Review: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Every so often - though not all that often once childhood is over, I think - you read a book which you know is going to affect your mental landscape forever. This, for me, is such a book. It's the story of Oscar de Leon, a New Jersey ghetto nerd struggling with the curse imposed by his family's history of entanglement with the cruel Dominican regime. It's a heartbreaking yet uplifting story, and the thing which will imprint it for me is the voice.

The overall narrative voice is that of Oscar's university friend Yunior (though two sections are narrated by Lola, Oscar's sister and ex-girlfriend to Yunior). It's a wonderful voice, colloquial, feisty and combative yet generous and humane. And direct, addressing the reader on familiar terms. Here's Yunior describing an episode from Oscar's teenage years (a passage which holds a subtle prefiguring of Oscar's destiny):

Those were some fucking lonely weeks when all he had were his games, his books, and his words. So now I have a hermit for a son, his mother complained bitterly. At night, unable to sleep, he watched a lot of bad TV, became obsessed with two movies in particular: Zardoz (which he'd seen with his uncle before they put him away for the second time) and Virus (the Japanese end-of-the-world movie with the hot chick from Romeo and Juliet). Virus especially he could not watch to the end without crying, the Japanese hero arriving at the South Pole base, having walked from Washington, D.C., down the whole spine of the Andes, for the woman of his dreams. I've been working on my fifth novel, he told the boys when they asked about his absences. It's amazing.

See? What did I tell you? Mr Collegeboy.

There's a special kind of authenticity about this voice. While it conveys a very particular character - Yunior, with his own shortcomings and blindspots as well as his warm heart - one suspects, as with the voices in Diaz's story collection Drown, that it is not too far removed from the author's own voice: there's an overriding tone and an energy which inform the sections related by both Yunior and Lola. The impression of authenticity is further reinforced by the piecemeal and non-linear way the story unfolds, as Yunior weaves together the information he has gathered from the de Leon family members, provides a retrospective introduction and footnotes (in his own inimitable style) on the historical background and lays bare the workings of his written tale:

Footnote 15: A favourite hangout of Trujillo's, my mother tells me when the manuscript is almost complete.

Indeed, the book itself is dedicated to Elizabeth de Leon. But it would be far too reductive to say that what Diaz has achieved here is a magical and explosive mix of historical fact and imagination: this book is something more magnificant than that. It goes beyond fact, it goes beyond fiction: it's a true voice, it's the searing dream and deep new knowledge that stays with you for good.

Oh, and I cried buckets.

Review: Inglorious by Joanna Kavenna

Seems to me that the awarding of the Orange New Writers Prize to Inglorious by Joanna Kavenna is a gloriously heartening sign that timid conservatism does not always rule in the contemporary literary world.

This book, which was sent to me by Faber and which I had only just finished reading when it won last week, is a delicious anti-novel, breaking many of the rules which writers are so often taught to stick to and sidestepping many of the (same old) conventions publishers seem to believe the reading public requires in its books.

For a start there's no story or action in the conventional sense: and that's the point, the wonderful, clever and to me totally gripping point. Rosa Lane, 'thirty-five and several months', is a successful journalist in a settled relationship, but once she begins grieving the death of her mother this life comes to seem to her no longer a structured story but a state of stasis - 'She had spent the previous ten years in a holding position'; 'Instead of seeing herself as the centre of her own small world, with the city as a backdrop to her life, she began to see everything as a fractured mess.' Rosa quits her job and immediately her life begins to unravel as, comically and painfully, she becomes further mired in stasis, increasingly unable to act, enraging her friends who want her to do something, merely walking around the city and observing everything with an alien's vivid eye, thinking herself into greater and greater intellectual contortions steeped in literary references, and making hilarious To Do lists which she never carries out and which sum up her existential muddle:

Things to do, Monday

Get a job.
Wash your clothes
Go to the bank and beg them for an extension....
Read the comedies of Shakespeare, the works of Proust, the plays of Racine and Corneille and The Man Without Qualities...
Clean the toilet.

