Learning Strategies

During the last few months I read two interesting novels by John Hart: The Last Child, which I believe is his newest, and The King of Lies, which is definitely his first. It’s not really clear why I read them in that order, but I guess it was because I read a review of the new book, which caused me to read the book itself, and only then did I think of going back to his first effort. Anyway, it won’t be a surprise that The Last Child is definitely the better of the two — but both are worth reading if you want a diversion. I’ve already reviewed The Last Child.

The King of Lies is a legal thriller in the style of Scott Turow and John Grisham, but with a lot of North Carolina culture thrown in. The characters are mostly pretty annoying, so don’t read the book if that’s a complete turn-off for you. On the other hand, if you’re interested in some effective writing and development of character, do read it. Like many male writers, Hart portrays men more successfully than women. The plot, though implausible, is absorbing. All in all, a decent first effort.

The setting of Lisa Scottoline’s Lady Killer feels authentic to me, but that judgment certainly doesn’t come from first-hand experience. Unlike my previous review (of My Latest Grievance, where the family, the location, and the social milieu are all familiar to me), I have to take a lot on faith here: the world of Italian Catholic working-class South Philadelphia is certainly not my own. Lady Killer is firmly in the traditional mystery genre, definitely on the light side, much more a cozy than a hard-boiled thriller, despite the setting. The plot is engaging, the characters are mostly appealing (except for the woman who may or may not be the victim — but even that’s traditional in the mystery genre), and the themes are reassuring.

This 12^th novel in Scottoline’s Bennie Rosato/Mary DiNunzio series can be read as a standalone work of fiction, although the context and characters will make somewhat more sense if you’ve read at least some of the preceding stories. But read it anyway; it’s meant to be more entertaining than deep, and it succeeds on its own terms.

The first page of Elinor Lipman’s 2006 novel, My Latest Grievance, grabbed my attention immediately:

Of the five main characters, narrator and protagonist Frederica Hatch is a sophomore at Brookline High School. Two of the others — Frederica’s parents — are well described in the excerpt above. The fourth is her father’s over-the-top ex-wife, Laura Lee French, who serves as the catalyst for conflict and resolution within the novel. The fifth, Dewing College itself, might or might not be based on Pine Manor College; that’s my hunch, though I have no hard evidence to support this conjecture.

As you can probably tell by this point, My Latest Grievance is a satire, but a very gentle and sympathetic one. Elinor Lipman is best known as an observer of human interactions and social mores; the added touch of having her novel narrated by an indulged only child of radical parents gives it a point of view that’s fascinating to the reader (at least to this reader). While it’s firmly anchored in Brookline, no special knowledge of the Boston area is needed in order to enjoy reading it.

The late Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a quirky and fascinating novel. It is at once a thriller, a character study, and a political exploration — all taking place in Sweden. The lead character, Lisbeth Salander, is a brilliant computer programmer who seems to have Asperger’s Syndrome (not unusual among brilliant computer programmers). Secondary themes abound — political and corporate corruption, pressures on independent media, modern-day fascism, various shades of hacking, sexual violence, racism, the complexities of human interaction — all tightly interwoven with each other and with the main plot. Read the book, or listen to the audiobook version (superbly read aloud by Simon Vance) as I did.

Here I am, continuing my efforts to catch up on some of the books I read in 2009. I’ll turn my attention now to writing a capsule review of John Dunning’s The Bookwoman’s Last Fling. As a bibliophile, I’ve had a special fondness for Dunning for many years, but this book just isn’t as good as its predecessors.

In case you aren’t familiar with Dunning, take a look at my brief pre-review of The Bookman’s Promise. I wrote that post before I had finished reading the entire book, but in the end it held up as I had expected:

…some interesting history, a bit too much violence, and unfortunately not quite so much fascinating detail about the book business as the first two books offered the reader… But so far it’s well worth reading, even if it’s a notch below Booked to Die and The Bookman’s Wake.

Unfortunately The Bookwoman’s Last Fling continues the downward trend: it’s still worth reading, but it’s two notches below The Bookman’s Promise; unless you’re committed to Dunning, just read Booked to Die and then The Bookman’s Wake.

Yes, this is a bizarre title for a novel. But a novel it is. And it continues one of the themes suggested in yesterday’s post: the extraordinary but still believable teenager.

Many readers found Marisha Pessl’s narrator (and hence this book, her first novel) annoying. Perhaps I’m biased, because I’ve taught teenagers for many years, but I can’t object when they are merely annoying; you have to look beyond that to the wide panoply of redeeming characteristics. In this case the narrator, Blue van Meer, is a precocious intellectual — precocious to the point of being a definite outlier but not to the point of stretching credulity. That, of course, is my opinion. Yours may differ. In fact, this is one of the rare occasions when I want to look at the opinions of others. Normally I review books, not reviews of books; but I’ll make an exception this time.

Let’s look at some excerpts from the contrasting but not incompatible reviews in the Washington Post and the New York Times. First comes Donna Rifkind in the Washington Post:

A self-absorbed scholar and a young girl crisscross America by car, flitting through college towns where they endure ill-advised sexual encounters, heartache and a potent dose of popular culture. Studded with ingenious wordplay and recondite allusions, their story veers between highbrow comedy and lowbrow tragedy as it careens toward a couple of ambiguous murders and some crafty detective work.

