea… to turn a gifted novelist loose on an odd American subculture and see what riches are unearthed,” says The Boston Globe.
When is it available?
I’m betting you can find this book at the Downtown Hartford Public Library.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky
by Lydia Netzer
(St. Martin’s Press, $25, 352 pages)
Who is this author?
Midwest born and bred, Lydia Netzer is an emerging author who has already won plaudits for her debut novel, “Shine Shine Shine,” which was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Married to a mathematician and living in Virginia, when she is not working on a book, Netzer teaches, home-schools her kids and plays guitar in a rock band. Her new novel, “How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky,” is garnering enthusiastic reviews.
What is this book about?
Two scientists, both brilliant, ambitious, tired of being alone and searching for answers to profound questions about God and the universe, find themselves on an emotional and spiritual collision course at the prestigious Toledo Institute of Astronomy. But the scientific truths and theories they are exploring can’t compete with their discovery that their mothers, longtime friends, raised Irene and George separately (and puposefully) to eventually fall in love with each other. George hopes a proof of God’s existence can be found in the heavens; Irene is all about hard science and its delights and disciplines. Brought together in Toledo when Irene’s difficult mother falls down a flight of stairs and dies, Netzer’s characters (and her readers) will learn if their relationship will end not with a whimper but a big bang.
Why you’ll like it:
Are our faults or favors in our stars, can destiny be engineered by well-meaning tinkering, is love a matter of the heart or of the mind? Here is a quirky romance that is buttressed with fascinating if abstruse astronomical lore, made palatable by Netzer’s skills at writing about science for readers who may never have studied such complex material nor even considered it. This is a touching love story and a short course in astronomy, rolled into one twinkling story.
What others are saying:
The New York Times Book Review says: “antically inventive, often outrageously funny…Netzer excels at comedy, and some of the most savory humor arrives with side characters…Netzer’s fans are likely to be quite entertained by this second charmingly weird novel of hers that grapples with big questions. Is love written in the stars? Where does inspiration come from? Who decides our fates? Netzer’s wise answer: “The most important things are mysteries.”
Says Publishers Weekly: “Netzer’s second novel (after Shine Shine Shine) ties together cosmology, astronomy, and astrology into a dense but absorbing meditation on destiny. After making a career-defining discovery, astrophysicist Irene Sparks is leaving Pittsburgh, Pa., to take a job at the Toledo Institute of Astronomy in her old Ohio hometown. Returning to Toledo means confronting her complex relationship with her recently deceased mother, a lifelong alcoholic who worked as a professional psychic. Most of the staff at TIA is indifferent to Irene’s arrival or outright unwelcoming, but when Irene meets her new colleague, George Dermont, they immediately feel a powerful connection to one another. But what Irene and George don’t know is that 29 years prior, their mothers—both astrology enthusiasts—made a pact to conceive a pair of cosmically ordained soulmates, then separate them so that they can find each other again. The knowledge that they were quite literally made for each other shatters the worldviews for both George (a self-described dreamer with an interest in mythology) and Irene (an empiricist to her core). Although the high-concept astrophysics and philosophy may initially feel daunting, and the story frequently veers from quirky into just plain weird, things pick up speed as well-rounded characters and a few surprising twists are introduced. Whatever their beliefs on fate, readers will root for George and Irene to find their way back to each other.”
Library Journal says: “At the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, George Dermont is hoping to prove the scientific existence of a Gateway to God. Clear-eyed mathematician Irene Sparks has come to the institute to direct work on its massive superconductor. Imagine their surprise when they fall for each other, then discover that their mothers raised them together and subsequently separated them in an attempt to engineer true love. Just the kind of touchingly offbeat stuff you could expect from the author of Shine Shine Shine, a big debut that was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist, and more.”
“Star-crossed lovers usually aren’t, really. More often it’s family or other interested parties that make connection difficult — even when these outsiders mean to do the opposite. That’s certainly the case in Lydia Netzer’s “How to Tell Toledo From the Night Sky,” although in this winning second novel, the answer may genuinely lie in the heavens. Irene Sparks and George Dermont were not born to be lovers. They were raised to be — part of a plot dreamed up by their mothers back when the two were girlhood best friends. Irene is a pragmatist who has avoided intimacy for all of her 29 years. George is a dreamer, an easygoing soul whose visions of gods and goddesses threaten to interfere with his everyday life. Both are damaged, in part because of the falling out between their mothers 23 years before. Both are also astronomers, who meet as adults when an important discovery by Irene brings her to the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, where George had been the rising star. . . . Netzer’s often impressionistic writing swings from science to the flesh in broad, fearless sweeps that incorporate astrophysics, mythology, and characters who are true to themselves, even when those selves are maddening,” says The Boston Globe.
When is it available?
“The Night Sky” is shining on the shelf at the Downtown Hartford Public Library.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
The Boy In His Winter
By Norman Lock
(Bellevue Literary Press, $14.95, 192 pages)
Who is this author?
Norman Lock, an author who lives in New Jersey, has won an Aga Khan Prize from The Paris Review and a writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and has published novels, short fiction, poetry and stage, radio and screen plays. His books include “Love Among the Particles”, a Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year.
What is this book about?
What if Huck Finn’s iconic antebellum journey with Jim down the Mississippi River didn’t end when Mark Twain’s classic novel reaches its conclusion? What if Huck and Jim, never aging and living outside history, instead travel through time together till 1960 on their raft and witness Civil War battles, the murderous onslaught against Native Americans, the failed legacy of Reconstruction, the horror of Hurricane Katrina and much more? In Norman Lock’s imaginative and brilliant riff on Twain’s great American novel, Huck tells us his new stories and does not leave us until he is an old man in 2077, inviting us to recall the original novel and to review American history with a fresh eye.
Why you’ll like it:
It takes a brave and highly skilled author successfully to put his own spin on a beloved, if controversial, classic. By all accounts, reviewers say Lock has done an admirable job, even if the concept of Huck Finn as a time traveler seems outré at first. Twain’s youngster on the river gave us a sometimes humorous, often poignant and ultimately courageous perspective on the ingrained racism of mid-19th century America. Lock’s inspired take on Huck’s life from that point on shows us that racism is sadly and apparently inextricably entwined in our history. This is a provocative and challenging book.
