Utter Crap: The Clique by Lisi Harrison

I read this for work. It is brainless and offensive. Don't get me wrong, I really like YA fiction and that's one of the reasons why I'm a teen librarian. I'm never dismissive of popular teen series' (I'm the first to admit that I'm huge fan of the Georgia Nicholson books) and I don't think that YA novelists should be required to write books exclusively for the betterment of young people. This book is appalling, though, in the same way that Sophie Kinsella's Shopoholic series is appalling. But it's creepy in a way that the Shopoholic series is not, because the girls in this book are twelve. Twelve!

That said, I really like this line:

"She was ready to pick up the pace. She triple-tapped Brownie and he began to gallop. Massie could feel her newly sprouted A-cups bouncing along with her. She loved the constant reminder that they were there."

I like that line because I enjoy imagining the moment that Lisi Harrison wrote it, reread it, and then actually told herself that it was good.

A Complex Pancake: The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien

I want you to know that this book is awesome, but ineligible for a Clammy because Flann O'Brien died forty-two years ago. That is all.

Boring Guy Annoys Me By Writing a Surprisingly Satisfying First Novel: A Good and Happy Child by Justin Evans

The good people at Shaye Areheart Books (a little-known imprint of The Crown Publishing Group) did right by first-time novelist Justin Evans when they designed this cover:

(This creepy cover illustration is the only reason I picked up the book)

Justin Evans is a Business Development and Strategy Executive in NYC and, because I'm a snob, I tend to think that's enough to make anyone a really crap novelist. I'd pretty much dismissed him as one of those douchy business-types who say things like, "I'd love to write a novel one day, but I just don't have the time right now!" as though writing fiction must be the easiest thing in the world- anyone without a really demanding day job could do it, right? Thing is, Justin Evans actually did it. And he did a good job. And that kind of pisses me off. My friend Sam used to rant about Vincent Lam, claiming that it was supremely unfair that a successful doctor should win the Giller Prize on his first try, when poor Sam was struggling just to keep his (unread) blog witty in between shifts at the bookstore where we worked. I sort of feel the same way about Justin Evans and take petty, mean-spirited comfort in the fact that, although A Good and Happy Child marks the debut of a serious talent, it hasn't really been noticed by anyone.

George is 30 years-old and he has a wife and a newborn son. Trouble is, he can't bring himself to hold his son. His wife is, quite understandably, getting seriously annoyed by this, and insists that George see a psychiatrist. The incredibly creepy and unnerving childhood memories that come back during these psychiatric sessions form the bulk of the novel. Evans has written a literary, psychological thriller about the nature of demons - real or imagined. Think Donna Tartt's The Secret History (Southern gothic without the South) crossed with The Exorcist and then crossed again with The Turn of the Screw.

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.