Dumb Cover, Good Book: Everyone's Pretty by Lydia Millet

Lame cover, right? I felt like a simpleton reading this thing. Still, I love Lydia Millet. If you haven't read Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005), you should get up out of that chair and haul-ass to the nearest library right now.

Anyhow, all of Lydia Millet's books are radically different from one another and, weirdly, actually read like they were written by different authors. This one, Everyone's Pretty (also published in 2005, but written long before), reads like a found manuscript by John Kennedy Toole.

Like Nicola Barker's Darkmans or a typical Robert Altman film, Everyone's Pretty follows a pretty huge and interconnected cast of characters as they each do a lot of running around and stumbling through zany misadventures. Each character is over-the-top, enormously exaggerated, and all are desperately trying to inch towards some sort of individual happy ideal. Dean Decetes, the novel's central character is a pornographer and sloppy alcoholic with messianic delusions who is constantly getting beaten up. His sister, Bucella, is trying to be as pious and moral as possible in order to endear herself not just to God, but also to her gay co-worker with whom she's deeply in love. We also have Alice, a depressed and promiscuous co-worder of Bucella's, and Ginny, a teenaged math prodigy who hates her parents and is often on the receiving end of Decetes' sexual harrassment.

Despite the fact that these characters are hugely exaggerated and their madcap adventures often border on slapstick, none of them can actually be laughed at. The novel, while often very funny, never devolves into pointless farce, even if we're constantly afraid that it's about to cross that line. Really, Lydia Millet has thrown half a dozen not-so-ridiculous characters into a society where wild, outlandish actions are mandatory just to stave off the alienation and loneliness. It's a very sad novel underneath it all, and it takes her wacky sense of humour to keep us turning the pages.

Gassy Ghost: Darkmans by Nicola Barker

My award, my rules. Darkmans might have been barely noticed when it was published late last year, while To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960, but I don't care. Darkmans moves to the top of the list, and if you've got a problem with that I'll fight you with my (small, weak) fists. Here, I proudly present you with a big, fat, smart, sassy, rude novel about a drug dealer, a Turkish immigrant with an irrational fear of lettuce, a chiropodist, an art forger, and the farting ghost of a 15th century court jester. It's also about language, and the pressing, almost suffocating weight of history. Oh, and it's hilarious.

Nicola Barker is a serious writer, for sure, whatever that means. She's also a comic genious. I'm a woman obsessed.

Check her out:
Growl! I'd marry, you, Nicola, if I weren't so damned straight!

Darkmans (apparently an old thief cant for nighttime, in addition to the title of the novel) takes place in Ashford, a bland English suburb sort of like the horrible Canadian one where I reluctantly travel to work every day. Remember that in Europe, of course, anything new has literally bulldozed over centuries of history. Enter Bede, an elderly man who works in the hospital's laundry and who tries to save the old. He once succeeded in saving the Channel Tunnel from destruction but, because of a complicated mix-up involving some stolen antique shingles, has ended up dull and embittered. Bede has a son named Kane, who sells drugs pilfered from the very hospital where his own father works. Kane finds his father hugely annoying, fancies himself the anti-Bede, and is himself "easy as a greased nipple (and pretty much as moral)".

Now, listen closely because this gets complicated: Bede is secretly in love with a chiropodist named Elen. Elen has a husband named Dory who (unbeknownst to the characters in the novel) appears to have been possessed by the spirit of John Scogin, the long-dead court jester to King Edward IV (famous for his theatrical farting, for constantly accusing the Queen of adultery, and for setting fire to a church full of beggars). Elen and Dory have a young son named Fleet who is precocious and unnerving. In addition to busying himself with building an exact replica of the Cathedral of Saint-Cecile out of matchsticks, Fleet also possesses inexplicably detailed information about the life of John Scogin. There's also Kelly. She's Kane's delightfully and endlessly profane girlfriend. She has a broken leg, is weirdly sweet despite her filthy mouth, and comes from a long line of criminals so that her entire family is despised by the residents of Ashford. Finally, there's Gaffar- a Turkish immigrant who speaks almost no English, but who has somehow ended up in the middle of this whole mess. While Dory unwittingly replays Scogin's famously malicious pranks, all the characters occasionally lose their grasp on modern English, sputtering whatever Anglo-Saxon or Latin root the word they're looking for came from. Eventually, we see that history itself is sort of the joker here, and each character has his own complicated relationship with it, reacting differently each time it bites them in the ass.

