EMBASSYTOWN (BY) CHINA MIEVILLE

Published 2011, 368 pages
Characters: B-
Writing: B+
Plot: B
Pacing: B
Poignancy: B-

Embassytown is a good book, an OK sci-fi novel, and a slightly disappointing China Mieville novel, given his demonstrated potential. Of the four Mieville books I've read now (I'm concurrently reading The Scar, but that review won't be up for a few weeks) Embassytown is probably the least-great. Probably, that just goes to show how strong Mieville is as an author. Yet here, he shies away from the those things that previously made him such an interesting, unique writer, even as he seems to embrace the same themes and stylistic decisions that should play to those very strengths. Embassytown, like all Mieville novels that I've read, is as much about the city in which it takes place as any of the other plot components. The city is a character — though here, it never becomes the main character, which is maybe the primary difference.

Embassytown only embodies that theme in its setting, a human ghetto set within the borders of an alien city on a frontier planet — it never really deals with the nature of cities within cities the way Mieville's other stories did. Embassytown is the name of a human colony nested within the city of the Hosts, aliens who speak an extremely unusual language. The nature of language itself, rather than that of cities, becomes the main "character" of the novel. There are two quirks to the language of the Hosts: first, they have two mouths, and so their language is layered, a dual language of simultaneously spoken sounds, thus making it impossible for a human to physically reproduce. Secondly, the Hosts are stuck in some bizarre stage of evolutionary psychology, and are not sentient in the way that humans are sentient, despite having evolved society, cities and complex bio-technology. This is also due to their unique language, which isn't a language to them at all, but manifested thoughts. To the Hosts, their words are not 'words' but simply shared, pure reality; they have not evolved the concept of signifiers or metaphors or language as humans understand it. As a result, Hosts cannot lie; what they speak can only directly relate to the world around them. Also as a result, all other organized language is gibberish to them, including their own when not spoken by another Host. In order to communicate with the Hosts, humans have bred special clones, identical dual ambassadors that are able to speak the dual language as one mind. Eventually, naturally, this tedious and imperfect system causes an upset in the balance between the species. Hilarity ensues.

So Embassytown is about language, more than anything. Every plot development is a result of language. The main character herself is caught up in the concept of language — as a child, she was forced to undergo a sort of performance for the Hosts in order to become a living simile, as the Hosts are only able to refer to things that have actually occurred. Embassytown deals with linguistic playfulness far more directly than any other sci-fi book I've read in the past, yet it makes the theme seem obvious and necessary. With an alien civilization, wouldn't the differences in language dominate everything, every relationship and interaction between those societies? And yet, with this interesting and undoubtedly unique conceit, the book takes on a directness that is simultaneously a great idea and its main flaw. Mieville's strengths are in his imagination, and his imagination seems to be best when he gives himself a lot of material to play around with. Embassytown is so straightforward in the themes it addresses that it misses out on the atmosphere and intrigue that usually go with Mieville novels. This isn't a fault — there's nothing wrong with what's actually there, just the sense of missing pieces that could make the story better. The plot seems weak and thin, and so do the characters. Mieville's past novels generally hinge on some mysterious outside force driving the action, but since it's the characters here who push things forward, their flaws become more problematic. I just didn't buy — or even understand — a lot of the developments in the second half of the novel, because I felt no connection to the characters' logic. Worse, a lot of the characters were wholly pointless by the time everything wrapped up.

Embassytown is still good, purely through Mieville's strengths as an author. While much of the book felt a bit thin and arbitrary, it was also consistently interesting throughout, and raises a few interesting concepts — just not as many as I've come to expect from Mieville, and not handled as well. It's easy to criticize a lesser book by a brilliant author, because they've already established their skill, making it hard to ignore when those talents are missing.

HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE (BY) CHARLES YU

Published 2010, 231 pages
Characters: C-
Writing: B
Plot: C
Pacing: B
Poignancy: B-

Every now and then a book comes along that seemingly every Big Name in the literary world decided — possibly through a show of hands after poetry readings at KGB Bar — to just jump on and overhype. It's a great thing for an up-and-coming author, and I guess I can understand the appeal for an industry type, hoping to toss in their hat before everyone else does, so later they can be all "Hey I called it!" So every year, a few books come out that seem to receive all the buzz. (Side note: this happens in music too, obviously.)  Late last year, How to Live Safely In a Science Fictional Universe was one of those books.  I first heard its praises sung at my local bookstore.  Then, seemingly everywhere.  It has a glowing review featured prominently on its Amazon page from an author whose novel I quite enjoyed.  Lots of people thought this book was a poignant masterpiece from a new literary hotshot.  But still, the literary world was restless.  "What did Derek Dellinger think of it?" they asked.  A free copy of the book was quickly ushered along to me, all for me to read and ponder and review, before it's due back at the library.  Well, ever the contrarian, I'm not quite so impressed as everyone else.  There are some interesting ideas here.  It's reasonably well written.  It's a bit of a third-rate Vonnegut knock-off, which I'm surprised no one else mentioned.  "It was okay." - Derek Dellinger.

How to Live Safely In a Science Fictional Universe is about Charles Yu (hey! that's the name of the author AND the main character!), who repairs time machines for a living.  The novel means this in a quote unquote kind of way, because mostly Charles just floats along in between dimensions hiding in his time machine with his dog and his sexy interactive software personality, TAMMY.  There is very little repairing. Or interacting.  Mostly, Charles reminisces about his dad and his own life and how he sucks.  Then a thing happens and he thinks he's trapped in a time loop, doomed to repeat the same events over and over, and the only way to fix things is to reminisce about his dad and his own life and how he sucks.  (Could it be possible that time travel and recursive loops are metaphors?  I'll give you a hint, it's TOTALLY possible!)  And that's pretty much it.  I won't spoil anything.  Not that there's much to spoil.  

How to Live Safely In a Science Fictional Universe is a slim book, in every way.  My main problem was that there just isn't enough to it.  Charles Yu is essentially the only character in the entire book, and as a narrator, he's never particularly interesting.  He's not funny or clever enough, he doesn't inspire much tension or drama; he barely manages to push the plot forward.  The only "person" Charles actually interacts with in the course of the narrative is his on-ship software, TAMMY, who isn't any more interesting than Charles is. (She's an operating system that's become depressed and doesn't think she's any good, like the beginning of an idea Douglas Adams might have had and then forgot to run with.)  There's a dog with hardly any role in the story, and then Charles' absent father, who he spends the majority of the novel thinking and moping over, essentially just an emotional MacGuffin.

