Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li (review by Andrew '17)

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A few months after I finished Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, the Chinese-born writer Yiyun Li’s 2010 story collection, only one piece lingered in my mind: a novella, entitled “Kindness,” about a girl’s complex relationship with her female commander in the Chinese army. The storytelling style of “Kindness” is pretty run-of-the-mill realism, but there was something in the narrative, some hint toward a deeper melancholia, that stuck with me. Li’s brand-new memoir, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, helps pinpoint what that profound sadness is and where it comes from. Li wrote these essays during her years-long struggle with suicidal depression, but most often she presents recollections from earlier in her writing life. One essay deals with her decision to forsake Chinese entirely and write in English, another with her unlikely friendship with the legendary Irish writer William Trevor, a third with her mentor at the Iowa Writers Workshop, a man just as flawed as the commander from “Kindness.” The publisher bills this memoir as a “richly affirming examination of what makes life worth living.” It’s not. The essays here are pained and painful, meditative and often oppressively sad. Readers willing to brave all that will find insight on nearly every page into the particular somberness of Li’s life and art. - Andrew R. '17

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The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter (review by Andrew R. '17)

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It won’t take the reader long to realize that the stories in The Bloody Chamber, the most famous book by the late British master Angela Carter, seem strangely familiar. In fact, each of the ten pieces in this collection is a direct descendent of a well-known fairy tale. “The Company of Wolves,” for instance, in which a vulnerable young girl travels alone through a wood infested with monstrous wolves, brings “Little Red Riding Hood” irresistibly to mind; and the lovers at the center of “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” clearly represent Beauty and the Beast. Carter is much too canny a writer to freshen up these worn-out fairy tale narratives by changing the plot: none of the stories is given a modern setting, at least not overtly, and many end with “happily ever afters” if the original versions require it. What sets the stories in The Bloody Chamber apart from the tales that inspired them is a subtler kind of magic. Carter weaves a spell with her dispassionate, often slightly ironic narrative voice, which heightens the qualities of the original fairy tales—particularly their undertones of violence and sexuality—to make familiar narratives seem suddenly oppressive and strange. In Carter’s hands, even a tale ending “happily ever after” isn’t for the faint of heart. - Andrew R. '17

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A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter (review by Andrew R. '17)

A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Ours is a young nation, and its literature is a young literature. But in A Jury of Her Peers: American Women’s Writing from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, feminist scholar Elaine Showalter profiles the enormous amount of progressive, boundary-pushing material that’s come out of America since the days of the Pilgrims. The writers featured in this encyclopedic book—more of a literary reference guide than a readable chronological account, although a few chapters are marked exceptions—tend to weigh toward the nineteenth century, with novelists like Harriet Beecher Stowe getting far more individual attention than the more modern women writers whose names come to mind when we think back on American literature. Civil War–era authors like Catherine Sedgwick may be in more dire need of recognition than better-known writers, but, with familiar names like Dorothy Parker and Flannery O’Connor on their way a few chapters later, it’s hard for the reader to stay invested in the dustier, more distant history of these early chapters. The core of the book is a long, engaging, and appealingly written dual portrait of Wharton and Cather. If Showalter had adopted this storytelling mode for the rest of the book, A Jury of Her Peers would have been not just informative but enjoyable, too. - Andrew R. '17

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We Have Always Lived Here by Shirley Jackson (review by Andrew R. '17)

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There’s a malicious presence in the Blackwood estate, the imposing structure on the outskirts of town inhabited by the only surviving members of a reclusive aristocratic family. It might be wheelchair-bound Uncle Julian, who constantly relives the day most of his family dropped dead of arsenic poisoning. It might be Constance, who hasn’t left the estate in six years and is fanatically devoted to the rules of etiquette. It might even be Merricat, the younger sister, who surrounds the estate with wards and totems to keep the rest of the world at bay. Jackson is best-known today for “The Lottery,” her horrifying story of small-town insularity gone wrong, but of all her notoriously creepy works this one deserves the most attention. Its suspense works in two directions: the reader discovers unsettling details about the past even as the narrative creeps toward a chilling climax, leaving the present moment doubly uncertain and doubly tense. The question of who sprinkled arsenic in the sugar bowl is pretty easily answered, but don’t be fooled—that apparent mystery is just a diversionary tactic to let more frightening revelations approach unnoticed. Even if horror isn’t your genre of choice, as Halloween approaches, Shirley Jackson’s novels are worth a try. - Andrew R. '17

