Landline: Can a Magic Phone Save a Marriage?

You may have heard about the trick in this novel already, and it's a good one, to be sure: What if you discovered a "magic" phone that allowed you to talk to your spouse in the past? Would it offer you fresh insight into your current marital problems, or would it just make things more complicated, and possibly force you to realize things were actually broken beyond repair?

Those questions, and the magic phone gimmick that launches them, make Rainbow Rowell's Landline really intriguing and fun – but the soul of this novel is the very simple, yet impossible to answer, question: Is love enough?

If you think that sounds a bit ooey-gooey, you're not wrong. It is. This is part love story, part story of that love story beginning to fail. And so something like this may usually have been a solid pass for me, but I took a chance on this — well outside my comfort zone — because several Book Rioters read it for the July Riot Read, and most really liked it, even the dudes. And I loved it!

I loved it because Rowell is a super cool writer — her characters are awesome. They feel like people you may know, and while they're often neurotic and quirky, smart and witty, or mysterious and humorless, you still want to get a beer with them. Her dialogue is authentic and often funny. And the story keeps you guessing — you know what you hope happens, but you're never quite sure what will.

The two principles are Neal and Georgie, late 30s parents of two girls, who live in Los Angeles. Neal is a stay-at-home dad, and Georgie is a TV writer for a crappy prime time comedy. But when she and her longtime writing partner get an offer to pitch their own show, they jump at it. Only problem: Georgie was supposed to go to Omaha with Neal and their kids for Christmas with Neal's mother. Neal is pissed! So he takes the girls and goes anyway, and Georgie stays behind to work on her show. Is this the nail in the coffin for the marriage? Or will the magic phone (which doesn't appear until about page 70, and until you get there, you have to be a little patient) be the magic marriage-cure a magic phone should be?

If you're still on the fence, check out this list of books to try if you've loved Landline. For me, this was more a reverse-engineering process, as I really liked all four of these books (especially The Financial Lives of the Poets and Domestic Violets), so I figured Landline was a pretty "safe" calculated risk. And it panned out. Highly recommended!

Mr. Mercedes: King Goes Crime

Stephen King's new crime thriller (I guess that's the appropriate genre — it's often horrific, but it's definitely not horror) Mr Mercedes is certainly entertaining, a novel you can plow through (maybe a poor choice of words) in just a few sittings. But it also sort of feels like the kind of novel King can crank out in his sleep. There isn't a tremendous amount of depth or unexpected drama here — you know who the killer is from the opening pages — and so the only question is whether or hero will be able to stop said killer from committing his heinous encore act.

To fill in the details: The killer is a dude named Brady Hartfield, a late-20s fellow who works at an electronics store and moolights as an ice cream truck driver (you'll never trust your ice cream truck driver again after reading this novel). Brady lives with his drunk mother, with whom he has a massively inappropriate relationship. Brady is the eponymous Mr. Mercedes, the title psychopath who mauled down and killed eight people waiting in line at a job fair in a stolen Mercedes Benz.

Our hero is Bill Hodges, a former detective who had failed to solve the Mr. Mercedes crime before fading into retirement. But Brady reels him back into the case in the opening pages. Brady sends him a letter, chiding him about the crime, and endeavoring to guilt poor Bill into committing suicide. Brady had already been successful in this regard with the rich woman from whom he stole the Mercedes. She killed herself a few months prior after he'd needled her as well. Evidently, this sort of thing is a sadistic power trip for him.

But of course, Brady's best laid plans go awry, and he only succeeds in re-motivating Bill to solve the case. So together with a computer-whiz teenage neighbor Jerome, a slightly off woman named Holly, and a saucy rich minx named Janelle Patterson (who is the sister of the Mercedes owner), Bill races against time stop Mr. Mercedes from committing more mass murder.

At least one part of the novel struck me as extremely odd. One of the lessons Bill learns as he continues to run down leads, is that you shouldn't let your personal feelings about people influence the weight of their evidence. He and his partner had been annoyed with the whiny rich lady who owned the Mercedes, so they didn't believe her when she said she didn't know how the killer was able to steal her car without breaking in, and that caused them to look past what might have broken the case. Later, Bill is interrogating a neighbor, and amid a rant about aliens, she tells him she doesn't trust the neighborhood ice cream man. Bill writes her off as crazy, so he puts no stuck in what she says. If only he'd istened to her! But here's the problem: King often describes Bill as a hugely successful detective with a long, storied career of solving crime. If that's true, wouldn't this have been a lesson Bill learned many, many cases prior. This may sound like nit-picking, but this lesson is sort of one of the hinges of the novel. So it bugged me.

Overall, though, this is a good, fun summer read — not quite on par with King's more popular novels or my favorite novels of his (Duma Key, 11/22/63, The Stand, eg), but not terrible either. I'd give it three out of five stars.

The Sleepwalker's Guide To Dancing: Visions of India

Mira Jacob's debut novel The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing is, naturally and almost too easily, drawing lots of comparisons to Jhumpa Lahiri's fiction. That's because it's a decades-long tale of a family that immigrates from India to the U.S. But whereas Lahiri's fiction is almost always unflinchingly straightforward and earnest, Jacob's contains many moments of levity that kind of sneak up on you if you're not reading carefully.

Here's one example: Kamala's son Akhil paints a mural on his bedroom ceiling, including such important figures to his new left-leaning world view as Gandhi, Che Guevara, and Rob Halford. Kamala explains to friends who don't knew who Halford is that he's a "singing priest." Kamala makes quite a few of these mistakes throughout the novel, and they're always amusing.

