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Published to DJR February 28th, 2008
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Getting Rid of Matthew
Chick-lit books are generally despised by the literati and I must admit I have little patience with them myself. Somehow, however, when it’s British chick-lit, it seems less grubby than the American versions. Such is the case with a very tricky new novel by Jane Fallon. Fallon is, by trade, a TV producer in England where she lives with Ricky Gervais of “Extras” and the original “The Office.” In fact, her novel contains a bit of both atmospheres, set as it is in a PR office in London that handles wacko TV stars and wannabes, most of them definitely on the “D List,” such as Sandra, who can’t keep her bra or her panties on in public and wonders she is not taken seriously. But Sandra is very much a peripheral character in this Feydaux-farcical novel.
The plot turns around Helen, nearing forty and working as a personal assistant to Matthew, one of the honchos of the firm. They have been having an illicit relationship for over four years when, out of the blue, Matthew appears on Helen’s doorstep, suitcases in hand, to move in. He’s left his wife, Sophie, and their two daughters, and is to start a new life with Helen. There’s only one problem: Helen has been thinking of breaking it off and Matthew’s arrival sets in motion a series of near-collisions and double identity confusions that Helen barely keeps straight in her head, all in an attempt to settle the situation happily for everybody.
Perversely, but naturally, Helen meets, then befriends Sophie. To Sophie Helen is “Eleanor” who has a boyfriend named Carlo and who works in PR. The first element of potential farce is introduced when Sophie asks Helen to do some PR work for her steps-son, Leo, who is opening a new restaurant. There is an instant attraction there that cools for Helen when she realizes she has kissed her lover’s son. The perceptive reader is left wondering for most of the book 1) how are Helen and Leo going to get together and 2) how is Helen going to be unmasked?
In the meantime, Matthew wallows in his own perfidy and inability to tell the truth about himself to any of the women in his life and is generally portrayed as a total dickhead, a facet of chick-lit that seems to be inviolable. Leo is terrific, but we seldom get to see him once Helen determines that she can have nothing to do with him. The office where they both work is thrown into an uproar by the whole situation and even Sandra, the exhibitionist, figures in the action as catalyst for the final confrontation that you knew all along had to take place.
Fallon is facile and the novel zips along. It is definitely not a heavy read and those of you who like your chick-lit with Pinot Grigio and a crumpet or two will love it.
This review has (2) responses
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- response from BLNicholas
- I’ll have to say I have not indulged much in the Chic Lit scene myself but may just dabble with this one. From your review, I like already the irony of that undressed secondary character who is not taken seriously, pitted against the main character, Helen, who also cannot keep her clothes on in public--if she’s dating a married man--yet somehow she is taken seriously. Love those interesting glances into the male/female assignments within our culture and apparently the British culture!
- response from sbarranca
- I enjoy true Literature with a capital "L" and chick-lit and page-turners. Basically, anything in print I guess. I am leaving on a trip soon, and you sold me to get a copy of this novel. Perfect Beach Reading! Thanks for the great review!
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Published to DJR February 26th, 2008
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“Then We Came to the End” is a problematic novel, at once slapstick funny and, in an extended middle section, straightforward serious narrative. After pondering the total effect of the book, I admit I have problems with the mix.
The basic story line of the novel by Joshua Ferris concerns a declining ad agency in Chicago. In scenes sometimes ripped from the headlines of “The Office,” we hear about the usual shenanigans: office romance between Larry and Amber resulting in a constant nag from Larry to Amber to get an abortion to save his marriage, obviously not to Amber. There is the heart-stoppingly lovely Genevieve, Marcia, severe until she gets a haircut, Tom, who everybody suspects will eventually go postal, fat Benny who is in love with Marcia but can’t find a way to tell her, and others. The catalyst for most of the action is the consecutive firing of the cast of characters. The ad agency is not only declining but winding down. It has come to this: the major ad campaign the agency works on is a pro bono campaign for breast cancer awareness in which the client, who nobody can find record of, has asked for a campaign that will make breast cancer victims laugh.