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Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson (review by Andrew R. '17)

Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In Fortune Smiles, which won the most recent National Book Award, Adam Johnson collects six short stories that showcase both his penchant for dark, uncomfortable subject matter and his startlingly powerful ability to treat unsympathetic characters with compassion. Johnson, who has garnered laurels in the past for a novel about North Korea, repeatedly takes on apparently unredeemable perspectives—a virtual-reality-obsessed programmer in Palo Alto, a reclusive pedophile with a traumatic past, a retired and unrepentant East German prison warden—and convinces the reader to replace at least some disgust with sympathy. Certain stories, like “Interesting Facts” (about a raging cancer sufferer) and “Hurricanes Anonymous” (about a displaced delivery man in Louisiana in 2005), miss the magic ratio of darkness to compassion and spoil the effect. But then you get a piece like “Fortune Smiles,” in which Johnson turns his focus back toward North Korea to explore the lives of two defectors to South Korea and their near-suicidal impulse to re-defect back into the North. This story closes the collection, cementing the book’s diverse but complimentary themes: the irrationality of obsession, the persistence of pain, and, most importantly, the essential humanness of everyone, even those we don’t understand.

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Lark & Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips (review by Andrew R. '17)

Lark & Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Very occasionally, a book you’ve never heard of and wouldn’t expect to like by an author you don’t know will make its way into your hands and remind you why you read books in the first place. For me, Lark and Termite was that book. Jayne Anne Phillips’s subtle, looping novel combines the story of Leavitt, an American soldier mortally wounded by friendly fire deep in enemy territory during the Korean War, with that of his orphaned son Termite, a sufferer of severe mental and physical disabilities nurtured by his half-sister Lark and the few sympathetic members of their small-town community. Flitting through the book, seen only from a distance, is Lola, the biological mother of both Lark and Termite, whose abandonment of her two children and of the town of her birth casts a long, complicated shadow through the characters’ lives. Once the stage is set and the characters introduced, the novel’s plot is simple and unadorned. Viewed through the questioning gaze of Lark and the lyrical, kaleidoscopic perspective of Termite, though, even the simplest childhood memory takes on beautiful, subtle shades of meaning. There aren’t many books that I plan to read and reread and reread, but this is one of them.

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The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong (review by Andrew R. '17)

The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions by Karen Armstrong
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In The Great Transformation, religious historian Karen Armstrong sets out to analyze the origins of Buddhism, Judaism, Confucianism, and Daoism in the context of political and social strife in the centuries leading up to the Common Era. As a primer to the study of ancient Mediterranean and East Asian philosophy, The Great Transformation occasionally hits the mark: its analyses of the historical realities of the Babylonian Captivity in the Middle East and the Period of the Warring States in China bring clarity to historical periods often overshadowed by the state-building that occurred on either side. Such moments of lucidity, however, appear far too rarely in this thick 500-page text. Having set out to compress an eight-hundred-year history of philosophical movements in the entire Eastern Hemisphere into a single volume, Armstrong falls almost constantly into disjointed, abstract accounts of wars, reigns, and migrations, indulging in so many disparate stories that her ostensible subject—commonalities of Mediterranean and Asian religious movements—disappears for twenty pages or more. Too wide-ranging to shed light on any particular historical subject and too bogged down in specifics to synthesize its parts into one coherent thesis, Armstrong’s book leaves the reader with little more than a mound of undigested historical facts by the last page.

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The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver (review by Andrew R. '17)

The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Initially, Barbara Kingsolver’s debut novel is appealing but unremarkable: a native Kentuckian on the cusp of adulthood named Taylor Greer hits the road, hoping to escape the stifling small-town life that’s suffocated her for her entire life. As Taylor’s odyssey through the Southwest progresses, though, a warm, eccentric cast of characters emerges that begins to set the novel. Chief among these is Turtle, a Native American toddler unceremoniously dumped in Taylor’s truck while her back is turned, who quickly becomes the heart of this endearing, mostly light story. For me, the book’s appeal was rooted in its lively sense of humor: characters like Mattie, the owner of a middle-of-nowhere auto repair shop called “Jesus Is Lord Used Tires,” kept me engaged even when the plot got bogged down in sentimentality. Despite the lofty themes of motherhood and self-actualization that float through the narrative, The Bean Trees, at its heart, isn’t much more than a tale about a girl who leaves her small town to see the big wide world. That’s a story we’ve read before, of course, but Kingsolver’s talent for character and humor makes it worth reading again.

