Don’t worry, there are no spoiler-alerts in this TFT review!

Answering this oft-posed question would subvert and demolish the immense pleasure of reading 11/22/63, Stephen King’s new epic, published sagaciously on the cusp of Zeitgist awareness that in two years’ time we will observe the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The ghost of America’s greatest homegrown philosopher, John Dewey (1859-1952), inventor of pragmatism, (and a Vermonter, I must add) obviously whispered his memorable credo into the ear of Hampden, Maine novice writer Stephen King four decades ago: “The local is the only universal.”

For his life’s work, King has hovered over, walked through, lived in, speculated about, exhaustively described, dissected, and, of course, ultimately loved, a resolutely-generic small town in Maine going by different names, but always coming to rest as the same richly-revealing place, “a burg off the main road that nobody cares about much, except for the people who live there.”

11/22/63 begins in just such a town — Lisbon Falls, Maine — where present-day high school English and Drama teacher Jake Epping is led to a dim staircase in the pantry of an outmoded diner, down which he crosses a portal that takes him into 1958, and to Derry, quintessential small town of King’s lifelong fears and fantasies. From there, by way of prelude to the larger cause, and urged on by the desperate pleas of a dying friend, Jake takes on the mission of preventing a horrific family mass murder – only to end up in Fort Worth and Dallas in the fateful years leading up to our blood-drenched national cataclysm.

Thanks to King’s prodigious imaginative and narrative gifts and — more crucially — to his lifelong hunger for a lost childhood world, we are drowning in a time of hula hoops, Lindy Hops, five-cent Cokes, jukeboxes, tailfins, back-seat necking, country stores, five and dimes and antique shops, bicycling newspaper boys, amiable dogs, good manners, smiling little old ladies, hitch-hiking, and Technicolor nostalgia.

The perverse counterpoint to this dreamy landscape comes in the hot, dry litany of names and locations with darker resonance: Dealey Plaza, the Texas School Book Depository, Parkland Memorial Hospital, and Love Field. All are revisited and described with haunted fidelity.

Assuming his new name and identity for “The Land of Ago” as George Amberson, inexperienced but doggedly-persistent gumshoe, Jake rents a couple of seedy apartments and hunkers down for three creepy, voyeuristic years with the obsessive purpose to stake out Lee Harvey and Marina Oswald, then intervene at the appropriate instant to save the future of mankind.

However, true to form, the past, “turning on a dime,” as King likes to say, throws its own obstacles across George’s path. The first is through the sweet, engaging personality of a “good-looking in an artless what you see is what you get American girl,” a willowy, witty and affectionate fellow-teacher named Sadie Dunhill with whom our hero falls hopelessly in love.

And love – as those of us familiar with Stephen King’s oeuvre already know – has a way of conquering all.

The other, more ambiguous impediment to George’s mission has to do with how the memory of the past becomes corrupted – or “compromised,” to use a current cliché – when you are actually in the past. This syndrome is hard to explain, of course, unless you have had the opportunity to occupy the past in the first place. Through a series of temporary obstructions to his momentum, George finds out the hard way that what he knowingly calls “the obdurate past” itself does not “know” its own future…the future toward which George is hurtling.

Remember, TFT Reader, no spoiler-alerts. So that’s all I’m going to say about that.

11/22/63, weighing in at 849 pages, is a lumbering juggernaut of a book. No need to be daunted by these numbers. It has all the gravitas of a Greek tragedy; we (think we) know what is destined to happen – and yet, are surprised and shocked when it actually occurs.

The tumultuous denouement of the story includes some harrowing set-pieces, as when George actually meets and locks eyes with “the man who was going to blow off the right side of Jack Kennedy’s head.” And ultimately, 11/22/63 poses far more questions than it answers. This is a novel that wants to know where the past resides, not simply what happened in it.

Stephen King regards the contextualizing of events – news as the first draft of history – with an historian’s dispassionate gaze, yet never loses sight of the fact that life is a story to be told. And the story is told in his always-engaging and intimate fashion. He creates and nurtures the comfortable effect of seeming to speak directly to the reader, while at the same time penetrating the psyche of a quasi-fictionalized madman and dragging you along for the ride.

