The Minireviews (Books 7-9)

I'm on pace to read over 150 books this year.  If there's one thing I can guarantee, it's that I won't read 150 books this year.  It's just that I've been in a sort of reading zone since Christmas.  Nothing much else--TV, movies, music--has mattered.  That, and the fact that I have a nice, healthy stack of potentially good reads piled on my desk has helped keep nose to page these last three weeks.  It'll all come to an end soon enough.  And there is Vollmann's brick sitting toward the bottom of the pile which will probably drop my three books a week average down a couple of books.  We'll see.

Anyway, here's the latest round of minireviews.  If you have any interest in keeping up with what I've been reading, you can find the previous six books that I've finished and minireviewed here.

*****

Book Seven

I.
by Stephen Dixon
McSweeney's
Novel; 338 pp.
Finished 1/14/06

The first thing one notices about Stephen Dixon's I. is the cover design:  a maroon hardback with the title "I." cut out to reveal a sketch of the writer's face staring through with his sad, stressed-filled eyes.  Maybe it was the admiration of the design that made me completely miss the fact that this book isn't what I thought it was.  See, it took me three or four stories--or parts, or sections--to realize that I wasn't reading a collection of stories, but that the book was, in fact, a novel.  Says so right on the title page, "I., A Novel."  But I skipped right over that to what I thought were stories, and to be honest, the book reads just fine that way.  I. is about a guy named I., an aging writer, father of two, husband to a wife who has a debilitating disease which forces I. to care for her, often against his will, and whose disease constantly reminds I. of his own mortality.  Each chapter--or section, or story--deals with I.'s relationship to one of these aspects of his life.  And always at the heart of these relationships is I.'s craft, his writing.  Some stories deal with the writer directly or with the craft of writing.  At times, the novel reads as if it were a sketch done by a writer trying to come to terms with what he's doing. One section may be in first person; the next in third.  A single story, "Detours," shifts from first to third to second as I. himself tries to figure out the best way to tell the story. And sometimes an item presented one way in one story will be different by the time it comes up again.  There's nothing linear, but things rarely are straightforward in Dixon's writing.

*****

Book Eight

Our Napoleon in Rags
by Kirby Gann
ig Publishing
Novel; 211 pp.
Finished 1/16/06

I'm sure most of us have spent enough time in dive bars to have met a guy like Haycraft Keebler, the protagonist of Kirby Gann's Our Napoleon in Rags.  He's a man full of ideas and ideals, with plans to save the world, or at least his part of it.  He's driven and he wants nothing more than for everyone around him to feed off of his passion and assist in the pursuit of his goal.  He's thwarted at every turn, either by the pessimism of his fellow bar regular Romeo Diaz or the actions of the corrupt cops or the jaded realism of the bar owners.  Ultimately his Achilles' heel is love, or what he believes to be love, of a 15-year-old, paint huffing street hustler and the disappointment and betrayal of not having that love requited to the degree he feels it should.  What he doesn't realize is that he has made a difference.  Perhaps not on the scale that he envisioned, but in some ways more profound.  He's changed lives for the better.  The novel is set, appropriately enough, in Don Quixote, a dive bar complete with a windmill entrance and a bust of Cervantes located in the heart of the heart of a crumbling neighborhood.  Though I'm often skeptical of novels set in bars, having spent so much time in them myself, I found Gann's portrait of the downtrodden regulars at the Quixote original and daring.  For one, Gann's writing is almost Victorian in tone.  In fact, it takes a while to get accustomed to the language and sentence structure of the novel.  But then once you get used to it, it seems a perfect fit.  At times the novel drags toward some obvious resolutions and some of the peripheral action tends to diminish the novel's focus, but overall, this is a nice work and worthy of the praise that it has received.

{More on Gann at his site.}

*****

Book Nine

Bitter Milk
by John McManus
Picador
Novel; 195 pp.
Finished 1/19/06

A sometimes precocious, often confused, overweight nine-year-old boy, Loren, raised by a single mom in the shadow of an east Tennessee mountain, a mom with gender dysphoria who disappears to have a sex change operation, leaving the boy with his not-so-caring relatives, all narrated by the boy's imaginary friend in one continuous scene without the benefit of quotation marks or a hiatus, this is what you have in John McManus's first novel, Bitter Milk.  At times funny, at times downright depressing, the book was definitely hard to put down mostly thanks to this single, unbroken scene and the way that McManus keeps us wondering if we'll ever get to the truth of the many secrets that seem to be hidden just beyond our grasp, and just out of Loren's range of comprehension.  I did have some problems with Loren as a character.  At some moment's he's too smart for his age, able to think his way out of difficult situations one moment, but then he's unable to figure out some of the more obvious things, like his mother's disappearance.  Some of this can be explained by his own denial of the situation and the fact that the narrator--Loren's imaginary friend--seems willing to give us only the information that will make him (the narrator) appear to be the only person capable of taking care of the boy.  Overall, I was impressed with this novel.  McManus has given us a nice though terrifying portrait of some backwood and backward mountain folks and this portrait will stick with you for a long time.

{see SlushPile's interview with McManus here}

Comments

[ed]

Damn, Jeff, if this is a race, you're kicking my ass. Maybe I should stop producing podcasts and stop dating and stop taking classes and stop hanging out with friends. Maybe I should lay off the Perlman and get several 200 page books under my belt to catch up. :)

But in all seriousness, it's really cool that this whole reading challenge thing has generated so many posts of people writing about the books they read. Keep up the good work!

[lucina]

i can't believe how many you read *and* minireview. i can not wait to get my hands on your library! ps i really liked the people of paper and now am off on the hummingbird's daughter. thx for the recs. just got a lil catchin up to do it seems.

[Dan Wickett]

Great selections Jeff - I loved the Gann and McManus (look for his two short story collections if you've not read them already!), and the Dixon is in my pile.