Category: book review

I have a bookshelf where I keep the most ruthless of books, the books where writers have written unflinchingly, and Faw’s novel Ultraluminous has a place of honor there.

Reading Ultraluminous is like being thrown into a tornado of dissonance that resolves in a morally ambiguous and yet somehow completely satisfying way. I imagine it takes quite a lot out of a writer, to write so ruthlessly. It’s a disturbing book, and it breaks so many taboos, and part of what i love about it is that it proves to me that words still retain the power to shock.

This is a book written for women, by a woman, and its conclusions are bleak. I feel happy for the men who can read it and enjoy it but in some ways this novel feels more than anything like a #me-too reflection, where the male-on-female abuse is dialed up to its last possible ear-splitting amplitude. Throughout the novel the reader is invited, by the narrative tone, to consider the protagonist an empowered woman, a sex industry worker at the top of her game, even as she is being demeaned and abused in every way possible. It’s okay to her if her johns break a finger or blacks an eye because they pay her extra for it. She comes across as the one in control. Her bravura was seductive to me as a reader. I could easily fall into the notion of her as heroic. I could talk myself into thinking she is in charge of her own life, making big money and living the good life even as she is dehumanized in every possible way.

The violence and objectification that the protagonist experiences don’t escalate from start to finish so I’ve been trying to puzzle through why it reads like a thriller. It could be because the protagonist is trapped in a repeating space where the most horrible objectifications become mind-numbing routine, and as a reader you know this level of nihilism can’t go on forever; that this level of sexual violence eventually won’t stick to a schedule and will begin to bleed out in unexpected ways. So you’re just waiting for some wire to trip. For something to change the equilibrium. It’s a hellish stasis, where the repetition of the protagonist’s scheduled weekly meetings with men becomes a terribly tense read.

Even though the nihilism in the novel is relentless, and even though neither the protagonist nor the author ever gives any hints about what we readers are meant to think about any of it, the novel somehow left me feeling uplifted and hopeful. I’m still trying to work out why. In the meantime though I’m a fan of Katherine Faw, and I’m happy I read her brave relentless and very risky book.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting about other novels that similarly took my breath away. Maybe it’s more accurate to say they metaphorically garroted me. Whatever you call it, it’s amazing and wonderful to me that words on the page still have the power to evoke such raw feelings, and I’m grateful to the writers who are brave enough to take us there.

Here are more of my reviews on Goodreads and

Here is a forum where you’re welcome to come join us and talk about contemporary literary fiction.

Optic Nerve by María Gainza

I just opened a discussion thread in my “newest literary fiction” goodreads group, where I asked people, here at the 3/4 mark for 2019, to name the one best book they’ve read this year…

And that gives me a delightful excuse to say over here on my blog how much I loved Optic Nerve by María Gainza.

What a wonderful novel. From the first page, I was immediately and intensely endeared to the narrator of Optic Nerve. I would follow this narrator on any reading journey, wherever she would lead me, because the places she leads me, sentence by sentence and chapter by chapter, are unexpected, wonderful, startling, and humane.

The chapters hang together loosely. There is no plot to speak of. And yet the pieces and digressions come together again and again to become something whole and true.

The novel situates you in the mind of an insightful person, and makes you wiser as she herself becomes wiser. Her epiphanies come to her through the experience of viewing art, and thinking about art deeply. She lets her experience of art reverberate through her life experience.

So, of course I love this novel, because at its core it is championing the idea that contemplation of the arts can be life-changing, enriching, devastating, and above all, an essential part of what makes us human.

To have an entire novel make this case, at a time in the world where there is so much ugliness, and so much attention given to economic utility over aesthetic utility, is a gift.

This is one of the most personally significant books I’ve read since Laurus by Evgenij Vodolazkin.

I spend more time on goodreads conversating about books than I do here on my blog–so here is a link to all of my goodreads reviews.

I just read my first Barbara Pym novel and was bowled over by its subtle truths. The author’s bio of Pym on the back of my copy of Jane and Prudence accuses her of writing primarily about “Anglican spinsters.” The phrase itself seems like it’s from another age, and so does this novel, about middle class British women making their way through the immediate postwar years. But that’s what makes it so amazing.

