The Nest: What's Money Between Siblings?

A great modern poet once wrote: "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need." That's the theme of Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney's terrific dysfunctional family story, The Nest. The questions of the novel: What happens when something you'd been counting on — in this case, a YUGE inheritance — is suddenly gone? How do you adjust? How do you extract the wrenches thrown in the works of your carefully laid plans?

What we have here is four New York City siblings, whose father died and left them all a trust. But the catch is that it could only be dispersed when the youngest sibling turns 40. The mother, Francie, a decidedly Lucille Bluth-like character, has resisted all requests from the four to borrow from The Nest...that is until only a few months before the money's about to be doled out, eldest son Leo wrecks his car with a 19-year-old-not-his-wife waitress, and some hush money is required.

So The Nest, a windfall all four siblings had counted on, is mostly gone. And though Leo, fresh from rehab, promises to pay them all back, they're all pretty skeptical he will. The story that unfolds is about how each sibling, to varying degrees of success, deals with the money being gone. They'd made plans. They'd kept certain financial indiscretions from their significant others. They'd lied.

This novel is just an absolute delight from cover to cover. It's funny, it's sad, it's chock full of social commentary and wickedly sharp observation. And these characters are so fully real — they're all empathetic, but the moment you start feeling badly for them, they do something that makes you just cringe.

I loved it! It's one my favorite novels of the year so far. Just so fun and scandalous — well worth the considerable hype!

Chicago: Novel of Broad Shoulders

Brian Doyle's novel, Chicago, is a brave book. It's a passionate, wistful love letter to a revered city...that includes a friggin' talking dog. It's hard to imagine Bellow or Cisneros, Roth or Wright, making that choice. But of course dog-as-character is a metaphor — for the diversity of the city itself, and eventually, for the attachment our narrator feels to it. And your ability to enjoy this novel will hinge almost solely on whether or not you can get past the fact that there's an anthropomorphized animal in an otherwise realistic novel. I was warned ahead of time, which helped, and so I ended up really enjoying this. So consider this your warning as well.

But let's back up a second: Chicago is about a young man, our first-person narrator, who moves to the city in the late 1970s (the specific year isn't important, because Doyle sort of combines events of several late-1970s years into one — the White Sox 1977 season, the Blizzard of 1979, Jane Byrne's election, etc.) to take a job as a journalist for a Catholic magazine in the Loop. He spends his free time exploring Chicago's neighborhoods with the dog Edward, who knows everyone and everything about Chicago.

Frankly, it's a story that's a bit short on story: Our new Chicagoan makes friends, plays basketball with gang members, hangs in blues clubs (like Kingston Mines), goes to White Sox games, helps his landlady out of a jam, plays matchmaker, and falls in love himself. But mostly, he spends a lot of time hanging out, philosophizing, and being shown the sites and the people with Edward, the stamp-collecting, Abraham Lincoln-obsessed talking dog. 

As is the case with Edward the dog, whether you like this novel will depend on your reaction to several pages-long "thought bubbles" from the narrator himself, as well as soliloquies by various characters the narrator meets and befriends: The building manager of his Lakeview apartment building, who is Edward's owner, but in stark contrast to Edward, barely leaves the apartment, the mailman, a bus driver, etc. Sometimes, these are so eloquent they give you chills (a particularly beautiful one about the blues, for instance), as the narrator tries to identify the soul of Chicago; what makes Chicago the most American of American cities. Sometimes, however, these feel a bit overwritten or just seem like odd tangents that don't add much to the overall piece. But the latter are definitely fewer and farther between than the former.

So, if you're a Chicagoan, and you're attached to your city, as I am, this is highly recommended. It's certainly not Augie March, my personal favorite classic Chicago novel, but it's a solid addition to the overall Chicago canon.

The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: Fun! Fun! So Much Fun!

If you're like me, and fun is one of the main reasons you read, then stay tuned. Because I haven't had more fun with a book in a long, long time than I did with Manuel Gonzalez's crazy, goofy, hilarious, utterly original novel The Regional Office Is Under Attack!, out today.

What it's about: A mysterious organization called the Regional Office, housed in a secret location several stories below a Manhattan travel agency, uses a cadre of highly skilled young women warriors and assassins to protect the world from all that is dark and evil, including time traveling aliens and terrorist cartels. Founded by the mysterious possibly insane Oyemi, whose origin story includes becoming radioactive at a young age, and Mr. Niles, who has always loved her, the Regional Office may not, however, be all it seems. One of our two protagonists, the young and beautiful, but mercurial Sarah, is a Regional Office lifer, vowing to defend it to the death. Also, she has a mechanical arm, which allows her to kick more than the usual amount of ass. 

Rose, a mere 17 years old, is our second protagonist and represents the opposition — the attackers of the Regional Office. She's already a graduate of Assassin School and is like a more foul-mouthed, smoking-and-boozing version of Katniss from The Hunger Games. But why is Rose attacking the Regional Office, and what is her organization of highly trained graduates of Assassin School all about?

As we learn more about the backgrounds of these characters, we begin to see a more full picture of everyone's motivations, and why they're making the decisions they are. We also learn about a mysterious man named Henry, who recruits Rose at the beginning of the novel and may or may not be playing both sides. But what is his motivation? Revenge? Love? If there's a "serious" theme at all to this novel, it's about how tough it is to make decisions without complete information, and the dire consequences of doing so.

