Book Reviews

Cheryl Strayed

Alfred A. Knopf

Tana French

Viking

Jonathan Safran Foer

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Steven Pinker

Viking

Larry Colton

Crown

Hardwired to tell our stories

In Ridley Scott’s classic sci-fi film, Blade Runner, the dying leader of the replicants (androids programmed with built-in termination dates) recalls the extraordinary experiences he has had and sadly realizes “all those moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain.”

There seems to be something hardwired into us humans that makes us want to tell our stories. From prehistoric cave paintings to the current plethora of self-published memoirs, we seem to have this deep need to leave some kind of testament that we were here, and that what we personally experienced was significant and worth sharing.

Larry Colton, the featured writer at this year’s Word Catcher event and author of Goat Brothers and Counting Coup, tells the stories of four men in his most recent book, No Ordinary Joes.

Chuck Verhalin of Dundee, New York, Bob Palmer of Medford, Oregon, Tim McCoy of Dalhart, Texas, and Gordy Cox of Yakima, Washington were all serving on the submarine USS Grenadier when it was damaged fatally by an aerial torpedo on April 23, 1943, and sank to the bottom of the Strait of Malacca. Through a daring maneuver, the crew was able to float the sub slowly to the surface where they were met by a Japanese warship and became prisoners of war.

Had they known what was ahead of them, the crew might have chosen to remain on the ocean’s bottom. Like Dick Cheney, the Japanese military could not be bothered with the niceties of the Geneva Convention, and the brutality, even outright cruelty, the prisoners experienced from their guards is harrowing to read.

The majority of the book covers their experiences as sailors, then prisoners, each chapter written from one of the four men’s viewpoints. Eventually, with the war’s end, they were liberated and returned to a very different America than they had left. All settled into civilian life, finding wives, having children, and making a living.

We are then shuttled sixty years into the future where these young men are now old men in their eighties, “whose lives describe the lifetime burden of war.” Each has problems with alcohol, women, and with their sons.

They wanted their stories told, and Colton performed a tremendous service to them by writing this book. It’s perhaps unfortunate that none of the four lived to read it. But then, the stories we want to leave aren’t intended for us anyway.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (April 15-May 14, 2012.) Reprinted with permission.

Katherine Boo

Random House

Too poor to afford the luxury of guilt

Along the roadway leading to the Mumbai International Airport, there is a long concrete wall covered with sunshine-yellow advertisements for floor tiles with the running slogan, “Beautiful Forever.” On the other side of the wall is the vast sprawling slum of Annawadi.

Katherine Boo, Pulitzer-prize winning reporter and staff writer for The New Yorker, spent three years getting to know the inhabitants of Annawadi, and has written a powerful and moving account of their lives that resembles a Dickens novel more than a sociological study.

Certainly, many are characters worthy of Dickens: wily and cunning Asha, who aspires to become a slumlord; Fatima the One Leg, hysterical and bitter, whose desperate self-immolation will scorch many innocent lives; Corporator Subhash Sawant, elected official of the slum district, epitomizes the corrupt politician, dressed in his white safari suit with “enough oil in his hair to fry garlic.”

And, as in any good Dickens tale, there are the waifs: Abdul, a youth who works hard as a garbage trader, supporting his disabled father and mother and their large family; Manju, Asha’s lovely 18-year old daughter, who aspires to teach and help others out of their poverty, a rare beautiful flower in a fetid swamp; and Sunil, a twelve year old street urchin who looks nine due to malnourishment, living by his wits and continually dreaming of a better life.

Dickens wrote his popular stories against the backdrop of the social ills of his time, a lesson Boo has learned. She portrays corruption in India as a way of life, among the politicians (to be expected), but also in the hospitals, schools, and the so-called justice system. When Abdul is falsely accused of a terrible tragedy, the court has him examined to determine whether he, at five-foot-one and weighing 105 pounds, is a minor or an adult. If determined to be an adult, he goes to the notorious Arthur Road prison where he faces rape and brutality while awaiting trial. After examining him, the doctor tells Abdul that he is seventeen years old if he pays four thousand rupees, twenty years old if he doesn’t.

An economic pecking order exists in the slum where the destitute prey on those even more destitute than themselves, and life is reduced to its basics: a 2-year old whose chronic ill health is draining a family’s meager resources “accidentally” drowns in a basin of water. The people of Annawadi are so poor they can’t even afford the luxury of guilt. Human values, like dignity, compassion, honesty, are subordinated to the primary value of survival.

Boo concludes, “It is easy, from a safe distance, to overlook the fact that in undercities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good. The astonishment is that some people are good, and that many people try to be…”

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (June15-July 14, 2012.) Reprinted with permission.

Charlotte Rogan

Little, Brown and Company

Three weeks adrift in a metaphor

I first read Lord of the Flies when I was in seventh grade. When I read it several years later in high school, I was surprised that it was the same book. Instead of a simple boys adventure story, the novel had become something much deeper and darker, and layered with meanings.