Pym’s women are intelligent and educated, and ambitious in their own way, but they never quite break free of their nineteen-fifties views of what women are meant to occupy themselves with–mainly, the occupation of finding a man to marry. Prudence might rebel against that fate, but she doesn’t rebel in a very serious way. Even if she doesn’t seem particularly attracted to marriage, her ambition goes no further than a series of romantic attachments with men, and she can’t imagine a life beyond the meaning these men give to her life.

Pym’s publisher dropped her abruptly in 1961 and she was out of print for fifteen years, which seems just about right, because her novels had no place in the decade of The Feminine Mystique. But going back to the novels after that turbulent era also seems right, because they capture a post-WWII mood so perfectly, and they are testaments to that time, and that world.

Many Pym readers are reminded of Jane Austen. I also felt that affinity, especially for the deft use of free indirect style, and the subtle bombs Pym crams into each paragraph, critiquing of the middle class and its values. But it’s a darker vision than Jane Austen, because these women know how silly their lives are, and how wasted their talents are, in a world that affords them so few choices. So where Austen’s novels are comedy-of-manners, Pym’s novels are tragedy-of-manners. You feel the loss of what these women might have become, in other circumstances.

Pym is a new and unexpected favorite author for me.

here are more of my reviews on goodreads, where I like to hang out and talk about books…

The Laws of the Skies by Grégoire Courtois

Here’s a lovely little tale about a class of six-year-olds on their first overnight camping trip. Things don’t go quite as expected. This very short novel is relentless, ruthless, and unbelievably cruel to both the reader and the characters alike. It gripped me, and it horrified me, and you should read it, not just because it gleefully stomps on every convention of story-telling, but also because it does so in such a clever, literary, and playfully metafictional way. Great fun. In its execution it reminds me of Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games.

here are more of my reviews on goodreads, where I like to hang out and talk books.

Threats by Amelia Gray

I just reread Threats for the third time, just to see if I can figure out how Amelia Gray does it.

At times the experience of reading Threats reminds me of having a conversation with a schizophrenic person: the grammatical logic is there, intact, but the semantic sense unthreads by the end of each sentence. You know it’s nonsense but still your mind grasps for meaning, and sometimes finds it. In other passages reading Threats was like looking at random patterns on a wall and finding faces there, because our minds are so good at imposing that kind of order on random things. Sometimes a verb or an adjective was so unexpected in a given sentence that I imagined the author playing Mad Libs.

And yet I am so moved by this writing. That is the amazement of this novel for me. This is a novel that nearly obliterates the typical relationship between novelist and reader. Novels usually engage parts of the brain that are rational, logical, social. That’s the kind of exchange between text and reader that novels can do well. Reading Threats was very different. I’m disoriented by this writing. I feel the book leaves me to flounder on my own. But then suddenly I find myself making connections. As I read I have feelings of compassion, recognition, and joy, feelings that may or may not be anything at all to do with the “author’s intent.” I also have the feeling that whatever I decide to feel or imagine is happening will be completely ok with Amelia Gray.

As I read this novel I try to think of literary precedents. “Lenz” by Buechner comes to mind, or in contemporary literature, Remainder by Tom McCarthy. A few reviewers mention that the novel reminds them of Murakami. But in Murakami’s novels any fantastic elements are corroborated by multiple characters, where I feel I can count on a certain mode of reality being the “correct” reality to believe in, within the framework of a Murakami novel. Threats gives me absolutely no framework to count on. No firm ground where I could say “this is really what I’m meant to believe is the ‘real’ for this novel.” The reality you believe in for a few pages is quickly undermined by a new happening. The disorientation is marvelous and though-provoking.

The word “original” is so sloppily used for almost everything that I almost hate to use it, but there it is: This is original writing. It gives me joy just to know that something so new and unexpected can still be written after all the thousands of years we humans have been writing stories.