I mean, okay. It's a story about time travel. I'm not complaining that essentially everything that happens, happens in the "past."  But even then, nothing much happens.  I suppose a large part of my problem is that I'm entirely fed up with Daddy Issues in entertainment.  I have never and will never find Daddy Issues remotely interesting.  Sorry.  I don't care that your dad didn't love you enough.  Being a teenager sucks, I know.  Family dynamics are hard and most people felt mistreated by their parents and whatever, yeah, okay.  I just really was hoping we could move this whole Daddy Issue business now, in our post-Lost world.  But I guess the entertainment industry is never going to give it up.  

Too bad this book didn't have any more on its mind, because Yu seems like he has the potential to be a clever writer.  There are some good ideas here, some decent writing, even if everything is overly-satured in an air of Literary Poignancy.  There are some attempts at humor, and some of them land.  But mostly they blend into the whole post-modern air of Too Clever For Its Own Good.  In a way, this really does remind me of a third-rate Vonnegut book.  Obviously, I love Vonnegut, but the man wrote a ton of books in his career, and sometimes his ideas just got regurgitated, spread too thin.  That's what it feels like here — moments of cleverness and insight, but drowned out by the overwhelming assumption throughout that it's all a grand statement on the nature of life and regret and memory and humanity.  Really, there are only a short-story's worth of memorable ideas here.  I read this book very casually, never more than a few pages at a time, and I found that pace to be indicative of my opinion of it.  I never disliked it, I was never bored, but otherwise, it seemed a whole lot more interesting before I actually started reading it.

CATCHING FIRE (BY) SUZANNE COLLINS

Published 2009, 391 pages
Characters: B-
Writing: C+
Plot: B-
Pacing: B-
Poignancy: B

I don't really understand how Collins does it, but Catching Fire (aka book 2 of The Hunger Games trilogy) continues a series that is somehow, simultaneously, one of the catchiest yet sloppiest series I've ever read. Random internet visitors who accidentally stumble upon my site while deciding how to spend their government bailout dollars by purchasing a large boat, multiple crates of red wine, and copies of their favorite YA action-adventure series will no-doubt jump down my throat in the comments section for this slight. So don't get me wrong: I'm still plowing through the series like a fat man going down a flume-ride poured with gravy. And I'm definitely still enjoying the ride. These are some catchy books, but Catching Fire begins to form noticeable cracks that irritate the critic in me. The Hunger Games showed signs of those same flaws, but its relentless pacing and well-written action bullied them to the side.  Here, facing middle-book-of-the-series syndrome, only a sense of momentum really keeps the novel from falling apart.

Sadly, most of the book's flaws are fairly obvious. Collin's strength is as a plot-architect, not as a writer, but she undermines herself as both here.  A good chunk of the story, particularly in the first quarter of the book, is basically told in expository chunks of summary.  As a first person narrative, obviously a lot of the tale will be internal musings by Katniss, its main character.  But when you're writing around a fast-paced, action-packed plot, its a really bad idea to have half the action happen not only off-screen, but in the past.  Katniss spends an awful lot of Catching Fire summarizing what happened in the first book, then explaining events going on in the present that she's just not around for. Other great books have violated that fundamental show-don't-tell principal — specifically, I'm thinking Lord of the Rings, which had a lot of off-screen action summarized neatly for the audience, but only because the world was so big and dense and rich.  Everything about the Hunger Games trilogy, on the other hand, already seems sparse. We're never directly shown enough of the world in the first place to make those off-screen events truly resonate.  And with Collins forced to move away from the simple brutality of the Games, into the complex political tensions of the Capitol and its districts, I remembered why the running background tensions of longer series like Harry Potter led to a real sense of urgency and in-world reality — because we had time to get attached, to care about places we'd already been to.  The tension of the Hunger Games world — the struggle of some peasants against their tyrannical government — rushes through standardized emotions and developments that work mostly because they're so familiar.  There's not much to feel here, just a lot to experience.

And fine, Catching Fire doesn't need to be an exquisitely detailed book.  I think 90 percent of its charm is its rapid pace, its thin-ness, and a more structured narrative would work against its lightning plot.  But the plot of Catching Fire should have been stronger, that's all.  When all the summarizing and plot-setup are finally out of the way, freeing the story up to move forward, what does Collins do?  Give us a second-half twist that turns Catching Fire into a rehash of The Hunger Games.  It does move the plot along, but as fun as it is, the change of pace basically destroys any tension, like there's even less at stake than the first time around just because everything is so rushed. Once again, few side characters are given a chance to develop.  And while Katniss herself becomes a more interesting heroine than I expected, the people she bases most of her emotions and actions around never have the chance to demonstrate why. One of Katniss' main motivations in the book is, at least as she explains, saving her younger sister from any more pain.  But that sister is only in the book for a few pages — and not many more in the first installment — making her something of an emotional human MacGuffin.  Same with Gale, one of the two boys competing for the affections of Katniss.  (Rather inexplicably, considering she's a selfish asshole most of the time, but that level of unlikeability is actually one of the most surprising, interesting things about the series.)  Gale is never developed, or even really described, as anything more than a handsome, surly teenager, yet this blank slate of teenage hormones drives half the things that happen in the book.

For all its shortcomings, Catching Fire is still an entertaining book.  And The Hunger Games trilogy is still a series I would recommend that anyone check out.  I should probably be about 14 years younger than I am to fully enjoy it, but I do think it's better — and darker, and more daring — than most of what I likely read at that age.  I don't think it will go down as one of the classics.  Not unless the movies are gangbuster, anyway.

LZ-'75 (BY) STEPHEN DAVIS

Published 2010, 215 pages
Characters: n/a
Writing: C+
Plot: n/a
Pacing: B
Poignancy: B-

Fact: Led Zeppelin is the greatest band of all time. There are very few bands that I would be interested in reading a book-length account of, much less a book focused specifically on one tour, but I would read just about anything detailing Zeppelin's zany shenanigans. At the peak of their power, they weren't just the most popular, highest-selling band in the world — they crafted a cult-like mystique around themselves, birthing bizarre urban legends, rumors of black magic and deals with the devil.  The mass media hated them, journalists feared them, and interviews were rare.  It didn't matter that Rolling Stone refused to acknowledge their existence for six years — Zeppelin had no trouble selling out massive coliseums in a matter of minutes.

