notanotherbookreview

A “Farewell” that’s really a hello to Dorothy Parker I’m a fan of Dorothy Parker’s story, Big Blonde, though she may be better remembered for her clever quotes, “I’ve never been a millionaire but I just know I’d be darling at it.” Though her heyday was 1920’s, Parker’s wit is still fresh and inspiring. So I cheer Ellen’s Meister’s novel, which brings her ghost to the rescue of a modern literary woman. Farewell, Dorothy Parker by Ellen Meister (Putnam & Sons, February 2013) is a thinking woman’s fantasy. Violet Epps, fearless movie critic for a national magazine, is a hopeless wimp in her personal life, crippled with anxiety not entirely of the neurotic variety. Recently, Violet lost her sister in a car accident, as well as custody of her beloved niece. To add to the turmoil, her loser boyfriend is set to move into her house and her snarky assistant wants her job. Feeling she needs inspiration, Violet, who thinks of Parker as a kind of literary alter ego, makes a rese...

The Stockholm Octavo is completely entertaining and totally unexpected Karen Engelman’s The Stockholm Octavo (Nov 2012, Ecco/Harper Collins) is completely entertaining and totally unexpected. Not only is it set in 1791 in Stockholm but the plot hinges on Cartomancy, a form of divination using cards. This is not Tarot. The Octavo is a construct with its own images and meanings, involving Masonic metaphysics. It is crucial to the fate of our hero, the Seeker Emil Lasson. When Emil first goes to the gaming salon of Mrs. Sophia Sparrow, there are rumbles of the revolution in France and the revolt of aristocratic “patriots” against Sweden’s populist king, but the people in her comfortable rooms are more interested in gambling. There are also those seeking Mrs. Sparrow’s gifts as a seer. And when the vision comes to her, she must communicate it.  That first night, she sees in Emil’s hand a good future in cards. And his dexterity at the gaming table is such that he bec...

The Middlesteins is a Greek Tragedy in Bar Mitzvah clothes. This is a funny novel in a sad grotesque kind of way. It's also painfully familiar in the way of family dramas. But this is a barbed comedy, where characters are not just edgy depictions but  instruments of destiny that are very connected to earthly tortures. It begins with our heroine, Edie, as a little girl. Her mother and father, immigrants from the war-torn old world, are delighted that she can eat what she wants and as much of it as she likes. Isn't that the idea of the land of the free and plentiful? So when little Edie suffers pain, she's of course given food as solace. She grows up equating food with love, the pleasure that never lets you down, until of course, she can't eat. And that is the crux of this book, Edie's food obsession. Only time she stopped eating was when her father was dying and she was in law school. A svelte 164, she agrees to meet Richard on a blind date, though she's s...

How can I say this? Probably because I never read it before. Tolstoy wasn't on my high school reading list. And I studied art in college. I've spent years reading for truth, when this book existed; luminous, transcendent, full of dirt and tragedy--like life itself. Tolstoy doesn't open with Anna, but her brother Stepan and it's brilliant he does so, because Stepan, Anna's brother has some similar proclivities. Stepan is a pleasure-loving family man, a sensualist easily moved by passing sentiments, and a philanderer. He's presented as attractive, a fun aristocrat with the usual indulgences of his class. In society he's liked for his easy-going personality and Stepan understands how to network and use connections. You almost agree with him that he's right to have a mistress or two, because pretty women are attracted to him and his wife has lost her looks, disposition, and has little of interest to say to a man of his cultured intelligence. You may symp...

This novel steals you, SUTTON by J.R. Moehringer (Hyperion) I was grabbed by  SUTTON, a novel about the famous bank robber from the Great Depression. Sutton is aspiring and resigned, flinty and sensitive, brilliant and a fool. He got under my skin with his soft noirish voice and the pathos of his thwarted life. I heard Moehringer talk about researching this novel and the odd coincidence that his mother, once a bank secretary, witnessed one of Sutton's robberies. It's the kind of coincidence Sutton details, and these telling details have more weight than bare facts in the elusive life of SUTTON . It's a fact that "Willie the Actor" was released from Attica prison on Christmas Eve 1969, after serving 17 years. (The irony that Gov.Rockefeller, a former banker, signed the order was probably not lost on Sutton). His lawyer made a deal with a newspaper for an exclusive, so he spent his first night secluded with a reporter and photographer.  SUTTON, the fictio...