I had this same sense when reading Charlotte Rogan’s The Lifeboat; that it was a metaphor for humanity.

The story is set in 1914. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife have just been assassinated and the world is rapidly moving toward global war. But it could just as well be 2014, as the planet teeters toward ecological cataclysm.

Like many of us, the passengers on the ocean liner, Empress Alexandra, choose to remain oblivious to the disaster coming. “Imagine, all that fuss about one dead duke,” says Grace Winter, the 22-year old narrator. Newly wed, she is more concerned about how her husband’s mother will accept her.

Following a mysterious explosion, the ship sinks, and Grace joins an overcrowded lifeboat (It seems a requirement in survival literature that the lifeboat must be overcrowded).

Mr. Hardie, one of the ship’s crew, takes charge; he knows what needs to be done. He beats away the swimmers with an oar, since they would sink the boat. Civilization depends upon its Hardies (hard versus soft?) to do the ugly things that must be done and that most of us wouldn’t have the nerve to do. They leave a small child in the water, clinging to its dead mother.

Opposing Mr. Hardie is the formidable Mrs. Grant, “holding the higher moral ground,” who will come to challenge his authority. She would have saved the child; she would have probably tried to save the desperate swimmers who would then have capsized the lifeboat and all would have drowned. Grace is caught between the two of them.

Like most survival stories, the novel may be taken as an allegory for what happens when life is reduced to its basics. The news is not encouraging. It was three weeks before the survivors were rescued, and Grace, now on trial for murder, realizes that “The bare bones of our natures were showing…I couldn’t see that there was anything good or noble left once food and shelter were taken away.”

The story can be enjoyed (if that’s the right word) purely as a survival epic, or as a metaphor for humanity. There are the strong, the weak, the self-sacrificing, and the majority who just cling to their life(boat) each day.

The good news is that most are rescued; but they now must live with “survivor’s guilt”—the suspicion that one’s survival perhaps wasn’t worth the cost.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (August 15-September 14, 2012.) Reprinted with permission.

Gillian Flynn

Crown Publishers

Anatomy of a marriage, and maybe murder

In my university philosophy class, we were told that, in addition to the partners, any relationship also contains each partner’s projection of the other person—how we see him or her—so that when two people go to bed together, there are actually four people in that bed. I suspect Professor Canning’s more profound point was lost on our group of college sophomores, fantasizing with glazed eyes being part of a foursome.

Who we are and who we seem is key to Gillian Flynn’s mystery thriller, Gone Girl. We are reminded that things are not always as they appear. In fact, things rarely are.

Amy Elliot Dunne is missing; there are signs that she was abducted, possibly killed, and her husband, Nick Dunne, looks like the prime suspect.

The novel is narrated by Nick and Amy in alternating chapters, Amy through her diary, providing the anatomy of a marriage, and possibly a murder. We learn of their previously happy marriage in New York City (“We do silly things, like last weekend we drove to Delaware because neither of us ever had sex in Delaware”) but everything changes when they lose their jobs in the 2008 recession (“His and her lay-offs, isn’t that sweet?”)

They move back to Nick’s hometown in Missouri—“a quaint little 1950s town that bloated itself into a basic midsize suburb and dubbed it progress.” Nick and his twin sister, Margo, buy a bar with Amy’s inherited money to ride out the recession, but Amy, coming from a sophisticated, well-to-do East coast family, becomes increasingly unhappy stuck in the Midwest, and their marriage begins to buckle under the strain (“There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.”)

Aside from the mystery of what happened to Amy Dunne, there is some clever and insightful writing about relationships. Nick realizes his wife is “only remotely like the woman I fell in love with.” Amy wonders “if that is at the root of his distaste for me: He’s let me see his shortcomings, and he hates me for knowing them.” Nick confides, “Amy likes to play God when she’s not happy. Old Testament God.”

“Isn’t that what every marriage is, anyway?” concludes Amy. “Just a lengthy game of he-said, she-said?”

He-said, she-said, indeed! As we read their chapters, our sympathies slide back and forth between the two of them. The revelations keep coming, and with each one, marriage seems less and less like a good idea. Even for avid readers of thrillers, this is probably not the best book to give as a wedding present.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (September 15-October 14, 2012.) Reprinted with permission.

Karen Thompson Walker

Random House

Coming of age amid global catastrophe

We didn’t notice right away. We couldn’t feel it. We did not sense at first the extra time, bulging from the smooth edge of each day like a tumor blooming beneath skin…There was no footage to show on television, no burning buildings or broken bridges, no twisted metal or scorched earth, no houses sliding off slabs. No one was wounded. No one was dead. It was, at the beginning, a quite invisible catastrophe.

In Karen Thompson Walker’s first novel the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow and the days are growing longer. The Age of Miracles is a mixing of genres, the coming-of-age novel with science fiction.