The post The Historian’s Dispassionate Gaze: The TFT Review of Stephen King’s 11/22/63 appeared first on The Faster Times.

Bollen, an editor-at-large at Warhol’s magazine, Interview, tells the stories of a loosely connected band of New York City residents (mostly young and unsatisfied) post-9/11, and the same demographic who might subscribe to Interview. And The Lightning People is populated by characters you might imagine Bollen interviewing. Artists, mostly: writers, actors (my second-least-favorite type of artist), and one awkward photographer (my least-favorite). But also business people, snake experts, and conspiracy theorists. All of the characters get generous backstories (sometimes, I thought, a bit too generous) and interior lives, and the book adds up to 360 pages filled with small type. Which is pretty long for a first novel.

The Lightning People is certainly ambitious in scope. It has an interesting beginning, in which Bollen humorously binds the characters’ lives in Manhattan together using an urban legend. (Supposedly, the lack of the Twin Towers post-9/11 made it more likely that Manhattan residents would be hit by lightning. I fell for this literary trick, and spent the rest of the novel wondering when someone was going to be struck by lightning for real. When no one was, I realized how clever – and Warhol-like – the tactic was.) And it tells a worthy story of New Yorkers adrift in their city after a tragedy, but before any sort of resolution.

What it also has is some amazing prose. Every page of the novel contains striking imagery and beautiful lines. “Alexandra hissed,” Bollen writes. “’More nostalgia, the worst, most malicious strain. She stroked his cheek with her knuckles in consoling condescension, and her eyes hardened like she was dispensing some sage advice to the obstinately naïve.” It’s lines like these that kept me turning the pages, wishing I had a highlighter. Sort of like how I felt watching the Warhol movie about the Empire State Building, being awed by the light changing on the building’s face, but bored to screaming that’s all that happens in the movie.

About all those characters. The best-drawn of them, Joseph and Del, have recently gotten married, and Del has drama at work, where she works with snakes (literal and otherwise), while Joseph tries to forget a kind of prophecy of death: the male members of his family tend to die at the age of 31. If these were the only main characters in the novel, I would have been happy. Their marriage and the secrets that each is hiding from the other are plausible, and their boredom (and boring-ness) make sense. But more characters pile on top of these central two, and Bollen tells their stories with what appears to be a wildly varying degree of interest. William is sort of a bitter, washed-up actor, not getting calls from his brassy booking agent anymore. (Zzzz.) Madi is a businessperson who begins to develop a conscience, which makes her question her line of work. (And also would seem to make her belong to the realm of science fiction, if businesspeople of recent memory are any barometer.) Raj is Madi’s brother, a photographer who’s probably the least developed or sympathetic character in the book. He takes pictures of architecture, but secretly yearns to have a big art show.

One thing that really impressed me about Bollen’s characters was his effort to make the cast so diverse. There are Indians, Midwesterners, one native Greek. Maybe Bollen is making a point here about the uniformity of most characters in the typical “New York novel.” And, despite the characters’ seeming familiar, they all (mostly) are there for concrete, sensible reasons. The one exception, interestingly, is the sole gay character, Quinn. Bollen, who is gay, could surely have made this character the most interesting one in the book, but instead … there is no polite way to say it: Quinn is an embarrassing cliché. He’s a washed-up old queen living amidst “old photographs and dusty bric-a-brac,” fawning over a young, straight man, and HIV-positive, of course. When Quinn meets even further ignominy later in the novel, it almost seems like too much is being piled on this poor character.

Without giving away the novel’s ending, The Lightning People ends with a central mystery being resolved, and the characters moving on from twin tragedies. There’s some great, surprising stuff in the final chapters. For one, the novel’s villain gets away unpunished. There’s a visit to Greece, a chapter with some of the best writing in the book. Oh, and Raj has his big show! But then the paintings don’t sell, and so he must change, which he does, to his and Bollen’s credit.