What others are saying:
Publishers Weekly’s starred review says: “Inspired by Mark Twain and propelled by the currents of the Mississippi River, this is a tall tale that Lock has abducted and handed over to Huck Finn. In Lock’s fantastical iteration, Huck and his old friend Jim set off from Hannibal, Mo., in 1835 and raft through the rest of the 19th century. Along the way they meet Tom Sawyer, grown up to become a Confederate soldier, view piles of Union dead, and help a Choctaw chief die with dignity. Jim is inconsolable when he hears John Wilkes Booth has shot Abe Lincoln. By the time they reach Baton Rouge, they’ve entered the 20th century, with horseless travel and the first motion pictures. The time travelers make their way through American history without aging a day, until Jim decides to leave the raft in 1960, sure that it is a good time to reenter the world. (Sadly, he seems to enter the world of To Kill a Mockingbird, fatefully breaking up a chiffarobe for Mayella Ewell.) Huck, still 13, almost makes it to New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina finally blows him from myth into real time. “I can feel my cells divide,” Huck says, reinventing himself as Albert Barthelemy and continuing his journey with a couple of smugglers and a black man who happens to be named James. Albert makes sure things turn out pretty well for himself as a grown man—he’s the author of his own destiny, after all—before he reveals that his beautiful black wife (whose name happens to be Jameson) has written an illustrated children’s book about the adventures of a boy named Albert, calling it A Boy in His Winter. Lock plays profound tricks, with language—his is crystalline and underline-worthy—and with time, the perfect metaphor for which is the mighty Mississippi itself.”
Kirkus Reviews says: “The latest from distinguished elder statesman Lock, winner of the Aga Khan Prize from the Paris Review, is an eclectic hybrid of literary appropriation, Zelig-like historical narrative, time-travel tale and old-style picaresque. It’s narrated in 2077 by an octogenarian Huckleberry Finn, who meandered down the Mississippi alongside his stalwart friend Jim for 125 years, from 1835 until 1960, remaining miraculously unchanged by time. Along the way, they drifted southward through the Civil War (Tom Sawyer has a cameo as a Confederate officer, and Jim is photographed at Vicksburg); the uprooting and massacre of Native Americans (they play a role in allowing Cochise to die with dignity); the electrification of the country (which they encounter when they enter the 20th century around Baton Rouge); and the Jazz Age. Jim, trying to wait until racism has either passed away or grown less virulent, leaves the raft in 1960; after a brief excursion into the world of To Kill a Mockingbird, he discovers there’s no outlasting that particular viciousness. Huck, who’s followed his old companion, ends up having to stand by helplessly as Jim is lynched. He staggers back to the raft and meanders for nearly another half-century, until Hurricane Katrina spits him ashore in a storm-battered south Louisiana necropolis, a landing that at last jars him back into time. Over the next seven decades, an aging Huck serves as an accomplice to a group of marijuana smugglers; lands in juvie; becomes a flashy, globe-trotting yacht broker; marries an African-American woman who writes novels for children; and makes a late-life return to Hannibal, Mo., where he exacts a kind of revenge on his “creator” by playing the elderly Mark Twain, “river pilot and raconteur,” at a riverside amusement park. The philosophical and literary musings are inventive, and Lock manages to make the combination of brevity and tall-tale looseness mostly work. But for all its charms, the book ultimately seems pretty diffuse.”
Says NPR: “Finn and Jim set out from Hannibal, Mo. on a July afternoon in 1835 aboard a raft. But this is not Mark Twain’s tale: In Norman Lock’s brief and brilliant fabulist novel . . . , Huck and Jim sweep down the Mississippi toward the Gulf of Mexico as though in a dream, caught in mythic time. “We were held in the mind of the river, like a thought,” Lock writes. . . .
“Huck narrates from the perspective of old age, in 2077, questioning all the way, acknowledging early on that while he is writing a time-travel novel, he has “no adequate theory to explain why the raft was able to travel through time. . . .
“By reconceptualizing Twain’s 1884 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to include three centuries — from slavery, the Civil War, emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and onwards — Lock raises questions about why we struggle still with the notions of freedom and justice. The “Territory” Huck lit out for in 1835 has developed, Lock writes, into “a nation of pleasure seekers; not all, of course, but enough to form a constituency with strength to pervert the virtues of democracy.”
The Minneapolis Star Tribune says: “I always wondered why Mark Twain didn’t number the last chapter in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Instead, he titled it “Chapter the Last.” Was it so we’d be discouraged from ever thinking of Huck as anything more than that mischievous kid we’d come to know and love?
“Regardless of Twain’s reasons, any author picking up where Twain left off is an audacious literary move, one Norman Lock has made with his most recent — and 15th — book of fiction, “The Boy in His Winter.” Though in truth, to call it a work of fiction is to tell only part of the story. This book is as much a treatise on memory and time and the nature of storytelling and our collective national conscience as it is a novel in the sense “Huckleberry Finn” is.
“….There is no shortage of rhetoric on the nature of time and our memories in these sections, much of it wildly funny and extremely intelligent, and most often Lock’s prose matches his purpose to wicked effect. But if you come to this book expecting a yarn like you got in high school when you were assigned “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” you will end up finding something else in “The Boy in His Winter.”
When is it available?
No time travel required: this book is now at the Downtown Hartford Public Library.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
Lucky Us
By Amy Bloom
(Random House, $26, 256 pages)
Who is this author?
Connecticut readers know…or certainly should know …fellow state resident Amy Bloom’s fine work. Trained as a psychotherapist, she taught for many years at Yale University and currently is Distinguished University Writer in Residence, teaching creative writing, at Wesleyan University. The prolific Bloom is the author of many highly regarded books, including the nonfiction “Normal,” and story collections and novels that include “Come to Me,” “A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You,” “Love Invents Us; “Away” and “Where the God of Love Hangs Out.” Her stories are a mainstay in the best anthologies, and Bloom also has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, Slate, and Salon. She also is a winner of a National Magazine Award.
What is this book about?
It’s the 1940s, and a pair of half-sisters from a not-so-functional family take off in a stolen station wagon from Ohio to the glamorous West Coast and the temptations of Hollywood, only to wind up on the East Coast and the ritzy, glitzy mansions of Long Island and eventually, London. Iris and her younger sidekick Eva pursue their dreams, despite personal betrayals and the national struggles of a nation at war. This lively story is a jazzy as the musicians who are among its cleverly drawn, piquant characters, all of whom possess the energy and ambition that blossomed as the Great Depression tapered off and America became even more of a world power. Bloom combines history with humor and heart to tell this story, and it is a captivating tale.
Why you’ll like it:
It’s hard to determine whether Bloom’s skills at therapy deepen her writing or whether her authorial imagination has influenced her ability to help her patients, but either way, it has made her a powerful storyteller and insightful interpreter of the human soul. Opening one of her books is like climbing into a car with a savvy driver: you may not know for sure where it is heading, but you are confident that it will be one hell of a trip. This is a many-layered novel, which uses letters as a form of narrative, and fans of historical fiction, as well as those who savor brightly imagined characters of varying races, ages, genders and sexual preferences, a compelling plot and delicious dialogue are going to enjoy the ride.