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The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker (review by Andrew R. '17)

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The premise of The Golem and the Jinni has an irresistible sort of cosmic balance to it: when a female homunculus named Chava and a male fire spirit named Ahmad collide in nineteenth-century New York, earth meets fire, the mythology of the West means that of the East, the Judeo-Christian tradition collides with one far older, and the ancient past meets the modern era. If only this novel could shed its affected writing, its chronically flat characters, and about a hundred and fifty pages, it might be able to meet this impressive potential. Wecker makes the unfortunate decision to relay the entire story in a faux-historical voice, weighing her sentences down with unwieldy vocabulary and convoluted syntax in a misguided effort (like so many other writers of historical fiction) to stay true to the literary style of the time she portrays. Uninspired prose might be excusable, but, in my view, weak characters are not; populating a fantasy world as Wecker does with transparent characters, single-minded and invariably “good at heart,” is a cardinal sin in any sort of fiction. I have to give the author credit for the alluring symmetry of her premise, but her execution is unremarkable and doesn’t nearly deserve the 500 pages it takes up.

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The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (review by Andrew R. '17)

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To call The Handmaid’s Tale a dystopian novel would be to do it a disservice: while the near-future mockery of American society in which the novel is set does, technically, fall under that category, the freedom-fighting and romantic entanglements that we’ve come to associate with the genre have no place in this book. On its surface, the story follows Offred, a young woman assigned to a high-ranking official in the Republic of Gilead and tasked with bearing him children. With birthrates falling below crisis level, Offred and the other “handmaids” of this brutal patriarchy represent the society’s only hope, but Gilead’s fanatical and fundamentalist codes of conduct force all women into submission, their lives characterized only by traumatic memories and a fervent hope for pregnancy. Atwood intends this novel, it seems, to be a thought experiment that extends systemic gender inequalities and the “family values” that perpetuate them to their most oppressive extremes, which may explain why Gilead is sometimes so hard to distinguish from the postmodern America it replaced. The novel’s dystopian conceit is so complete that its cast of characters tends to feel more like symbols than humans in their own right; still, The Handmaid’s Tale achieves a level of social-justice-minded indignation that very few other works of science fiction manage to attain.

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Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (review by Andrew R. '17)

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Americanah bears all the hallmarks of the traditional epic story: between the protagonist Ifemelu’s emigration from Nigeria to the other side of the Atlantic, sparking a long process of depression, race-inspired musing, and eventual financial success, and her childhood friend Obinze’s thwarted attempt to make a life for himself in London, the novel encompasses all the heartbreak, alienation, and self-realization that characterizes the best epic novels. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has crafted a novel that handles a difficult topic—race relations, especially in the cultural interactions between African-Americans and non-American blacks—incisively and powerfully while refusing to pander to the reader’s opinions or reservations. Every character (and, given the prodigious heft of this novel, there are many) is treated with a rare mixture of sympathy and harsh honesty, resulting in a cast that strikes the reader as impressively human. Maybe the conclusion, when Ifemelu comes to terms with the personal changes her decade and a half of Americanization has wrought, trails off less powerfully than a novel of this magnitude deserves, but overall Americanah easily proved one of the best books I encountered all year: utterly convincing and unapologetic, the kind of book that it would be a shame to miss.

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Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry by Elizabeth McCracken (review by Andrew R. '17)

Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry by Elizabeth McCracken
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

One character stands out above all the rest in Elizabeth McCracken’s flamboyant collection of short stories: Aunt Helen Beck, an imposing and imperious wanderer who moves from stranger’s home to stranger’s home, masquerading as a long-lost relative until she is kicked back out onto the street. Judging by the vast array of circus sideshow performers, eccentric tattoo artists, and itinerant poets with handlebar mustaches on display in this collection, colorful characters are McCracken’s forte, and the supporting casts of each of the nine stories included here are really what give the collection its drive. Sometimes, as in the case of “Mercedes Kane” (an unsatisfying sketch about a middle-aged former child genius), the author’s tendency to prioritize characters over plot becomes tiresome; often, as with Aunt Helen Beck, the tradeoff is entirely worth it. Overall, just as with so many other short-story collections, the humorous genius of a few pieces is marred by their less impressive neighbors, and, like Aunt Helen Beck, Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry is best picked up, briefly enjoyed, and then cast away once more.