An Orphan World by Giuseppe Caputo

An Orphan World is written in a tone that I would call playful, absurd, post-modern, and surreal. The story itself, on the other hand, is ugly, violent, and extreme. Tone and story clash jarringly for me here, making this a difficult book for me to interpret. The novel reminds me a great deal of Chilean-French director’s Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 2013 film “The Dance of Reality,” for the way it combines fantastic absurdity with horrific reality. It’s not a comfortable combination for me as a reader. So this novel is going on my “reread” list, because I feel like I didn’t understand it, and also, that it deserves a more open-hearted reading next time, when I’ll know what to expect.

In some places the scenic renderings are so visceral, and so full of smell and touch and need, that I had that delightful feeling as I read along that we readers get sometimes, too rarely, when we read something unlike anything we’ve read before. There is a father and son in this story who show their love for one another in goofy and particular and touching ways. The sea in this story offers up clocks that still work. A kelp-festooned couch on the beach becomes an absurd and effective representation of the poverty of the main characters. The writing throughout is poetic and pleasingly cryptic, with the exception of a passage that seems meant to bore me, as it demonstrates at length the inanity and emptiness of online sex.

While the story’s thematic undercurrent is serious—homophobic violence, and the degradations of poverty — the tone is so detached and absurd that these serious themes disturb me and unsettle me and distance me from the horrors. I felt little emotion as I read other than delight about the prose, and curiosity and puzzlement and occasional boredom about the story itself, especially when it turned to these darker themes. The second chapter, for instance, describes bodies after a horrific mass lynching. The bodies have been mutilated in what should have struck me as revolting ways, but the tone is so detached and absurd that my feeling was muted.

Maybe that was the point. Lately I’ve been having conversations elsewhere on GR about the way a writer might choose flat affectless prose to get to the truth of horrific themes, rather than trying to amp up the reader’s empathy artificially by writing emotionally. Colson Whitehead in The Nickel Boys for instance writes in a flat tone when describing the most horrific of realities in his novel. The tonal detachment here, though, was in the direction of a exaggerated surrealism, and not in the direction of trying to render a reality that allows readers to experience their own emotions. It will take some acclimation and hence my plan to read this novel again.

all my reviews on goodreads

Jacob Olson’s review of The Book of Dog on the “Reviews and Robots” blog focuses on The Book of Dog’s critique of American culture, something that no other review of my novel has emphasized. It made my day. For a small press author every review is a gift, and that is even more true when it feels like your book connects with an individual reader in exactly the way you intended.

From the review:

“The Book of Dog is one of the strangest books you’ll ever read, yet somehow it works. This apocalyptic tale of the coming of the rapture pairs American ignorance with freakish occurrences, sending the read on a dystopian path through the stories of six women and the inevitable end of the world as we know it. I can’t begin to describe how strange of a read this is, and I’m amazed at how well all of the bizarre pieces work together to create this inspiring story.”

Here is the full review, complete with a very cute, Apocalyptic Pug.

I’m so grateful to Ilana Lucas for including The Book of Dog by Lark Benobi in her review of “3 New Books About Unusual Woman Warriors,” published in the online magazine Brit + Co today. I especially liked this part:

“The book serves as a metaphor for female powerlessness in male and religion-dominated societies, but its six heroines are still willing to kick ass and take names…the irreverent and fantastical novel is filled with evocative, stylized cartoons and is an ode to friendship. Individually, they may not be able to change very much, but together, every dog has her day.”

Here is a link to the full review.

I feel really good when readers describe my book as an “ode to friendship,” in particular, as an ode to female friendship. The novel was inspired and shaped by my friendships with other women, especially the friendships I have made since November 2016, with women I’ve met at marches and readings and gatherings of like-minded crones… we women are just now beginning to find our collective political power.

As I write this I’m listening to Bob Woodward, Superhero, talking with Terry Gross about the most dangerous man who has ever sat in the White House. It seems likely I will be reading FEAR by Bob Woodward very soon, along with about a million other people.

But so many other readings–not all of them new–have helped me cope and helped me to understand the world, since Trump’s election. Here are a few off the top of my head. I’ll probably post some more later. Deepest apologies for these all being men, this time–I will make it up one day.

