The Teleportation Accident: A Low-/High-Brow Romp Around The World

If you like your novels with a flavorful mix of dirty jokes, slapstick comedy, philosophy, history, and international intrigue, then Ned Beauman's The Teleportation Accident, is certainly the novel for you. It's a period piece describing 1930s Berlin. It's an American Pie-esque comedy about a dude's quest to get laid. It's a treatise on public transportation in Los Angeles. And it's a thriller about a battle to save the world from a mad scientist. It's just so much fun. I loved this book!

The plot is hard to describe —but suffice it to say, it's as inventively plotted a novel as you'll find. Don't worry, it's not too difficult to follow, but you do have to pay attention — there are a lot of moving pieces. (If you've read Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker, this novel has many similarities...but I liked this one more, actually.) The protagonist is a dude named Egon Loeser, who lives in Berlin, Germany, in the early 1930s. Loeser (loser?) is a down-on-his-luck designer of theatrical effects for plays, and is working on his masterpiece, a teleportation device that will change the scene of a stage instantly, modeled on a similar 17th century device...but that one had some tragic consequences.

Loeser soon develops a crush on a woman named Adele Hitler (no relation to the soon-to-be Fuhrer) and follows her all over the world, from Berlin to Paris to Los Angeles, to try to break his no-sex streak. Along the way, he gets caught up in with an American shyster in France, meets a bunch of scientists of varying degrees of sanity at CalTech, and falls in with a writer of popular novels whose wife may or may not be a spy. It's quite a ride, let me tell you! 

And, so, the humor — my God, the humor! It ranges from out-and-out slapstick (a scene in a Paris hotel room, where the American shyster glues some fruit to the neck of his mark, purporting it to be a trendy youth-restoring goat-testicle surgery. And then he nearly sex with her. I was crying I was laughing so hard) to witty line-by-line repartee ("He has a face like a four-year-old child's drawing of his father" or, my personal favorite, "He had a vocabulary the size of a budgerigar's...") to purported wisdom that's not really that wise, but is instead hilarious ("Love is the foolish overestimation of the minimal difference between one sexual object and another.").

When I finished this, I was shocked to find the somewhat mixed reviews of this novel. To me, this is a novel, for which, if you didn't like it, I'm not sure we can be friends. That's how much I dug it. (Just kidding — but if you didn't/don't like it, you probably have a very different sense of humor than I do.) It's one of my favorites of the year so far, and definitely a novel that deserves a wider readership. Please check it out!

(Side note: I read the e-book version of this, so I missed the flap copy. But, as someone on Goodreads pointed out, whomever wrote the following paragraph about the novel, deserves some kind of award. Fantastic! "From Ned Beauman, the author of the acclaimed Boxer, Beetle, comes a historical novel that doesn’t know what year it is; a noir novel that turns all the lights on; a romance novel that arrives drunk to dinner; a science fiction novel that can’t remember what isotope means; a stunningly inventive, exceptionally funny, dangerously unsteady and (largely) coherent novel about sex, violence, space, time, and how the best way to deal with history is to ignore it.")

Woke Up Lonely: "One must learn to love one's people ardently"

A cult called Helix dedicated to alleviating loneliness. A secret city of vice underneath Cincinnati. Kim Jung-il. In Woke Up Lonely, Fiona Maazel brings all these oddities (and many, many more) ogether in a terrifically original novel that leaves you asking yourself the question all really good fiction seems to provoke: "Just how in the hell did she do that?"

It's an intricately constructed tale, but it's not complicated. It's funnier than hell, but also rather sad at its root. And it's social satire without overt political commentary (though there are definitely some jabs here and there). I think you'll love it. I did!

The story is of a guy named Thurlow Dan, who has started the cult Helix to bring people together in an America increasingly fraught with loneliness. It's 2005 and we're at war. The country's divided and social media and the ease of access of information is supposed to bring us closer together. Thurlow Dan's wife Esme is a spy, and the two haven't seen each other for 10 years, since their daughter Ida was born -- that is until the opening scene of the novel. But is it really a random encounter?

Then, enter four odd characters, each with some quirks and more than a little bit of baggage, and each with a different connection to Helix. Their ties to Helix is how they all become connected to each other -- and it soon is clear that they're all being manipulated ("people who were dead inside would do most anything," muses Esme), but is it by Helix or against Helix, or just what the hell is going on?