Rosa's alienation creates an ironic commentary on contemporary society and her flights of fantasy makes for splendid social satire: 'We can do you an appointment for Thursday,' the bank clerk tells Rosa, and as she clips off to arrange it Rosa riffs silently:

We can do you an eviction on Tuesday, she thought. We can do you a spell in a reform centre for the fiscally incompetent on Wednesday.

What this book is portraying of course is an emotional breakdown (shock-horror: a 'dark' subject!) but it is done with such lightness of touch and such linguistic relish that there is nothing gloomy about it - quite the contrary. And Rosa is an anti-hero: you want to wring her neck at times, but that's the point - she's involving; I at any rate was utterly hooked on knowing whether or not she would ever kick-start her life again. In any case, it is Rosa's vivid and witty imaginings which power the book and render it buoyant and dynamic . There is a story, of course, on the emotional and imaginative level, which is the real level for fiction, after all.

So, great that Faber published it in the first place, and the fact that it won should dispel the nervousness implied by its packaging (an American paperback edition was blatantly 'chick-litty', and I'm not sure that the 'ironic populist' English edition [above] works for any market).

Review: The Bookaholics' Guide to Book Blogs by Rebecca Gillieron and Catheryn Kilgarriff

I have to say I'm a bit puzzled as to why Marion Boyars offered me this book for review. Its single brief and slightly damning reference to this blog appears early on in a discussion of the online persona: ...some might be put off ... by the self-proclaimed 'Bookslut' or 'Fiction Bitch'. Since this is not a blog the authors recommend it would seem they share this view, and what seems to emerge from this book is a chariness of the kind of critical irreverence and impartiality which this blog is intended to stand for.

But since the Bitch does indeed always endeavour to be impartial, she will begin by agreeing with A Stevens that it has to be a good thing that lit-blogging has become such a force that publishers - as these authors are - are embracing it. It's just... well, you know the Bitch, bitchily suspicious as ever: she can't help seeing those little flies in the ointment. Like the spirit and the motives with which they are embracing it.

Of course it's only sensible for publishers to recognize the explosion of blog book-reviewing as a whole new potential marketing opportunity - it is after all their job to look out for marketing opportunities - and I should say right away that there is a genuine air of enthusiasm about this book which goes way beyond such simple pragmatism: you feel that the authors really do like the blogs they recommend.

Yet...

Let's look again at some of that early chapter in which the authors discuss 'the online persona' and the names of blogs/bloggers.

Ms Baroque in Hackney suggests a perky, fun and modern if slightly flamboyant type of girl... it's clear she has a positive outlook on life and this welcome air of enthusiasm pervades all the postings on her blog ... Bookfox is another sassy-sounding young woman whose wit and cunning might just match up to her name.

Well, me, if I hadn't immediately detected in that title, 'Baroque in Hackney', a certain oxymoronic irony, I should never have clicked on and discovered precisely what I had hoped for: an incisive and sometimes politically angry mind amidst her love of beautiful things and her extremely fine prose - an aspect of her blog which I love most and find the authors skip over. And here they are on others:

There are some names which just don't sound appealing... Bibliophile Bullpen 'The Whiff of Old Books With Your Coffee' does little for the appetite. Calling yourself Checkhov's Mistress online doesn't exactly set a person up as a barrel of fun...

That phrase 'barrel of fun' and the earlier, describing Ms Baroque's 'welcome air of enthusiasm', are key, I think. For what publisher wouldn't want their books discussed on an instantly attractive and amenable platform? And this is how the book concludes: There has to be a way of encouraging the reading of books which is more democratic, fair and not full of intellectual concerns that put people off (My bolds). Democracy and fairness are set up in opposition to the intellectual - thus unwittingly endorsing the view of those critical of litblogs - and it is not intellectual engagement for which blogs should be valued, it seems.

The authors aren't unaware that bloggers are suspicious of publishers trying to co-opt their independent enthusiasm for marketing purposes: they quote a post by Susan Hill in which she wags her finger at any publishers getting hold of that notion. But in the very same post Susan says this: If we like [books] we say so. If we don't we ignore them, which in itself is amenable to publishers. Who when trying to sell books wouldn't embrace a platform where you could be sure not to get a negative press? And there's a chapter on publisher-led virtual book tours (around blogs) for which the authors show undiluted enthusiasm.