Launch Oct 11th, featured in Vanity Fair's Hot Type The Watchmaker's Daughter heartbreaking and funny The Watchmaker’s Daughter  by Sonia Taitz: Extraordinary, wise, heartbreaking and funny Sonia Taitz’s  The Watchmaker’s Daughter  (McWitty Press, October) is an extraordinary memoir -- wise, heartbreaking and funny.  I love this book, which reveals the unassimilated soul behind Marjorie Morningstar, the ethnic origins of Erica Jong’s  Fear of Flying , and the ambitions that fueled Natalie Wood, another dark-haired immigrant’s daughter.  The Watchmaker’s Daughter  is about black-haired Sonia, growing up the child of Holocaust survivors in the 60’s in New York neighborhoods rough and middling.  You experience the clash between kids eager for a free American life and survivor parents, traumatized and working hard for a living. Young Sonia tries hard to reconcile her own desires with her parents’ insular world.  She also w...

Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, Lauren Bacall, Natalie Wood, Liz Taylor…Who hasn’t watched stars of old Hollywood  and wondered what it was like to get discovered in some drugstore and become a legend?  Emma Straub’s new novel, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures (Riverhead Books) creates an imaginary star, who’s real and immensely appealing.  While movie star biographies tend to be more tease than truth,  this fiction succeeds.  Though you know the story arc, Laura Lamont delivers the pleasure of a not always charmed Hollywood life.  And you don’t feel the vague necrophilia guilt about enjoying  a dead  star’s  glamorous life. Emma Straub’s art is to make Laura’s interior life so visceral you almost feel you’re enmeshed in her luck and misfortunes, talent and delusions.  She’s a very specific character, though a familiar American archetype.  For within Laura Lamont lives Elsa Emerson, the Wisconsin farm girl with old-fashioned values....

Wilkie Collins’ BASIL, written in 1852, is all about class I read Wilkie Collins’ second novel, BASIL, not expecting a masterpiece like the THE WOMAN IN WHITE.  Yet I liked it for its comparative brevity, urgency, and shocks.  Considered a precursor to the detective story, there are telling clues only seen as important in retrospect by Basil, the narrator.  The second son of an aristocratic family whose lineage goes back to the Norman kings, at the beginning, Basil is exiled from his privileged life to the coast of Cornwall. Heartbroken with shattered nerves, Basil writes to save his life and fears it will be forfeit before he can finish. An almost demonic force threatens him and, though you think he may be crazy, you have to read on.  The story begins with his family, particularly his father, whose pride in his ancient heritage, the conviction that virtue is based on class, is pivotal to this mystery.  How Basil ruined himself is the subject of his narrati...

The Watchmaker’s Daughter by Sonia Taitz: Extraordinary, wise, heartbreaking and funny Sonia Taitz’s The Watchmaker’s Daughter (McWitty Press, October) is an extraordinary memoir -- wise, heartbreaking and funny.  I love this book, which reveals the unassimilated soul behind Marjorie Morningstar, the ethnic origins of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying , and the ambitions that fueled Natalie Wood, another dark-haired immigrant’s daughter.  The Watchmaker’s Daughter is about black-haired Sonia, growing up the child of Holocaust survivors in the 60’s in New York neighborhoods rough and middling.  You experience the clash between kids eager for a free American life and survivor parents, traumatized and working hard for a living. Young Sonia tries hard to reconcile her own desires with her parents’ insular world.  She also wants to please and protect them and can’t imagine why Germans wanted to kill Jews. When her grandmother puts her in a harness in the playground ...

The Age of Madness by David Maine, Red Hen Press I first thought Regina, the darkly ironic central character in David Maine's The Age of Madness, was a chick-lit standard, the successful professional woman, who knows something's missing from her life. Almost a caricature of the type, Regina's a runner obsessed with her performance, a fervent health food consumer, a home-owner fixated on light white spaces,classical music, peace and quiet. But this Regina is a psychiatrist,  a hard-headed rationalist, a non-believer, who doesn't suffer fools easily and yet suspects she is one. Maine cracks open her facade to reveal a woman shell shocked by the simultaneous deaths of her husband and son. "Facing the facts," Regina wonders if she's the cause--the evil feminist, who forced her husband to abandon literature and become a househusband.  Was this the reason for his suicide or homicide-suicide?  She's obsessed with the question of what happened. And so are...

American Boy by Larry Watson, August 2012, Milkweed Editions Matthew Garth, the 17 year old narrator of AMERICAN BOY, is a hard-scrabble not quite hard-boiled boy in the early 1960’s in Willow Creek, an isolated town in Minnesota. Families here have known each other for generations and newcomers, like the charismatic Dr. Dunbar, are both admired and viewed with suspicion. Raised by a struggling widow, Matt’s from the “wrong side of the tracks,” grateful for his status, as an unofficial member of the Dunbar family. And like a Dreiser hero, he knows it’s strangely provisional. His friendship with Johnny Dunbar gives him access to the luxurious Victorian house, holiday parties, but most of all to the charismatic Dr. Dunbar. When Matt’s father died, the pain of that event was muted by Dunbar, who credited him with enough intelligence to be able to understand the medical causes. Flattered that Dr. Dunbar encourages him, as a future physician, Matt considers his comfortable pl...