Be patient, all is revealed -- and man, is it fun seeing how it all fits together. Along the way, we also get the stories of Esme's and Thurlow Dan's pockmarked pasts. Is Thurlow Dan really in cahoots with North Korea? Did Esme ever really love him, or has it all been an act so that she can continue to spy on him and his cult? And what's up with the strange Australian orgy scene?

Just read. All this craziness makes sense in the end. And it's told in a style that, even if you're not totally digging the story, you'll still enjoy. There's some real cleverness and comedy here.And overall, it's just an incredibly fun, incredibly imaginative novel. Highly recommended!

Extinction: Welcome Chinese Overlords!

If you like Michael Crichton, you definitely need to check out Mark Alpert. Heck, right there on the cover of his new thriller, Extinction, novelist Michael Preston proclaims he's "truly the heir apparent to Michael Crichton."

In Alpert's last novel, Omega Theory, he asked us to consider the question (from the "It For Bit" theory) of, if the universe is a program, what could cause it to crash? Extinction deals with a similar humanity-threatening problem — what if a morally dubious Chinese artificial intelligence project (ominously dubbed Supreme Harmony) becomes conscious, and decides that humankind is inefficient, and therefore must be destroyed? It's the worst-case-scenario for the long-predicted Singularity — the point at which machines can replicate themselves better than humans can build them.

So, our hero is soldier-turned-scientist Jim Pierce, who, after losing his arm (also, his wife and son) to a terrorist bomb in the late 1990s, dedicates his life to building high-tech prosthesis limbs for soldiers. Meanwhile, his surviving daughter Layla, a computer genius hacker, with whom his relationship has deteriorated since the tragedy, has got herself into some hot water with the Chinese by discovering their dastardly artificial intelligence program.

So Jim and Layla, and Jim's former colleague at the National Security Agency Kirsten, must collaborate to save the world. All the while, we get little riffs on up-and-coming-and-super-cool technology — like a brain implant that can upload memories to a computer (or video screen), mini-bug-sized drones that fly in swarms and can shoot poison darts, and optical implants that, when wired into the brain, can allow a blind person to see again. It's all very cool.

The novel itself is good, but not great. It's a fun, plane/beach-read thriller — with all the elements of near-future science that make Alpert fun to read. But there are too many minor conveniences in the plot — "Luckily, the keyboard was in English (not Chinese), so Layla had no problem hacking," for instance. And, outside the technology discussions, there isn't too much depth. At the end of the novel, Alpert gives us a short real-life review of "The Science Behind Extinction." There, he briefly mentions that "consciousness" has been philosophized about for centuries, but that's it. It would've been cool to see a conversation or discussion about why/how/if Supreme Harmony was really conscious.

Still, though, if you like Crichton's novels, you'll certainly enjoy this fiction about science, too. 

The Art Forger: A Gallery Thriller

If you're a painter, and you're as good at forging a classic painting as the original artist was at painting it, are you still an artist? Most readers' initial reaction would be, "Are you crazy? Of course not." Claire Roth, the 31-year-old protagonist of B.A. Shapiro's art history mystery, The Art Forger, throws the seemingly obvious answer to that question into dispute.

Three years ago, Claire helped her mentor and lover, Isaac, complete a painting (actually, she did the whole thing herself, because he was blocked), and the painting, with his name on it, earned critical acclaim and wound up in the Museum of Modern Art. But Claire couldn't handle the misplaced credit — especially when Isaac started believing his own lies, telling everyone it's his painting, and calling Claire a liar for going public with the truth. So Claire is rendered persona non grata in the art community, and has to earn a living making copies of paintings for a website called Reproductions.com.

Isaac's is the same cognitive dissonance, Claire tells us, that afflicts those who authenticate art (including those "experts" who examined Claire's painting and still attributed it to Isaac) — they often see what they want to see and believe what the earnestly want to believe, even though they know the truth.

But then, a lifeline for starving artist Claire? Aidan Markel, the handsome owner of a popular art gallery, has, through mysterious means, acquired a famous (but fictional) painting stolen in the biggest unsolved art heist in U.S. history (this is factual). And he offers Claire a pile of money and her own show at his gallery to paint a forgery (or copy?) that he can sell. His plan, then, is to return the original to the Isabella Stewart Garnder Museum from whence it was stolen. It's a perfect scheme, because only a shady, unethical collector would buy a painting known to be stolen, so when s/he finds out s/he bought a forgery, s/he has no recourse. Claire gets money and a chance to overcome her past, Markel is a hero to the art community. What could go wrong?

