Damon Garr

I've read war novels that I've liked. I've read junkie novels that I've liked. Though this book combines the two, I did not like it. There was no real story here, no lessons learned, no new direction for the first-person narrator. That this is also autofiction doesn't redeem it. The only thing that keeps you reading is the hope that he'll go to jail or wise up. The best part of this book was reading about areas of Cleveland with which I am familiar.

I would take his writing class

The bits on writing here are the best part of the book. The ending is inspirational, and every writer can take advice from Annie Dillard. As for the personal stuff he's working through here, the history he never could fully admit before, I don't think he really digs deep enough. What's here isn't as moving as the reality of the event should make it.

Now, I am usually reluctant to embrace the over-hyped, the popular, reviewed-everywhere book. Yet, I heard an interview with Celeste Ng that inspired me to give it a try. And I really enjoyed it. The writing was sensitive while still keeping me interested in reading on. The handling of the ensemble of characters and their multiple points of view was deft. Maybe it wasn't all hype.

Maybe I'm a sucker for the “inside story.” It takes me back to when I used to devour music magazines, trying to learn all of the details of the bands I love. Peter Hook tells the New Order story in a lively, subjective fashion, and a language thick with dialect. Hook may be full of himself, but he's easily likable and can tell a good story. Halfway through reading this, I went ahead and bought Unknown Pleasures, Hook's telling of the Joy Division story. Still, this is a big book and probably only worth reading if you were a New Order fan.

I knew it was George Saunders, so I should have expected something different. To be honest, I'm not much into gimmicks. That's what it is in a way. The quirks that Saunders puts into everything. So, I should have expected it. But a trusted friend recommended it, so I read it. And, I really enjoyed it. It was surprisingly moving. A tough book to read when you're on a trip, away from your children. Maybe now I need to go back to read the Tibetan Book of the Dead to try to understand what was really happening here. None the less, it was a good book. Deserving of the Man Booker Prize.

I am sure that I attempted this book when I was about twelve, when one would expect I would find this sort of adventure appealing. Reading it now, in tandem with my own child who is reading it for school, I know that I didn't finish it then and only finished now because I had to. There is nothing really wrong with the book, but there is also nothing very redeeming about it.

How much context should we bring to a novel? Should we consider the writer's other works? Should the author's biography inform the reading of a particular novel?

I would like to read a book independent of its context. While the text may have an historical context that comes from without, what we should care about is within the text. Yet, when I read John Cheever's Falconer I couldn't help but consider the author's other work. The novel is so different from what I think of as John Cheever.

The novel centers on an upper-middle-class heroin in Falconer prison for murdering his brother. Other than the upper-middle-class part, there is little in common with the characters that inhabit most of Cheever's writing. But it goes beyond the setting and the protagonist. The writing itself is loose, casual, colored with flourishes. At times it is brutal, infused with violence and obscenity, and at others it is dreamlike, fantastical.

Falconer is not a suburban novel. It is a prison novel, filled with the things that make up prison life. Shocking, naturally, but even more shocking in contrast to Cheever's other work. At the same time, it never feels like the other is trying to shock us. He doesn't show us the violence and sex in order to make us gasp about the awfulness of it or to prove that he can shock. Falconer is given to us from the point of view of a character who has, in a way, given up. He is not shocked by what comes his way. Not resigned, but not amused. He doesn't completely accept his fate, but his attempts at change are only derived from desperation. Even when he experiences strong emotion, he seems to be documenting it in order to make it true. At the novel's ending, he has gone through change and maybe we can believe that he is capable of the emotion he describes, but he is so over the top that we can help but doubt him.

In all, context or not, more like Denis Johnson than John Cheever, the novel was a good read.

Butler is a good writer, but these stories didn't move me much. I appreciated the perspective on Vietnam and I generally feel that writers should be free to write from various cultural perspectives, but so many of these stories are from the point of view of a Vietnamese character. These days, it might just be better to read the work of a Vietnamese writer.

This one did not live up to the hype. I had been led to expect a rambling sort of memoir that was a bit dense and self-important. What I read here, though, was something that felt sloppy. In fact, I was bothered often by run-on sentences and poor punctuation. But really, it was a bit conventional and boring. After recently reading Joan Didion, I was ready for something equally as evocative. What I got was something trite.

Now, I must admit that I am not the target audience for Steig Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but with all of the widespread praise the mystery had been receiving, I thought it may be worth my time. Or at least it would be a fun waste of time. It was, instead, a frustrating waste of time.

It's bad hen you come in with pretty low expectations and are still let down. I tend to be annoyed with genre conventions, but that wasn't even the problem here. In fact, it probably would have been a better book if it had tried to adhere to a standard format. Instead, we get what amounts to hundreds of pages of meandering, useless back story, no plot development, and not actual progression. I say all of this without criticizing the line-level quality of the writing (it is dry and dull).

I'd like to summarize the plot, the central storyline, here, but it so convoluted that is not worth the paragraph it would take to write it. There is a mystery that involves two dozen or so family members, and a secondary mystery that sort of bookends the first mystery. Then there are another twenty characters, each with Swedish names that make them hard to distinguish from other characters (Don't miss Nora Ephron's New Yorker piece if you too struggle with this book).

Around two-hundred pages in, after being sufficiently frustrated and confused, the action begins. It is for this action that we're meant to enjoy these sorts of books, right? On a personal level, I enjoyed the concept of Mikael Blomkvist holed up in a spartan guest house in northern Sweden, tasked with chronicling a family history and attempting to solve a murder along the way. I also enjoyed the character of Lisbeth Salander, for all of her supposedly shocking characteristics, but I do think Larsson misunderstands her at times, giving her thoughts and actions (some critical) that are wholly inconsistent.

When the action gets good, when things are building to a climax, though, Larson lets some events happen so matter-of-factly that they fall flat. A couple of key moments in the novel happen without any sort of build up. Its as if the author needed something to happen, and instead of leading us to it, it just happens. When I wanted more of what the genre should have served up, the book let me down.

The action only lasts a few hundred pages, and then we return to the meandering, the other irrelevant characters, and the ancillary mystery (which, like the other, is a let down). The last hundred pages of the book were so frustrating to get through, so indulgent and self-serving. I could not help but wonder where the editor was for this book. This isn't a Stephen King book, where you pretty much let him write whatever he wants to write, slap a cover on it, and wait for the money to pour in. This is a debut novel. Sure, there had been international success before it ever appeared in the U.S., but couldn't we have pulled it into shape first?

Unless you're so inspired by the cover that you have to read this book (it was one key reason I was interested), don't. Wait for the David Fincher film. Or, better yet, see the Swedish film, which is getting good reviews. Though maybe you shouldn't believe the reviews.

More of an epic than I expected, the novel doesn't get to the real gender issues until late in the book. But by then the reader ought to be eager to hear about it. Still, the weighty topic was dealt with maybe too lightly. A key and defining moment in the book comes off more as a whim than anything significant.

Frankly, I was amazed at how enjoyable this book was. I expected hyper-masculine, hard-boiled, plot driven nonsense. The plot is convoluted and somehow irrelevant. Philip Marlowe is obviously sad but cruelly observant. The descriptions are incredible my favorite part. The sexism was to be expected, but I was surprised and horrified by the gay-bashing. Still, I enjoyed the book very much.