By the release of Physical Graffiti in 1975, however, it was hard to ignore Zeppelin's dominating presence, and the American media started paying attention.  Stephen Davis — a music journalist who, by his own admission, was only passingly familiar with Zeppelin at the time — wanted in.  He got in, of course, flying around with Zeppelin in the Starship on their rocky-but-pivotal American 1975 winter tour.  Unfortunately, LZ-'75 isn't the first thing he's written as a result of those experiences. In fact, it's the third, but after churning out an article and another book, he somehow managed to lose most of his notes from the tour.  When Davis rediscovered them a few years ago (and obviously, realized how much money he could make by milking another book out of them), he decided to turn them into LZ-'75.

Judging by the reviews on Amazon, there's not much here that isn't covered by other Zeppelin biographies, or even in Davis' other pieces.  I haven't read any other Zeppelin accounts, so that wasn't a dealbreaker for me, but LZ-'75 is certainly on the anemic side.  Davis was granted fairly extensive backstage access, and writes about the band with appropriate reverence and knowledge.  Yet it's clear that Davis was never really an insider.  He writes like a journalist, and only ever had the access of a journalist.  Though he adds some personal backstory, musings and scant analysis, most of the narrative is taken up by descriptions of Zeppelin's performances.  Reading about shows is nowhere near as exciting as experiencing them, however, and after some early-tour drama and set-backs, each performance begins to sound fairly redundant.  Davis delves deep into his thesaurus and does an admirable job of describing each song in a dozen different ways, but he's not a great music writer, and the strain shows by the end.  As a product of the 70's, Davis' prose (or maybe Davis himself) can get a little hammy, and most of the time he simply tries too hard.  It's not the 70's anymore, and though it's fun to see that energy captured in moments, too much of it makes LZ-'75 read as sensational rather than revealing.  Personally, I was never close to bored, but this is definitely one for fans of the band — aficionados of rock'n'roll history can probably find more thorough accounts.

FULL DARK, NO STARS (BY) STEPHEN KING

Published 2010, 364 pages
Characters: B
Writing: B-
Plot: B
Pacing: B+
Poignancy: B

At this point in his career, Stephen King has nothing else to prove. As a "popular" author, King gets very little credit for just how versatile and innovative of a writer he is — though after his dozens and dozens of novels, he can be forgiven for sticking to "competent, consistent but unadventurous," which is how I would describe this new collection of four novellas.  While King doesn't attempt to dazzle with creativity, his mastery of the short form is evident.

Did you like The Shawshank Redemption? How about Rob Reiner's classic coming-of-age tale, Stand By Me?  Add in a slightly less well-known film, Apt Pupil, and you have the three movies based on three of the four novellas in Different Seasons, one of King's earlier novella collections.  Not a bad track record.  Though the nine-billion page The Stand is possibly King's single best work, he's at his most consistent with the medium-length style.  King's major flaws are less grating in his shorter fiction, and he makes efforts to subdue them altogether in Full Dark, No Stars, mostly by toning down the ambition.  It works, to some extent — the four stories here are all perfectly competent and enjoyable to read, despite their grim, off-putting subject matter.  But the darkness running throughout these tales mostly just hides the fact that there's little drama or tension.  The good guys (actually, good women, so far as it applies here) don't have too much trouble resolving their hideous problems, and the simplified conclusions are just a little too convenient.  It's not a major blow, but the material in Full Dark is just not as memorable as anything in Different Seasons, making this a satisfying read, but far from essential.

The best tale here is the first one, "1922," and the closest the collection comes to classic horror.  Each of these stories is about murder, to some extent, and "1922" deals with the subject most directly, by dropping us into a first-person account of a Kansas farmer who felt he had no choice but to kill his wife.  King gets a lot of mileage out of the rustic countryside atmosphere, helping the surreal ending stick its landing, and the story takes a few interesting turns along the way.  "Big Driver" — your basic "Hey lady, don't take that deserted country road shortcut home, you might blow a tire and run into some creepy yokel!" tale — is perhaps the darkest of these stories, but its bleak subject matter makes its convenient, all-too-easy ending feel mostly justified.  "Fair Extension," a "make a deal with the devil to cure your cancer" story, is short, simple, and gleefully perverse — and makes its satirical simplicity work for it, by simply leaving off just when you think King would be forced to give the plot another twist.  Much like "Big Driver," "A Good Marriage" ends a little too conveniently, but its simple intentions make for an interesting psychological experiment.  It's an earnest examination of all the little things one knows about a person after years of intimacy, and the way larger, darker truths can still slip through the cracks.

Though everything works well enough, nothing works itself into your mind the way the best King stories do.  Some of his more annoying writing habits pop up too often — King is excellent at writing about average people, and his characters are often more fully-fleshed than those of most literary darlings, but he still relies far too much on hokey inner-monologues and witticisms.  King's characters all think in goofy puns and folky nonsense-phrases that they just love to repeat to themselves.  But aside from that, King remains a fluid, clever writer, and unlike the majority of his peers, remains impressively self-aware of his strengths and limitations even after decades of dominating sales charts.

BRIGHTON ROCK (BY) GRAHAM GREENE

Published 1938, 247 pages
Characters: B
Writing: B+
Plot: B-
Pacing: B-
Poignancy: B+

Given the time period, the tone, the air of danger that pushes the book to its swift start, one might expect Brighton Rock to be a noir, or at least an gangster thriller.  But dark as the novel is, Graham Greene has a different agenda.  Brighton Rock is more of a character-piece than a noir, a meditation on the nature of good and evil rather than their methods, and its memorable young villain quickly steals the focus of the story.  It's nice little twist, and Greene's skill at unraveling characters' motivations in powerful literary bursts drives the novel to interesting depths.

Brighton Rock is mostly the story of Pinkie, a 17 year old gangster struggling to hold on to a feeble criminal empire.  After the murder of a journalist results in a few too many witnesses, Pinkie is forced to go to great lengths to keep them silent — and it's those lengths that make up this story, his mounting desperation at the incompetence of his allies, and his reconciliation at his own inadequacies.  Pinkie makes for an interesting character, a young, somewhat naive boy described as "pure evil" more than once, who understands better than anyone else what he is and what he's capable of.  He feels little remorse, and is portrayed as almost inhuman, incapable of relishing the joys that those around him partake in.  He doesn't drink, has no interest in women, doesn't take the time to savor all the stereotypical vices that gangster characters are known for.  He is cast almost entirely in moral darkness, while his adversary — an overly-happy, overly-noble woman named Ida, determined to avenge the death of a man she barely knew — engages in "good" simply for the virtue of it.  These characters are assessed again and again from each other's perspective, but whatever his message was meant to be, Greene had the insight necessary to make each perspective believable.  When Pinkie and his girl address why they don't want to be good, like Ida — who comes off as kind-of obnoxious and self-righteous — it's fully believable, even understandable.