As impossible to accomplish as that seems, everybody gives it a go, partly because of one of the many rumors in the office: Lynn, the manager, has breast cancer and is to go in for surgery. Lynn and her lover, Martin, are the subjects of the long straight narrative section that is 1) too long and 2) too different in style to fit into the tone of the rest of the book. The madcap nature of the persons who inhabit the agency clashes with Lynn’s seriousness and her phobia concerning hospitals. The section stops the action and, by focusing on one character seriously, makes even more peripheral our concerns about the others.
There are many manic turns in this novel, the most manic of which may be the studied dismantling of an office chair by one of the fired employees, a scene that ends with the parts of the chair being flung into Lake Michigan. But many of the manic turns seem to have no purpose other than to stir the waters without opening the drain. I found myself impatient for the story to get somewhere and was ultimately disappointed that it never seemed to get anywhere in a meaningful way.
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Published to DJR February 21st, 2008
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I have been heavily into literary novels lately so this was a refreshing break and a tense one. “Person of Interest” is an interesting variation on the police procedural since it involves what you might call a “police family procedural” approach. Craig McHugh is a Chicago detective, undercover, to discover the identity of a Chinese gang that is infesting the city with a particularly virulent form of drug that is taking lives. It’s called “China White.” While McHugh labors undercover, his wife, Leslie, is convinced he’s having an affair, an assumption that allows her to feel free to indulge herself in fantasies and inappropriate behavior with a young Greek jazz pianist named Niko who just happens to be the current boyfriend of Leslie’s nubile and hormone-racked daughter, Ivy. The plotline consists of McHugh’s attempts to close the case without getting killed, Leslie’s conquering her mid-life housewife sexual frustration and Ivy belonging to the family in any reasonable way.
McHugh gets beaten, bitten by spiders and shot at, what happens to Leslie we will let you read and Ivy gets down to no end of problems, most of them caused by the utter cluelessness of a teenager who wants to be older than she is capable of handling at the moment. Sound familiar?
The two most interesting characters are McHugh and his wife and their misunderstandings and misinterpretations are the most damaging, but the most rewarding as well, in their working out. Schwegel has a good sense of pace: start fast and speed up from there, and a good sense of how to write street dialogue without losing the suburbanite reader. If you want to read a good crime novel that also seems mostly believable and one in which “heroism” is not cavalierly defined, “Person of Interest” may be a book of interest to you.
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Published to DJR February 18th, 2008
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This is NOT your run-of-the mill Hollywood novels though almost every page is referential to one movie or another or one star or another. The protagonist, a loner named Vikar, is noted particularly for a tattoo of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in a scene from “A Place in the Sun.” The tat is easy to see because Vikar’s head is shaved. The novel is about obsession—mostly Vikar’s with the movies and with Clift and Taylor, but also the obsession movie people have with profits, the ladder of success and the politics of movie-making. That obsession never takes over the often irrational world of Vikar whose adventures take him from Hollywood to Cannes to Oslo and other places in search, ultimately, for the original print of a silent film of the life of Joan of Arc. Along the way he picks up yet another obsession with a beautiful but suspicious actress named Soledad and her daughter, Zazi, a strange waif in her own right. This is a book about the possibility that the movies are watching us as much as we watch movies. Sort of a parallel with the theory that the world is not real, but is actually a computer program that is being manipulated by the Cosmic Geek. If that sounds somewhat bizarre, so is this novel.
It is written in very short, sometimes one word, chapters that run from 1 to 227. Chapter 227 reads: “Vikar doesn’t know it, but everything has now been reset to zero.” From there the chapters run in reverse until they end, not at all where they began.
It’s impossible not to find a fascination with Vikar. Who is he? Is he mad or is it the world around him? Does he really see the people he thinks he sees or are they figments of his imagination based on film characters? Are the movie characters more real and more meaningful than the minor players who populate Vikar’s life? We are never sure, nor need we be. That’s part of the appeal of this odd journey into a world that, face it, is all pretend and celluloid anyway. It is we, who make it real, who have to find our way back to normalcy after leaving the theater. Somehow, Vikar can never make that journey.
Ratings (100 pt scale)
Overall Rating - abstained
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Published to DJR February 14th, 2008
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Romantic fiction is different from romance fiction, of course. If you want to see how different, may I recommend “Symphony” by Jude Morgan? It is a frustrating, moving and accurate portrait of the romance between Irish actress Harriet Smithson and the quixotic genius, Hector Berlioz. It is also the stuff of which Jane Austen made so much but on far higher level.
