Grit and Squalor Carpenter, Don (1966/2009). Hard Rain Falling. New York: New York Review Books Gritty is too mild a descriptor for this unrelentingly dark character study of a young man in Portland and San Francisco in the 1960’s. Jack … Continue reading
Hornby, Nick. (1995). High Fidelity. New York: Riverhead Books/Penguin. Well-written, Non-nutritive Imagine a character, thirty-five, who has the mind of a fifteen year-old. Would that be funny? It is mildly amusing in High Fidelity. Rob runs an obscure, used-record store … Continue reading
Mrs. Dalloway Meets Emma Bovary While The Sun Also Rises. Salter, James (1975/1995). Light Years. New York: Vintage. If you enjoy lyrical writing, fine descriptions, acutely observed personalities, this book is for you. It’s an impressionistic portrait of two main characters, … Continue reading
Zombie Professor Williams, John (1965). Stoner. New York: New York Review of Books, 278 pp. This is a well-written story of an average man who lives an average life. William Stoner, son of farmers in Missouri, goes off to college … Continue reading
Too Subtle For Words Briante, Susan (2011). The Market is a Parasite that Looks Like a Nest. Chicago: Dancing Girl Press. 16pp chapbook. www.dancinggirlpress.com. Susan Briante gave a poetry reading for the U of A Poetry center (http://poetry.arizona.edu/), in the … Continue reading
It Was A Dark and Stormy Tale Vann, David (2011). Caribou Island. New York: Harper-Collins, 293 pp. This is a dark, unrelenting story set in a dark, unrelenting land. A long-married, long-bickering couple try to build a log cabin by … Continue reading
Wealthy Drunks Swan About Europe Hemingway, Ernest (1926). The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner’s Sons. This was Hemingway’s first novel, written shortly after a visit to Spain, where the novel is mostly set. It famously features vividly colorful descriptions … Continue reading
A Smelly Book Suskind, Patrick (1986). Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. New York: Vintage. (Translated from the German by John E. Woods.) It’s difficult to conceptualize smells and to describe their essence in writing. Even familiar smells, like coffee … Continue reading
Bums with Feelings Kennedy, William (1983). Ironweed. New York: Penguin, 225 pp. This beautifully written novel is a character study of homeless alcoholics in Albany during the depression. Sounds depressing, but it isn’t, because the characters are so alive and … Continue reading
The Novel That Didn’t Know When to Stop Shacochis, Bob (2013). The Woman Who Lost Her Soul. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 713 pp. I’d characterize this as a spy thriller, in the camp of LeCarre, perhaps, although unlike LeCarre, … Continue reading