Books we can’t quit

Books We Can’t Quit: The Long Home, by William Gay

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long home

 

Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

 

William Gay’s novel The Long Home is epic in scope. Its rural, desolated landscape offers up the sublime as often as it portends doom. Its villain, Dallis Hardin, bends an entire rural community to his evil designs, gaining power from their weaknesses for liquor and prostitutes. Most of the book focuses on its hero, young Nathan Winer, as he pursues an unlikely love and strives to preserve his dignity while working for the devilish Hardin. The book’s sage, though complicated, elder, William Tell Oliver, opens and closes the story with his struggles to reconcile what he knows about the disappearance of Nathan’s father and his fear of what will happen when he comes forward with the truth. Oliver holds onto his corrosive secret until he must share it in order to prevent young Nathan from an inevitable act of honor-redeeming vengeance that would either land him in jail or in the grave.

Gay’s characters range from solid and kind to phantasmagorically evil. But even his best characters are flawed by pride and poorly-timed righteous indignation, and his worst characters offer glimmers of humanity. So The Long Home pits good against evil, but the rivalry is not entirely fabular but true and possible, too. All this against a backdrop of a 1930s – 40s rural Tennessee, where not everyone has electricity or telephone service, and a lot of people run homemade liquor and bury stashes of cash in the ground. They are dirt-poor dirt farmers, bootleggers, day laborers. They live (and die) by the work of their hands: honestly, dishonestly, generously, greedily – in a web of their own histories full of double-crossings and death. Continue reading →

Books We Can’t Quit: The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

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Handmaid

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
311 pages

 

Review by Corey Pentoney

 

 

When I first picked up A Handmaid’s Tale a few years ago—I know, I’m behind the times, here—I did so because it was a classic and had been recommended to me time and time again. As the familiar story goes, I fell in love with it, and have read it every year since, my already slightly ragged copy all the worse for wear for it.

The first time I read the book, the craft of Atwood’s writing was what kept me going, her ability to get into the head of her character, Offred, and stay glued there, is impeccable. With very little else to do as a woman in the Republic of Gilead, Offred spends much of her time scrutinizing every detail of her surroundings and remembering what she can of the past. “A chair, a table, a lamp. Above, on the white ceiling, a relief ornament in the shape of a wreath, and in the center of it a blank space, plastered over, like the place a in a face where the eye has been taken out.” So she describes her living quarters with Fred, from whom she takes her name. Offred’s attention to detail is second to none, and the way she fleshes out the world for the reader keeps you hooked from page to page. Continue reading →

Books We Can’t Quit: War Cries Over Avenue C, by Jerome Charyn

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War Cries

Originally Published by Donald Fine, 1985

 

Review by Morris Collins

 

In his biography of Isaac Babel, Jerome Charyn describes discovering Babel’s writing for the first time. “I read on and on. I found myself going back to the same stories—as if narratives were musical compositions that one could never tire of. Repetition increased their value. With each dip into Babel I discovered and rediscovered reading itself.” This description perfectly reflects my experience of encountering Charyn’s own mysterious novel, War Cries Over Avenue C. Reading it for the first time was an epiphanic experience: I had just finished college and decided that I was going to be a writer. This meant that I was taking a year off, doing manual labor, and writing everything I could: stories, novel fragments, poems. I had an inkling that I was decent with language but unschooled in form. I wanted to learn the rules—how did a story work? What was a novel supposed to do? Then I picked up Charyn’s novel—and found myself quickly beyond any literary world I recognized, beyond the terra firma of conventional plotting, form, or genre. It was a novel of linguistic bravado, narrative mayhem, and structural acrobatics—a beautiful and crazy book where the author never stopped to wink or nod at the reader. Unlike in Pynchon or Barthelme—two writers Charyn is often compared to—the absurdity felt desperate, essential, and real. You could tell Charyn believed absolutely in his vision.

War Cries Over Avenue C opens as a war novel, a chronicle of two lovers who separate and find each other again on the front lines of the Vietnam War, but from this fairly traditional point it explodes out in a lyric howl, a novel of war and espionage and love and drugs that reads like a chronicle from the dream side of the twentieth century. Here, from early in the novel is Uncle Albert, a Henry James scholar and American spymaster discussing the war: “It’s a clump of ideas too far out for the regular boys…We conduct a war that runs counter to the war that’s going on…We don’t stop at any border…We go anywhere to get what we want.” Ostensibly he is describing the CIA’s covert operations along the Cambodian border, but he could just as well be describing Charyn’s novel itself, a novel running parallel to, but perpetually separate from, conventional popular fiction, too far out in every direction, alive with language that, as Charyn describes Babel’s prose, “reverberates in every direction.” Continue reading →

Books We Can’t Quit: The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley

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PANK’s Books We Can’t Quit series reviews books that are at least ten years old and have shadowed and shaded, infected and influenced, struck and stuck with us ever since we first read them.