Berlioz’s family figures in the plot. His mother denounces him when he switches from medicine to music and his father is not pleased either. One can only imagine their feelings when Hector, besotted to the point of distraction, falls in love with rage of Paris, Miss Smithson, who knocks French audiences out with, first, her Ophelia and next her Juliet. The legendary characters of actors Kean and Kembel play a role in her life, but most of all, it is controlled by the fickle finger of fate. The finger writes “Revolution” and Shakespeare loses his panache, leaving Harriet to form her own company and struggle to regain audiences with a second rate troupe of actors. Enter Hector Berlioz, stage right.
Berlioz did not find much favor in Paris early in his career and he struggled to make ends meet by writing reviews of others’ concerts while he wrote his own music. Even winning the Prix de Rome, a contest he hated for its academic boundaries and cloistered environment, did not jump-start his career. His first major work as the “Symphonie fantastique,” dedicated to and inspired by Harriet. She is duped into going to its first performance and, like most of the rest of the audience, is shocked and dismayed by its raw energy and doleful finale in which “you can hear the head hit the basket.” She soon yields to his constant attention and they marry and have a son, Louis, to whom Berlioz is devoted.
Harriet, plumping up and no longer thinking of acting, begins to tilt the brandy bottle and it is not spoiling the story to mention that she goes mad as well. The novel opens with scenes of Harriet in Monsieur Blanche’s Asylum for Lunatics in Montmartre. The story of her life with Berlioz is spun out in the atmosphere of post-Waterloo France and it is, in a way, the story of most fine artists who are not recognized in their lifetimes. Berlioz eventually yields to Harriet’s growing insanity, somewhat perfunctorily takes a mistress and gets on with his life, finding some success in England and Germany, but never the rewards he deserved. The only quibble I find in the novel is the lack of the interesting and significant fact that he never learned to play piano (mentioned) but was a guitar virtuoso and, it is said, used the guitar to find harmonies while other composers used the piano. That is such a quirky turn that it deserved mention but we learn only that Berlioz did not play the piano and thus could not, like Chopin, make money by teaching the daughters of the rich.
Reading this novel is frustrating. If you have a musical collection at all, you will want to run to the CD player and load it up with Berlioz, Chopin, Schubert, Liszt and other composers mentioned in its pages. Most of all, however, you will mourn for an epic romance that sours and wonder what might have been had everyone been able to get along. A moving read.
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Published to DJR February 1st, 2008
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When people say: “The novel is dead,” they often overlook what the best novels have always done: they use the condensed space of a finite number of pages to tell a story that illuminates the life of the careful reader. “War and Peace” says a lot in a lot of pages about humanity, history and love. Other recent novels spend only slightly fewer pages, not always as successfully, to tell their stories. Then there’s Stewart O’Nan’s jewel of a novel, “Last Night at the Lobster.” It is ostensibly the story of a Red Lobster in a New England mall that has been, in a sense, “decommissioned.” Shortly before Christmas, it has been ordered closed by the corporation. The entire novel, only 146 pages, takes place during the last night of the restaurant’s operation. O’Nan researched the running of a Red Lobster in considerable detail: from the setting of the tables to the order of cooking, to the presentation, to the processes necessary to both open and close the place. They don’t get in the way, but rather serve as devices by which O’Nan shows us the routine, non-creative nature of what the staff does and how their lives are prescribed, in large part, by what they do. It becomes much more than a story of the last night of a restaurant.
Manny, the fat manager, has a pregnant girlfriend, Deena, but he has also recently concluded an affair with Jacquie, a waitress at the Lobster. Manny has regrets about both relationships and, while he plans on marrying Deena at last, it is with a pending sense of resignation rather then joy. Manny is a good man and a decent manager. He willingly pitches in at all necessary jobs when some of the staff, working their last day, bail out early. He is considerate of them and of his women and most warm toward the memory of his “abuelita,” or “little grandmother,” who was clearly close to him and remains so even though she is gone. We come to care about Manny and thus to care about his staff. I began to wonder, as I reluctantly reached the end of “Last Night at the Lobster,” how many restaurant managers in his position would have remained open to the end during a snowstorm? How many would insist that everything be made ready for a dinner traffic that was simply not going to materialize “just in case?” How many would struggle to start a snow blower to clear the walkways for non-existent patrons? How many would handle the disasters that visit the Lobster in its last night with such resigned aplomb and professionalism?