In addition to being huge and brainy (did I mention that it's 838 pages long?), Darkmans is hilarious. Kelly's obese and mean-spirited mother is "Jabba the Hut with a womb, chronic asthma, and a council-flat." Gaffar speaks brilliantly and eloquently in Turkish (represented by italicized lettering), but the only word the other characters can make out is "thermos." One of my favourite lines comes from Kane, puffing on a joint and casually informing us that "one irreducible fact is that people who climb mountains are invariably cunts".

The novel - alright, I'll say it again - is funny and smart as hell, but never, ever sloppy. It's expertly constructed and brilliant. It did NOT win the Man Booker Prize in 2007, but how could it have? Ali Smith recently said of Nicola Barker, "An extraordinary writer; we're lucky to be alive at the same time as her."

Twoness in Oneness: 26a by Diana Evans

Pretty red cover! Umbrellas and twins! Speaking of twins, have you ever considered the emotional complexities of growing up in twinhood? Come on, admit it: there was a set of identical twins in your elementary school and they were, like, famous, and you always wondered what it would be like to have an identical you. I know that in fifth grade I definitely used to spend quite a lot of my time staring at Matt and Graham F. in the cafeteria and straining my little brain trying to think about it as realistically as possible. And wasn't it fun being one of the few people who knew how to tell the twins apart? I was all, "That's Graham. Oh, I don't know why, I just KNOW. It's no big deal."

Georgia and Bessi are twins, obviously, and the novel introduces them in childhood. The title refers to their family's address - 26 Waifer Avenue - in London, where the sisters inhabit a loft with a "spaghetti-Western saloon door" and a pair of identical beanbag chairs that smell like strawberries and are used for problem-solving. The narrative is warmly funny, but it's also fresh and clever enough to prevent an overdose of preciousness. Gradually, though, some darker details of life at 26a Waifer Avenue are revealed. The girls' father often drinks and stomps around the house like Mr. Hyde, while their mom shuts herself up in the bedroom and has lengthy imagined conversations with her own absent Nigerian mother. At one point quite early on in the book, the family sits in the living room watching Charles and Diana's wedding on television. Georgia and Bessi are hoping that the romance and theatrics of it all might rekindle something between their parents, but are disappointed when their father's eyes deliver a cruel and ordinary domestic message for their mother: "Where the fuck is my pudding?"

The girls are more than just close or even co-dependent. They're connected. When one is sad, the other physically aches. At the onset of puberty, their barely-perceptable differences trouble them and they do all they can to remain physically identical. The gap widens during a trip to Nigeria when Georgia is attacked by a gardner and keeps it secret from her still-innocent sister. Early adulthood brings a whole new set of painful challenges as the girls crave the familiar comfort of "twoness in oneness," are terrified of being apart, but simulateously need to assert their individuality. While one twin strikes out on her own, the other's mood swings urge self-destruction and both suffer enormously, wishing that they could be one person.

Georgia and Bessi's story is about loss, but it's also about that pleasantly-suffocating, addictive, and all-consuming kind of love- not just between twins, but also as it exists between friends, lovers, or parents and children. It's about how the death of a person or of a relationship sharpens our peception of life. 26a deservedly won the Orange Award for New Writers in 2005.

Hospitable Stranger: The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid

This book feels like it's over in an instant. It's quick, easy, charming, and familiar- A young man named Changez arrives in New York City full of hope and ambition. He finds success, but then realizes that his new life goes against a set of values that he hadn't necessarily realized he had and, older and more self-aware, he returns home. That's the story in a nutshell, but what really makes it interesting is author Moshin Hamid's impeccably-managed framing device. Changez tells his story- politely, matter-of-factly- on the patio of a restaurant in Pakistan where he is treating an American stranger whom he has just met to dinner. Because he's addressing this single listener, Changez tells his story using second person narration, using again and again the awkward "you," and making the reader feel as though he/she is being addressed directly.

