brief book reviews

realized i had abandoned my blog halfway through writing a couple book reviews. these first two are from, like, november, i think. the last bunch are from what i can remember reading. since then and more recently. i think i'm forgetting several books, haha

Taking Care by Joy Williams (Vintage): this is a collection of stories. most revolve around, basically, "alcoholic parents", in retrospect. i think in some of the stories she does a wonderful job of capturing this strange ephemerality of things due to pointlessness, drinking, and isolation, where the writing and scenes are vague and evocative and really capture this reality she's describing. in other stories this strangeness is due to the protagonists - children or the elderly, so there's an ongoing vibe of how these internal or external factors influence how we experience the world. but some of the stories surprised me, in a negative way, with how she felt the need to sort of really clarify or set up her intention behind the story, and a couple were a little too transparently bleak. i also dislike that the second-to-last story is an excerpt from her novel Breaking and Entering, which i had recently read, and so skipped (it's possible it's a different version or outtake, but i didn't feel compelled to read it). but overall most of the stories are impressionistic and let you sort of contemplate or experience the culmination of little things in daily life to create a mood, which i found engaging. but what sticks out to me most about her writing in these stories is her evocative and powerful choice in adjectives/adverbs, especially in plain, staccato sentences, sort of like punctuation. i enjoyed thinking about what it would mean (making this example up to illustrate) to feel like my "life" was "rude" or something. these lines were interesting in terms of writing - the writer - and also the characters (and their self-awareness) and story, consistently across every story. i think this is interesting writing, to me, as 'literary fiction' in all the generic ways - quiet, domestic, (rich?) white people dramas - but in that each little detail feels impactful and important, in contrast with some other writing in this vein i've read, but i don't know enough about 'the canon' to really comment on this much. i look forward to reading more joy williams stories but i hope they aren't all based on these same themes of childhood/parenthood. but i liked the stories or scenes that emphasized things like ecological change due to human endeavors, plants, animals, etc.

Body High by Jon Lindsey (House of Vlad - ARC pdf) - brian sent me this over e-mail, which coincided with a stretch of nights where i had to stay up holding a toddler who doesn't sleep well, so i read this one on my phone in increments of maybe 45 minutes in the middle of the night over the course of a week. i feel like my appreciation for the book hinges on my (mis)understanding of various plot points and (changes in) characters and may be due to this bleary state of mind. overall, i was surprised, i think, at how 'straightforward' this book is, as a novel with a linear plot and resolution, considering the more alternative-leaning press and author, and also its emphasis on relatively 'heavy' and 'serious' themes, like incest/rape/pedophilia. it is a more or less 'action packed' story in the second half, with concise beginning and endpoints, reveals and 'twists', some degree of character development related to the established themes, and a good deal of exposition and scene-setting. so that's my biggest takeaway - aside from a few House of Vladian quirks (like a paragraph that's just a list of like 50 wresting moves, for example) it's, like, a normal book. most chapters start in media res, which is a fancy term i learned which means that each chapter starts after the start of some interesting action/decision/event to 'hook' the reader and then backfill the details a couple paragraphs in - for whatever reason this surprised and sort of bothered me, especially in the last half/third, since in this stretch the 'plan' that is concocted for [reasons] keeps (arbitrarily) changing in drastic ways, making each new chapter artificially confusing. in this way the in media res effect kind of wore me out, mentally (i'm trying to write this without including any specifics as regards the plot so i won't spoil it for anyone). the biggest thing i think that bothers me is how the narrator is written to be highly intelligent, thoughtful, motivated, virtuous, and grounded, or something, but the plot is more or less fueled by him being stupid or amoralistic in a few ways. there were several moments where it feels like someone would reasonably ask "what is happening" or "why is this happening" at some point, and the narrator is written to be someone who would ask these questions, but then never does. while i think part of this is narratively 'explained away' by some underspecified and kind of unmotivated 'drug binge', which would negatively affect everyone's ability to make decisions, it didn't feel realistic for the character. but i think with any kind of action-forward plot like this, you run into the potential for things to feel like they would be awkward to make 'realistic', so there's a trade-off on some idea of narrative propulsion and realism - i'm thinking here about how 'easy' it is for the narrator to find/access/confirm some information on a computer in the last few pages, with the relevant stuff, like, just saved to the desktop, on a powered-on, unlocked computer? i'm not trying to be too negative about this, like i said, because i think it's just something that happens with these kinds of books, which i usually don't read - you need to suspend disbelief in order to let the action unfold. i did also overall feel confused by the sort of jarring juxtaposition of 'slapstick' humor - some of which i thought was funny/interesting, like the jack nicholson corpse - and these serious, action-packed themes and the moralistic heroism; there are other moments where i think a scene is intended to be funnier than it reads because of this pallor of seriousness, like the scene in the sperm bank. this all comes off as negative, like i said, but i think is just me trying to understand what it is about these kinds of books that make me less interested in them in a general sense, and maybe i'm not the intended audience. in positive things, to me, i think he does a good job incorporating contemporary things like social media in a realistic and natural way, and the aunt character is very interesting and complex throughout. i also actually really enjoyed the wrestling subplot(s) and felt like it would have been even more interesting, to me, if it played a more active role in the story. i haven't read anything else by jon lindsey but am curious to look at his short stories (josh hebburn has hyped up to me a story jon sent to hobart). revisiting this in may, now, i feel continually 'gaslit' by how popular this book seems to be with everyone in the community, such that i kept revisiting it to see if i was just really out of it while reading it, but i feel the same way about it. some vague thoughts about what this means in terms of how people think about style and content - people like a certain kind of novel, and i don't like that kind of novel, i think, is just what it is.