I’m always tempted to see a novel like this as a “generational” novel, like Bright Lights, Big City, perhaps – a novel that seeks to tell the story of a time and of a type of person by telling the stories of a few. While Bollen cleverly throws a few bones to that trope – with his large cast, some drunkenness, and the general malaise of these pretty people – I choose to believe that Bollen merely wanted to tell a specific tale of specific people alive at a certain time. In this, he has succeeded.

The post Just Because It’s Boring Doesn’t Mean It’s Bad: The TFT Review of Christopher Bollen’s The Lightning People appeared first on The Faster Times.

Murakami cannot be praised without simultaneous mention of his longtime translator, Jay Rubin who – this time with the collaboration of Philip Gabriel – has delivered the smoothest flow of nearly one thousand pages you will ever encounter. The tone is uniformly quiet and undisturbed, despite the relentless succession of exquisitely disturbing circumstances.

1Q84 takes place in a perverse variant of the year 1984, by which I mean that it is both historically situated in that actual year, and tinted with resonance of Orwell’s dystopian vision. Aomame is an intelligent, attractive, kinky-ish 30-year-old exercise therapist with a weakness for designer outfits. She’s attracted to older men with thinning hair, and makes her living through a stealthy method of – shall we say? – taking people out of this world and depositing them into the next. Tengo is a strapping, singular fellow, a would-be novelist who lives alone, cooks elaborate meals, likes jazz, teaches math at a “cram school,” and writes fiction on the side; he has a lot in common with Haruki Murakami.

The novel is follows the lives of Aomami and Tengo, as they pursue separate meandering paths through Tokyo’s dense geographical and sexual labyrinths. Seemingly unattached to each other, their parallel lives imperceptibly, and then noticeabl,y begin to converge.

The fragile human magnet that eventually pulls them together is Fuka-Eri, a diminutive, wide-eyed teen-ager who has written a draft of a novel entitled Air Chrysalis. Tengo is enlisted by Fuka-Eri’s editor-publisher to help polish the manuscript so that the book can be entered in competition for The Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most–coveted literary award. We find out precious little about Air Chrysalis. Tengo’s top-secret labors are described with detailed superficiality. It soon becomes clear that we are reading a book called 1Q84 which, in and of itself, has constructed an alternative universe, within which one of the main characters is knitting together the undisclosed plot of another fiction which, likewise, portrays a made-up world invaded from time to time by a mysterious group of earthly alien troublemakers, The Little People – about whom, in this review, the less said the better.

Meanwhile, Aomame’s career is increasingly dominated by a reclusive heiress who subsidizes her murderous skills, setting Aomame upon the path of systematically assassinating men who have been abusive to women — with the ultimate prize in reach: the dreaded “Leader,” who masterminds a religious cult. It is to be Aomame’s final assignment, after which she will be forced to change her identity and disappear from public view forever. TFT readers…are you still with me?

Right about now, those of you in category (1) above are probably nodding your heads, thinking, “Well, this is par for the course with Murakami. All of his fictions, from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle to Kafka on the Shore to Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World, are characterized by alienated, post-modern existentialists, chock-full of sporadic and tantalizing sex, story-lines twisting vertiginously along on three levels simultaneously. You “newbies” in category (2) above, with no previous reference, are probably thinking, “This sounds like a very weird reason to spend $30…but what the heck!”

Suffice it to say that the disparate threads weave into a starkly-coherent and, I must tell you, very moving and romantic denouement. Aomame and Tengo realize they are drawn to each other – that, in fact, they cannot live without each other – and that, at all costs, they must find each other before it is too late; the monosyllabic and haunting Fuka-Eri is their knowing catalyst.

This is a book with characters who succeed in inspiring empathy no matter how close to the edge of feasibility they stray. It is therefore a book for everyone who loves language. Indeed, the best way to read 1Q84, as with all of Murakami, is to allow him to seduce you with his formidable yet gentle narrative skills.

