O, Democracy!: O, Silly, Silly Politics

A "Rapacious British Oil Company" has just received permits to dump pollutants into Lake Michigan. It's crazy, but it's perfectly legal. So the Senator for whom our protagonist Colleen works in Kathleen Rooney's fantastic under-the-radar, indie-published novel O, Democracy! holds a press conference to denounce this burgeoning environmental disaster. But the Senator's opponent in the upcoming election holds another press conference and claims that dumping toxins in the lake helps create jobs, and also, there's "some evidence" that plants and animals that live in the lake use these pollutants as food.

It's preposterous! But this anecdote perfectly captures one of the main themes of this novel: That politics are ridiculous. As the staffers for the Senator discuss later, they're sure that at least 50 percent of voters will believe that plant and animal life will actually benefit from swimming in toxic industrial waste — not because it possibly could be true, but because they want to believe anything their candidate says and disbelieve whatever the other guy says. It's not about being factually accurate, it's about muddying the waters just enough to plant seeds of doubt — especially among "low-information voters."

Yes, politics are ridiculous. As Rooney says, they're also funny in a "have-to-laugh-or-you'll-probably-cry kind of way." And that certainly shines through in this novel about Colleen's experiences as a staffer for the Senior Senator from Illiniois. It's the summer/fall of 2008, and election fever — both for the Senator's re-election and for the Presidential election, which includes the Junior Senator from Illinois — is in full pitch.

This novel is based on Rooney's own experiences on Senator Dick Durbin's staff between 2007-2010. Rooney's fictional stand-in for herself, Colleen, dodges blatant sexual harassment by the smarmy yet somehow likeable chief of staff, deals with ridiculous requests from the public (can the Senator get me an extension on my mortgage so I'm not foreclosed on? Help!) and extremist protest groups, and trains new interns, including a former dancer for the Chicago Bulls (a Lovabull) who has dubbed herself J-Lock, and who annoys Colleen to no end.

The big hook for the novel is when Colleen comes into possession of a video that would absolutely destroy the Senator's opponent. She has to decide whether to make the video public — to play dirty politics, as the Senator's opponent, a despicable politician who is using every dirty trick in the book, is.

If you're interested in politics, especially those of the left-leaning variety, you'll love this novel. Rooney doesn't use any real names of people, and the Senator's opponent is totally invented, but if you know politics and Chicago, you'll be able to easily tell who she's talking about. I actually really liked this part of the novel — because when you can decipher her clues, you feel like you're in on the joke. And, each reference – to the 39th governor of Illinois who is currently in jail for corruption (George Ryan) or the current (in 2008) governor of Illinois who has ridiculous hair and will soon go to jail for trying to sell the Junior Senator's seat (Rod Blagojevic) — feels like a trivia contest. So it's just fun! (Oh, and the Rapacious British Oil Company? BP, obviously.)

Anyway, this is a small press book that really deserves a wider readership. It's a novel that's as infuriating as it is entertaining. I loved it!

The Rise & Fall of Great Powers: "History is the issue"

The title of Tom Rachman's second novel, after his awesome 2011 debut The Imperfectionists, is only slightly grandiose.  The Rise & Fall of Great Powers is actually much less epic than it sounds — it's about a bookish woman named Tooly who is trying to uncover her past. But this novel is still a great read. The title is a nod to the central idea of the novel*: Humans, like great and powerful empires, are built, shakily or firmly, upon their histories. But still, humans, like great and powerful empires, rise and fall, based on making the most of the present.

We first meet Tooly as a 31-year-old tucked away in a tiny Welsh village, the owner of a failing bookstore called the World's End. It's 2011, and all we know about Tooly is that the two years she's spent as the proprietor of the store is the longest she's spent in a single location in her whole life. Then, we jump back to 12 years previous, 1999, and see Tooly as a 21-year-old living in New York City. Then, we leap further back to Tooly as a 9-year-old, arriving with a guy named Paul to live in Bangkok.