Greene is exceptionally skilled at short bursts of character insight — one or two sentence denouements wrapping up some character action — and its a testament to his powers of characterization that the villains of the novel are often more sympathetic than the woman who would be the hero.  His prose is strong throughout, but in these moments it manages to achieve lasting poignancy. Interestingly, Greene consistently focuses on such small, action-related revelations, yet does little to explain the underlying motivations of his characters. Pinkie is interesting enough, but when he's presented again and again as simply evil, with no explanation or even backstory, it begins to pull apart the drama.  Convincingly scripted characters can still benefit from complex motivations, and everyone here mostly acts a certain way because it's the way they are.  They're the sort of characters you want to take by the shoulders and shake, until they get some sense.  Brighton Rock is far from the crime-thriller it seems to be at first — everything is a slow burn, good and evil laying their plans but rarely coming face to face.  The pacing is so steady that I sometimes found it difficult to read more than a few pages at once.  It's the sort of book that is savored, and contemplated later, but is just gripping enough to get you through.

NOTHING TO ENVY (BY) BARBARA DEMICK

Published 2009, 294 pages
Characters: n/a
Writing: C
Plot: n/a
Pacing: B-
Poignancy: B+

I've been mildly fascinated with North Korea lately, probably just because it's so hard to find any information about the place — it's perhaps the most bizarre, backwards country on earth. In my research, I came across Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives In North Korea, which sounded like it might address exactly what I was wondering: what are ordinary lives like in North Korea like, and should I envy them?  Sure, the title is a bit awkward and nonsensical.  (Isn't it a bit like titling a book Not Particularly Delicious: How Enriched Uranium Changed Western Energy Consumption?)  Still, Nothing To Envy is a fascinating look into this real-world 1984, even if it's not meant to be a comprehensive one.

Demick, at the time of the book's release, had been to North Korea a number of times herself, though the North Korea government only allows select visitors into its showcase capital city, and allows tours into the countryside only with special government guides.  Most of her research for this book was through defectors from North Korea now living in China or South Korea — she says she interviewed over a hundred, as well as various humanitarian organizations and groups, but Nothing To Envy primarily follows six or so North Koreans throughout their lives, up to their escape into South Korea.  Much of the book deals with the terrible famines the country experienced in the 90's, and which most North Koreans probably still have to deal with today.  As a result, the narrative is paced somewhat strangely, jumping back and forth between its "characters."  Demick spends varying amounts of time with each, since some of their stories are inherently more interesting — like a boy and girl who fall in love as children and maintain a secret relationship all through their years in North Korea, yet never reveal to each other how they long to escape their country.  Yet both of them do, eventually but separately, and then find each other again in South Korea — except the woman has married and neither can remember what they saw in each other now that there's no longer a tyrannical government keeping them apart.  These stories are interesting, but Demick jumps in and out of others, all of which are ultimately about starving, jobless people with little to distinguish their lives, all eventually escaping over the Chinese border.  The pacing suffers as a result, with some stories seeming under-developed and hard to tell apart from one other.

I can't fault the book for its content — even when the pacing is a bit sloppy, the stories are always interesting.  Demick sticks to these "ordinary lives" and doesn't write much about the government and politics of the country, or anything much outside of the cities where her subjects lived.  If there is a major fault to Nothing To Envy, it is the tone it takes, or perhaps just Demick's writing style.  She is clearly a journalist and not a novelist, and unfortunately her book reads like it.  Her writing never drifts or loses focus, but it's lifeless and even a little cheesy when trying to convey the pathos of its subjects; it doesn't drive the story the way many successful non-fiction authors are able to do.  At times, Demick seems to skip narrative tangents that could have explained a great deal more about how these people lived, and since she writes without citations or specific references (because most of the stories were related to her orally), I often felt a strange disconnect as a reader, having to remind myself that this is a non-fiction book. She repeatedly refers to the habit of North Koreans having to forage for weeds and grass to eat, and multiple times mentions that older women would leave their jobs in the afternoon and go into the mountains to collect wild plants.  It's a very sad thought, but as an image, it doesn't really click — maybe just because I'm a hiker, but how are these starving, middle-aged women going from an urban center "into the mountains" to collect weeds that barely nourish them?  How are they getting there and back in a matter of hours?  I was genuinely curious, but perhaps Demick herself could not flesh out all these strange curiosities.

While the writing in Nothing To Envy doesn't give the book the spark it should have had — with such unbelievable, dramatic material — the material is still interesting enough to make this a great read, and Demick does seem to be a good researcher, uncovering anecdotes from her subject's childhoods, and allowing them to open up and speak their minds about the horrors they escaped.  In all of this, North Korea as a country comes out seeming the most flat and confusing of all, because it is such a contradiction.  Rather than a ruthlessly efficient dictatorship, it is a country where the military cannot afford to give socks to its soldiers.  The government is undoubtedly brutal, but from the comfortable distance of this non-fiction account, it often seems naively incompetent rather than sinister.  More than anything, it is astonishing that such a a regime still survives, when most have been predicting the country's collapse for over two decades.

THE THIEVES OF MANHATTAN (BY) ADAM LANGER

Published 2010, 253 pages
Characters: C-
Writing: B-
Plot: B
Pacing: A-
Poignancy: B-

I suppose I should just accept that comedic books, especially satires, aren't really my thing. I mean, I enjoy comedy — who doesn't? — and I like the concept of satire, I like the depth and precision a book can wield, and everything else that should make me appreciate comedic books.  But it's happened a lot lately: I'll read a book, conclude that it was cute enough, but ultimately a bit flimsy and forgettable.  Wondering what the book was missing, I'll look at other reviews and notice everyone calling it "laugh out loud funny," or whatever, and realize — oh, this book was supposed to be comedy?  It's not that I thought the jokes didn't work. If forced, I'm not sure I would be able to point out what was even meant to be funny.  Which is not to say that The Thieves of Manhattan a bad book.  I enjoyed it well enough as goofy, lightweight satire that sort of missed the mark but was pleasant to read.  I guess I'm just not the market for goofy, lightweight satire.