Few other writers on the present scene have the superhuman ability to bend the literary medium to such hypnotic effect. Here we have a modern master at the top of his game.

The post Universes Within Universes: The TFT Review of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 appeared first on The Faster Times.

Made up of nineteen well-constructed vignettes, many no longer than just a few pages, the book explores the childhoods of three half-white, half-Puerto Rican brothers as they are alternately terrified and charmed by their parents, their neighbors, and their surroundings. If you add “until one of the boys [spoiler alert!] starts getting turned on by dudes,” that’s pretty much the whole plot.

But Torres isn’t necessarily a plot kind of writer. He’s more concerned with the characters’ odd, ringing language. Much of the book is written in the seldom-used first person plural point-of-view, which turns out, as it happens, to be the perfect way to capture the inner lives of three young brothers who are close in age, growing up together. “’Us hungry,’ we said to Ma when she finally came through the door. ‘Us burglars,’ we said to Paps the time he caught us on the roof … and later, when Paps had us on the ground and was laying into Manny, I whispered to Joel, ‘Us scared.’”

It gradually turns out that the boys have good reason to be scared. The family dynamic here is obviously fraught with violence, though the violence mostly takes place off the page. It comes out, to great effect – again, in language – in what the boys say as they play. When they toss a ball around, they imitate their father with each smack the ball makes: “This is for raising your voice,” “And this is for embarrassing me in public,” “And this is for doing something,” “And this is for doing nothing.” Torres’ language perfectly ties danger–when the brothers fight, they fight “kennel-style”–to family; when their mother gets her toenails painted, one of the brothers proudly notes that she’s “toe proud. Toe crazy.’” There are no milquetoast characters; everyone is either hilarious or histrionic, passionately loving or creepy. (Some, like the boys’ parents, are all four at once.) In a memorable scene towards the middle of the book, the boys pretend to hide from their parents, but when they’re ignored, they dare to tickle and slap them, shouting “because you’re bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, why don’t you do right, why can’t you do right…” Although Torres wisely resists the urge to depict child abuse in explicit scenes–Sapphire may have ruined that tactic for everyone–he can’t help letting the reader in on the fact that there’s more going on with this particular family than meets the eye. A co-dependent mother and father with no boundaries, for one.

Speaking of Sapphire, while reading We the Animals, I found myself thinking for some reason about her novel Push, made recently into the movie Precious. After I saw Precious — and was moved to tears by the performances in it — I was stunned when friends of mine said they hated it, that it was a shame that this type of novel is the only kind that tends to get published about poor minorities. I mean, I see their point, but I ultimately feel that writers should be allowed to just tell a story, and not have the story be thought of as representative of the characters’ race, or economic status, or anything. But Push is an interesting book to compare with We the Animals. If you like books that portray parents as evil abusers, and children as noble, tragic victims, this might not be the one for you. It’s more nuanced than that. The boys are obviously loved, and they obviously adore their parents. They have great imaginations, like many children do. When the family is together, they’re often having real fun together–although sometimes the fun reads as slightly sexualized, which may make you wonder where the book is heading. The book is set upstate, though the parents are from Brooklyn, and you can infer, if you like, that real sacrifices have been made to bring the boys up away from the concrete jungle, away from bad influences. Sapphire and Justin Torres are two very different writers, of course – one is a poet who chose painful, immensely evocative language for her first novel – and the other is a first-time novelist whose style is more oblique but still very powerful. I had similar complaints about both books, too–in We the Animals, as in Push, the ending feels very rushed for some reason.

By the end of We the Animals, Torres has cleverly switched away from first person plural to the more standard first person singular, focusing on the book’s main narrator, the brother who might be gay. Then he switches perspectives yet again. The changes in perspective, from “we” to “I” to “the boy” let us know, however abruptly, that things can’t go on like they have before. The boys are growing up. They have distinct personalities. One of them likes to have sex with bus drivers. In the final page of the book, the fate of the narrator is revealed in such spare language that it seems almost brusque. But again, that’s the power of We the Animals – it made me care for the characters so much that I wanted a lengthier, happier resolution.