“Last Night at the Lobster” is a gem of a novel. Its characters are real, the setting impeccably drawn and we care about everybody who populates its small space. It’s almost good enough to make you want to work for Manny in his next job at the Olive Garden. I don’t think there is a novel written yet that’s good enough to make me want to do that.
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Published to DJR January 28th, 2008
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“Scarlett” was awful but made gazillions. “Rhett Butler’s People” may test the market to see if it is finally saturated with “Gone With The Wind” sequels or spin-offs and it thus might not make gazillions. Donald McCaig, authorized by the Mitchell Estate, for what that’s worth, has taken his own informed shot at the soap opera novel of Mitchell and, except for some odd and sporadic condensation of events and dialogue, it works well enough. The characters have a different emphasis: much more becomes known about Belle Watling and her bastard son, Tazewell, than in the original. Rhett becomes even more of a cipher at times, operating in the shadows and making money in mysterious but consistent ways to ride in at the last moment to save whoever needs saving.
There are new villains as Belle Watling’s father and brother become involved in a vendetta against Butler and O’Hara, along with another Ku Kluxer and there is the evil Andrew Ravenal who meets his just deserts at the right time and the right place. There is still the confusion over Rosemary Butler, Rhett’s sister, who seems destined to marry any man around who can breathe and who has not been left by another woman by death or design. Scarlett’s passion for Ashley still feels and sounds wrong, but that may because most readers of the original know that Scarlett and Rhett belong together and that’s the whole point of the story.
Tara takes its customary beating and Scarlett fights to preserve her pretty dresses and ribbons and keeps trilling “fiddle-de-dee” at odd moments. In short, there’s enough familiar there to keep the ball rolling. McCaig honored the somewhat overblown style of Margaret Mitchell by adopting it himself. I felt, without re-reading the original, that the portrait of Reconstruction in the South is much more accurate here: out-of-control KKK members, overthrow of elected governments and terrorism, but it is still perhaps underplayed in order to emphasize the noble mythology that sustained the South until the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s.
“Rhett Butler’s People” also takes us past the events of the original and wraps up more story lines, careful to make sure that Ashley Wilkes does not have to struggle to survive alone. I didn’t feel embarrassed reading McCaig’s work but I know that there were and are other books on my waiting list that might be more rewarding. That is, unless you are a Mitchell nut, in which case, indulge, indulge.
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Published to DJR January 14th, 2008
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Pop quiz: some of the characters in a novel are named Julie Galjour, Grace and Justin Pitre, Minna Cancienne, Buddy Dupere and ‘Ti-Ray Lajaune. Where is the novel set? If you didn’t say Louisiana, you just haven’t been reading widely enough or have a tin ear. Ken Wells does NOT have a tin ear and the characters are as euphonious as their speech: “He got banged as hard as a Mardi Gras drum” is typical. Unfortunately for this reader, so was the situation in “Crawfish Mountain.
While I certainly have sympathy for the environmentalists and not much for the oil companies who are destroying the bayou country of Louisiana without about as much regret as they have demonstrated over destroying other areas of the globe in order to exploit resources at all costs, this story of a semi-corrupt Louisiana governor, Joe T. Evangeline (yeah, Longfellow is grinding his molars), his lovely and smart-as-a-whip colleague Julie Galjour and the pure-as-the-court-boullion Pitres has been told before and the plot moves in a predictable straight line from corruption to comeuppance. One does hanker for some of the shrimp, catfish court boullion (“coo-boo-yan”) and other dishes and getting a hold of one of those ten-pound redfish sounds like a good way to spend an afternoon, but the heroes are too pure, the villains too starkly evil (even though they are also inept) to maintain anything but a slight distance from them all so the stains that won’t wash out can be avoided.