Thieves is the story of an aspiring memoirist, Ian Minot.  He lives in a world where the publishing industry publishes only outlandish memoirs — at least that's the impression I got, given every character's bizarrely dismissive attitude toward fiction; but then again, maybe this was part of some broad satirical statement, and maybe the fact that the satire was so difficult to pinpoint was part of the problem.  Ian interacts with loud, generic morons and struggles to find a publisher for his work, until a strange man informs him of a scheme to hookwink the publishing industry. With extremely little effort, they hoodwink the publishing industry.  Who knew it was so easy to achieve rampant success!  Of course, shenanigans ensue.

I think the problem for me is the tone such novels take.  Thieves is a satire attacking memoir writers, liars and greedy editors, with a bit of a metafictional bent, which for obvious reasons intrigued me on paper.  But satire in novels always seems to end up so broad and goofy, whether it's the raunchy randomness of Palahniuk or the slice-of-wacky-life essays of Sedaris.  And there's a good reason such writers adopt a lightweight tone and zippy prose: they want to make you laugh, and if the prose is feisty enough to begin with, you'll already be in the mood when the jokes land.  If they land.  If there are jokes to begin with.  The satire in Thieves is so broad and cartoonish that I'm guessing the tone was the joke; that the reader's understanding of the publishing industry is meant to be filled in, a self-provided punchline.  But the characters are all too ridiculous, the situations too contrived, the repercussions cliched and silly.  Langer gets a few good jabs in, of course, but jokes about the publishing industry more or less write themselves.  One main character is meant to satirize James Frey and other such writers who have published "memoirs" full of outlandish, impossible-sounding drama.  The character is as generic as a character could possibly be, a loud, crass thug who ends every sentence with "yo", even if that sentence is a written blurb advertising another book.  There is no context or background for his success, but it's meant to seem ludicrous — as if just making the improbable happen in a fictional novel will somehow prove a point.  Another character can't get published because his mystery thriller novel isn't "true."  Okay, satirizing the industry for latching onto bullshit memoirs, that I get.  But a novel that sounds awfully like Da Vinci Code can't get published because it didn't really happen?  Because a thriller novel wasn't a memoir?  Seriously?

Whatever Langer had to say about the publishing industry gets lost in a haze of conflicting messages and unbelievable behavior.  The tone remains cute even when the action picks up, and there are plenty of in-jokes to make sure that literary types understand that this one is for them.  But cute is all it really is.  If that's your thing, this is a good book for you.  It's enjoyable, it's silly, it reads fast.  I'm just not altogether sure what the point was.

FAR NORTH (BY) MARCEL THEROUX

Published 2009, 314 Pages
Characters: B
Writing: B+
Plot: B
Pacing: B
Poignancy: B-

If you know me, you know that I'm obsessed with post-apocalyptic fiction.  I've read pretty much everything out there, but it's been a weird relationship, as I'm never really satisfied with what I find.  It's strange, but post-apocalyptic books always seem to lack imagination.  Most of them end up dealing with the same themes, same situations, same stoic but jaded characters.  Far North is the upcoming selection for a book club I joined, so I had no knowledge of the plot whatsoever going in.  But I had hope.  Much like the character of a post-apocalyptic novel, I believed that maybe this time could be different.

It's not that post-apocalyptic books are usually bad. I wouldn't be able to sustain my fascination with the genre if that were the case.  It's just that they're usually "alright", and frankly, I want more.  Even the best ones — say, Stephen King's The Stand — usually end up having some huge, awkward flaw.  Far North doesn't really expand any horizons, doesn't really have any original ideas, doesn't demonstrate anything new about human nature, but it is at least well written.  It's gripping and fairly well paced. But I wish there were something more to stick with me, because the plot is basically the plot of every post-apocalyptic novel.  This time, it was global warming.  A group of pilgrims established a new frontier in northern Siberia, taking advantage of the receding temperatures, and a couple years later the rest of civilization went to shit.  This time, the main character is a woman — except she acts like a man in every way, to the point that other characters spend most of the novel believing that she's a man, so a bit of a missed opportunity there.  This time, there isn't even a side-kick along for her adventure.  This is basically a "road" novel, as most post-apocalyptic novels are, except this journey is shaped in little futile loops, and there's never a clear goal or threat.  True to life, I suppose, as our protagonist just sort of wanders around randomly and deals with the various situations she finds.  This is a book of random encounters, fleeting danger that's inevitably resolved within a few pages, so there's never any great tension or suspense.

Post-apocalyptic novels so often deal with hardship, society's healing or reforming, the cruelty of men cut loose from civilization.  And that's fine, but not when there's nothing else to it.  Here, the side characters never stick around for long enough to develop, and without side characters the book lacks even a sense of danger.  There's a clipped, casual quickness to the pacing of the book. Though well-written, Far North isn't particularly profound.  It doesn't make any great statements about civilization or human nature that haven't been made before — although it does make them better than most.  At times, it actually starts to steer towards something unique, only to shy away at the last minute.  Set in the wilds of Russia, it never takes advantage of its unique scenery or the mystery that is the vast Siberian landscape, which was a huge disappointment.  I assume that Theroux has never been to Siberia, as there's no sense of unique personality to the place, and it could have been set on almost any landmass with no changes but in the names of towns.  Once a mysterious region called "The Zone" is introduced, I was hoping Far North would at least have the good sense to borrow some of that awesome Russian creepiness from STALKER, but alas, this too is barely developed.  The main character wanders.  The main character perseveres, no matter how unlikely. And so on.

All this disappointment does not make Far North a bad book.  I always do this, getting caught up in the flaws of a novel, only to claim at the end that it's pretty decent — but whatever, Far North is pretty decent.  While it lacks creativity, it isn't really derivative or cliche either, and makes up for this in readability.  There's a lot of attempted poignancy that falls flat, but Far North works on a structural level better than most books.  So if you haven't read all that many post-apocalyptic books, this wouldn't be a bad start.  It doesn't cover any new ground, but it nonetheless makes for a reasonably satisfying journey.

BLUEBEARD (BY) KURT VONNEGUT

Published 1987, 318 Pages
Characters: B-
Writing: B+
Plot: B
Pacing: B+
Poignancy: B+

I generally hate being asked "Who's your favorite author?"  I like to think of myself as well-read, yet I don't seem to process books in a way that would allow me to answer such a question.  There are very few authors where I can say I really like more than one or two of their books. For example: I loved The World According to Garp, but then Irving just kept re-writing it, and his recent books have been a disaster. Then there are authors like Stephen King, who has written literally dozens of solid, entertaining novels (and the best book On Writing you'll likely find), whose output to consistency ratio would be extremely hard to beat.  But none of King's books on their own would make it onto my all-time favorites list, so how could he? Or what about an author like J.K. Rowling, who has written one perfect series but nothing else?  Would that be fair?