Eleven-year-old Julia watches as global catastrophe becomes the new normal. There is an initial panic when the news is announced. People jump in their cars and clog the freeways—“They scurried in every direction like small animals caught suddenly under a light. But, of course, there was nowhere on earth to go.”

The birds die first, affected by the changing gravity; soon some people begin to fall ill with “gravity sickness.” As the days grow longer, a teacher replaces 24 Hours with 25:37 above a world map in his classroom, but uses a Post-it note so it can be updated. Over the coming months as the earth continues its slowing, the days will eventually become 60 hours long.

Julia’s parents and teachers try to reassure the children—“but that was the thing: We kids were not as afraid as we should have been. We were too young to be scared, too immersed in our own small worlds, too convinced of our own permanence.”

And not only the kids. Most adults, too, adjust and carry on with their lives. They go to work, continue their little adulteries and other hobbies as if nothing major was happening. Facing the potential ending of life on earth, they continue to put out the garbage and recyclables.

Much of Julia’s life is focused on school and her first crush (“I had never spoken much to Seth Moreno, but I had perfected a way of watching him that didn’t look like I was watching.”), for she and her classmates are entering the “age of miracles”—puberty, and their concerns are primarily pubertal in nature (“That bra wasn’t supporting much. Michaela was as flat as I was. But she wore it anyway, a racy symbol of things to come.”)

Unfortunately, Walker provides us no scientific explanation to account for the earth’s slowing (My own theory is that it had something to do with the outcome of the 2012 U.S. Presidential election.)

The reader is left wondering at how ordinary catastrophe can become, and it can be reassuring to see how people adapt. Or maybe not reassuring.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (October 15-November 14, 2012.) Reprinted with permission.

David Mitchell

Random House

Souls bumping into each other across time

Cloud Atlas is an impressive book that was made into an impressive film. Worthy companion pieces, each can stand alone, yet each enhances and magnifies its artistic counterpart. I finished the novel at 11:00 on a Saturday night and saw the film on Sunday, which immediately sent me back into the book.

In his 2004 novel, David Mitchell (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Black Swan Green) tells six different yet interconnected stories, mixing genres and styles as he does so. There is a 19^th century journal of a passenger on a sailing ship; letters from a young composer working with a master; a modern day thriller about the nuclear industry; a comically outlandish narrative of being confined in a care institution; a science fiction tale about a humanoid “fabricant” discovering her humanity; and a post-apocalyptic fantasy written in a unique dialect (“Oh, bein’ young ain’t easy ‘cos ev’rythin’ you’re puzzlin’n’anxin’ you’re puzzlin’n’anxin’ it for the first time.”)

As Mitchell proceeds through these different stories, set in different time periods, we find connections between them that leave the reader with a sense of awe, as if we had turned over the fabric of time and can see the way the individual threads have been woven together.

Cloud Atlas, the film, is creatively faithful to the book. Lana and Andy Wachowski (The Matrix) adapted Mitchell’s novel and co-directed the film with Tom Tykwer (Run, Lola, Run.) The result has “Oscar” written all over it, in part because of the caliber of its actors (Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Jim Broadbent, Jim Sturgess, Ben Wishaw, Susan Sarandon, Hugh Grant), but also because the Wachowskis stretch the film beyond its filmic conventions, just as Mitchell did with the novel.

One can see the Oscar nominations coming. Like their original Matrix, or Christopher Nolan’s more recent Inception, Cloud Atlas is a cinematic mind bender that will send viewers back a second and third time to parse and piece together its possible meanings and connections [Best Adapted Screenplay.]

The filmmakers decided to convey Mitchell’s idea of eternal recurrence and interconnectedness by having each actor assume a number of different roles, “playing souls, not characters,” explained Tykwer. Mitchell, who appears briefly in the film, has written, “each role (is) a sort of way station on that soul’s karmic journey.” It is a bit of a stretch to see lovable Tom Hanks playing a London thug; but it’s a fun stretch. It is also refreshing to see Hugh Grant playing a role other than Hugh Grant.

Part of the film’s enjoyment is trying to identify the actor behind the make-up. The actors not only play different roles, but even different genders and races—Viewers will not be surprised to learn that Halle Berry is also stunningly beautiful as a white woman [Best Make Up.]

The filmmakers chose to forgo the novel’s narrative structure of telling the stories sequentially, and instead intermixed them, which gives a dizzying sense that all these stories—in the past, the present, and the future—are occurring simultaneously [Best editing.]

And as for the acting awards, it’s tantalizing to think that Cloud Atlas could make Academy Award history if, say, Tom Hanks receives the Oscars for Best Actor and for Best Supporting Actor…in the same film.

Mitchell is a daring writer and the Wachowskis are daring filmmakers. Here is a book and film that are worthy of each other, both striking the mystic chords of our collective memory.

This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (November 15-December 14, 2012.) Reprinted with permission.