Rachman alternates these three threads in each chapter to tell us Tooly's story — we learn as she learns about how her past fits together. Along the way, we meet some oddball characters. Indeed, these characters, as was the case with Rachman's debut, are the strength of his writing. Tooly, in each of her three age-iterations — as a precocious kid, as a young woman not sure about her place in the world, and then as a more mature adult, finally trying to decode her past — is cool, but it's the secondary characters that makes this novel fun. Most notably among these is the Russian fellow Humphrey, who Tooly meets when she's nine, lives with when she's 21, and then goes to visit as he's dying when she's 31. Humphrey is a chess-playing, John Stuart Mills-reading intellectual who is fond of calling people "trivial beings," and messing up hilariously English idioms. There's also the mysterious con man Venn, and the woman who loves him, Sarah, who may or may not be Tooly's mother.

What is Tooly's relationship to all these people? How did Tooly become the person she is now? We read to find out, as she is trying to find out also. Is her entire life — the person she thinks she's become — based on faulty assumptions about her past, and why she trusted those people? Is her own rise and fall (and rise again?) built on a shaky cornerstone, or a solid one that will eventually allow her to settle down and be happy?

Another awesome thing about this novel is that it's a total pander to book lovers, but in a good way. Humphrey is a huge advocate for the reading life, and Tooly often tries to interpret events in her own life through the lens of books she's loved. Near the end, as Tooly organizes some books, she thinks about what the books mean, and comes up with this gem, which is 100 percent exactly how I (and I'm guessing many book lovers) feel about books, too:

"People kept their books, she thought, not because they were likely to read them again but because these objects contained the past — the texture of being oneself at a particular place, at a particular time, each volume a piece of one's intellect, whether the work itself had been loved or despised or had induced a snooze on page forty."

I mean, right?! RIGHT?!

Anyway, if you're a fan of character-driven novels told with a bit of pizzazz structure-wise, you'll probably dig this. Rachman is a funny, profound writer who is a pleasure to read on a sentence-by-sentence basis. Highly recommended!

*The title is also a nod, presumably, to a stuffy, similarly titled work of history by a British dude named Paul Kennedy. Here's more about that book, if you're interested.

A Mess of Mini-Reviews: Catching Up

I'm back, baby! Did you miss me? Did you even notice I was gone? (Don't answer that.)

Having just completed a major life event (hint: "I do."), the run-up to and immediate aftermath of which sapped up any and all blogging/writing time I had, I'm super excited to return to The New Dork Review of Books. I missed it! I missed all of you!

During the last few months while the blog has been inactive, I haven't stopped reading. I just stopped, temporarily, writing about what I read. So let's play some catch-up. Here are some very short reviews of books I read during the blog's hiatus. Enjoy!

Books I Loved

Shotgun Lovesongs, by Nickolas Butler — Sometimes, you read a novel at just the right time in your life, and it resonates immensely. That was the case with Butler's debut. But even if this hadn't been the perfect novel for the perfect time, it's still an incredibly good read — my favorite of the year so far. It's about a group of childhood friends who return to their small-town Wisconsin homes. It's told from the varying perspectives of the characters, as we see how their pasts inform their present relationships to each other and others. It's a novel about loyalty and love, and it's effing fantastic. Highly, highly recommended!

The Unamericans, by Molly Antopol— This is the best short story collection I've read since George Saunders' Tenth of December. Not a single dud in the bunch, and several that have stayed with me and that I still think about constantly — most notably, the story "Minor Heroics," about an Israeli kid who saves his brother after a tractor accident and develops a crush on his brother's girlfriend.

Sharp Objects, by Gillian Flynn —Flynn's debut novel is, if possible, even more disturbing than the novel that made her a household name. Sharp Objects is about an early 30s Chicago journalist named Camille who returns to her small Missouri hometown to write a story on the murders of two girls. Camille has quite the past of her own — her younger sister died tragically, and Camille dealt with that loss by turning to cutting. She's scarred just about every inch of her body with cuts of words, and what she finds about the girls' murders may scar her even more deeply. This is a short, immensely engrossing read.