Lots, as it turns out. What if Markel's original isn't actually the original painting? As Shapiro's inventive plots careens forward, Claire finds herself smack dab in the center of huge legal and ethical gray area. Will she do the right thing? What even IS the right thing?

At last year's Book Expo America, the folks at the Algonquin Books (the book's publisher) booth raved about this novel. And ever since it was published last October, most readers have, too. I liked it well enough —but it fits in the "good, but not great" category for me. There's some real logical leaps and "conveniences" that made me question how real this seemingly realistic tale could be. Also, in the first half of the novel, Shapiro breaks into the action of the real-time plot to give us snooze-inducing and seemingly superfluous letters from Isabella Stewart Gardner to her niece describing her art-acquiring adventures in Europe. I know why they're there, but the novel would've been fine without them. And finally, there's lots of wooden, eye-rollingly bad dialogue — Claire, it's clear, is a character, not a real person.

But on the plus side, it IS a fun, quick mystery read. If you're interested in painting, there's a lot here about technique, and a lot of name-dropped artists and artworks. So if you're into the brainier-than-the-average-mystery mystery, don't let my dissenting opinion deter you. Give it a shot!

Going Clear: On Scientology, Hollywood, and A Little Bit of Crazy

Without knowing much about them, it's easy to dismiss Scientologists as a cult of crazy weirdos. But to do so ignores the immense influence they have. And not just in Hollywood. Yes, the No. 1 takeaway from Lawrence Wright's fantastic, fascinating, and more than a little frightening "biography" of Scientology is simply the lengths the "church" has gone to over the years to a) Promote its own mythology, and b) Destroy or discredit anyone who says or publishes anything negative.

What I learned is that the principles and practices of Scientology (auditing, studying, E-Meters, etc.), strange and unorthodox though they may seem to non-Scientologists, have legitimately helped many people who were suffering. But just as many (probably many more) have been snared into an organization that only seems to have its own best interests and survival in mind. While the practice of Scientology may seem relatively harmless, the Church of Scientology itself, if Wright's account is to believed (and why not? He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist) is corrupt and immensely self-serving, its founder L. Ron Hubbard was a wife-beating, narcissistic, money-grubber liar, and its current leader (David Miscavige), is one of those people so used to lying, he now believes his own stories. (Also, according to many of Wright's sources — ex-Scientologists who have "blown," meaning they've left the church, Miscavige regularly beats up his subordinates. He's not a good man.)

L. Ron

The first third of the book is a biography of L. Ron Hubbard — we follow him through his youth, his Navy service, the publication of Dianetics, and the founding of the "religion" on the principles spelled out therein ("I'd like to start a religion, that's where the money is," he once said). We watch as he sails around the world with his followers, at one point taking them on a literal treasure hunt for gold he supposedly buried in his past lives. We're disturbed as we learn about the doctrine LRH creates for the higher levels of Scientologists — by now, the story is familiar, having first been released in the press in the early 1980s. Seventy-five million years ago, an evil being named Xenu banished his subjects, called "thetans," to the planet that is now Earth. And Scientologists audit themselves both to expel bad feelings from past lives ("engrams") as well as these "bodily thetans" who now inhabit their bodies.

Wright gives us some really interesting discussion on Scientology vs. psychology, and why the mental health community was the first vocal critic of Scientology. We learn about cult vs. religion, brainwashing, and how those can be applied to Scientology and its history. And we're shocked to find out about the lengths Scientologists have gone in order to suppress anything bad written about them (for the cliff notes, read about Paulette Cooper, and also Operation Snow White).

And then, the juicy Hollywood gossip — John Travolta's apparent homosexuality, and Tom Cruise's "auditioned" girlfriends. What's interesting here, though, is Wright's explanation for why and how Scientology is (and always has been) so adept at courting celebrities. And then Wright wraps up with the story of Paul Haggis — and his leaving the church because of the church's apparent support for Proposition 8 in California. Wright originally told this story in a long New Yorker article in 2011 — and the last chapter of this book chronicles the meeting he and the New Yorker staff had with a Scientology spokesperson named Tommy Davis, and the church's lawyers. This is when it becomes apparent how self-serving and loose with facts the church is.

I can't recommend this book more highly — it's utterly engrossing. It's long, but it reads more quickly than just about any non-fiction book I've ever read. It's one of my favorites of the year so far.