Point being, Kurt Vonnegut is the only answer I got.  Of the fourteen novels he wrote (in addition to hundreds of short stories and essays, published in numerous collections), I've now read all but four.  A couple of his books are all-time favorites, and none of them (that I've read) were worse than mediocre.  Vonnegut's bibliography is about as solid as any author can hope to achieve while still being as prolific as he was.  Needing something reliable for once, I picked up one of his later works, Bluebeard.  Bluebeard isn't usually considered essential Vonnegut, and while I agree that it doesn't reach the heights of his best novels, it just goes to show how strong of an author he was.  Even as one of his more average books, it's still quite good.  And like most Vonnegut, it's a quick, engaging read, short and "easy" but nonetheless bearing some weighty philosophical musings.  Perhaps it's easily overlooked because it isn't one of Vonnegut's more ambitious novels.  The story is fairly simple: ostensibly the autobiography of an Armenian abstract expressionist painter named Rabo Karabekian, the narrative rarely pushes any further than its "old man looking back at his life" structure. Vonnegut divides the story into past and present, and while the two perspectives can be a bit lopsided and don't always merge as well as they should, they successfully move the book along at a brisk pace, even adding a dash of mystery and tension rarely found in Vonnegut novels.

In Karabekian's past, he moves from his childhood home to be the apprentice of a famous American painter in NYC.  Eventually, (inevitably, perhaps, since this is a Vonnegut novel), he gets involved in WWII, before returning to America and becoming part of a circle of famous painters, alongside Pollack and Rothko.  Not nearly so much happens in the "present" thread — Karabekian has retired to his beach house in the Hamptons, where he debates the merits of his own art and art in general with his best friend, an old quirky writer, and a young widow who seems mysteriously keen to pry out the old recluse's secrets.  The present is probably the weakest narrative, and the least developed, not focusing quite enough on these underdeveloped side characters but still dishing out a few morsels of insight.  Yet for the shallowness of the side-stories, it all leads up to an unexpected, well-written denouement.  It's not a complex novel, or even a particularly deep one, but this allows Vonnegut to focus and play to his strengths, developing the voice of his main character into something sharp, consistent and funny.

Vonnegut does a great job of tackling the art world, and Bluebeard could be viewed almost as art-critique, although I don't think it was intended as such.  Most of the insights come in other areas, and through the strength of his signature writing style, which is so earnest and easy and playful that it could carry satire of any kind. Unlike Palahniuk, whose writing I found so forced and processed and wink wink self-aware that it became almost painfully robotic, Vonnegut has always had a natural, sincere approach to the subjects he takes on, and Bluebeard is hardly satire at all — Vonnegut, let's say, examines things, rather than satirizing them.  Some of the flaws common to his later books do pop up here, but not enough to distract — the man had a habit of aping his own style almost to the point of self-parody as he aged, but Bluebeard has only a few moments of overly-silly prose.

Bluebeard deals with many of the themes that Vonnegut tackled in other books, but avoids regurgitating any of them.  I wouldn't recommend it as anyone's first Vonnegut novel, since it does cover some familiar ground in a more toned-down, indirect manner.  Yet for those same reasons, it's one of Vonnegut's strongest later-career novels, offering new perspectives and plenty of engaging, fresh material.

NAKED (BY) DAVID SEDARIS

Published 1998, 224 pages
Characters: N/A

Writing: B-

Plot/Pacing: B

Poignancy: B

It's always an interesting experience re-reading something you enjoyed a great deal in the past.  I was a huge fan of David Sedaris in college, so I've already read every one of his books. Recently I needed a quick book to kill some time, and there was Naked, sitting on my shelf, untouched for probably six or seven years. I was curious to see how it fared, since I seem to be awfully jaded when it comes to comedy, of late.

Naked, like all of Sedaris' stuff, is a collection of autobiographical short stories, mostly detailing his childhood, family, wacky college adventures and difficulty coming to terms with his homosexuality.  The events in Naked are probably mostly true, but embellishment is part of Sedaris' authorial voice, so there's really no point in pondering how he could possibly remember a detailed conversation from 30 years ago. It's the events that matter, and the rest is clearly filled in by the author, writing retrospectively.  With that said — and having read his other books, which cover various other periods of his life — Sedaris has lived a remarkably tumultuous life that gave him plenty of material.  It's often difficult to believe that all these stories are about the same man, especially when the focus of one piece — his OCD, for example, which must have been a major part of his childhood — disappears entirely from the rest.  This is partly due to Sedaris' casual, flippant story construction.  He shapes each piece much like a sitcom, taking unrelated elements and weaving them into a purpose-driven plot, usually ending in some conclusion or retrospective revelation.  The fact that his OCD provided the basis for one story seems to have been enough, and he barely mentions it again — a sign of good focus and plot construction, I suppose, but it gives the collection a lightweight, surreal tone.  This is comedy, after all, and given the "PG-13"ish rating of some of the material, Sedaris plays it very tame.  Nothing really carries any weight — not his OCD, not his near-rape encounters with strangers while hitchhiking, not even his mother's death.  And that's fine; it fits his style.  Sedaris manages to produce tales that seem sharp and quick and enjoyable, regardless of their content.

If I can pinpoint one main reason that I failed to enjoy Naked as much as I did the first time around, it's that the stories are too tidy. Everything is so droll, skipping from one event to the next with little fanfare. Cleanly-presented material needs a bit of shock value to produce laughs.  Being older and more jaded, nothing in the collection was cringe-worthy or outrageous anymore, and most of the time it seemed like Sedaris was going out of his way to interact with the stupidest, most-ignorant people he could find.  He plays himself off as incredibly passive, a naive victim blundering from one bizarre event to the next with a sort of recklessness and ambivalence that eventually begins to raise flags.  How could someone so passive find himself in these situations again and again?  It's not that I don't believe him, but you start to see through his tone, and the authorial voice seems like just that — a style, something manufactured and deliberated upon. Since Sedaris mostly reacts as a narrator, and rarely as an in-the-action character, he seems to be merely drifting through life, prodding those around him in the hope that they'll produce material.  Despite this, there isn't a whole lot of comedy in the prose itself.  There are no jokes, per se, just funny situations.  It's entertaining, easily-digested, and little more.  I know I laughed the first time around.  But now, I honestly had a hard time trying to decide what was supposed to be funny about these stories. 