MIsts

Del Rey
912 pages, $25.84

 

Review by Dawn D’Aries

Once upon a summer in the mid-1980s, while perusing the shelves in a B. Dalton’s bookstore, I discovered a tome – as thick as the Bible — which granted me access to a world I had theretofore never imagined existed.

The tome’s paperback cover was intriguing: a white swan; a gold-hilted sword held aloft by an enrobed woman; a handsome white steed, its hooves obscured in mist. On the inside pages, the Prologue began:

 Morgaine speaks…

In my time I have been called many things: sister, lover, priestess, wise-woman, queen. Now in truth I have come to be wise-woman, and a time may come when these things may need to be known.

Here was a narrator who embodied all my girlhood fantasies of being queen of the woods behind my home, or a priestess who could harness the power of the wind. The novel, The Mists of Avalon, became my first purchase with the babysitting money I’d saved. Written by Marion Zimmer Bradley and first published in 1982, it is a clever interpretation of the legend of King Arthur, including the Knights of the Round Table, Lancelot, Guinevere, and Morgan le Fay. Continue reading →

Books We Can’t Quit: Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace

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PANK’s Books We Can’t Quit series reviews books that are at least ten years old and have shadowed and shaded, infected and influenced, struck and stuck with us ever since we first read them.

 

DFW

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, 1996

Little, Brown

1079 pages, $18

Review by Joseph Michael Owens

 

I submit that Infinite Jest fans have gotten a kind of rap. Whether good or bad, deserved or undeserved, the rap’s derivation remains up for debate. What’s clear though is that I.J.  is most certainly not for everyone: hating the book does not make you an inferior reader, incapable of understanding its brilliance, a douche, a simpleton, a minimalist fanboy/girl, etc. Likewise, at least in my humble opinion, loving the book does not make you a hipster, pretentious, a “snoot,” a lit snob, a douche, and/or a postmodern meta maximalist fanboy/girl etc. et al. &c. […]

Infinite Jest is ultimately a book I can’t quit, though I should probably mention up front that it’s not like I’ve tried or have ever had any real ambition to change this. Every reader has a book like this; a book that, for some inexplicable and intangible reasons, sinks its hooks into you in a way that few others can. It resonates with the fibrous strings of your core being. When you read your unquittable book, harmonies synchronize; connections are orchestrated between the page’s ink, the room’s light travelling at 299,792,458 m/s, and the relationship between your retina and the dilation of your pupils; neurons fire across pathways in your brain and . . . something happens.

You inhabit the words of another writer. Continue reading →

BOOKS WE CAN’T QUIT: Green Water, Green Sky by Mavis Gallant

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It gives me great pleasure to reintroduce PANK’s Books We Can’t Quit series – reviews of books that are at least ten years old and have shadowed and shaded, infected and influenced, struck and stuck with us ever since we first read them.  And it is with a certain bittersweetness that the first book I’m offering is by the late, great Mavis Gallant.  An expatriate like so many of her characters, Gallant left her native Canada for Europe in 1951. There she wrote stories about rootless and possibility – more than 100 of them appearing in The New Yorker – and two novels, one of them Green Water, Green Sky.  She died in Paris, on 18 February, at the age of 91.  –Randon Noble, Reviews Editor at PANK

 

Green Water

Green Water, Green Sky by Mavis Gallant, 1959

 

Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

 

Whartonesque in its focus on the travails of the unfortunate wealthy, Mavis Gallant’s Green Water, Green Sky uses lush language and sharp insights to tell the story of a young woman’s mental deterioration.

Bonnie McCarthy is an expatriate in self-imposed exile.  She and her daughter Flor bounce from one European resort community to another, surviving mostly on the good will of Bonnie’s brothers and some form of child support. Flor, by turns emotionally friable and drily vicious, eventually succumbs to a psychic woundedness that seems to arise at least in part from the instability and vacuous rootlessness of their nomad’s life. Continue reading →

Books We Can’t Quit: The Wild Iris, by Louise Gluck (A Review by Rachel Mennies)

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Ecco

80 pages, $15

When I first read Louise Gluck’s Wild Iris, I was not suffering. I sat on my futon several years ago preparing for discussion of the text in my graduate workshop the following week, and I took in the book quietly and then I read it again and again, entirely consumed. I consumed Gluck’s sharp lines, her exacting verbs. (Her prosody will instruct young poets forever on the bold and crucial task of word choice, of the image so precise and correct that this reader dares to call them perfect.) I mourned, and found comfort in her bravery in the face of her own mourning- but when I read Wild Iris the first time, I was not suffering. Instead, I wore Gluck’s suffering like a coat in summer- puzzled by its trapping force, unsure I would ever need the thickness of its pain.  Continue reading →

Books We Can’t Quit: Dance on My Grave, by Aidan Chambers (A Review by Katherine D. Stutzman)

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Editor’s Note: Books We Can’t Quit features reviews of beloved texts in any genre that are at least ten years old.