las vegas bootlegger by noah cicero: this was great. the best adjective i could think of while reading it was "free." noah seemingly let himself freely write exactly what he felt like writing at any given stage. the story is a weird mix of social commentary and politics (which is standard for cicero) and a ridiculous adventure novel. style-wise, he leans into a unique and artificial technique for dialogue - the characters speak in a very plain, artificial way so that their message/role for the character's arc is made very clear in a way that's funny, and it's formatted like a play, basically. i can't really explain it well. the plot itself is compelling and silly. there are no special twists, kind of - characters are open and honest about ridiculous things. it feels very unselfconscious, or, like, if this plot were written by someone else, they'd try to introduce some bullshit about, like, things not being what they appear, or things being a trick or plot, because they'd feel like what happens is too ridiculous or simple. so it's like a rejection of a rejection. it's overall very funny, by design. i kept taking pictures of paragraphs to send to my friends.

noah cicero's wild kingdom by noah cicero:  these are short, plain poems about his childhood in a very small/rural town in ohio, framed by this autoficitonal artifice of the narrator talking about his childhood. the long section of dialogue at the end was good. i like the structure of this - i like that noah feels liberated to experiment with structure i awkward and unconventional ways. the poems themselves are mostly pretty good. there's some awkward phrasing a few places and i kept hoping for the endings to be slightly different, but i think he's consistent in letting them be what they are - memory is strange and never neatly tied up like a poem is 'supposed to be,' and these poems reflect that. found myself feeling nostalgic for weird little things regarding food and nature and family.

something gross by big bruiser dope boy: read this really quickly because of its quick structure and exciting subject matter. bbdb hates the term 'alt lit' so i won't classify it as that but it reads a lot like books like best behavior in its autofictional style and subplot about real writers/publishers. i enjoyed looking stuff up on twitter to figure out who some of the characters correspond to in real life, but i don't think i know enough to identify one of them. it's one of those 'inside baseball' treats in an otherwise really great book. i similarly talked about it a lot while reading it and recommended it to several people. the last half leans into the self-shame over shame-of-others, with very 'vulnerable' moves to include things that characterize the narrator as complex and difficult. in this book he builds on some things he's done elsewhere - there are sort of ironic/cynical puns and jokes, excerpts of very long and intense text messages/emails, and stylistically builds on some of his other longer-form autoficitional narrative poems, both in voice and structure, that sentograph line line line thing. several images that he included, i think knowingly for this reason, have stuck with me and others, and we talk about them sometimes, when things in real life reminds us of them. i also liked the theme of older/aging men doing a lot of drugs and dangerous sex, this sort of bleak reality that everyone seems to acknowledge but can't/won't escape. it's written with a lot of empathy, i think, under this more cold and critical tone. it's a complicated and compelling book.