Ten points if you identified this as the plot of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Extra credit if you also recognize it (minus the pedophilia) as the plot of a much-ballyhooed first novel by Marisha Pessl, who tackles the art of fiction by vigorously associating everything in her book with something else. Constructing the novel as if it were the core curriculum for a literature survey course, complete with a final exam, Pessl gives each chapter the title of a classic literary work to which the episode’s events have a sly connection: Chapter 6, “Brave New World,” describes the first day of a new school year, while in Chapter 11, “Moby-Dick,” a large man drowns in a swimming pool.

Along the way, there are thousands of references to books and movies both real and imagined, as well as an assortment of pen-and-ink drawings.

…

[H]unkering down for 514 pages of frantic literary exhibitionism turns into a weary business for the reader, who after much patient effort deserves to feel something stronger than appreciation for a lot of clever name-dropping and a rush of metaphors.

As a Harvard freshman recounting the events of the previous year, …, Blue remembers being thoroughly in thrall to her father, a political science professor who changes jobs at third-tier colleges so frequently that by age 16 she’s attended 24 different schools. To compensate for this rootlessness (her lepidopterist mom died in a car crash when Blue was 5), Dad has promised his daughter an undisturbed senior year in the North Carolina mountain town of Stockton, where Blue will attend the ultra-preppy St. Gallway School.

It’s at St. Gallway that Blue’s dedication to her pompous, theory-spouting father begins to waver. Her attention is diverted by the school’s most glamorous figures, a clique of five flighty kids called the Bluebloods who meet every Sunday night for dinner at the home of their mentor, Hannah Schneider, a charismatic film teacher.

…

[T]he final third of the book charts Blue’s efforts to prove that the teacher did not commit suicide, as the coroner concluded, but was murdered.

Like Hannah, Pessl herself is something of an expert at evasion, nimbly avoiding scenes that might require emotional delineation, hiding behind this Nabokovian sentence structure or that Hitchcockian plot twist, always equipped to defend each dodge with the tacit reproach that, hey, it’s only a high-school murder mystery, lighten up. Yet here and there the author betrays glimpses of sensitivity, in Blue’s genuine expressions of grief for the early loss of her mother and in this moving evocation of loneliness, framed (of course) in a simile: “To the far-off tune of the blue Volvo driving away, it slipped over me, sadness, deadness, like a sheet over summer furniture.”

These briefly poignant moments are enough to make a reader wish for more, for a book that is less about other books and more about life…

And then we have Janet Maslin in the New York Times:

Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics is the most flashily erudite first novel since Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. With its pirouettes and cartwheels, its tireless annotations and digressions, it has a similar whiz-kid eagerness to wow the reader.

In Ms. Pessl’s case that means sustaining the mock-academic brio of her title throughout a long, serpentine, seemingly lightweight schoolgirl story. It also means that the narrative…is sectioned into chapters named for works by writers familiar from the classroom.

…

The extremely good news: Special Topics in Calamity Physics soon jettisons its booster rockets and begins to soar. All Ms. Pessl must do is dispel the suspicion that she is dawdling and indicate that serious ingenuity is at play. At that point the teenage insights of the book’s narrator, Blue van Meer, become only part of a more complex construction, and it becomes evident that Ms. Pessl has hidden a secret history beneath her novel’s surface.

This book’s gradual upward trajectory leads it toward mounting suspense, a hall-of-mirrors finale and a coda that is supremely inspired. In the guise of asking questions, Ms. Pessl resoundingly answers a big one: yes, she knew precisely what she was doing all along.

…

Everything about Special Topics in Calamity Physics is comparably coy, convoluted, brightly self-conscious and (to use a word blessedly remote from Blue’s jubilant vocabulary) postmodern. Even the physics equation on the book’s back cover has outsized verve. And what begins as a dubious proposition, in a world wholly without need for additions to its Prep School Confidential bibliography, becomes a whirling, glittering, multifaceted marvel, delivered in an irrepressibly smart and flamboyant new voice. No reference points need be invoked. It speaks for itself.

The book’s triumphant coda is a final exam rehashing questions raised by the narrative. True or false: “Blue van Meer has read too many books.” True or false: “Reading an obscene number of reference books is greatly advantageous to one’s mental health.”

Here’s one not from Ms. Pessl. Q: Is Special Topics in Calamity Physics required reading for devotees of inventive new fiction? A: Yes.

So both reviews are somewhat mixed, but I definitely agree with the overall tenor of the second one. Add this to my list of recommended novels about high schools and high-school students.

Part mystery and part thriller, John Hart’s absorbing novel, The Last Child, is well worth reading. Actually, more than a mystery or a thriller, it’s a portrait of an extraordinary 13-year-old boy, a mother, and a police detective, all caught up in forces beyond their control. It’s about obsession and relationships and friendship, all wrapped in rural North Carolina. I’m not sure that I want to say anything more about it, other than to recommend it if you want something that transcends the usual conventions of the mystery genre.

The Writing Class, by Jincy Willett, might make a good companion volume to The Jane Austen Book Club. Though much lighter — with no pretense of being serious literature — this mystery novel also deals with a group of adult English students. This time, as the title reveals, they’re a writing class rather than a book club. The Writing Class functions well on at least two levels: as an excellent mystery and as an amusing satire. Although I’ve never taken an adult-ed writing class, I’ve taken enough other adult-ed courses to realize that this one definitely rings true, even if it has to be a bit over the top (it’s satire, after all). The character development and the plot are everything one wants (if one doesn’t mind a bit of implausibility). This black comedy is definitely worth reading!