Well, I guess I've bucked the trend, then, by being critical here, and I may as well add a few more caveats. This book has clearly been brought out quickly, which may account for the typos and a more than occasional lack of clarity resulting from the chatty tone. This casual tone is intended I suspect to reflect the flavour of blogs, but if so does them no favours with such nonsensical sentences as this: It's difficult to imagine readers in their thousands rushing for the next instalment of Today in Literature or Reading Experience; though I'm sure they do.

The book may have been rushed out, but it's inevitably out of date already: the web moves faster than printing. Struggling Author, for instance, is listed as a bookseller blogger, but it's a long time now since Marie Phillips was a bookseller, and a while since her blog went private and became unavailable to the public. There's no index, which is a real irritation - if there's one thing a book can do better than a blog it's provide an index. Which leads me to my most fundamental question: what or who is this book for? Isn't the best place to find out about blogs the, er... blogosphere? The authors say that they want to capture a moment in blogging, that the book is a 'book blog keepsake.' But then it's only their moment: disarmingly they admit that the book blog sites that we refer to throughout this book are often written by people we know in the trade and have met at the many social events we attend.

Well, if we're going to bloggingly admit our interests, I'd just like to say I'm really tickled that they have chosen a cover showing three books by Adele Geras, because she happens to be my friend!!

Book Review: Anonymous Lawyer by Jeremy Blachman

This blog is not primarily a book review blog; it's only occasionally that I've written about a book, and then it's been a book which I just happened to have read. Cynical Bitch though I am, I had naively assumed that review bloggers were doing the same but more often, and when the dispute about blog versus newspaper reviewing broke, the fact that many bloggers were being sent books by publishers was news to me.

Then Vintage asked me if I'd like a copy of Anonymous Lawyer - a Novel, the book of the famous blog, published in the UK this week. Instantly I was dubious, and a question which had been much discussed was thrown into stark relief for me. Would my critical independence be compromised? For I must say such an offer seems a heck of a lot more like a 'gift' than one mediated impersonally by a literary editor (and I have noticed that bloggers have begun thanking publishers in their blogs for their copies). But hey, a Bitch is a Bitch, and this was a blog book, surrounded by specific issues of blog anonymity, and I was very interested, so in the next instant I emailed back and said yes.

Turns out Jeremy Blachman, the author, is a man after the Bitch's own heart - in fact, he's a bitch and a half. The blog, initially anonymous, is a hoot and deservedly popular. Purportedly written by a hiring partner in a large Los Angeles law firm - monstrously vain, scheming and sadistic, but ultimately vulnerable - it exposes with broad satire the nasty underbelly of corporate law. There was much speculation about the identity of the author and whether or not the blog was fictional, which is amusing to read now, but the author was finally outed as a Harvard law student whose recent experience of student internship in a law firm was from the other side. An astute editor picked up on Blachman's thus clearly fictive skills and the book, or at least the idea of the book, soon followed.

It's hard to believe in retrospect that the blog was ever thought to be anything but fiction, which shows the power of context. The novel takes the form of the original blog - interspersed with emails - and its style and voice, those of a satirically exaggerated (unreliable) narrator, are identical:

We have students lining up to hand us their resumes, yet we've got a 30 percent annual turnover rate... That makes my job a bit of a challenge. How to stay positive about selling students on the excellence of this place when we have to make sure the boxes of copier paper aren't tied up wih rope - because that rope is just too tempting. One hanging every so often is to be expected, but when there's another one every time we get new office supplies it starts to get a little difficult to work.

The blog is smartly shaped into a proper story - that of Anonymous Lawyer's scheming to oust his rival to the chairmanship of the firm - but the novel is more complex, both structurally and thematically, than this. Rather than simply being the means of telling a story, the blog is a crucial aspect of the wider story. It's the place where Anonymous Lawyer postures (though sometimes letting his mask slip), but it is counterpointed by the emails in which a different reality unfolds. Initially there is some fun (which Blachman must have had in real life) at the expense of those emailing to guess AL's identity, but eventually someone emails who really does know who he is, his anonymity is threatened, the incriminating blog becomes the potential means of his downfall, and the stage is set for further machiavellian manipulations. Thus the novel goes beyond the scope of the original real-life blog to become not simply an expose of the evils of corporate law but a witty comment on the nature of blogging and anonymity, and on the double-edged power and vulnerability of bloggers.