the nickel boys by colson whitehead: this is one of the very few 'normal' books i've read in recent memory - famous author on a big press writing standard mfa kinda stuff. the story is bleak and engaging and presents a good perspective on things i had internalized the formal story behind, i think. it was a compelling read with lots of 'action' and 'drama' but i think this means that the style, clarity, and cohesion took a backseat. i felt like there were a lot of awkwardly written passages, and it does that thing of like, time jumping to 'hook' the reader, leading up to a big 'twist' at the end. would be interested in reading more books like this in terms of content/perspective that aren't funneled through the big five palatable-for-the-masses writing choices. also felt interested in it being one of those fictionalized accounts of something that really happened, based on a lot of research and, apparently, the reading/study of nonfiction, firsthand accounts of this type of story. between this and some other things i've read/listened to, it seems like this is a good method of writing a best selling book, and seems weird to me.

escapes by joy williams: i liked that these stories didn't feel 'samey' about alcoholic parents. really enjoyed most of them, felt continually inspired by her interesting use of adjectives and adverbs. some of the stories seemed overly bleak, like, artificially dark (like someone was mashing together dark topics - 'what if we gave a dying old lady a baby? nothing could go well, right?'), but most were good and intriguing. felt confused by the fact that there are two stories that are, apparently, about the same characters/events but separated by time, but on first read through, i felt like it was two versions of the same story, because of how much parallelism is written into them; these were also the least exciting, to me, maybe.

libra by don delillo: read this for a bookclub with mike but he read it much faster than me. i've forgotten a lot of what i thought about it, but enjoyed the ambiguity of plots, plots on plots, the sense of being in control when not being in control. felt like a lot of the writing/structure was needlessly pretentious or dramatic in a way that people who read best sellers like. probably wold have enjoyed it more if it just followed oswald - his sections were most compelling to me.

white noise by don delillo: i was given this and libra as an xmas present. everyone says this book is super great so i was excited for it, but felt generally let down. i think reading too much frederick barthelme and some other kmart realism stuff ruined it for me. it's basically that kind of book but with some more pretentious dramatic writing. i did like how he lets certain unique scenes play out, in spite of them being 'dramatic' scenes. i enjoyed some of the dialogue between the professors - felt like realistic 'guys fucking around at lunch' talk - but overall most of the characters felt very artificial and wacky for the sake of being interesting. i liked the move of letting audio from the television or radio bleed into scenes, like a part of the dialogue. felt weird reading about the toxic airborne event and how people react to it from the perspective of living in a global pandemic. it overall felt a little long and the ending petered out in a way i didn't really enjoy- felt like i was just skimming the last two pages.

bob the gambler by frederick barthelme: got this bc mike wanted to bookclub it, but he read it in like 3 days and it took me a couple weeks. i like the mid-90s setting and especially the emphasis on the narrator being kind of a jerk/idiot. felt refreshing to read a novel about a guy who does stupid 'bad' shit like littering. also laughed at several scenes, like him wearing a massive shirt for no reason. the gambling scenes and subplot were very stressful and anxiety-inducing, which i was impressed by. it's a weird book and felt like he was having fun experimenting with what it means to include things in a book - like he was flexing, kind of, his writing skills, but pushing on some ideas in a risky way. he could have just written a more popular, probably, action novel about gambling, but he didn't - the second half is very meandering and calm in way that doesn't feel like a succinct 'happy ending'. enjoyed various scenes and subplots in the second half.

tracer by frederick barthelme (counterpoint): this one is short and full of strange imagery and characters. he lets weird little dumb moments play out and people tell stupid little stories. there's a lot of standing around and not being sure what to do which feels realistic. i liked a lot of little scenic details and how he lets little scenes play out, like the narrator and ex wife fucking around wih their cars on the highway. i looked it up on goodreads and saw joey grantham gave it a 5 star review and just wrote "perfect."

painted desert by frederick barthelme: went on a freddy b kick, obviously. it's pretty long compared to his other books and felt very...transparent in its moral arc. like there's an obvious couple of messages and it just sort of plays out naturally, no twists or anything. i liked all the scenic details. made me want to go on a roadtrip out west. enjoyed the reference to that kids in the hall sketch toward the end. enjoyed reading it in 2021 and feeling like nothing in the world has changed since 1994, only we're looking for this end-of-the-world-disaster content on social media instead of television.