What others are saying:
An Amazon Best Book of the Month review for August 2014 says: “From its provocative opening paragraph–”My father’s wife died. My mother said we should drive down to his place and see what might be in it for us.”–to its sweet tableau of an ending, Amy Bloom’s Lucky Us is a percussive novel about two sisters who go from Ohio to Hollywood and back trying both to find and lose themselves and each other. Iris has the disposition (if not the talent) of an actress, but early on she gets drummed out of Tinseltown for a particularly shocking (for the time) youthful indiscretion; Eva is her younger, more dour sister/observer. Through short vignettes of and letters from the Acton sisters as well as a growing cast of tragicomic characters, we get a jazzy novel about the WWII era. Bloom is particularly good at recreating the idioms of the time–in her acknowledgements, she thanks her cousin, the writer/scholar Harold Bloom for teaching her “to find a better way to put almost anything.”–and both her style and her story have a subversive, iconoclastic quality. This is not a very long novel, but with its expansive understanding of human nature and of history, it covers a lot of ground.”
Publishers Weekly’s starred review says: “Two teenaged half-sisters make their way through WWII-era America in Bloom’s imaginative romp. After being left on her father’s Ohio doorstep by her absconding mother, 11-year-old Eva meets Iris, the older half-sister she never knew she had. They escape to Hollywood, where Iris hopes to become a movie star. But they wind up on Long Island, where the girls and their father, Edgar, find employment in the home of the nouveau riche Torelli family. Over the course of the story, Edgar develops a relationship with a black jazz singer named Clara Williams, Iris falls in love with the Torellis’ cook, Reenie Heitmann, and Eva learns to read the tarot and sets herself up as a psychic. Joining the lively cast is Francisco Diego, a Hollywood makeup artist; Gus, Reenie’s German husband, who is deported; and Danny, an orphan who is ultimately raised by Eva. On the way to a gloriously satisfying ending, these characters are separated by fate and distance, but form a vividly rendered patchwork American family (straight, gay, white, black, citizen, immigrant). Bloom transforms history to create a story of stunning invention, with characters that readers will feel lucky to encounter.”
Says Kirkus in its starred review: “On a journey from Ohio to Hollywood to Long Island to London in the 1940s, a couple of plucky half sisters continually reinvent themselves with the help of an unconventional assortment of friends and relatives. In 1939, 12-year-old Eva is abandoned by her feckless mother on her father’s Ohio doorstep after the death of his wealthy wife. After a couple of years of neglect, Eva and her glamorous older half sister, Iris, escape to Hollywood, where Iris embarks on a promising career in film—until she’s caught on camera in a lesbian dalliance with a starlet, which gets her blacklisted. With the help of a sympathetic gay Mexican makeup artist as well as their con-artist father, Edgar, who has recently reappeared in their lives, the girls travel across the country to New York and finagle jobs at the Great Neck estate of a wealthy Italian immigrant family. Hired as a governess, Iris promptly falls in love with the family’s pretty cook, Reenie, inconveniently married to Gus, a likable mechanic of German ancestry. In this partly epistolary novel interspersed with both first-person and third-person narration, Bloom tells a bittersweet story from multiple viewpoints. The novel shares the perspectives of Eva, Iris, Edgar, Gus and Cora, a black nightclub singer who becomes Edgar’s live-in girlfriend and companion to Eva. Though the letter-writing conceit doesn’t always ring true, since it’s unlikely that one sister would recount their shared experiences to the other in letters years later, the novel works in aggregate, accumulating outlooks to tell a multilayered, historical tale about different kinds of love and family. Bloom enlivens her story with understated humor as well as offbeat and unforgettable characters. Despite a couple of anachronisms, this is a hard-luck coming-of-age story with heart.”
Booklist, in another starred review, says: “Eva, age 12, knows her father as a sweet man who visits on Sundays, until her mother announces that his wife has died and they’ll be paying him a visit. And so Eva arrives at a home she’s never seen to live with her father and older half sister, Iris, whom she didn’t know existed. Talented, self-involved Iris is a doggedly hopeful performer, winning every local and regional competition in their small midwestern college town before graduating high school and escaping to Hollywood with the embarrassing but brainy and reliable Eva in tow. There is a gossip-column scandal and a cross-country road trip, an abducted orphan and an accused spy, and more than a couple of masquerades, but everything here is fresh; Bloom’s cannonballs read like placid ripples. Told partially from Eva’s perspective, and with epistolary interludes over the novel’s 1939–49 span, Eva’s world is one of endless opportunities for reinvention—and redemption—if one only takes them. With a spare and trusting style, Bloom invites readers to fill the spaces her pretty prose allows, with true and beautiful results.”
“Bighearted, rambunctious . . . a bustling tale of American reinvention . . . [a] high-octane tale of two half-sisters who take it upon themselves to reverse their sorry, motherless fortunes . . . If America has a Victor Hugo, it is Amy Bloom, whose picaresque novels roam the world, plumb the human heart and send characters into wild roulettes of kismet and calamity. . . . Love will fizz and fizzle, outrageous lies will be told, orphans will find happiness and heartbreak, and fate will sweep in to drive characters into hellish corners of the world. . . . There are few American novelists writing today who can spin a yarn as winningly. . . . Welcome to America, dear reader. Lucky us,” says The Washington Post.
When is it available?
Lucky for us, it is at the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Dwight and Mark Twain branches.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
Praying Drunk
By Kyle Minor
(Sarabande, $15.95, 192 pages)
Who is this author?
For an author who is not yet 40, Kyle Minor has racked up a quite impressive list of honors. Minor won the 2012 Iowa Review Prize for Short Fiction and the Kroger Prize for Short Fiction, was a three-time honoree in the annual Atlantic Monthly writing contest and was selected as one of Random House’s Best New Voices of 2006. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Salon.com, Best American Mystery Stories 2008, Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers, and Forty Stories: New Voices from Harper Perennial. He also is the author of the 2008 story collection, In Devil’s Territory. He grew up in Florida and has lived in Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio.
What is this book about?
Tortured souls, including some who have actually been physically tortured, abound in this complex collection. While this is a book of short stories, Minor instructs his readers that they are meant to be read in order, as themes and events and characters play return engagements in these tales set in Kentucky, Florida and Haiti. You will encounter people who speak in tongues, bully a classmate, seek God, fail to find God and battle despair. Minor creates people who embark on the great struggle to maintain faith in a world of random pain. “Praying Drunk” is a sobering book.
Why you’ll like it:
Kyle Minor is unafraid to tackle the downside of belief and the grimness so many find in life, but while there is a lot of unhappiness in this book, Minor handles it so skillfully and intelligently that it uplifts, rather than depresses. His characters struggle and do not always succeed, but it is the struggle that counts. Adding to the complex nature of this collection is his use of repeating themes and characters, a layering that adds depth to these already provocative tales.