Books I Liked A Lot

Nine Inches: Stories, by Tom Perrotta — If you're gearing up to watch the HBO series based on Perrotta's novel The Leftovers, this 2013 collection of 10 short stories is a great appetizer. Perrotta manages to make the mundane fascinating — a junior high dance, for instance, where nine inches (also, no doubt, a fairly unsubtle but highly amusing double-entendre) of space is required between dancers. These stories are straightforward and don't require much mental acuity to keep pace, but they're always entertaining and they all fit together well in this collection. 

The Noble Hustle, by Colson Whitehead — This book is a chronicle of Whitehead's experience at the World Series of Poker — told with intelligence, wit, and no small amount of self-deprecation. Oh, and jokes. So many jokes. It's a quick read that really makes you want to get out the chips and try your hand.

Hawaii, by James Michener —I've had this on the shelf for a solid 15 years. I finally read it before the honeymoon in Maui. As with most of Michener's fiction, it's long, detailed, and covers several millenia. But I learned a ton about my favorite vacation spot — from sugarcane to leper colonies, and from fire gods to the Plague. Fascinating read! 


Books I Didn't Like ... But You Might?

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, by Joshua Ferris —An atheist dentist has his identity stolen, and learns he may or may not be part of an ancient sect called the Ulms. Why are we here? What's the point of it all? Why is Facebook so annoying? You get to think about these questions and more in this good-premise-but-poor-delivery novel.

The Flame Alphabet, by Ben Marcus — Sooner or later, Marcus is going to deliver a mind-blowingly good novel that makes him a David Mitchell-esque superstar. The guy is an immensely talented writer. Unfortunately, this novel about what happens when the sounds of kids' voices cause their parents to be sick, isn't it. It's rather original, but a bit of a slog.

A New Dork Review Short Storypalooza

Here in Chicago, you normally have to wait for a month or (often) more for any nominally popular book or ebook from the library. However, that's not the case for short story collections, which for reasons I can't even begin to fathom, seem to be much less popular among librarian patrons. But other readers' loss is my gain, and I've been on a huge short story binge the last few months. Here's a round-up of four collections.

1. I Want to Show You More, by Jamie Quatro — Man, this was great - by far, my favorite of these four, and one of the more entertaining, sad, smart, funny short story collections I've read in a long time. Quatro has a lot going on here - running as a metaphor for life, several stories about a woman carrying on a long-distance-but-ever-face-to-face affair, and a few stories about a woman who dies of cancer (the story "Here" is one of the saddest things I've read). My favorite story is titled "Demolition" about a southern church that slips, seemingly innocuously, into a sex cult. How could that happen? This collection — which wound up on several readers' best of 2013 lists — is highly, highly recommended.

2. Bark, by Lorrie Moore — This collection was, frankly, a bit disappointing. Of the eight stories included here, only two seemed like well-developed actual short stories (i.e., more than 12 pages), while the other six, all fewer than 12 tiny pages all felt incomplete — like first drafts of longer projects. The two longer stories, however, were both very good. Lorrie Moore is one of those writers for whom the curtains are never just blue — everything means something else. The first story, titled "Debarked" is about a divorced guy named Ira who begins dating a crazy woman with a teenaged son, and a very uncomfortable-making relationship with him. Poor Ira just can't seem to get it together. The other long story - my favorite in the collection - is titled "Wings." It's about a failed musician couple who live in a rental house in the suburbs. The woman befriends a dying old man in the neighborhood, which creates more problems than she could've thought. Fascinating story, in which Moore's trick here is making the easy way out not seem like the easy way out. You'll have to read it for that to make more sense. This collection is worth picking up just for this story.

3. Leaving the Sea, by Ben Marcus —This collection ranged from straighforward-and-awesome stories, to experimental-and-awesome stories, to experimental-and-WTF-is-he-talking-about stories. The stories in the former two categories were mostly really interesting and fun to read. The stories in the latter (of which, mercifully, there are fewer) were a bit of a slog — you have almost no clue what is going on, like Marcus forgot to include the Rosetta stone that would translate his words into a recognizable story. But so, the collection is arranged in six section, the first of which includes four pretty straight-forward stories, all of which are really good. "I Can Say Many Nice Things" is a highlight — an amusing, slightly sad story about a guy teaching a writing workshop on a cruise ship. The last story in the collection, the longest - almost novella length - was a mixed bag, a microcosm of the collection itself. It's titled "The Moors," and it's ostensibly about a creeping guy following a woman to the office coffee bar. But throughout the story, Marcus is digressive and philosophical and sometimes hilarious and sometimes unintelligible. I'd recommend reading this story first, actually, and then starting at the beginning with the more traditional short stories. (Oh, and I'd recommend skipping "The Father Costume" all together - it doesn't make a lick of sense.)