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The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II by Iris Chang (review by Andrew R. '17)

The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Iris Chang’s account of the Rape of Nanking, the month-and-a-half-long period of looting, barbarism, and murder after Japanese forces captured the then-capital of China in 1937, is the first book of its kind to be published in English. Part of the reason for this appalling lack of coverage of the massacre in the United States is that certain details, like the exact death count (somewhere in the hundreds of thousands), are still debated and may never be known for sure; Japanese officials’ ongoing reluctance to acknowledge the episode, as well as the intense pain associated with it for the families of all involved, have also prevented it from being intensely studied by American historians. Chang’s book, then, is enormously important in that it fills a gaping hole in the library of English-language studies of World War II, but that doesn’t mean I’d recommend it. The Rape of Nanking is painful to read, with its graphic descriptions of mutilation and abduction and its photos of the episode’s victims, alive and dead; the early chapters especially are as unpleasant and intense as they are informative. This is a brave book, an important book, but you should know what you’re getting into before you pick it up.

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Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead (review by Andrew R. '17)

Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A ballerina smuggles a celebrated Russian dancer away from his Soviet handlers and into the United States, where they have a tempestuous love affair; later, said ballerina raises a dance prodigy who himself experiences some painful romance, while all the while minor characters around them (the neighbors, the owner of the ballet company, more haughty defectors from the USSR) fall in and out of their own miniature romantic dramas. As a novel primarily focused on the way dance shapes the lives of those who dedicate their souls to it, Astonish Me sometimes seems to be taking place onstage, what with its preoccupation with beauty and drama and tangled romantic threads, rather than in the Cold War-era society it tries to recreate. That said, though, Shipstead pulls off the intertwining love triangles at the novel’s center with impressive success, and the resolution brought about in the last few chapters feels satisfying without coming off as too neat or too overblown. Fans of ballet, and probably of the domestic drama as a genre, are certain to appreciate this book, but to the wider population the tendency of Astonish Me to prioritize aesthetics over real character development might not be entirely appealing.

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Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (review by Andrew R. '17)

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In “The Glass Essay,” her long and brilliant verse meditation on aging and self-knowledge, the poet Anne Carson invokes the middle Brontë sister again and again as a parallel to her own experience: “I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë, / my lonely life around me like a moor, / my ungainly body stumping over the mud flats with a look of transformation / that dies when I come in the kitchen door.” On its surface, Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s only novel, is a gothic romance: it follows the cruel and sinister Heathcliff and his consuming, almost maddening obsession with a childhood lover. But, for Carson and for me, it’s not the romantic tension that sets Wuthering Heights apart from all other eighteenth-century British novels—it’s the fog of gloom that pervades the book’s pages, from the somber, mist-shrouded moors where the story takes place to the towering tragedies that loom large in the protagonists’ destinies (and in Brontë’s own life). Unremitting gloom might not sound like a compelling backdrop to a romantic novel, but in the end it’s precisely that quality that makes Wuthering Heights linger in my mind in a way few other classics do.

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Sala by Toni Morrison (review by Andrew R. '17)

Sula by Toni Morrison
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I chose Sula as my first introduction to Toni Morrison’s work because it was slimmer, lighter, and—apparently—easier to understand than her more famous and acclaimed novels, but now that I’ve finished the last chapter I find myself wondering if this book is really representative of Morrison’s greater oeuvre. The plot sounds deceptively peaceful: young black Sula leaves her small hometown behind as she heads off to be educated, and upon her return ten years later (a significant gap in the novel’s chronology), she’s estranged and distrusted by her former friends. You can’t call Sula “peaceful,” though, because Morrison fills its pages with wanton, almost casual violence and death. A mother soaks her son’s mattress in gasoline and sets it alight; a woman burns to death trying to light a yard fire; a little boy slips from his friends’ fingers and falls into the lake, never resurfaces. Hard as I try, I can’t reconcile these near-constant, near-faceless deaths with the practices of “good novel-writing” that I’m used to, and so for the moment Sula seems more off-putting and grim than I’d wish. Maybe someday, when I’m more familiar with the rest of Morrison’s novels, I’ll be able to return to Sula and appreciate, or at least understand, its pervading sense of randomness and cruelty.