What others are saying:
The Los Angeles Times says: Kyle Minor’s “Praying Drunk” offers a grim, gripping view of men and women still searching for the miraculous. Evangelists embark on missions to Haiti hoping to save anyone, if not just themselves; grieving family members struggle with questions of faith in the face of mounting evidence that they have no business having any; and a young narrator is tortured over and over again in school.
“To read “Praying Drunk” is to open yourself up to the type of rumination that some might be afraid of: namely, how can anyone have faith when humans do so much to distort godliness? The stories in Kyle Minor’s second collection are tender, searching and reflect onto one another. . . . tales are told over and over again from different perspectives, with facts erased, altered or added. Characters inhabiting one story pop into others, shifting our belief in who the characters are and who they wish to be. Minor quotes a teacher in the story “Q&A”: “Our job is to identify the distance between the story we’ve been telling ourselves about our lives — the received story, or the romantic story, or the wishful thinking — and replace it with the story that experience is revealing about our lives, the story that is more true.”
Says the New York Times Book Review: “Kyle Minor wants you to know that Praying Drunk is not actually, or only, a collection. In the epigraph, he warns: “These stories are meant to be read in order. This is a book, not just a collection. DON’T SKIP AROUND.’ Minor is right to insist. The stories may span decades as they move from Kentucky to Haiti and points between, but they work in concert to slowly reveal the landscape of an emotionally desolate quasi-America sinking under the weight of its own faith. . . . Minor writes beautifully about these ruined lives.”
In a starred review, Kirkus says: “An award-winning short fiction author offers 12 stories so ripe with realism as to suggest a roman à clef. . . .”In a Distant Country” is the most affecting, ringing with the haunted truths of Shakespearean tragedy—a missionary in Haiti, his teenage bride, the Duvaliers overthrown, his death, her disappearance—a tale unfolding in six letters from witnesses. It’s the 10th tale, but don’t read it first. In sequence, the stories present a powerful reflective narrative, offering perspectives on friends, family and faith. Stories cut to the heart—a teen helps his father chop a pink piano into kindling before he “walked toward this woodpile with a loaded shotgun and blew off his head”; then the boy’s funeral is rendered through multiple stories. Then come stories of the narrator’s brother, a Nashville musician, cheated and misused, who quits, finds a good job and then quits again . . . .Pain and loss range from Ohio to Tennessee to Kentucky to Florida to Haiti, with prose ringing with the hard-edged, mordant clarity of Southern writing. A preacher turns the making of biscuits into a funeral parable, and there’s more sardonic play with faith, as when a character sniffs up methadone powder: “There’s the line, gone up like the rapture.” That surrealistic piece follows a bereaved father who recreates a dead son as a bionic robot to win back his wife. This brilliant collection unfolds around a fractured narrative of faith and friends and family, loved and lost, an arc of stories in which characters find reason to carry on even after contemplating a “God with agency enough to create everything…and apathy enough to let it proceed as an atrocity parade.” There’s cynicism and despair and nihilism in the collection, certainly, but there’s courage too and a measure of blood-tinged beauty.”
Publishers Weekly says: “Similar to a great magic trick, the 13 stories in Minor’s latest lure reader investment with strong visuals while simultaneously pulling the rug out from underfoot with clever, literary sleights–of-hand. Though not necessarily linked in the traditional sense, there is a sequential order to the collection—ideas, locations, incidents, and characters echo as the volume chugs forward—and the result is an often dazzling, emotional, funny, captivating puzzle. At the heart of the book are the Haitian tales “Seven Stories About Sebastian of Koulèv-Ville” and “In a Distant Country.” Set within the same village, though separated by decades, the narratives follow the lives of missionaries and the natives they look to aid during the Duvalier dictatorship and after the 2010 earthquake. The ideas of trust and faith run deep, and these emotions bleed throughout the collection, particularly in the narratives concerning a character akin to the author, who frets over his musician brother (in “There Is Nothing but Sadness in Nashville”), his dying grandfather (in “First, the Teeth”), and his own convictions (in “You Shall Go Out with Joy and Be Led Forth with Peace” and its companion, “Suspended”). Minor’s continuous play with form keeps the book fresh, despite a somewhat distracting presentation.”
Booklist says: “Minor’s first book of short fiction, In the Devil’s Territory (2008), introduced a talented writer with a penchant for experimental repetition and extraordinary vision, whose characters struggle to contain or divulge the dark secrets faith and family conceal. This well-honed second book consists of a series of linked narratives dealing again with questions of religion and kin, spanning Kentucky, Florida, and Haiti. The book deserves to be read sequentially, not because it’s arranged in chronological order but because characters and conceits recur, eventually coalescing into heartrending closure. In one instance, Minor tells the story of a son’s suicide from multiple perspectives, spinning off seemingly peripheral characters, only to take up alternate points of view in subsequent stories. Elsewhere, a rational young man questions his romantic interest’s spiritual awakenings, which include speaking in tongues and dangerous visions. Minor writes with the descriptive clarity of Denis Johnson, the jigsaw-like structuring of Sherwood Anderson, and the Appalachian acuity of Jayne Anne Phillips. Certainly one to read and enjoy and to watch for in the future.”
When is it available?
The Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Mark Twain branch have copies available for borrowing.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
Instructions For a Heat Wave
By Maggie O’Farrell
(Knopf, $25.95, 304)
Who is this author?
Part of the fun of writing about books is getting to discover authors I’ve never before read. Not that they aren’t already well-known, just not to me. My summer discovery this year was the award-winning Maggie O’Farrell, who was born in Northern Ireland, grew up in Wales and Scotland and now lives with her family in London. This is her sixth novel, the others being “After You’d Gone,” “ My Lover’s Lover,” “The Distance Between Us,” “The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox” and “The Hand That First Held Mine.” Happily, that means I have five more to look forward to.
What is this book about?
It’s the brutally hot summer of 1976 in London, where an Irish family (or most of it) is coping with the stunning heat wave. Gretta, mother of three troubled grown children, wakes to find what seems like a normal day, and despite the punishing heat, bakes some soda bread. And then she realizes that her husband, a quiet retired banker named Robert, has quite unbelievably disappeared, along with some money and his passport. Soon the children — unhappily married history teacher Michael Francis; equally unhappy and very judgmntal middle daughter Monica; and far off in New York, smart but dyslexic youngest daughter Aoife, who has hid her inability to read from family, teachers, employers and even her boyfriend Gabe — are forced to put aside their sometimes petty and more often profound differences and solve the puzzle of where their father has gone. And even more important, what they themselves want from life, and each other.