The climax of Changez's story occurs when he describes watching the twin towers collapse on television, and he admits that his reaction was to smile. The entire book pivots on this smile. It's what inspires Changez to return to his family in Pakistan, and it's what makes his situation with this nameless and already slightly uncomfortable American even more chilling. The Reluctant Fundamentalist was nominated for the 2007 Man Booker Prize, and was also named best novel of the year by Now Magazine.

Plot Schmot, Mr. Bigshot: A Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker

In her 2003 review of A Box of Matches, Salon.com writer Amy Reiter nominated novelist Nicholson Baker for the title of "Grand Poo-bah of the High Art of Navel-Gazing." She meant it as a compliment, since "no one gets more out of his navel- and head and life and ever-evolving sense of time and space- than Baker. A Box of Matches is basically just a really lovely and almost plotless novel about our ordinary and short lives.

Emmett, the narrator in Baker's novel, wakes up every morning before dawn, makes coffee in the dark, builds a fire in the dark, and then sits in front of that fire and thinks. It's his "fire journal" that we're reading. What does a married medical textbook editor with two children, a cat, and a duck think about? Well, his growing children, belly button lint, and death, obviously.

Emmett on his growing children, sparked by noticing his son's ability to touch both ends of the bathtub: "I remember how proud Phoebe was to be able to touch both ends of the tub, too—‘Nice growing!’ I said to her. And I even remember how proud I was myself to touch both ends of the tub.”

Emmett on belly button lint: "While I stretched...my hand strayed under my pajama top and my middle finger found its way to my belly button where it discovered some lint. I rolled the lint into a tube, as one does, and having done so, I became curious about what such a tube would look like if burned. I tossed it into one of the spaes between the coals. It went orange for a moment, fattened, and then darkened. It is still there now but it will be lost when I stir the coals."

In Baker's hands, a passage about burning belly button lint becomes one about the unrelenting passage of time. His fires, in fact, represent not only destruction, but also the search for warmth and love, as well as for some sense of our own purpose and our desire for a lasting impact. Don't believe me? Here's Emmett history and death, being completely direct:

"The ungraspableness of history, which can seem thrilling or frightening depending on your mood, can assert itself at any moment. I just found another small bedroll of lint in my automatic lint-accumulator and I tossed it into the fire; there was an almost imperceptible flare of differently colored fire--ah! lint fire!--and it was gone. That is part of why I like looking at those burning logs: they seem like years of life to me. All the particulars are consumed and left as ash, but warm and life-giving as they burn."

There's something really comforting about this book. It's nice to take a break from the constant fear of being bland and unremarkable, and just enjoy the beauty of the ordinary.

Balls Plus Brains Equals Me, Swooning: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Hey. Huh. So. This is awkward. It's been, what, six months or something? In that time, I've read far too many books to write about in any kind of impressive detail, so I'll do a bunch of short posts about the unremarkable ones, and longer posts about the others. This torturous game of catch-up is actually fine with me, considering the reason for my long absence (new job 2 hours away) and the reason for my reappearance (the desperate need for some sort of life outside of working and travelling to and from work. This need became very clear last week when I basically lost my mind and sobbed for 2 straight days). So yes, I will blog. And no one will read my posts except for my friend Duff (hi, Duff!), but that's okay with me too.

Anyhow, I read Cloud Atlas back in November. It was my first experience with David Mitchell, and I had been unsure of what to expect. I might have even been resistant. See, people are always raving about Cloud Atlas, but every time I picked it up and read the back cover I thought to myself, "Huh. This looks a bit too much like work." Of course, this is coming from the woman who not-so-recently downloaded a copy of Eastern Promises and then let it sit, unwatched, on her desktop for something like two months before finally watching it and having her mind blown by the greatest naked knifefight in the entire history of nakedness and knives and fighting. That's sort of how I felt after finally getting around to Cloud Atlas: Why the hell did it take me so long?

Here's the thing: Cloud Atlas is not one story, but six. And by six stories, I don't mean that the book is a story cycle or a novel with five subplots. It actually takes us to six different but equally intensely imagined and detailed worlds. Six different time periods, each with its own vocabulary and literary style. In one story, Mitchell is summoning Evelyn Waugh. In another, a Grisham-like writer of thrillers. In still another, Martin Amis. The last two stories are the most frightening, and call to mind Philip K. Dick and Cormac McCarthy. We're taken to each world twice, with the exception of the sixth, as the novel follows this format: 1 2 3 4 5 6 5 4 3 2 1.