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Mr. Potter by Jamaica Kinkaid (review by Andrew R. '17)

Mr. Potter by Jamaica Kincaid
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Mr. Potter is the story of an illiterate Antiguan chauffeur whose father was long-gone by the time of his birth, whose mother drowned herself when he was still a young child, whose clients are disdainful of his social status and the color of his skin, and whose illegitimate daughters are strangers to him because he abandoned every one of them, just as his own father abandoned him. One of these daughters narrates this novel from a distance—a distance of time, since her father died years prior (we watch her visit his grave), but also an emotional distance that causes her to treat him with a mixture of pity and contempt and guarded affection. The best one can say about Mr. Potter as a novel is that it’s lyrical; in fact, it takes lyricism and extends to an almost illogical extreme. In the interests of lyricism, then, our narrator repeats the same facts and phrases five or six times in the same sentence. “Mr. Potter was my father, my father’s name was Mr. Potter,” she tells us at least once every chapter. It’s an interesting technique, certainly, and one that lends a certain power to this novel, but more often than not it turns Jamaica Kincaid’s otherwise impressive prose into a sticky morass.

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The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (review by Andrew R. '17)

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

No one who’s read Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” is likely to forget it anytime soon: even sixty-five years after its explosive debut, the narrative of sinister small-town ritualism retains an impressive staying power that makes it as jarring to modern readers as it was to its original audiences. Shirley Jackson draws on the same arsenal of subtly suspenseful plot devices in her 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, in which the scarred and unstable Eleanor Vance joins a research party to live in a crumbling Victorian mansion for the summer. Part Edgar Allen Poe and part Henry James, this psychological ghost story isn’t quite a horror novel, at least not in the Stephen King sense; its terror, as in “The Lottery,” is so understated that the full force of the book’s scariest scenes isn’t likely to manifest itself until days after you’ve read them. (From what I’ve heard, Jackson’s last novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, ramps up this creepiness to an even more intense and chilling pitch.) For a haunted-house story, this novel is very strong, and rates only one notch below “The Lottery” in its quality and spine-tingling effect.

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Rook by Sharon Cameron (review by Andrew R. '17)

Rook by Sharon Cameron
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are only so many post-apocalyptic dystopia concepts that exist in the world, and, thanks to the mad rush of YA science fiction sprang into being following the enormous success of The Hunger Games, it’s almost—almost—impossible at this point for an author to come up with a brand-new one. In Rook, however, Sharon Cameron may just have pulled it off. The world that protagonists Sophia Bellamy and René Hasard inhabit is full of not-so-subtle overtones of the French Revolution, with lower-class mobs overrunning the Upper City and a massive, blood-spattered blade decapitating enemies of the state. But this isn’t eighteenth-century Paris—this is Europe hundreds of years after the polar shift that wiped out most of humanity. The loss of all pre-apocalypse technology has forced society to backtrack several centuries to a bloodier and more brutal time. The characters are almost as interesting as the setting—Sophia may be a classic YA heroine fighting off the advances of two devilishly handsome suitors, but at least the love triangle has some political intrigue to spice things up. (Nearly all the characters are benevolent criminals of some sort.) Rook is lengthy, but readers will forgive its heft once they get caught up in the engaging narrative and well-conceived setting.

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An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir (review by Andrew R. '17)

An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The Hunger Games. Eragon. Star Wars. Odds are you’re already perfectly familiar with these stories, in which case there is no reason for you to pick up Sabaa Tahir’s new novel. For me, An Ember in the Ashes reads like a half-hearted cut-and-paste of all the fantasy/sci-fi books that came before it, an unapologetic catalog of tired genre clichés—romantic tension! teenagers fighting to the death! orphaned protagonists! unimaginative fantasy names! faceless demonic warlords!—without a single page of original material. Faced with such an apparent lack of inspiration, the author repeats her ideas and plot points thirty times throughout the book. That’s standard practice with many YA authors, unfortunately, when it comes to romance (“Does he love me or doesn’t he?”), but it gets downright tiresome when we have to hear this sentence repeated ad nauseam: “As my grandmother always told me, ‘Where there’s life there’s hope.’” According to the American Library Association, there are approximately 5,000 YA books published per year, and I can safely list (without much exaggeration) about 4,999 new books that are more worth your time than this one. I was not a fan.

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