1. Frederick Douglass: “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” (July 5, 1852)  Douglass’s white friends seemed to think there was nothing untoward about asking a man who had suffered slavery to give the Independence Day address to the Ladies of Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester New York, and a time when nearly four million people were enslaved in the United States. What they got from Douglass was a masterpiece of rhetorical oratory and the most eloquent definition of white privilege ever written, even though the term ‘white privilege’ wasn’t current in the 19th century. After setting the 600 people at ease with his patriotic introduction praising the Founding Fathers, he confronts them with their hypocrisy, and asks: “why have you invited me to speak to you on your Fourth of July?…The Fourth of July is yours and not mine…You may rejoice, but I must mourn.” Profoundly moving. Douglass’s speech reminds me that we have been here before, and what is true and right is the same today as it was in Douglass’s time.
   
2. Runagate, Runagate: a poem by Robert Hayden. Hayden’s subject is the flight of enslaved African Americans to the north; with only slight changes it could just as well be about the flight of Latino refugees to the north. I like to be reminded that terrible things have been overcome before in this country.
3. Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera. A border story, about a very young woman making her way confidently and fearlessly through a world of men, many of whom wish to do her harm, and yet the young woman prevails, she triumphs, she finds a way to be fully alive and fully happy even with danger all around her. Much of what I love about Signs Preceding the End of the World has to do with what is not explained. The human relationships and even the landscape itself keep changing, shifting, in mirage-like realignments of feeling and color. The truth is never laid out in explicit detail and it seems right for the novel to remain in many ways unknowable, just as so many things that might happen on a journey across the border can’t ever be fully understood, or fully in control of those who make the journey. This novel gave me the sense of the border as an organic living country in its own right, with dignity as well as degradation, and hope as well as despair.
4. The Plot Agains America by Philip Roth. Ignore anything you have been told about Roth’s treatment of his female characters long enough to read this book. It is one of those rare books that, like 1984, seems to capture our age before it happens. Granted, I am a Roth fan, but believe me, the women here are the core of the story and they are beautiful and deeply imagined characters.
5. The Sarah Book by Scott McClanahan. I’ve already recommended this novel, here, when I said the novel taught me more about despair in West Virginia than reading sixteen billion profiles on Trump voters ever could. The people in McClanahan’s book seem real. Maybe they are. They are unique individuals who are coping with the stress of living in an impoverished state, where jobs are few, and hope is just a cynical memory of a feeling, and where becoming an addict seems like a reasonable life choice, and where living in a Wal-Mart parking lot is just the way things are. Read it to expand your empathy in an unexpected direction, perhaps.

well, five seems enough, for now.

buy The Book of Dog by Lark Benobi

Do you wake up every day as I do, to a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when clouds hang oppressively low in the heavens, and a crushing despair is strangling your soul, because your country is being led by an amoral, self-interested, ignorant, and possibly demented old man with his finger on the nuclear button?

Ok, true, the best solution for this feeling for each one of us to vote in the mid-terms, and volunteer at a phone bank or two, and do everything you can to avert this Apocalypse by voting them out in November.

But also, you could use some REALLY GOOD ESCAPIST LITERATURE just about now.

So here you go–my recommended required reading for times exactly like this one.

FIRST: READ ANYTHING BY POE. You probably haven’t thought of him for decades. Start with the lovely love story, Berenice, and then move on to the weirdest novel ever written, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. You will be so confused that you will momentarily forget your despair.

SECOND: Read PYM by Mat Johnson, which achieves the astounding outcome of making Poe’s novel funny. Best if read immediately following The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Pay attention to the dog backstory for best results.

THIRD: Read LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF JOAQUIN MURIETA: CELEBRATED CALIFORNIA BANDIT .

Novelist Tommy Orange mentions this novel in his 2018 novel, There There, in a somewhat disparaging way. Too bad. OMG, this is the best escapist novel I have ever read.  Published in 1854, it is probably the first novel written and published by a Native American author, John Rollins Ridge. It’s breathless and remarkable and pulpy and escapist but also it’s old enough to have become of interest to literary scholars who plumb its deeper meanings. Like in this essay, published in The Paris Review.

FINALLY, read Rootabaga Stories by Carl Sandburg.