1. Adrift in the Pacific in 1850, a Yankee notary named Adam Ewing sojourns on the island of Chatham, where he surveys the impact of colonialism.

2. Robert Frobisher, a penniless cad and criminal, travels to Belgium in the 1930s to track down a reclusive, ailing composer. He succeeds, starts working on "The Cloud Atlas Sextet," and seduces the composer's wife. He also finds a book, annoyingly torn in half, called "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing."

3. A journalist named Luisa Rey uncovers a corporate nuclear scandal in 1970s California, and is at constant risk of assassination. One of the scientists who she speaks with is Rufus Sixsmith, who had been Robert Frobisher's lover in the 1930s. She also purchases a record: "The Cloud Atlas Sextet."

4. Timothy Cavendish is a vanity publisher in London in the 1980s. He has a found manuscript called "Half-Lives: the First Luisa Rey Mystery," that he thinks will get him out of debt, but ultimately ends up trapped in a retirement home.

5. Sonmi-451 is a cloned slave in some future state who has acquired intelligence and vision. She is soon to be executed, and her dying wish is to see the end of a film (films are called "Disneys" in the future) she once started to watch called "The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish."

6. Zachry is a tribesman in an extremely violent postapocalyptic society on the island of Hawaii after the fall of civilization. His narrative is told in a thick dialect that is difficult to read. Somni-451 returns here as a hologram and ultimately as God for Zachry.

What connects these stories- what effectively prevents the book from being a collection of (brilliantly written) short stories or novellas- is a peculiar reappearing birthmark and, more compellingly, the unifying theme of the endurance of and our need for human communication between generations.

Cloud Atlas is hilarious and terrifying and beautiful and huge. It's also a literary experiment that would be a total slog if it were written by anyone else but the insanely gifted David Mitchell. As it stands, it's a challenging read but enormously entertaining and each story is equally engaging regardless of the reader's personal feelings about the literary genres represented. For pulling this whole thing off without resorting to gimmickry, David Mitchell gets a spot on the top five.

Points for Creativity: The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Oh, Hi! I think I used to have a blog here. It's been a busy month. I got hired at a new library, quit my old one, fell into a lethargic depression as a result of the weather, and also did some rather interesting binge-drinking. Of course I read too, but more slowly than usual. This book, which should probably be read in only a few sittings, took almost a week. Note the illustration to the right. I selected it for two reasons: First, we've all seen the real cover by now because "The Time Traveler's Wife" was enormously popular when it was published a few years ago and second, the real cover (think knee-socks, mary-janes, and a thermos) is too hideously cutesy to contemplate. This illustration is cutesy too, but at least we haven't seen it hundreds of times.

It's possible that I selected this book because I wanted to give something a bad review, and I was sure I'd hate it. I'm always avoiding books with titles like this (The So-and-So's Wife, or The So-and-So's Daughter) because they annoy me. Also, according to the back cover, "'The Time Traveler's Wife' is a story of fate, hope and belief, and more than that, it's about the power of love to endure beyond the bounds of time." Am I a jerk for finding that description irritating? Am I alone in this? Anyhow, it's not that bad. It's hugely imaginative, and the characters are all unique and likeable. But take away the (admittedly pretty awesome) fact that Henry is an unwilling time traveler (which, by necessity, actually gives the book a really interesting structure), and what are we left with? A saccharine story of epic and fated love which I don't really feel is enough for a book to be about. Don't get me wrong- I don't believe that writers should ever write with a particular message in mind. The best writers don't because otherwise it would feel forced, but they at least communicate something larger and compelling by accident and then fine-tune in later drafts. There's not much of anything being said here other than "Henry and Clare have a profound romantic connection that you, reader, will never in your life experience because it's completely false and ridiculous. Sorry!"

Am I being all sour grape-y? Not at all. I completely prefer love of the ugly, improvised, and uncertain variety. I want to love the hell out of the wrong person and make it work. Fate is just so boring.