1. The Hours by Michael Cunningham
2. Ship Breaker (audio book) by Paolo Bacigalupi
3. Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation by Dan Fagin
4. Atonement by Ian McEwan
5. Kit’s Wilderness, by David Almond
6. Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley
Books Still in Progress at the End of the Month: American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
REVIEWS:
1. The Hours by Michael Cunningham
The Hours is a loving homage to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. The novel tells the stories of three women — Clarissa, a 52-year-old woman planning a party for her friend and former lover dying of AIDS; Laura, a young pregnant housewife in 1949 feeling trapped by the order of her life, and Virginia Woolf herself attempting to begin the writing of Mrs. Dalloway in 1925. Each story relates the women’s complex inner journeys over the course of a single day.
One of the many profound ways these women’s lives and hearts overlap is the way each woman seeks to create her own form of perfection in the world, making such a small thing into so much more than what it is. For Clarissa, it’s putting together a party that will properly honor her friend. For Laura, it’s assembling a cake that reflects all her feelings of love. For Virginia, it’s taking words and shaping them into a story that reveals and transports. And yet, each in her own way feels herself incapable of achieving this perfection. This is just one part of this novel, just one piece, but it’s a piece that resonated with me and is something I found to be a part of what makes this novel so heartbreakingly beautiful.
Not only do are each of these women affected personally by the novel, Mrs. Dalloway, but also the writing style of The Hours imitates Woolf’s style, the way she layered image and meaning together in complex network of poetic prose. Like Mrs. Dalloway, The Hours is a novel that requires a certain amount of presence and focus in order to follow, but the result of each novel is uniquely beautiful and each are worth a read.
A delightful little footnote: I love that Clarissa mentions seeing a movie star (maybe Meryl Streep) and that Meryl Streep plays Clarissa in the movie version of The Hours.
2. Ship Breaker (audio book) by Paolo Bacigalupi
Nailer is a ship breaker, one of the many scavengers on the beach taking apart abandoned tankers piece by piece. It’s dangerous, hazardous work and the dangerous, impoverished life makes for hard edged people. One learns not to expect much in this life, except a distant hope of striking it rich with some lucky find. When Nailer discovers a survivor inside a clipper ship that washed ashore after a storm, he has to choose between scavenging the ship for wealth or saving the swank girl.
Bacigalupi has shaped an almost believable dystopian world, which is starkly divided into poor and wealthy. Global warming has caused the seas to rise and fossil fuel has declined. The scavenge is a necessary part of business and the wealthy owners, who run things from a distance, don’t much care what happens to the crews on the beach.
I liked Pima and Sadna, Nailer’s friend and her mother who have cared for Nailer since he was a child and nursed him after his father’s beatings. They had a practical sort of compassion for Nailer and others whom they considered crew. I also liked Tool, the half-man, but he disappeared from the story just as his character arc was getting interesting, which was disappointing. I would have liked to have seen more of his character.
The story was fast paced with Nailer and Lucky Girl struggling to survive from one moment to the next and Nailer’s father is appropriately terrifying. A solid novel overall.
3. Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation by Dan Fagin
Looking for a place where they can manufacture fabric and industrial dyes and dump its chemical waste easily with little questioning from the public, a large chemical company (the name changes several times), constructs a plant in a small town known as Toms River in the 1950s. The plant is able to dump its chemical for years without question, even turning the river purple at one point, thanks in part to the silence of government adage vids. Later come cancer clusters, public outrage and investigations, buit takes decades. It’s horrifying and facinating. The author intersperses the modern events with the history of science and chemistry that had a direct impCt on those events. It’s an interesting story also because the expectation is for a clear resolution, which doesn’t come. The results of the studies and negotiations and everything are vague and frustrating. People have to figure out their own sense of salvation in the end.
4. Atonement by Ian McEwan
When I saw the movie years ago, I was enamored with the gorgeous cinematography and began to fall in love with the story — about a young girl who makes a terrible mistake that causes a young man and friend to go to prison and her sister to be separated from her lover — which was beautiful and wonderful… right up into the ending, which felt like the greatest cheat of all time and had me leaving the theater in rage. I remember asking, “How can they possibly call that the greatest love story of all time?” and having a friend answer, “You have to read the book to understand.”
So, now I’ve read the book and I almost understand, although the ending still feels like a bit of a cheat. Just like the cinematography in the movie, the writing is lush and gorgeous and I might have been able to enjoy it more, if I hadn’t seen the movie and didn’t already know what was going to happen. The ending in the book provides more explanation and a bit of nice symmetry that is not in the movie, but it still left me annoyed.
5. Kit’s Wilderness, by David Almond
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this story. It opens with a game called Death, in which the young teenagers of the small town of Stoneygate play inside an old coal mining shaft. There is a girl who wants to be an actress, a grandfather who tells old stories but is starting to forget his past, and a number of children ghosts. I liked the story, but didn’t love it and I’m not really sure what else to say.
6. Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley
This is a story about the sighting of a supposedly extinct woodpecker that reinvigorates a small town, except it’s not really. It’s more about a really decent kid Cullen Witter trying to cope with his brother vanishing one day, about his parents falling apart over the loss in different ways, about Cullen’s best friend trying to be supportive and feeling lost, too, about the girl Cullen has always had a crush on, about growing up and moving on. In other words, it’s about life, messy and frustrating and sometimes wonderful.
In addition to Cullen’s narrative, which has its own very clear voice, the book contains chapters from other characters’ points of view. Although they seem at first to be random and unconnected to the main story, they weave together rather perfectly by the end.
For the most part, I really enjoyed this quiet book, which felt so real in every way. I just wish the ending could have anchored things a little better. Instead of feeling elated by how things came together, I felt a little let down. I can’t say why exactly, since the ending fits but, yeah.