Why you’ll like it:
O’Farrell is deeply talented at creating believable characters who talk the way real people do, which immediately draws the reader in and does not let them go till the final pages are consumed. Anyone who has had to cope with dysfunctional family dynamics — and that is just about everyone — will be impressed by how skillfully O’Farrell handles them here, from the low-level sniping among the siblings that begins in childhood and grows more serious in adulthood to the constant struggle of a well-meaning mother to control the children she loves but does not understand and their never-ending battle to break free. What takes place over four days is fascinating, but compelling as the plot may be, it’s the power and beauty of O’Farrell’s writing that makes this book so good. Here’s a sample of her prose, as the story begins:
“The heat, the heat. It wakes Gretta just after dawn, propelling her from the bed and down the stairs. It inhabits the house like a guest who has outstayed his welcome: it lies along corridors, it circles around curtains, it lolls heavily on sofas and chairs. The air in the kitchen is like a solid entity filling the space, pushing Gretta down into the floor, against the side of the table.
“Only she would choose to bake bread in such weather.
“Consider her now, yanking open the oven and grimacing in its scorching blast as she pulls out the bread tin. She is in her nightdress, hair still wound onto curlers. She takes two steps backwards and tips the steaming loaf into the sink, the weight of it reminding her, as it always does, of a baby, a newborn, the packed, damp warmth of it.
“She has made soda bread three times a week for her entire married life. She is not about to let a little thing like a heatwave get in the way of that. …”
What others are saying:
“O’Farrell appears to be fascinated by the idea that the visible connections of kinship or marriage are often not the entire story — and not even the actual story — of what holds us close to one another. Secrets and lies pervade her fictional worlds, and they always tumble out to satisfying effect. She has made her mark by combining the elements of good old-fashioned drama — love affairs in the shadows, the reappearance of long-lost relatives, hidden wives — with a modern lightness of touch in language and a deft freedom in moving her narratives forward through juxtaposition rather than linear plotting. For the reader, this can feel like having one’s cake and eating it too. O’Farrell’s novels appeal to a broad audience, but they’re also smart and provocative. Over and over, they try to work out who people really are, how ordinary lives can conceal extraordinary stories,” says The New York Times Book Review.
The Observer says: “All the hallmarks of an O’Farrell novel are here: a family with secrets in its past and words left unsaid years ago, relatives long since forgotten, a claustrophobic atmosphere of uncomfortable emotional closeness. This is an accomplished and addictive story told with real humanity, warmth and infectious love for the characters. Highly recommended.”
Says Booklist: “It is July 1976, and London is in the grip of an intense heatwave. All over the city, people are coming unhinged, and the Riordans are no exception. Retired banker Robert has left to buy a newspaper and never returns. His wife, Gretta, calls their three children, who converge on the family homestead for the first time in years. marriage is over; uptight Monica, trapped in a second marriage with two stepchildren who hate her, is not speaking to the younger sister she practically raised; and Aoife, who has taken herself off to Manhattan but cannot outrun the dyslexia that has made her working life a virtual hell. As the siblings seek out clues to the whereabouts of their father, O’Farrell, in her sixth novel, draws a beautiful portrait of family life. The story really blossoms in the second half, when the Riordans end their search in Ireland, where the family’s secrets and private feuds come raging forth so that the true healing can begin.”
Publishers Weekly says: When Gretta Riordan’s husband, Robert, disappears during the 1976 London heat wave, her three grown children return home for the first time in years. All are dealing with personal crises that inform their relationships with each other and are tied back to their family history. The oldest, Michael Francis, is trying to keep his marriage together as his wife yearns for independence, and his two sisters, Monica and Aoife, have been estranged for years over a bitter secret that led Aoife across the ocean to New York, where she has made a life for herself while hiding her illiteracy. Under the stress of searching for their father and enduring the unbearable heat—which causes people to “act not so much out of character but deep within it”—the siblings and their mother are forced to confront old resentments which bubble to the surface. O’Farrell skillfully navigates between past and present, as family secrets are revealed and old grudges are hashed out, without ever losing the narrative’s pace. An absorbing read from start to finish, through O’Farrell’s vibrant prose, each character comes alive as more is revealed and the novel unfolds.
Kirkus Reviews says: “A sometimes-brooding but always sympathetic novel, by prize-winning British writer O’Farrell, of a family’s struggles to overlook the many reasons why they should avoid each other’s glances and phone calls. Hot town, summer in the city. . . . This does not keep Gretta Riordan, dutiful and uncomplaining, from rising early to bake soda bread. Desiccated Irish transplant Robert Riordan, though, takes a look at his suburban life, wife and family and makes his way to cooler and greener pastures without them. Has the heat addled his brain? Is he doing the only sensible thing possible? When his children converge to suss out what Da has done, they have no answers. Meanwhile, all of them are on the run from themselves: Michael, a schoolteacher, has a wife who’s taken to sheltering herself in the attic, away from her own children. Monica, the favorite (“Not even her subsequent divorce–which caused seismic shockwaves for her parents–was enough to topple her from prime position.”), is on the edge of a scream at any given minute. The baby, Aoife (pronounced “precisely between both ‘Ava’ and ‘Eva’ and ‘Eve,’ passing all three but never colliding with them”) has been off in New York, nursing a very strange secret. In other words, no one’s quite normal, which is exactly as it is with every family on Earth–only, in the case of the Riordans, a little more so. O’Farrell paints a knowing, affectionate, sometimes exasperated portrait of these beleaguered people, who are bound by love, if a sometimes-wary love, but torn apart by misunderstanding, just like all the rest of us. A skillfully written novel of manners, with quiet domestic drama spiced with fine comic moments. The payoff is priceless, too.”
When is it available?
Whether it is hot or cold, this book can be found at the Downtown Hartford Public Library.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
Without Warning
By David Rosenfelt
(St. Martin’s/Minotaur, $25.99, 304 pages)
Who is this author?
David Rosenfelt grew up in New Jersey, became marketing president for Tri-Star Pictures in California and then a successful writer of novels and screenplays. His books include five “standalones” and 11 Andy Carpenter mystery novels, including “Leader of the Pack,” featuring an appealing sleuth and his dog. (More about that later.) Rosenfelt’s second novel, “First Degree,” was a Publishers Weekly best book of 2003. The author and his wife are devoted dog lovers and moved recently from California to Maine in three RVs so that they could bring their 25 – that’s right, 25 — rescued golden retrievers with them. Their Tara Foundation has rescued nearly 4,000 dogs. His 2013 nonfiction book, “Dogtripping,” tells that epic tale..
What is this book about?