Not that the wit doesn't sometimes wear thin. The serial nature of a blog allows for - maybe even requires - some repetition, but a novel with its demand for development is less forgiving. I found this funny at the beginning of the novel:

He fired his assistant on the day she announced she was pregnant... At least I wait until they come back from maternity leave before I tell them they're fired.

but by the end of the novel, when this joke was still being riffed, its lack of subtlety, the very thing which had made it funny, had palled.

This isn't a subtle novel, and nor is it meant to be; its fast pace and rude wit are probably best taken at a sitting. At first I was suspicious of it as a publisher's cynical marketing conconction - a sentence in Blachman's Acknowledgements runs: Even when I was sure I couldn't write this book I never felt [my editor's] confidence waver. But the Acknowledgements refers to Blachman's prior aspirations as a fiction-writer, and the book justifies them.

But, hey, speaking of marketing, what about the product? I simply couldn't get this paperback to stop springing shut on me, and I've got bad enough RSI in my thumb without having to strain it further that way. And when I finally cracked the spine to make the book lie flat, all the pages came unglued and fell about in my hands.

Who said books last longer than blogs?

Taking Comfort by Roger Morris

Macmillan New Writing. Cause of well documented controversy. No advances for writers, but, according to the website, books by talented new writers who 'otherwise might fail to get into print'.

A potentially dangerous statement to make, this last, you might think, but now they've made it, let's examine it via the one the Bitch has now read, Roger Morris's Taking Comfort.

Here's the blurb through which you approach the book:

It's Rob's first day in his new job. On the way into work, he sees a student throw herself under a tube train. Acting on an impulse, he picks up a file she dropped as she jumped. Over the next few days, he's witness to other disturbing events, some more serious than others. From each one he takes a 'souvenir'. As his behaviour becomes increasingly obsessive, he crosses the line between witnessing disasters and seeking them out, and events begin to spiral out of control.

Hm. Sounds a bit like a thriller and not, therefore, quite The Bitch's cup of tea, a very different sort of thing from the brilliant psychological story by the same author, The Symptoms of his Madness Were as Follows which she once published in metropolitan, her literary magazine. Though that, too, was about a man with an obsession... So let's give it a go.

The bookseller holds it up (The Bitch has had to order it) and the dustcover confirms the impression: those dun greys, those fine lines like the crosshairs of a gun's sighting, that view of the tube station similarly circled, the blood-red lights of the train intimating violence and death, that minimalist collage of what seem like mystery/thriller clues: the knife, so iconically thrillerish, pointing towards that unsettling scene, but then the stranger teabag with its cosier Agatha-Christie-type connotations. The typeface: angular and sans serif mainly, though curiously not entirely, but on the whole at odds with its message 'Taking Comfort' - though, The Bitch thinks, carrying home the black shiny Waterstone's bag, comfort is perhaps what people read thrillers for: the comfort of the familiar mode, the comfort of violence packaged and dealt with and formulated - precisely the things which make her impatient with the genre.

She gets home. She sits down. She opens the book up, and she knows straight away that this is something else. Nothing formulaic at all, but something original and exciting; it's a book which deals, yes, with the violence and the existential fear which imbue every thriller, but its real task is to question our contemporary psychological reality, and the way it does this is by attention to LANGUAGE.

Language is where this book is at. Rob, the book's main character, (like Morris himself) works in marketing. He weighs words, he knows the weight of words, and we learn to weigh them with him as the book plugs us directly into his psyche. The novel begins as Rob makes his way to his new marketing job carrying his new briefcase, a Di Beradino classic, its marketing copy running in his head:

Robust stitching and lined with a cotton material Flapover conceals triple sectioned interior pus pockets on front Size 44 x 33 x 14cm

He is a marketing man. He can appreciate the abrupt punctuation-free poetry of that copy.