The press materials that accompany the book suggest that We the Animals is at least semi-autobiographical. For Torres’ sake, I hope that some of the book’s underlying terror was exaggerated. But I’m glad that he was moved to turn the experience of childhood–scary, fun and completely unpredictable for most of us–into all of this beautiful language.

The post The Language of Childhood: The TFT Review of Justin Torres’ We the Animals appeared first on The Faster Times.

If Bolaño was yesterday’s drug of choice—deluding us with youth, intoxicating us with a sense of literature’s wilder, life-altering capacities—Lerner could be, should be, tomorrow’s homegrown equivalent. His novel’s hero Adam Gordon is a hash-and potsmoker, a problem drinker and Internet addict in denial (tropes he’d ironize even while denying irony), and, but this is “true,” a liar. He’s also an American poet on fellowship in Madrid during the time of the Atocha Station bombings. Broken like a line between two women, the embodied enjambment of the political and the aesthetic (were those the antipodes? all poets always seem just a decade out of college), Gordon comes to hate himself, or not to hate himself, or to both hate and not himself simultaneously.

The post Avant Slackerism at Its Best: The TFT Review of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station appeared first on The Faster Times.

I thought of Tolstoy too, reading Train Dreams, but not of the story Wood mentions. (Tolstoy’s answer to his own titular question, by the way, is “just enough to be buried in.”) I thought of Harold Bloom’s chapter on Tolstoy in The Western Canon. Bloom writes, “Tolstoy was moved not so much by a commonplace fear of dying or death as by his own extraordinary vitality and vitalism, which could not accommodate any sense of ceasing to exist.” Vitality, for Bloom, means that life overflows with life, is super-saturated, complete in itself while also in some sense exceeding itself. But, Bloom warns us, “[n]othing is got for nothing, and certain strong writers (women as well as men) cannot achieve their aesthetic splendor without solipsism.” Elsewhere in the essay Bloom writes, “What Nietzsche called ‘the primordial poem of mankind,’ the cosmos as we have agreed to see it, is reperspectivized by Tolstoy. Reading him incessantly, you don’t so much begin to see what he sees, you start to realize how arbitrary your own seeing tends to be. Your world is much less abundant than his, since he somehow manages to suggest that what he sees is at once more natural and yet more strange.”

The last line of the Bloom quote is of course adapted from Wallace Stevens, another great American original, whose poem “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” concludes:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw

Or heard or felt came not but from myself;

And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

One gets a similar sense reading Johnson: while in his writerly company you cannot help but believe that the world is a function of his apprehension of it, and it is this quality that lends his matchless prose its sense of having been less written than received, an effortless and profound transmission, radio waves unscrolling in the black sea between the prairie and the star map—all that heady bullshit, but ringing true.

Several critics—Wood, for one, and also Anthony Doerr, writing in the New York Times Book Review—have mentioned that there is a connection between Train Dreams and Johnson’s novel, The Name of the World, which came out in 2000. The connection, as they have it, is that both books are slender, and each features a male protagonist who has lost a wife and young daughter to an accident—a car crash in The Name of the World, a wildfire in Train Dreams. That’s true, but it is not the whole truth. What I mean is that though much about the men is different, even opposite—their intellects, their stations, their eras—they share more than the nature of their losses. Each man consigns himself to loneliness, struggles to persist in the world of regular things (crucially, each man succeeds in living some version of an “everyday life”), refuses any woman who wants him, and suffers mightily for the love and absence of an unknowable, perhaps non-existent God.

Michael Reed, narrator of The Name of the World, is capable of telling his own story and willing to tell it. He has a cushy job he doesn’t want at a university of no particular distinction. He has followed a red-headed art student named Flower Cannon to a church outside of town:

“Fourteen rows, about a dozen folks on each side of the aisle: nearly three hundred people, all singing beautifully. I wondered what it must sound like out in the empty green fields under the cloudless blue sky, how heartrendingly small even such a crowd of voices must sound rising up into the infinite indifference of outer space. I felt lonely for us all, and abruptly I knew there was no God.”