Amulet Books

256 pgs/$9.95

I first read Aidan Chambers’s novel Dance on My Grave on August 17, 1994, when I was fifteen years old. I know this because it made a big enough impression on me that I wrote about it in the journal that, eighteen years later, I still have on my shelf. Although that journal entry doesn’t say much beyond, “I read a great book this weekend,” it’s impossible to overstate how much Dance on My Grave meant to me. I read it again and again. I knew its place on the shelf, and sometimes when I was at the Bethlehem Library I would go visit it, just to touch the spine and look at it, even if I wasn’t planning on checking it out. I can still remember the cover of that old edition: bright green, with white type and a picture of a newspaper clipping on the front.

Like so many books written for teenagers, Dance on My Grave is both a love story and a coming of age tale. In this case, the romance occurs between Hal and Barry, two boys in a seaside town in southern England. Hal and Barry are typical teenagers; their affair occurs against a backdrop of trouble with parents and nagging questions about The Future, and is marred by the recognizable teenage mixture of bad decisions, impulsiveness, and overreaction. But they are both boys and that’s where the story diverges from the typical, or at least from what was typical in my world in the summer of 1994.

At fifteen I was just coming out, and I was starving for images of queer people in books, in movies, on TV, anywhere. I couldn’t have articulated that at the time–I don’t think I even realized what it was that I was so desperately seeking. But Dance on My Grave was the first book that I ever read about gay characters, and that’s a large part of why it became so hugely important to me. I read it in my room with the door closed, holding my breath, barely trusting the words on the page- was I really reading what I thought I was reading? I got intensely involved in the love affair between Hal and Barry, amazed at the frankness with which Hal expressed his longing for Barry and at the frankness with which Chambers depicted both the emotional and physical aspects of their relationship. Continue reading →

Books We Can't Quit: Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

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Chosen by: Alicia Kennedy

Original Publication Date: 1996

 

Sometimes I think, I miss the places I used to go in those books I used to read. I don’t really know what it means. Do I miss being adolescent, spending weekend days lying on the living room couch with whatever book I judged by its cover at Borders? Of course. But what I’m getting at with this vague thought is more about missing how lost I could get in another world, with characters who felt like friends, whose lives I felt I was living a little bit, too.
My transition from reading young adult fiction to adult fiction was pretty sudden. In sixth grade, I was reading series books about girls a little bit older than me who were getting their periods and making out with boys for the first time. In seventh grade, I stumbled upon Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero. It was a whole new, nihilistic world. And then there was Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and an intense Kafka phase (that still hasn’t really ended). The book from that time that I read over and over again, though, wasn’t dark at all. It was Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, and I picked it up because of the cover’s deliciously clean lines, cute Lego man, and the pages of numbers and repeated words and weirdly sized text I saw while flipping through it. Unlike a lot of the other stuff I tried to get my mom to buy me, this was an easy sell after she read the jacket copy. That could not keep me immune to its charms.

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Books We Can't Quit: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster

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Chosen By: Ally Nicholl

Bullseye Books, 1988

272 pgs/$6.99

I discovered The Phantom Tollbooth at the appropriate age and in the usual way. I was about nine, and it was a battered old copy I came across in the schoolroom shelves during a period of silent reading (a part of the curriculum unofficially known as ‘teacher needs to get the marking done or she’ll be taking it home’).

Choosing a book for silent reading was a serious business. Once I made my selection I was stuck with it until the book review at the end, and the week before I’d suffered through a dismal tale about a young girl’s friendship with a seal so I was desperately in need of something fun. I’d never heard of The Phantom Tollbooth, but it promised fantastical adventures and had a funny dog on the cover.

My subsequent review, which was meant to be a paragraph saying ‘I liked/didn’t like this book because’, ended up more like a dissertation. I clearly felt I couldn’t convey just how awesome the book was without retelling the whole story in a garbled gush. It had everything – a daring quest, a likeable hero I could relate to, endless surprises, quirky humour and edible words. I wanted to be Milo, to find a mysterious tollbooth in my bedroom and go for a drive through a thrilling magical land in my own car. I wanted to conduct Chroma’s orchestra as it played the colours of the sunrise, and wave to the cheering crowds after I helped restore the princesses Rhyme and Reason to the Kingdom of Wisdom. No reading period ever went by so fast.

Continue reading →