So perhaps its best to put aside expectations that this will be an outrageous laugh-fest, as most reviews would have it.  It's decently funny, in the way that a competent sitcom is decently funny, or at least entertaining.  And really, that's all it needs to be.  Considering that his material is far beyond anything you'd find in a sitcom, Sedaris doesn't take many risks with his narrative.  I suppose part of my disappointment is the contradiction in this — for everything that happened to him, for all the insanity he faced, Sedaris himself should be at least slightly unhinged, and yet he comes off as far too even-tempered.  He's condescending and snarky, but he never makes much effort to earn it, as if he's worried one of his victims might still find him out.  Still, by all means, read Naked at least once.  Just don't expect to die laughing.  Life is weird enough as it is, and it's all in what you make of it.

BIRDS OF AMERICA (BY) LORRIE MOORE

Published 1998, 291 pages

Characters: B
Writing: A-
Plot/Pacing: N/A
Poignancy: B

When I suggest that someone is or is not a good "writer", it's rather frustrating that I could easily mean one of two things (or two of two things).  Writing can be successful on both a small and large scale, and the actual construction of sentences, imagery and metaphors is essentially as important as the overall impact of a piece.  Writing is one of the few mediums in which the quality of the craftsmanship is immediately obvious to any observer — Dan Brown can tell a compelling story, and thus is a decent "storyteller", but seeing him struggle with the English language is as embarrassing and uncomfortable as watching a retarded blind double-amputee try to win an Iron Chef competition.  So when I say that Lorrie Moore is a fantastic writer, there are a few caveats (I got caveats like Dan Brown has plot twists, buddy), but whether or not she succeeds as a storyteller is ultimately going to be up to the reader's personality and view on life.

How does this sound: stories that render ordinary, hopeless lives with astounding accuracy, scooping up many poignant details and observations along the way but, as a result of never developing any genuine conflict, ending abruptly and without payoff.  Does that sound like it has the potential to be beautiful and revelatory to you, or just tedious?  Being as objective as it's possible for me to be, I'd say it's a bit of both.  Moore makes some truly great insights, though of the "subtle implication" sort, but she also gets a bit too caught up in what she's doing.  Birds of America practically runs on metaphors and similes, which one senses are meant to carry the narrative in lieu of other more conventional propellants.  This isn't a plot-heavy book, after all.  It's about small characters leading pathetic lives, doing little with those lives, and reaching no real fulfillment in the end.  The details they notice along the way are what's meant to endear Birds of America to us as well — and mostly, this works.  Moore's writing is usually sublime and profound, and is enough on its own to push the stories forward.  Unfortunately, Moore is hyper-aware that over-studied details and cute linguistic tricks are her selling-point, and she's quite relentless in making sure we get our money's worth.  There were a few sentences that made me stop and stare at the page for a moment — in the very best of ways, in appreciation, understanding and a bit of jealousy — but there were also some similes so forced and stupid that I had to close the book and take a moment to recover.  While the bad ones were rare, the real issue is that Moore has surprisingly little restraint for a writer dealing which such low-key subject matter.  The first time she used a double or triple simile to describe something, I nodded my head in agreement and respect.  Her words are undeniably powerful.  But she doesn't stop.  Is there a malfunctioning toaster that can be compared to a bird with a broken wing as part of a deeper metaphor for the futility of our protagonist's life?  Expect at least three pretty, whimsical metaphors to follow.  There's not enough happening in the background to justify getting stuck on every line, and her stories quickly run the risk of becoming over-long poems.  Why am I being so harsh on her writing, when I gave it a rare "A"?  Because nothing bothers me more than a writer who's become so impressed with themselves that they lose control, and with just a bit of editing and restraint (or even more variety in the actual stories), Moore's writing could be damn near perfect.

As for the larger picture, there's not a lot to say, which is another of the damn Catch 22's that seem to go hand-in-hand with Moore's writing.  Moore has an exceptional command of voice, and every character in this collection is vivid and believable — however, I get the sense that I was reading the same character over and over, a bit like how Woody Allen will try to convince us that he's a sports writer in one movie and a comedy writer in the next, and you wish he'd just drop the damn pretense and play himself already.  In almost every story, our third-person protagonist is a middle-aged woman with a repressed, whimsical sense of humor and a feeling of crushed pride, who faces the fact that her life has gone nowhere and that she's dating / married to some slovenly Joe Average dipshit who isn't good enough for her, although she's so passive aggressive that he ends up being the one to screw her over.  There are slight variations on this theme, of course, sometimes introducing cats, children or cancer — the Big 3, innit — but ultimately, each explores a character stoically dealing with the slow, sad atrophy of their life.

Just writing this out makes it sound as if Moore has created a swan song for horribly stereotypical suburban housewives, but don't get me wrong — these stories are powerful enough to transcend their simple material and become something much more universal.  And though I was overall impressed by Birds of America, it began to grate on me by the end for reasons I expect have become obvious by now.  Since I didn't particularly care for any of the characters that much on their own monotonous merits, I was increasingly unmoved by their awkward revelations, their "Oh!  Isn't life like that!" moments.  Moore is such a good writer and observer that everything here is compellingly relatable, but it's also exhausting.  I've been told that Moore's writing is "funny", and though I don't think she ever really goes for outright laughter, I can see how some might find humor in these situations.  Personally, I'd describe them as "amusing" — frivolous in tone, generally placing us in awkward social entanglements without ever condescending to its characters the way that, say, The Office does. Each story on its own is a fine accomplishment, with few outright weak points, and for the right person in the right circumstances, Birds of America could be quite powerful.  For others, to whom these characters aren't quite so endearing, Moore's book should at least serve as an engaging tutorial on the usage of simile and metaphor.

THE LONE RANGER AND TONTO FISTFIGHT IN HEAVEN (BY) SHERMAN ALEXIE

Published 1993, 240 pages
Characters: B
Writing: B+
Plot/Pacing: N/A
Poignancy: B+

It's telling that, for all the vivid, attention-grabbing prose in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, there's barely any description of scenery or setting.  Sherman Alexie's first published book, a collection of short stories, shows us a reservation where alcoholism, marital problems, basketball, and poverty have become almost mystic. Alexie is interested in the struggles of Indians in contemporary America, turning their faults and failings into a new Indian tradition, a culture of Shakespearean Fatal Flaws.  Through interconnected vignettes, memories and fantasies, stories are whittled down to the essence of character's emotions and then mythologized into some kind of Indian lore.  It's both a strength and missed opportunity — for all we're shown about how Indians think and act amongst each other, Fistfight in Heaven certainly doesn't reveal much context.  We get a few clues — lots of gas stations, hitchhiking along the highway, various cities around Washington, and a slew of problems that seem to suggest these places are inescapable — but unless you've been to the geographical region in question, these tragedies seem almost to take place in a floating, disembodied wasteland. And in that sense, you don't have to be an Indian to understand the suffering here, though it would certainly help to explain where it all comes from.