Robert Grainier, the protagonist of Train Dreams, cannot or will not tell his own story, and so Johnson tells it for him, which is to say about him. Whereas The Name of the World grants us a mere slice of Reed’s life (the novel spans a period of roughly a year) Grainier’s life is presented in something like its entirety. He is born at or around the dawn of the 20th century and dies in the late ‘60s, having been a laborer and man of faith all of his days. Here he is on a visit to Bonners Ferry, the Idaho town on whose outskirts he lives:

“Over on Second Street, the Methodist congregation was singing. The town of Bonners made no other sound. Grainier still went to services some rare times, when a trip to town coincided. People spoke nicely to him there, people recognized him from the days when he’d attended regularly with Gladys, but he generally regretted going. He very often wept in church. Living up the Moyea with plenty of small chores to distract him, he forgot he was a sad man. When the hymns began, he remembered.”

You wouldn’t know it from the way I’ve been talking about it, but Train Dreams is also very funny. Quirky, colorful, off-beat characters intrude on Grainier’s solitude at regular intervals, each one a babbling fool. There are roughnecks and Indians and a man dying in the woods of knife wounds to the backs of his knees. When a risque film screens in town Grainier is nearly done in with lust by the word “pulchritude” on a promotional poster. A man reports himself shot by his own dog.

The Name of the World is a funny book, too—at one point, Reed walks into a room in which Flower Cannon is presenting a performance art project: she’s shaving her vagina in front of her whole class. All Johnson’s books are pretty funny, it’s just hard to remember this about them because they are so much more, or other, than works of comedy, even as comedy seems essential to their being. Jesus’ Son, a collection of linked stories that launches a thousand MFA theses annually, is narrated by a world-class loser junkie—such a fuck-up that he’s actually named Fuckhead—but the stories have such individual and aggregate vitality that not even twenty years of all the love in the world has been able to blunt their impact, render them familiar, or stale their jokes.

Padgett Powell once wrote that Johnson “takes loss through some kind of sound barrier, past which celebrations of joy in destitution appear. For clean line, for deftness, for hard honest comedy there is no better than Denis Johnson.” That seems exactly right to me, and as good a note to end on as any—better, probably, than whatever crescendo I might have otherwise lathered myself towards. But I guess I shouldn’t just end this essay by quoting an old blurb, so let me say that the one thing that gave me pause about Train Dreams was that instead of feeling complete unto itself it made me want to re-read The Name of the World. After reading them back to back I’m honestly not sure which one is better. The “right answer” of course is the new book, because it’s set in the wild past and is about a guy who works with his hands and because it’s the new book, whereas The Name of the World is about mid-life bourgeois ennui and is, among other things, a campus novel. But perhaps it is not (should not be) necessary to choose.

It seems to me that Train Dreams is not, in the final analysis, a repetition, a re-visitation, or a re-imagining of The Name of the World. I believe that the books have a binary relationship, yin and yang, achieving completion through their starkest contrasts, by the seed of each implanted in the eye of the other. You should read them both.

TFT Exclusive: Train Dreams Webclip by The Faster Times

The post Life Overflows With Life: The TFT Review of Train Dreams by Denis Johnson appeared first on The Faster Times.

The novel opens in 1836 in South Africa, where Catherine Colebrook is preparing to depart for Ceylon, a British colony off the coast of India (present-day Sri Lanka). Colebrook, an flexible stand-in for Cameron, is fascinated by the process of capturing images on tin or copper; she has heard about the technique from Sir John Holland, a visiting lecturer. At the same time she begins to develop her interest in Sir John’s photographic equipment, Catherine’s husband, Charles, an old diplomat, struggles with tensions between the English and the indigenous population of Ceylon, who crave sovereignty and, above all, dignity. After an altercation leaves a boy, Eligius, without his father, Catherine and Charles bring on the boy as a servant.