Wells has, as his expressed purpose, a point to make about the dangerous procedures being used to rape the bayous and swamps of a critical area of our natural habitat. What isn’t being drilled for more oil is being exploited as waste dump for dangerous chemicals that kill fish and trees and endanger mankind. He makes that point, but I wished for a bit more meat on the bones of his characters. Almost every woman under 40 is dangerously beautiful and only the good guys are handsome and witty. The deck is stacked and, unlike a good Creole meal, one is left wanting more.
Ratings (100 pt scale)
Overall Rating - abstained
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Published to DJR January 14th, 2008
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Pop quiz: some of the characters in a novel are named Julie Galjour, Grace and Justin Pitre, Minna Cancienne, Buddy Dupere and ‘Ti-Ray Lajaune. Where is the novel set? If you didn’t say Louisiana, you just haven’t been reading widely enough or have a tin ear. Ken Wells does NOT have a tin ear and the characters are as euphonious as their speech: “He got banged as hard as a Mardi Gras drum” is typical. Unfortunately for this reader, so was the situation in “Crawfish Mountain.
While I certainly have sympathy for the environmentalists and not much for the oil companies who are destroying the bayou country of Louisiana without about as much regret as they have demonstrated over destroying other areas of the globe in order to exploit resources at all costs, this story of a semi-corrupt Louisiana governor, Joe T. Evangeline (yeah, Longfellow is grinding his molars), his lovely and smart-as-a-whip colleague Julie Galjour and the pure-as-the-court-boullion Pitres has been told before and the plot moves in a predictable straight line from corruption to comeuppance. One does hanker for some of the shrimp, catfish court boullion (“coo-boo-yan”) and other dishes and getting a hold of one of those ten-pound redfish sounds like a good way to spend an afternoon, but the heroes are too pure, the villains too starkly evil (even though they are also inept) to maintain anything but a slight distance from them all so the stains that won’t wash out can be avoided.
Wells has, as his expressed purpose, a point to make about the dangerous procedures being used to rape the bayous and swamps of a critical area of our natural habitat. What isn’t being drilled for more oil is being exploited as waste dump for dangerous chemicals that kill fish and trees and endanger mankind. He makes that point, but I wished for a bit more meat on the bones of his characters. Almost every woman under 40 is dangerously beautiful and only the good guys are handsome and witty. The deck is stacked and, unlike a good Creole meal, one is left wanting more.
Ratings (100 pt scale)
Overall Rating - abstained
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Published to DJR January 11th, 2008
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Another book, like “The Journal of Dora Damage,” that goes into history with a female book person as guide. This time it’s the rough-on-the-edges Australian Hanna Heath, a book conservator, who’s given the job of working on the famed Sarajavo Haggadah. The fact that the haggadah is an actual book and that author Brooks watched it being worked on in 2001 only adds to the versimilitude of the novel. Some critics, who apparently like the nitty gritty only, have criticized Brooks for having too much bibliographical detail in the book. I found the mix very satisfactory with the conservation practices only adding to the fascination with the stories of the people who contributed various things to the book itself. Heath, you see, has several clues as to the provenance of the volume that she finds in the volume itself. Among them are a wine stain that proves to be more than wine, a white hair, a piece of salt and something that is not there: a set of clasps that at one time held the parchment pages closed. The stories that evolve from the clues might be a bit far-fetched at times but this is fiction and all surround the same theme: the brutality of men and women when religion rules their lives rather than compassion and humanity. There is no one group at fault here and several of the representatives of each religion do good things, but the consistent high odds they face from religious figures and zealots only complicates rather than soothes their lives. Much of the action takes place around the time of the Inquisition and that may be enough of an indication as to how irrational it gets, but it is all fascinating, fast-paced and good fiction. The fact that Brooks is herself an Australian adds to the often funny aspects of the book. Particulary funny is her description of women in the arts in Britain: “...women named Annabelle Something-hyphen-Something who dress in black leggings and burnt orange cashmeres and smell faintly of wet Labrador. I always find myself lapsing into Paleolithic Strine when I’m around them, using words I’d never dream of using in real life, like ‘cobber’ and ‘bonza.’” For anybody who loves books and dreams of tracking down exotic provenances, this is a great read. For those of you not into those things, it’s still a fascinating take on an obviously age-old question: What is it about religion that makes its practitioners spend so much time and energy not on improving their own lives but on ruining others’?
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