4. The Fun Parts, by Sam Lipsyte — There's a fine line between amusing self-deprecation and just plain sad, and many of the characters in Lipsyte's collection - generally drug-addicted or otherwise down-on-their-luck - blow past that line with reckless abandon. They're just pedantic and pathetic, and you feel more sorry for them than you're willing to laugh at them, or even try to empathize with them. There are few highlights: "The Wisdom of the Doulas" is a really funny story about a guy who worms his way into a job as a doula for a couple, but quickly oversteps his bounds, and vastly overstays his welcome. "The Climber Room," the first story in the collection, is another highlight — it's about a failed poet who a rich guy enlists to pay special attention to his spoiled son at the daycare where she works. Overall, though, this collection was a huge downer, and largely disappointing.

The Rehearsal: The Play's the Thing

Eleanor Catton's debut novel, The Rehearsal, written as her master's thesis, was published when she was only 23 years old. Her follow-up, The Luminaries, is a hugely complex, massive novel that won her a buttload of awards, recognition, and fame.

David Foster Wallace's debut novel, The Broom of the System, written as his undergraduate thesis, was published when he was 24 years old. His follow up novel, Infinite Jest, was a hugely complex, massive novel that won him a buttload of awards, recognition and fame.

Interesting, isn't it?

There are other comparison between the two, especially, it seems, in their theories on pushing the envelope on what a novel is. And I'm quite certain David Foster Wallace would've LOVED Eleanor Catton's stuff. But it's a little sad to think about. I can tell you this, though, now having read both of Catton's novels: I'll read every word she publishes forever. She's that good.

And but so, The Rehearsal — what a strange, inventive little novel! Publisher's Weekly wrote about The Rehearsal when it was first published in the US in 2010: "It's a good piece of writing, but not an especially enjoyable novel." I actually think it's a GREAT piece of writing, and as piece of fiction read for pleasure, PW might be right that it's not as enjoyable as say, a Dan Brown novel, but it's still immensely enjoyable. It just takes a little work.

The story is this: In the aftermath of a sexual scandal (a teacher slept with a student) at an all-girl's high school, several girls attempt to come to terms with what happened. These girls are all connected by a mysterious saxophone tudor, to whom they tell about the daily goings on in their lives, including the fallout from the scandal. There are three protagonists — one is Isolde, the younger sister of the girl Victoria, who was seduced (or was she the seducer?) by the teacher. Julia is another, she's an outspoken saxophone student and in the same class as Victoria. She and Isolde become acquainted and begin a relationship (or do they?). Finally, intertwined with the story of these girls is the story of acting student Stanley, who has been accepted into the prestigious Drama Institute. The stories converge near the end as Stanley becomes more involved in Isolde's life than he'd probably want to.

Part of the point of the novel — and I highlighted about 37 passages in this novel that relate to this; Catton is AMAZING on a line-by-line basis — is that it's so hard to tell what's genuine and what's an act. Catton writes: “Every word that comes out of your mouth – they’re just lines. They’re lines that you’ve learned very carefully, so carefully you’ve convinced yourself they are yours, but that’s all they are. They’re lines I’ve heard many times before.”

I loved this novel, but I may be in the minority. It's not a "difficult" novel, per se, but it's certainly not a straightforward, point-A-to-point-B type of fiction. We jump back and forth in time, we have several points of view, and sometimes we're not sure if we're in real-time action, or if a character is simply telling a story. It's heady stuff, but even if you don't understand everything Catton's up to here (and I sure didn't!), it's still an absolute pleasure to read. She's quickly become one of my favorite writers.