During each event in his novel, Rocklin’s wide-angle lens allows him to capture the prejudices of Victorian England and the political complexities of Ceylon, but his large aperture means that the drama plays out in tight focus, on an intimate, human scale. Catherine and Eligius in particular sketch out the anxieties of the world they live in. It’s a rewarding technique. By tethering the abstract problems of colonial occupation to specific people, Rocklin explores the hardships both sides face—both the occupiers and the occupied. What emerges is a remarkably human look at problems that are too often obscured by the language of academia: postcolonial ideology, colonial critique, and subaltern voices (people outside the hegemonic power structure).

More striking than Rocklin’s theories, though, are his sentences. His language is precise. He knows each term relating to life in Ceylon, and he fits those words into situations as the story develops. He vividly renders customs, clothing, food, and geography. At times, the unfamiliar words—coupled with the lyrical force of Rocklin’s prose—can cause the action to grow cloudy. Usually, though, that isn’t a problem. The effect is a novel in in portraits, where the action accommodates beautiful imagery. Rocklin writes especially well about light and its physical properties. His flexible syntax and far-ranging vocabulary add texture and depth to a compelling era, and his unique style allows The Luminist to rise above a host of other novels concerned with colonial injustice. His precision also benefits him when he writes about photography:

Over the course of February and March, Catherine and Sir John experimented with various chemical combinations. They used guncotton to bathe the plates in silver salt. They lacquered skins of collodion onto them and potassium mixed with oil of lavender to lend flexibility. They conversed in drams and durations. Light and shadow became their accomplices. … Sir John taught her and Eligius how to grind and polish glass for lenses. They reconfigured the camera’s plate holder with a spring-loaded trap of imported rosewood. For the collodion and silver salt, Eligius constructed vertical baths so the plates might be coated evenly. On his own he experimented with mirrors and angles. By spring he’d created his own topography of the light’s possibilities in Holland House. (p. 219).

In the age of the thinly-veiled autobiographical novel, where many works of fiction might as well be exaggerated memoirs, The Luminist celebrates another tradition: The ability of an author to put himself inside the head of other people, to explore a culture vastly unlike his own. Rocklin grew up in Chicago and attended Indiana University; he attended law school and lives in California, far from the mud-caked, rain-soaked world of Ceylon. To so deeply inhabit the hardships of people oppressed by the British empire is a risk, but in this case it’s a risk that pays off handsomely. This tradition, the novel as an act of empathetic imagination, sometimes gets overlooked in creative writing classrooms, where conventional wisdom often encourages students to “write what they know.” By eschewing this advice, though, and striking out into the uncertain world of 19th century colonialism, Rocklin manages to do what the critic David Kirby (in an essay called “Ghosts and Gadabouts”) said the American novel does best: refract the diffuse light of everyday existence into the concentrated radiance of art.

The post Let There Be Light: The TFT Review of The Luminist by David Rocklin appeared first on The Faster Times.

Willa’s life, and the facade of her happy family is forever changed when her father, who she barely remembers, kills his young wife and two daughters. His killing spree ends when he’s shot by police on Willa’s doorstep (her family had moved to a motel by then), carrying the severed head of her third half sister she never knew existed. Willa realizes she had a whole family she never knew, including a half brother a few years her senior who’s still alive, and she knows she can never go back to the Norman Rockwell existence her mother had tried so hard to create.

So she travels to the town she was born in, where her mother won’t return, and spends her days going to her dead siblings’ funeral, visiting her grandparents’ graves, and trying to figure out what it means to come from a monster.

This book is heavier than a twelve-hour marathon of SVU, but the incredibly sad and confusing subject matter is not overly dwelled upon. Rather, the focus shifts to the real emotional growth Willa experiences. None of the characters let Willa feel sorry for herself, though the reader might, and by bypassing a pity party Willa gains insight that is far beyond her teenage years .

The post A Deep Cut: The TFT Review of Susan Beth Pfeffer’s Blood Wounds appeared first on The Faster Times.