But, really, this novel's more about fun. There's almost a comic book feel to it. And there are a million pop culture references, including several nods to Die Hard, which all the characters think they might be in at one point. It's not sci-fi, exactly, nor is it a thriller. This novel is really its own thing — I've never read anything quite like this. And I thoroughly enjoyed it. Just so much fun.

Two Great Paperbacks: Private Citizens and The Sellout

Private Citizens, by Tony Tulathimutte — If I could nominate an alternate title for this incredibly well-written, smart debut novel, it'd be "Hot Mess Millennials Make Increasingly Bad Decisions." I really dug this book because to me the only thing better than reading about one character who can't get out of his/her own way is FOUR characters for which that's true. And that's what we have here. Four recent Stanford grads try to navigate their treacherous 20s in San Francisco, to vastly varying degrees of success.

I liked this book because it elevates itself well above the familiar theme of "life is hard when you're young and stupid." For one, stories like this almost always takes place in New York – so seeing this one unfold amidst the tech boom of mid-2000s San Francisco was fascinating. Secondly, the characters in this type of story are often good people striving against tough circumstances. These characters are decidedly...off. But they all have their redeeming qualities as well. There's your porn addicted tech guru who is dating a young ambitious woman who sees people as mere pawns in her grand scheme, a flighty nihilist who uses sex as power, an idealistic liberal activist who fails basic tests of common sense, and the perennial student with the odd upbringing

So if you liked A Little Life, but wanted a novel maybe a little shorter and a lot less horrifying, this is the story for you. Tulathimutte is a really talented, sharp writer — you might even see whispers of DFW here and there in the way he writes goofy logical double-binds and turns of phrases. Highly recommended!

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The Sellout, by Paul Beatty — Oh man, this novel is something else — like what would happen if Chris Rock (and I'm sure Beatty would be apoplectic at this comparison) decided to convert a stand-up routine to a novel, but make it much smarter and even more irreverent. Crazy stuff here! No racial taboo is untouched in this year's National Book Critics Circle award winner, and it is utterly, completely hilarious. Though it does lose a little momentum at the end (which isn't a huge deal, it's a short book), this is one of the funnier novels I've read in long time — but it's sure not for the easily offended.

It almost reads like a collection of set pieces (comedy bits?), but a story does emerge — it's about a guy named Bonbon Me, a black guy who is a farmer, surfer, grower of amazingly good fruit and weed, and rider of horses. The story takes place in present day in the town of Dickens, California, a Los Angeles suburb/neighborhood that has been zoned as farmland, but has turned seedy, like many other black LA 'hoods. Bonbon goes about his life in typical fashion, owning a slave who happens to be the last surviving Little Rascal, trying to re-segregate schools, pining for his long-time crush who has married a rapper named DJ Panache, and working hard to get Dickens re-recognized on maps.

It's a novel rich in irony, cultural references, and laugh-out-loud jokes. If you liked Americanah, but thought it just a touch too serious, this is the book for you. Great.

A Doubter's Almanac: Empathisizing with Tortured Genius

The trope of the troubled genius is a fairly common one, and it's what Ethan Canin is concerned with in his fascinating, immensely readable new novel A Doubter's Almanac. But what elevates this above the traditional "troubled genius" story is how Canin asks his readers to really parse their own feelings about how to react to a troubled genius, especially when that genius is, to put it bluntly, a spectacular asshole.

But what are the root causes of his assholery? Why does he behave the way he does, treating everyone around him as mere objects to serve his greater good? Does it matter? After all, if empathy is truly walking a mile in someone else's shoes, and seeing the world through their eyes, that must apply to someone who is gifted, but gauche, just as much as it does to someone who is troubled, but not gifted. Right? You may not completely agree as you find out just how horrible this guy is. You may not want to try to understand him, or much less, forgive him  But it's an interesting exploration.

Our Philip Rothian protago-villain here is a mathematics genius named Milo Andret, who, as an undergraduate earns a modicum of fame by solving a nearly half-century-old topology problem. (One of the highlights of this novel is Canin's ability to convey just enough information to help his reader understand the basics, but without getting bogged down into byzantine details.) Milo parlays this success into a professorship at Princeton, and turns his attentions and considerable talents to another problem. But he soon gets bogged down with booze, affairs with married women (and one with a sweet but sad unmarried woman), and being generally quarrelsome and cantankerous (even though he's still in his mid-30s).

Milo, like many geniuses, is constantly disappointed with the world, generally, but also most other people specifically. He's like a cross between Ignatius Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces and John Nash from A Beautiful Mind. For Milo, "There is no joy in God's creation," Milo's doctor explains to his son at one point. "No pleasure in sunlight or water. No pleasure in a good meal. There is no pleasure in the company of friends. There is nothing. Nothing that might assuage the maw." That sounds like a justification for everything bad Milo has done, and at some level, it is. So, do we buy it?

The second part of the novel switches gears to the perspective of Milo's son, filling in the blanks of Milo's time descending to rock bottom at Princeton and how he got to be an assistant professor at a small college in Ohio. Milo's son Hans is just as intriguing a character as Milo. Will the sins of the father be repeated by the son?

This big brick of novel (550 pages) absolutely flies by. Canin is just a great, smooth storyteller, in the vein of other great storytellers like John Irving and Richard Russo. And this is just a helluva great story — even if it makes you mad at times. Some of these characters are just much better people than I could be when presented with such an axe-wound-sized asshole as Milo. But overall, I loved it — it's highly recommended!