He is a marketing man. A phrase which recurs, a litany inside Rob's head, like other phrases, and phrases in the heads of other characters, replicating the psychology by which we maintain our tenuous hold on reality, and our sense of safety. The Bitch appreciates the poetry of this prose.

Furthermore, the novel is concerned with the way in which, in our commercial yet post 9/11 world we assuage our existential dread with objects:

In his hand, you have to imagine how it feels, the Di Beradino classic briefcase... The whole focus of his being is in the grip of his hand around that hard leather handle, in the way the seam stubs into the underbellies of his fingers, in the swing of the handle in its sold brass satin finished fittings. In the sense he has of its contents and how they influence the swing and how that swing uplifts him.

This is how we 'take comfort', how all of the novel's characters take comfort, pinning their fears and desires on certain objects - Rob's wife Julia on her particular brand of cooking knife, the Sabatier Au Carbone 8 inch Carbon Steel Chef's Knife (the knife on the dustcover), the receptionist on her Twirl mug - their psyches/identities and the objects becoming intertwined. And the form of the book replicates this perfectly, each short chapter being named for a branded object, and each moving forward the action through a character's relationship with that object.

It is Rob's intimate understanding of all this, as a marketing man, which sets him on the obsessive object-collecting course which will lead towards terror...

And as the Bitch is reading, she becomes aware of her own implication in these things. She remembers how she felt about the shiny black Waterstone's bag as she brought the book home. How she loves those bags, their glossiness, the depth of their blackness, the way they slip on the surface of the books inside them, and the freight of memory they carry, all those author readings when Robert Topping was at Manchester Waterstone's...

And the hardback book now in her hand. Taking Comfort. There's a lovely weight to it, solid without being heavy, it kind of anchors comfortably in her hand. And the cover, a matt ground with the picture and objects picked out in a shiny texture, and the dustcover very nice substantial paper, weighted in place around the contours of the book, with a comforting silky feel to the touch. The flyleaf a classy heavy paper in navy. In fact, the book is beautifully bound, just like books used to be, and the creamy paper is more than satisfying to turn and of a texture which makes the print easy to read. And there's a dark-blue ribbon marker which The Bitch can't help sometimes handling, and at its end a ridge of glue to stop it unravelling, a little nub which is somehow satisfying to rub across the cushion of your thumb. As an object this book is a beautiful thing, freighted, weighted, with this meaning: that this novel has been published with thought and care - is it too much to say even with love? - by people who understand it and want to do it justice, and have thought about how to carry its meanings in a concrete dimension.

And then The Bitch begins to notice imperfections which, freighted with this meaning, are touching, almost moving: on page 23 of her copy a small portion of the print is smudged, which makes her think of the guys at the printer's working on this book - all the work that has gone into this book! - and the care which has meant that there are no other smudges; and then she comes upon a pair of pages which have creased, ever so slightly, in the folding process, and the even fainter imprints of those creases on the adjoining pages, and she thinks of the people working those folding machines, and of the fact that however mechanised the printing process nowadays, it's still such a searingly human endeavour...

Yet none of this distracts her from the words of the novel; strangely, but not so strangely, the novel and these thoughts enhance each other. And as she reads compulsively on - this is a book The Bitch can't put down - and the events, as the blurb promised, spiral, she finds that she is fingering the final pages, and maybe she wouldn't have noticed she was doing it but for the fact that she finds these pages won't open at the bottom, they're not properly cut. And it even occurs to The Bitch that this could be a deliberate marketing ploy, but whether or not it is, it adds to her sense of excitement, as well as flooding her with thoughts of former times when the pages of books, routinely, had to be cut, and in a very concrete way this places this book, so supremely about our contemporary existence, in the tradition of great writing in which it belongs.

So. This is a book which opens up your perceptions, challenges your assumptions and makes you think about language. Does this mean, as Macmillan say, that 'it might otherwise have failed to get into print'? Well, if The Bitch's own experience as a writer is anything to go by, she thinks, yes, probably. It is clearly the thriller aspect of the book, though, which Macmillan have decided to stress in the marketing, and as I said in an earlier post, with the right marketing you can sell anything. I hope I'm right, because this book deserves to be read, and people deserve the chance to read it.