In small-town Maine, newspaper editor Katie Sanford is still mourning her husband, Roger, who was killed in prison after being convicted (wrongly, she insists) of the murder of Jenny Robbins, with whom he was having an affair. That killing still haunts Jake, Jenny’s husband, who is chief of police. When a hurricane hits the town of Wilton, a time capsule meant to be buried for 50 years is unearthed after just five, and its revelations are shocking: creepy predictions of a dozen murders and tragedies, including Jenny’s death, that strongly suggest Katie’s husband was not the killer after all and also implicate Jake in the various crimes. Kate and Jake now have information that could prevent the next murder and explain the mystery, if they work fast and furiously enough. But a killer this clever is no easy mark, even for this savvy duo.
Why you’ll like it:
Rosenfelt knows how to spin a good tale, and he also possesses the ability to write with dry humor, even about grim circumstances. Deeply buried dark doings in a small New England town is an almost sure-fire plot structure for an entertaining thriller, and Rosenfelt has the chops to set up the story and blend the mystery with a bit of romance and some much–needed comic relief. All of that makes for a good read.
What others are saying:
Publishers Weekly says: “At the start of this riveting standalone from Edgar-finalist Rosenfelt, a hurricane destroys a Wilton, Maine, dam. When newspaper publisher Katie Sanford and her staff unearth the time capsule they buried nearly five years earlier to check for water damage, they discover skeletal remains and a set of predictions about future crimes, including the murder of the wife of police chief Jake Robbins. Months after the capsule’s burial, Katie’s husband allegedly killed Jake’s wife, with whom he’d had an affair. Other predictions correlate to an unsolved arson case and a string of murders. When Jake realizes he’s the common denominator among the crimes, he races to piece together the cryptic clues, identify potential victims, and delve into his own past to discover who wants to frame him and why. His feelings for Katie—the high school sweetheart with whom he’s starting to rekindle romance, but who represents the potentially antagonistic press—add complexity and nuance. Only some minor chronological discrepancies mar this suspenseful page-turner.”
Says Kirkus Reviews: “A methodical serial killer is on the loose in a small Maine town, and it’s up to the police chief to resolve the case before more people die in Rosenfelt’s latest police thriller. Jake Robbins is a war hero, but it’s a role he neither likes nor covets. While in Afghanistan, he was involved in an incident that won him the Navy Cross, but though he saved lives that day, others were lost, and it’s something he has a hard time reconciling. When he returned to Wilton, where he grew up, he worked his way up to chief of police, but life there has its own price: His wife, Jenny, was murdered by Roger, the publisher of the local paper, with whom she was having an affair. Roger was murdered in prison, leaving his wife, Katie, to assume control of the paper. After Wilton suffers damage from a devastating hurricane, Katie decides to dig up the town’s time capsule, something that’s buried every 50 years, to make sure it’s not damaged; when workers open the hole, they find the skeletonized body of a man who apparently died about the same time the capsule ceremony took place. Even more disturbing is the fact that the capsule, which in addition to artifacts holds predictions written by local dignitaries, now contains an extra box of predictions—each of which addresses a murder. Some of those murders—like Jenny’s—have already taken place, but others have not, and Jake must resolve the mystery before more people are killed. Rosenfelt’s staccato writing style is clean if a bit abrupt. While the action moves along at a rapid pace, he fails to flesh out the characters, making the ensuing romance between Jake and Katie seem both forced and predictable. A romance camouflaged as a thriller but a short, smooth read most will enjoy.”
“Spooky. Creepy. Edgy. Shuddery. What more could anyone want? The author of the Andy Carpenter series offers an offbeat premise. A snoozy Maine town fills a time capsule with predictions and instructions to open it in 50 years. After only five years, though, the capsule is broken by a flood, and folks get a premature look at the predictions. They’re a shock. Some forecast vile things that have happened; others predict they’re going to happen. Then they start happening, ahead of schedule, and they all obliquely involve police chief Jake Robbins. The novel steps into Michael Connelly ground as Robbins learns that the savage murders he’s investigating are about him. The cop and the reader struggle together to figure out why. So effective is this approach that it’s almost disappointing when the air of mystery evaporates as the plot becomes clear. The novel is a tad too long, and Rosenfelt’s most engaging quality—a sense of humor in the face of growing menace—sometimes feels a bit inappropriate. Still, this is highly recommended for readers craving that elusive “something different,” says Booklist.
When is it available?
“Without Warning” is on the shelves at the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Albany, Camp Field, Dwight, Mark Twain and Ropkins branches.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
The Quick
By Lauren Owen
(Random House, $27, 544 pages)
Who is this author?
Lauren Owen, who lives in the north of England and is not yet 30, has a degree in Victorian literature, and that gives her debut novel, set in 1892, a strong underpinning. Owen studied at Oxford University and the University of East Anglia, where she won an award for best fiction dissertation. “The Quick” was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of its top 10 literary fiction books of the season.
What is this book about?
It’s the late 19th century in London, and a young, aspiring poet moves in with a wealthy and charming young man, who soon brings James Norbury into his aristocratic circle, where he makes new friends and falls in love. But when James unexpectedly disappears, it is left to his sister, Charlotte, to leave the family’s country home and find her missing brother. Mystery and sheer horror await her as she discovers a supernatural netherworld in the great city, where the men of the upper-class and powerful Aegolius Club hold the answers she seeks and secrets almost too dangerous to face.
Why you’ll like it:
Fall is fast approaching and with it, Halloween: time for some supernatural chills. You may think the horror genre has done just about all it can with the subject of vampires, but think again. Owen, who has studied the territory well, brings her own perspective and perceptions to this venerable subset of scary stories, and reviewers are delighted with her blend of historical fiction about the Victorian era and the horror she cleverly and thoroughly invokes.
What others are saying:
In The New York Times Book Review, Andrew Sean Greer says: “…a good old-fashioned vampire novel…To cover such well-worn narrative ground, a novelist has to either invent new possibilities or invent new storytelling devices. Owen has chosen the latter, and the novel proceeds by looping back over the previous episodes, each time from a different character’s perspective. This has the pleasant effect of plunging us into invention and then, slowly, into recognition…The Quick is full of…wonderful inventions, while still providing the torn collars and hungry looks the genre demands. Like a corpse in a bag, Owen’s novel is lumpy in places, spattered in blood and eventually opens up to horror. What fun.”
Publishers Weekly’s starred review says: “Though currently enjoying a resurgence in popularity, vampires as we know them are a Victorian invention: Dracula came out in 1897. Debut author Owen sets her seductive book in 1892, in a late-Victorian London with a serious vampire problem. And like her Victorian counterparts, Owen depicts a host of characters: there’s shy, provincial poet James Norbury and his intrepid sister Charlotte; vampire hunters Adeline Swift and Shadwell; a rich American in danger; and Augustus Mould, who researches vampire myth and fact on behalf of the vampires, and who’s as warm and friendly as his name suggests. The vampire world is divided: the elite men of the Aegolius club coexist, not happily, with a ragged band of underclass undead. The book’s pleasures include frequent viewpoint shifts that require readers to figure out how each character fits into the story, new riffs on vampire rituals and language, plus several love affairs, most of which are doomed. And there’s plenty of action—Mould’s research, the clubmen’s recruitment efforts, escalating battles between vampires and vampire hunters and among the vampires, and Charlotte’s efforts to save James. Though the book has an old-fashioned, leisurely pace, which might cause some reader impatience, Owen’s sentence-by-sentence prose is extraordinarily polished—a noteworthy feat for a 500-page debut—and she packs many surprises into her tale, making it a book for readers to lose themselves in.”