But on the whole, you wouldn't confuse Jacob's novel with slapstick by any stretch. There are some weighty issues to be dealt with here, and you get that sense from the opening scene: Kamala calls late 20s daughter Amina and tells her that her father Thomas is having long conversations with his mother; which would be fine, except his mother's been dead for 15 years.

So Amina rushes home to Albuquerque to find out what's wrong. We jump back to India in the 1970s to learn about Thomas's strained relationship with his mother and brother. We ease into 1980s Albuquerque where Amina and Akhil are high school students struggling to fit in as first-generation immigrants. And then we go back and forth between 1998 Seattle (where Amina makes a living as a photographer) and Albuquerque where she tries to right the ship and fend off her mother attempts to hook her up with eligible Indian bachelors.

The story hinges on what really is wrong with Thomas. Have a series of tragedies over the years finally caused him to lose touch with reality? Are his visions simply a coping mechanism? And as Amina tries to keep her own sanity, how does she deal with her own demons...and her constantly nagging mother?
  
It's a strangely fluid story for as much as it seems to jump around. And despite its 500-page length, it's a story that goes by quickly. Highly recommended!

Dark Places: Lukewarm Flynn Is Still Entertaining Flynn

You can almost seen the beginnings of Gillian Flynn's megahit Gone Girl in her second novel, 2009's Dark Places. Here, the narrative is told from multiple points of view (though the real-time narrative is first person) and we're not quite sure how reliable any of the characters' perspective really is. While Flynn's story here is as entertaining as ever, this is probably my least favorite of her three novels. But lukewarm Gillian Flynn is still better than at least 50 percent of what I've read this year — and probably 75 percent better, from a writing perspective, than other genre thrillers out there.

So the story for this one: Libby Day is a 31-year-old woman whose family was horrifically murdered when she was 7. Her older brother Ben — 15 at the time — was convicted of the murders based on Libby's testimony, and some weird rumors that he was involved in Satanic rituals. Libby has managed to squeak by for the next 24 years on the kindness of strangers' donations, but not now the money has run dry, and she has to figure out how to support herself.

When a nerdy dude name Lyle contacts her about an "appearance fee" at a club he's a member of, she jumps at the chance, and soon discovers a weird clique of people devoted to "solving" what they judge to be mistaken convictions or other unsolved murders.

Wavering between genuine need for money and genuine curiosity about what actually happened that fateful night in January 1985, Libby begins talking to the principals involved, including her brother who is wasting away in prison and who she's never talked to since her testimony put him away.

The story alternates between Libby's present-day attempts to find the people involved — including her drunk, degenerate father Runner, and Ben's former friend/bully Trey — and the perspectives of people on the fateful day in question, including Ben and Libby's mother Patty, a frazzled single-mother to four kids who is at her wits end about how to run their small farm in rural Kansas.

The setup here is great, but parts of the story should carry a bit of a disclaimer: "Suspend disbelief, all ye who enter here" — especially the ending when we finally do find out what happened to Libby's family. But that's okay — you don't read thrillers to compare them to the authenticity of your own real-world experiences, necessarily. You read them to escape your own real-world for a bit. At least I do. And I did enjoy this for Flynn's fantastic dialogue and intriguing characters. But if you're new to Flynn, definitely don't start with this one. Both Gone Girl and Sharp Objects are better.

A Collection of Quotes from Elizabeth McCraken's Thunderstruck & Other Stories

I just learned what many book nerds already know well — Elizabeth McCracken is a magnetic writer. Her new short story collection Thunderstruck & Other Stories is the first thing I've read by her, and I was enthralled. These are stories you'll want to slow down and read carefully because you'll want to underline/highlight just about every other line.

The stories themselves are...strange? They're about characters and places and things you'd probably never have any occasion to consider outside these pages — a drunk who sort of unwittingly collects animals in the French countryside, a kid in a poor Boston neighborhood whose mother disappears, a guy whose wife dies and he rents a house and tangles with his landlord about sprucing it up. If there's a common theme to these stories, it's something along the lines of beauty, authenticity, or just meaning is in the eye of the beholder. And while I realize that's a bit nebulous, the trouble for me in connecting these stories is that it's hard to see the forest for the trees amidst such profound, insightful, ingenious writing.

Indeed, instead of telling you more about these stories themselves (which I mostly really enjoyed, despite constantly thinking, "Hmm, that's an odd vehicle for discussing the notion of mortality or art or love), here's a collection of my favorite passage from this fantastic collection.

“You couldn't believe the people who believed that not mentioning sadness was a kind of magic that could stave off the very sadness you didn’t mention — as though grief were the opposite of Rumpelstiltskin and materialized only at the sound of its own name.”

“Most common mistake in the world, believing that physical pleasure and virtue are in any way related, directly or indirectly.”

“It was not nice love, it was not good love, but you cannot tell me it wasn’t love. Love is not oxygen, though many songwriters will tell you that it is; it is not a chemical substance that is either definitively present or absent; it cannot be reduced to its parts. It is not like a flower, or an animal, or anything that you will ever be able to recognize when you see it. Love is food. That’s all. Nothing better nor worse. Sometimes very good. Sometimes terrible.”

“Nothing less tolerable than a godly bird.”

“Nothing sounds more insincere than a parrot speaking French.”

“You can’t just make everything stop so people will look at you.”

"The world goes on. The world will.”

“Happiness was a narrow tank. You had to make sure you cleared the lip.”