Alexie's characters are both stereotypes and justifications, full of idiosyncrasies that we're told again and again are uniquely Indian and thus transcendent.  Still, the plight of these characters shouldn't seem too alien to anyone — as long as you're at least somewhat familiar with drunkenness, abuse, poverty, alienation and failure.  Alcoholism is such a common theme that it almost fades into the background, lost in the weight of the cultural burdens these characters drag around with them.  The prose, too, is ambiguous enough to leave readers at the risk of their own interpretations, noticeably similar to poetry in both style and substance.  Stories are held together by metaphorical non-sequiturs and extended poetic abstraction, all of which is well written and intelligently conceived, but leaned upon so heavily that the reader's appreciation will likely come down to their threshold for such devices.  Fortunately, Alexie is wise enough to not force any of the character's burdens too hard on the reader, his prose skipping nimbly around either explanations or solutions, and so there's little in the way of redemption here.  There is, however, a great deal of casual racism on both sides, something that is undoubtedly a reality for people in and around an Indian reservation.  As Alexie never goes far beyond his main characters' heads, there's no real depth to these prejudices, and it begins to seem a little too much like Alexie is providing his readers with a reassuringly-sophisticated, book-shaped confessional into which they can dump their white guilt.

Though Fistfight in Heaven steers more toward "interesting" or "thought-provoking" than entertaining or even relateable, it is admirable for its unique voice and examination of a people often ignored by literature and film.  One begins to see how there can be nobility in failure and suffering, and despite the stereotypes and cultural confusion these characters seem to wrap around themselves like a protective blanket, the emotions are genuine, the pain easily, uncomfortably felt.

ORYX AND CRAKE (BY) MARGARET ATWOOD

Published 2004, 374 pages
Characters: C
Writing: B+
Plot/Pacing: C
Poignancy: B-

Part dystopian future, part last-man-on-earth parable, Oryx and Crake is yet another book in the stack of literary authors attempting to explore genre themes intelligently, once again making it clear that writing good speculative fiction is a hell of a lot harder than anyone realizes. As with many such attempts, the end result reads like an awkward literary experiment more than a convincing warning of our possible future.

Oryx and Crake is the story of Jimmy, his BFF Crake, and mutual love interest Oryx. They live in a future where the earth has become crowded and miserable, where civilization is in the process of disintegrating.  The biggest companies — grown powerful and rich off of bio-engineered food and various disease vaccines — have become self-sustained cities in which their employees live free from the horrors of the outside world. It's not the most original premise, but it doesn't have to be, since Atwood starts out well, lays it out well, really gets into the scope of it all. Bizarrely, it's the trivial details that end up being her first major setback. Atwood approaches her material with a sort of tongue-and-cheek condescension, and just she can't seem to get enough of it. Despite the lack of humor anywhere else in this book, we're meant to believe that corporations in this world have given themselves phonetic, ironically childish names like AnooYoo and RejoovenEsense, and popular genetically altered foods are marketed as Happicuppa coffee and SoyOBoy burgers. And let's not forget the new animals: wolvogs, pigoons and rakunks. Because obviously, the future is silly and quirky, right?
It's grating the first time, nauseating the 100th time, and by the 1000th time you hear one of those goddam terms you wonder if Atwood is using them so often because she's daring you to try to take her story seriously. It's sad, as this lightweight approach to her own creation undermines the fact that her future world is actually  frighteningly realistic, a pretty dreary vision of where we'll be in 100 years.

Crake, from the very start, has ambitions for sweeping all the trash of the world away, though we're never once given a hint as to why. He's smart, has parental issues, is introverted and yet not really a social outcast. Despite providing a good chunk of the novel's dialogue, I can't say I ever really got a good sense of his character. Oryx, a former child pornstar who stumbles upon the male leads when all three are much older, has a complicated backstory that doesn't accomplish anything either. Instead of actually having a role or function in the novel, she's tucked into a series of hushed, post-coital bedroom dialogues. Oyrx could have been used to escalate the drama, to give Crake an identifiable motivation for his actions, to highlight some undeveloped conflict between the main characters... but no. There's no tension, no interplay between the three, no culmination of the mystery behind her that begins with the very first chapter — in fact, Oryx seems to have been placed in the story simply so it could have a female character. Atwood at times does touch upon something poignant, having Jimmy patronize the girl as he demands to know more about her troubled past and the men he imagines must have used her, but these little touches of character seem like part of another story told by other, deeper characters.

How does Atwood manage to accomplish so little? It's almost staggeringly short-sighted, as if she got so fascinated with her pun-based novelty foods that she was forced to skimp on plot. You see, the entire novel is told in flashback. Well, not the entire novel, but damn near 90% of it. The "present" is only there so we know that the world has ended and that Jimmy is the last person left alive (along with some of Crake's genetic hybrid creatures). There is no plot, technically speaking — a series of flashbacks can only result in  the present, thus removing any possible suspense. From the very beginning the reader knows that Crake and Oryx and everyone else are dead, we just don't know how. That's it. It's a self-creating mystery, and not a very complex one. It's immediately obvious that Crake wipes out humanity with a plague because Atwood foreshadows the hell out of it, and anyway, let's be frank here, it's a post-apocalyptic novel so obviously someone in it is going to wipe out humanity with a plague. Yet, despite spending almost the entire story in the novel's past, Atwood manages to explain almost nothing about what happened and the characters who made that almost-nothing happen.

I've focused on the negative aspects of the novel for the most part, because they truly need to be stated. And I could go on, but the point is made. Atwood is a solid writer, and her prose is mostly very strong, the pacing fluid, the characters interesting despite being hugely underutilized. In fact, Oryx and Crake is a remarkably readable novel considering how clumsily Atwood bungles her plot and the many potential paths she could have taken it down. The novel's main fault is that it simply doesn't go anywhere and refuses to make any kind of impact, and I think that eliminates any chance it has for being memorable. There are allusions to the redemption of man's spirit, the damnation of man, the superiority of nature, the horrors of the unnatural, the unstoppable greed of society, the adaptability of society... and yet none of those themes really stick for more than moment. Still, for a book that spends 374 pages treading water, it could have been a disaster and it wasn't. I'm curious to check out Atwood's other books, to see how she handles more comfortable material.