Says Kirkus Reviews: “An elegantly written gothic epic that begins with children isolated in a lonely manor house; takes a spin through the velvet-draped salons of late-Victorian literary London; then settles in to the bloody business of an outbreak of evil magic. The novel draws from several genres and benefits from innumerable literary influences. Indeed, its many elements are so familiar that one feels—not unpleasantly—as if one has read and loved it already, years ago, but can’t remember exactly how it ends. The year is 1892, and James Norbury, a poet fresh from Oxford, has taken rooms with an intriguing young nobleman. Alas, the joys of youthful gay abandon don’t last long. James disappears, and his sister Charlotte takes it upon herself to come to London to find him. The ominous city that awaits her will please readers who love magical creatures of the elegant, bloodthirsty variety, and the vast cast of more or less creepy characters that populates the cobblestoned streets will satisfy admirers of ensemble novels. As in Dracula, an obvious influence, the supernatural mystery must be solved by a motley crew of avengers. And although the book is not as lushly described as The Night Circus, Owen’s soaring imagination and her light-handed take on magic save this story from being either obvious or boring. Eventually, Charlotte discovers that her brother’s disappearance can be traced to a secret organization of gentlemen—and no sparkling Beau Brummell or amiable Bertie Wooster is to be found among the terrifying and powerful inner circle of The Aegolius Club.A book that seems to begin as a children’s story ends in blood-soaked mayhem; the journey from one genre to another is satisfying and surprisingly fresh considering that it’s set in a familiar version of gothic London among equally familiar monsters.”
When is it available?
It’s lurking on the shelves at the Downtown Hartford Public Library.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
Be Safe I Love You
By Cara Hoffman
(Simon & Schuster, $26, 304 pages)
Who is this author
Cara Hoffman writes and teaches others to write and appreciate literature. Hoffman has been a visiting writer at St. John’s, Columbia and Oxford Universities and now teaches writing and literature at Bronx Community College. Her first novel was the well-received “So Much Pretty,” and “Be Safe I Love You” is also getting critical raves.
What is this book about?
It’s about a soldier who unexpectedly comes home from a tour of duty in Iraq, bringing a daunting load of war-induced emotional problems. What’s different about this book is that the soldier is a woman. Lauren was once a gifted singer, but enlisted to help provide for her family, especially her very smart brother, Danny. Something is obvious wrong when she returns, but Lauren’s family, which has been rocked by divorce and her father’s illness, can’t or won’t deal with it, hoping that time at home will help her heal. Then she takes Danny to Canada, where there is an oil field she has grown obsessed with, and begins to teach him survival skills. Bit by bit, the reader learns what happened in Iraq and why she is behaving so oddly, and perhaps dangerously.
Why you’ll like it:
We’ve all read compelling books about men at war and the difficulties they have when they return home. But it’s a rare novel that captures the experience of a woman warrior who is just as devastated as male soldiers, especially when the book is earning great praise for its beautiful writing. As our armed forces have changed to offer opportunities for women, this book is a reminder that the horrific downside of the experience affects both genders.
What others are saying:
Publishers Weekly says: “Hoffman’s excellent sophomore effort (after 2012’s So Much Pretty) describes the troubled homecoming of U.S. Army Sergeant Lauren Clay to Watertown, N.Y., from a tour of duty in Iraq. Lauren, left as a young girl by her mother to care for her little brother, Danny, and her depressed, bedridden father, is bitter and skeptical of her parents’ newfound eagerness to play an active role in her life. Once a promising classical singer, she is now permanently on edge, quick to anger, and plagued by nightmares and hallucinations. Upon her return, Lauren is alarmed to find that 13-year-old Danny has become an Internet junkie, and she decides to take him on a road trip to Canada. There, she plans to look for work with former soldier Daryl Green, a kindred spirit with whom she served. Lauren chucks Danny’s phone and subjects him to a crash course in wilderness survival as the two head north. Meanwhile, Lauren’s acquaintances become concerned about her unusual behavior, especially after several calls from an Army psychologist. Hoffman fills her tight narrative with an ominous sense of imminent violence. The sunny ending sounds a rare false note in this haunting page-turner, which otherwise rings true in its depiction of a veteran’s plight.”
“A finely tuned piece of fiction . . . Be Safe I Love You is a painful exploration of the devastation wrought by combat even when the person returns from war without a scratch. The story—written with such lucid detail it’s hard to believe the main character is an invention—suggests the damage starts long before the soldier reports for duty. . . . In crystalline language that conveys both the desolation of the Iraqi desert and the north country of New York State . . . this book is a reminder that art and love are all that can keep us from despair,” says The New York Times Book Review.
The Washington Post says: “In so many ways, we still think of warfare and soldiering as male endeavors. The plight of the female soldier remains largely out of view — in print media, on television news, even in fiction and film. Through Lauren, Cara Hoffman’s thoroughly researched and carefully crafted heroine, Be Safe I Love You illuminates the distaff side of military service and the ways that life in uniform are at once different and, at times, uncannily similar for men and women. Toward the end of this fine novel, Lauren finds a new life for herself based on her old passions, but Hoffman doesn’t give us the sense that she’s fully healed. Rather, she is, in her own way, soldiering on, a woman forever changed. . . . ‘She knew now that the difference between never and always was small,’ Hoffman writes. ‘Never and always are separated by a wasp’s waist, a small sliver of safety glass, one bead of sweat; separated by the seven seconds it takes to exhale the air from your lungs, to make your body as still as the corpse you are about to create.’”
“Beautifully written and unflinching in its honesty . . . [Be Safe I Love You] is a penetrating social critique: Hoffman paints a vivid and nuanced portrait of post-traumatic stress disorder and raises questions about class divisions (the working class being more directly affected by American warfare than anyone else). . . . A terrific story, suspenseful and smart and tender in unexpected moments, but it’s also a call to action, a heartfelt demand for us to pay closer attention to the costly fallout of violence,” says the Miami Herald.