In my opinion GATES OF EDEN by Charles Degelman (August Harvard Square Editions) can well be compared to Gone with The Wind, in describing huge cultural and political upheaval. In GATES it's the 1960's--Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, the historical ending of the war by the most massive anti war movement in American history and its aftermath. Degelman's novel describes the war in Vietnam and the war at home, through the passionate drives and idealistic committments of a cross-section of very real characters. This ambitious novel begins with a nuclear blast seen by the boy Roger in Bronco, Texas. In Chicago, young Louis wants to go to the funeral of a black boy killed in the South. Middle class Connie, college bound, worries about her boyfriend, Eddie, a smart but poor kid bound for nowhere--or as she later learns, Vietnam. David and Madeline are New York sophisticates, privileged kids who want to make a mark, where it matters. D...

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is a clever novel. My book group chose it and oddly enough, we all had similar reactions. We admired how the book draws you in, using alternating letters between the husband and wife. And how you keep reading, wanting to know what did happen to the wife, who’s disappeared. Still about half through we got annoyed. All the detail of the wife’s letters become tedious. And most of us had inklings of what happened too early so it wasn’t so shocking. I found myself thinking of great noir—James Cain’s The Postman Rings Twice or  Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley. This book might be a homage to those, but it lacks the riveting directness, the punch and irrefutable endings. Postman creates a sense of horrified inevitability as you see two passionate people cross the criminal line toward insanity. In Mr. Ripley, the  chilling narrator is already there. Gone Girl seems to flirt with ...

WE ARE WHAT WE PRETEND TO BE: The first and Last Works w/special commentary from Nanette Vonnegut has never before been in print. Vanguard, a member of the Perseus Book Group, will be publishing it this Fall. The book is a treat for any Vonnegut fan and useful for aspiring writers. I love Kurt Vonnegut for his strong heart, whether breaking with irony or crackling with humor. His wit was beyond rapier, even off-center going after unexpected targets and he improvised like a clairvoyant. He's full of spontaneous feeling and more accurate than not. I was once waiting for a plane in the Iowa City airport, as he was getting off one. He caught my eye and pointed to the book I was reading, Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-up.” He made a “thumbs up” gesture and touched his heart. He mimed a finger across his neck about it being suicidal. Vonnegut loved the book, Fitzgerald, and, though I was across the room...

City of Women by David R. Gillham, an Amy Einhorn Book, published by  Penguin Group (USA). What is it about Berlin 1943 that we keep revisiting this time of impending doom, as the once indomitable Third Reich began to crack up? Hasn't this era and its aftermath been explored ad nauseum in fiction and films like "The Berlin Stories"/Cabaret, “The Good German,” "The Piano," "Sarah's Key," "The Boy in the Stripped Pajamas," Erich Maria Remarque’s unforgettable play Full Circle, and of course Gunter Grass's "The Tin Drum.?" Then I read City of Women by David R. Gillham (August, Penguin Group), whose heroine is someone I haven't met before. Sigrid Schroeder is not decadent, burnt out or a Nazi zealot who sees the light. She's a regular "haus frau,"except that she's not.  She has a job and no children, which separates her from her mother-in-law's generation. That woman continually scrubs, while self-...

You're Not as Crazy as I Thought (But You're Still Wrong) : Conversations between a Devoted Conservative and a Die-Hard Liberal by Phil Neisser and Jacob Hess published by Potomac Books. This book, in my opinion, should be read by every American who might possibly be sick of the "punch & judy show" we call national politics. This is the rare nonfiction book I'm reviewing, because I think it's important (not because I do book pr, though I choose books I think are valuable). Jacob Hess and Phil Neisser are the Conservative and Liberal, who engage in dialogue about “hot-button” issues seeking not agreement but understanding. And it hasn't come easily. The two met at a conference on dialogue. Jacob was one of the few conservatives presenting, Phil had recently published a book, saying how Americans no longer knew how to disagree constructively. Though Jacob, a religious Conservative of Mormon background, has convictions tota...

My son who's almost 14 had to read this book for school and at first told me he hated it, that it wasn't relevant to this time, that the guy, Holden Caulfield, was crazy, also whiny and boring, that he went on and on. Then he reread it, changed his opinion, wrote a longer report than he's done all year and got an A. What happened? Holden doesn't have any media, not a computer, let alone a smartphone. Yet my son found something on rereading he could relate to. I decided to see if I could figure out what, since I have no recall of this book and could use some insight into the male teenage mind. When first you meet Holden Caulfield, he's resting some unspecified place. His Hollywood brother with the Jaguar will be taking him home in a month. He's telling what happened to him before he got sick and had to rest. He was leaving Pencey, a prep school, and wasn't sorry about it. He shows you why; there's the handsome, unethical roommate, who by coincidence wa...