Holding no real authority other than what he can conjure, Calvin promotes safety like it’s fascist propaganda; “You’ve got nothing to fear if you’ve done nothing wrong,” he says, “Even quite old ladies knew to say ‘CCTV’ now.” When a young girl named China is abducted and swarms of media descend on this retirement community by the sea, John Calvin’s lust for information reaches a fever pitch and the ensuing conflict provides the meat for the rest of the novel. In a wicked bit of irony, Hensher situates the viewpoint of the reader firmly in the central tower of Bentham’s notorious cylindrical prison, as the overbearing and caustic eye of the narrator becomes the most ruthless surveillance method in the book—the reader is privy to the town’s secrets, even as they try to hide them from each other. But the question is, can a town be too safe?

Hensher is of the mind that in order to preserve some semblance of privacy, a certain amount of collateral criminal damage must be endured. Or in other words, there is a reason why a Utopia won’t work. Though it may be premature to call Phillip Hensher’s latest novel of small town Britain prophetic, given the recent scandal involving Emperor Murdoch and Google, and though this idea is not necessarily new, Hensher’s approach to the topic of surveillance, tampering and general busy-body-ness hits refreshingly close to home. The reader never gets the sense that Hensher is making a prediction, like a futuristic satire a la Big Brother in 1984, and rather, that this sort of thing is happening everyday, in little towns all over Britain, and probably the world.

On top of all that, King of the Badgers is also about rampant drug fueled orgies, abused and poor children, and the endemic plague of mediocrity that has infected modern society as our desensitization to atrocity and violence has created a herd of animals where once sentient beings roamed. Hensher’s critique is biting and without remorse. As Hensher details the lives and thoughts of the residents of Hanmouth, a picture of dark intentions and less than wholesome goings on behind closed doors, begins to show like a malignant tumor beneath the flawless tan skin of the village. The owners of the artisinal cheese shop, Sam and Harry, host parties for a group calling themselves “the Bears,” which entail lengthy hours of sex with multiple partners, leather outfits, and gargantuan quantities of cocaine. The abducted girl China is locked in a basement and repeatedly raped by a Hanmouth resident who got lost on his way to the casting for the British Deliverance—how she got there is representative of some of the most egregious and despicable parenting ever documented. Family man, Kenyon, witnesses a random public shooting from the train window as he commutes back to Hanmouth from Paddington Station in London and wonders at the innate horror of the moment; that what was most “noteworthy to Kenyon, [was] that a train had managed its departure at the exact same moment, as if the shooting were no more than a trivial and irrelevant part of the station’s normal work.” Hensher’s largest jab here, just below the belt buckle, seems to be that these rather unwholesome events that are hard to watch on the page, have become commonplace, as real life instances of this type of human behavior can be found in the daily news (google Shannon Mathews for Hensher’s inspiration for China). Hensher delivers a seamless invective, which, delightfully, begins to make John Calvin’s formerly heinous surveillance seem almost a welcome deterrent to what is going on in the town. But as the book moves forward, it materializes that the CCTV is responsible for nothing save scratching up an old widow’s house paint, let alone keeping anyone safe, and Hanmouth is left to wonder if the real question here is if anything at all will ever make it safe to be alive?

Though Hensher’s prose isn’t exactly the flashiest or most inventive, he maintains a strict control of the narrative and commands the plot. The stories of the fifteen or so main characters all intertwine and drape across each other in true epic British style, though it never spirals out of control. And by the end of the novel there is left a tightly woven tapestry depicting a candid snapshot of what our society has become. Kenyon gets a job with the new “Defecit Unit” in the Treasury because of the “sticky situation” created by giving “such a lot of money to those awful bankers,” and a hefty bonus for taking the job. China is saved from her captor by a well-informed, septic tank repairman who heard she was missing on the television. And Sam and Harry don’t change, despite a cease and desist letter from John Calvin, realizing that the most wonderful thing about a Saturday night in is being alone; “that there was no one counting, or watching.”

The post Can a Town Be Too Safe? : The TFT Review of King of the Badgers by Phillip Hensher appeared first on The Faster Times.