The Boston Globe says: “For those of us never deployed into active duty, it is difficult to fathom the adrenaline-fueled combination of terror and anger that combat instills. We only see the aftermath, when soldiers return home, forever changed, trying to connect with a world where everyone seems flawed and fragile and uncomprehending. . . . In prose that is both powerful and poetic, Hoffman (So Much Pretty) paints a searing portrait of PTSD and the disconnect of the returning vet amid the well-meaning but clueless. . . . Even more compelling is the novel’s rare, illuminating glimpse into the distinctive experience and psyche of a female vet. Hoffman challenges us to imagine how extraordinarily difficult it must be to reconcile the innate protective instincts of the caregiver with a culture of violence and orders to kill. Yet she does that beautifully and poignantly, without destroying our hope for redemption and healing.”
When is it available?
This novel is now at the Downtown Hartford Public Library and its Blue Hills and Mark Twain branches.
Do you have something to say about this book, this author or books in general? Please post your comments here and I will respond. Let’s get a good books conversation going!
Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade
By Walter Kirn
(Liveright, $25.95, 272 pages)
Who is this author?
I first heard of Walter Kirn when I saw the bittersweet movie, “Up in the Air,” starring George Clooney. That popular film was based on Kirn’s book of the same title, and another of his novels, “Thumbsucker,” also was adapted for the screen. His other fiction includes “My Hard Bargain: Stories” and “She Needed Me.” Kirn, who lives in Montana, is a contributing editor for Time and often writes for the New York Times Book Review. His writing also has appeared in in the New York Times Magazine, GQ, Vogue, New York and Esquire. “Blood Will Out” was named a USA Today Top 10 Best Book of Winter 2014.
What is this book about?
This is the story of a smart writer who was gulled – in no small part by his own willingness to believe and his desire to snag a fascinating story – by a con man who goes far beyond a kind of entertaining “Catch Me if You Can” life of impersonations straight to cold-blooded murder. In 1988, Kirn, whose marriage was failing and was about to become a father, accepted a strange assignment: bring a crippled dog from Montana to a mysterious New York banker and art collector who had seen the dog on the Internet and wanted to adopt it. The man called himself Clark Rockefeller and claimed to be part of the famously rich family, but in fact turned out to be a poor German émigré, a skilled sociopathic imposter, kidnapper of his own daughter and a ruthless killer. For 15 years, Kirn let his life be entwined with that of Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, aka Clark, and the book details what the author learned about his psychopathic pal and about himself, from the first ill-fated trip with the dog to the murder trial and beyond.
Why you’ll like it:
This is definitely one of those “truth is stranger than fiction” true crime stories, and you will be mystified by how “Clark” managed to fool countless people who should have seen through his brilliant and sophisticated con games, including his wealthy upper class wife. And you may well also be puzzled how Kirn, an apparenty smart and savvy observer of life, also fell – for many years and quite willingly – for Clark’s phony representation of himself as one of the privileged upper crust. Read this one as a cautionary tale: if someone’s story of his life seems too good to be true…well, you know the rest.
What others are saying:
Publishers Weekly says, in a starred review: “In the summer of 1998, Kirn . . . was a struggling writer, taking assignments where he could get them, when he accepted an odd task: transporting a crippled dog from a Montana animal shelter to New York City, where a wealthy benefactor from the Rockefeller family eagerly awaited its arrival. That alone could have made for a quirky riff on Steinbeck’s classic Travels with Charley, but Kirn’s road trip took another turn entirely as he entered a wild and murky 15-year friendship with the man who called himself “Clark Rockefeller”—a man who would eventually be the target of a nationwide FBI manhunt and charged with murder. Kirn artfully relates how the man born as Christian Gerhartstreiter manipulated those around him, operating against a backdrop of elite mens’ clubs, expensive art, constant name-dropping, and tales of wealth and sophistication. The parallels with Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley are not lost on Kirn, who spends as much time trying to understand how he and others fell under Gerhartstreiter’s spell as he does relating the primary tale of the criminal himself. Kirn’s candor, ear for dialogue, and crisp prose make for a masterful true crime narrative that is impossible to put down. The book deserves to become a classic.”
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, March 2014, review says: “An epigraph from Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley says much about what’s to come in Walter Kirn’s remarkable confessional: “He was versatile, and the world was wide!” When Kirn first met Clark Rockefeller, he was smitten by the man’s wealth and eccentricities. Coming off a failed marriage (to the daughter of Thomas McGuane and Margot Kidder), Kirn was a bit of a wreck, as was Rockefeller. The two men were drawn to each other. As the friendship progressed–into some uneasy terrain–Kirn ignored the clues “spread out for [him] to read,” and plowed ahead to become a confidant and enabler. Except, it turns out, Clark wasn’t a Rockefeller at all. Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter was, as Kirn puts it, “the most prodigious serial imposter in recent history.” He was also a murderer. So what did that make Kirn? “A fool,” he admits, “a stubborn fool.” This is a compulsively readable, can’t-look-away book and, ultimately, a brave piece of work. Kirn has laid himself bare: his failed marriage, his Ritalin reliance, his misguided allegiance to a sociopath. In exposing his own “ignorance and vanity,” what Kirn has really crafted here is the story of a bamboozled writer who for fifteen years ignored the big story right under his nose; who, in trusting his imposter friend, “violated my storyteller’s oath.” With Blood Will Out, Kirn has impressively restored his storyteller’s credentials.
Says Booklist: “In The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), Janet Malcolm dissected journalist-subject dynamics. Here Kirn also covers that subject, but in the highly personal story of his being hoodwinked, professionally and emotionally, by a man he knew as Clark Rockefeller, a member of the famously wealthy industrial, political, and banking family. Over the years, their often long-distance friendship faltered in suspicious ways, yet Kirn kept up hope, naively perhaps, considering the flaws and untruths he uncovered, disturbing occurrences Kirn chose to ignore. But when Kirn woke one morning to discover that his friend Clark was not even Clark, much less a Rockefeller, and going to be tried for a murder committed years ago, he decided to finally write about their relationship, questioning along the way journalistic integrity and the encounters between the subject and the writer. This tale’s a fascinating one (starting with Kirn’s road trip with a paralyzed dog) that is covered elsewhere (Mark Seal’s The Man in the Rockefeller Suit, 2011), but Kirn’s reflecting, musing, and personal dealings add a killer punch to this true-crime memoir.”
“Kirn is such a good writer and Gerhartsreiter such a baroquely, demonically colorful subject, you could imagine this being a fine read had they no personal connection. That they did, however, elevates Blood Will Out to another level: Kirn lards his story with detail while reviewing his own psyche, in an attempt to discover how he—a journalist!—could have been so fooled. The irony? With all due respect to Kirn’s skills as a novelist, it is hard to conceive of any fictionalized version of ‘Clark Rockefeller’ being as compelling as the real thing,” says Entertainment Weekly.”
When is it available?
Here’s the truth: it’s at the Downtown Hartford Public Library now.
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