THE SCAR (BY) CHINA MIEVILLE

Published 2002, 656 pages
Characters: B+
Writing: A-
Plot: A
Pacing: A
Poignancy: B+


I've read a lot of China Mieville books in the last year.  The Scar is probably the best of the those books, on a technical level, though it's not my favorite.  Here, Mieville seems to recognize his strengths while trying a bit too hard to shy away from his weaknesses, creating a novel that is consistently good and often great, yet never quite so stunning or impressive as Perdido Street Station.

The Scar, like seemingly all of Mieville's novels, takes place in a city that eventually begins to shape the plot through its own quirks and circumstances. The Scar is set not long after the events of Perdido Street Station, following an exile named Bellis who had to flee her home following the events of that previous novel. That is the only connection between the two books, really — the events of one set in motion the events of the next, but you could easily read The Scar on its own. Proceeding with the plot summary: Bellis is captured by mysterious pirates, who take her to Armada, a legendary floating city composed of thousands of stolen ships lashed together, existing for hundreds of years as a vagrant metropolis, impossible for anyone to intentionally track down. Of course, the story only begins there. The novel deals with a city of pirates, but the story isn't as topical as that tease-y synopsis suggests — stupid Johnny Depp — as pirating actually has very little to do with the plot. Once Bellis arrives in Aramada, she's soon involved in a complicated conspiracy and a hard-to-explain-without-giving everything-away plot to lead the city into a new era. Shit gets real.

Like with Perdido Street Station, the strength of the novel is all the odd, imaginative stuff that goes down. But Perdido Street Station reads like a fireworks display of creativity, with ideas bursting and arcing away out of nowhere, making little contribution to the plot, yet stunning nonetheless. The Scar is more balanced. The plot unfolds at a steady, well thought-out pace. Everything is well structured. Most of the random ideas Mieville throws out make an obvious contribution to later events in the book. And that's both an improvement and a detriment. The Scar is probably a better novel on a technical level, but it never really blew me away. The plot is more structured, and cleverly executed, there are moments when it doesn't feel quite satisfying. The characters are amongst the strongest Mieville has created, but as I've noticed in his other novels, many of them feel like a tease, as if he doesn't quite know what to do with them once they're there — developed to the point where you'd expect some last development from them that never comes. Mieville is also very distant with some of his plot points in The Scar — in particular the Avanc, which he seems to consciously keep at an arms length from the reader, as if worried he couldn't do it justice.

While not his most sprawling or ambitious work, The Scar is a fantastic novel and proof that Mieville has a deep understanding of his craft, an awareness of his own strengths that allows him to create a chaotic, vast world that somehow seems perfectly organic and tangible. In tone — if not in feasibility — The Scar and Perdido Street Station are perhaps the most realistic fantasy-type novels I've ever read. (Uh-oh, gritty... dark... pirates... vampires... how has this not been made into a movie yet?)  Mieville's ideas are so impressive not just because of their variety and uniqueness, but because they fit together like jigsaw pieces, creating something more impressive than any one of them, and somehow, also, creating a rich and compelling narrative.

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.

PERDIDO STREET STATION (BY) CHINA MIEVILLE

Published 2001, 710 pages
Characters: B
Writing: A
Plot: A
Pacing: A
Poignancy: A

Perdido Street Station is the most impressive book I've read in a long time.  One of the best, too.  It's not a perfect book, but goddam does it feel good to be blown away by an author's sheer imagination sometimes.  It's why I got into this whole 'reading' nonsense, isn't it?

Last fall, I read China Mieville's The City and the City. It wasn't a perfect book, and the end lacked a certain punch that might have made it truly profound, but it was nonetheless a vividly atmospheric read, dripping with creativity and literary ingenuity.  Perdido is another love letter to Mieville's baroque, labyrinthine cities, somehow both gritty, convincing and surreal at the same time. The two books of his that I've read share a similar impact, but Perdido is bigger, more ambitious, and simply better.

Unfortunately, it's not even fair to give a basic plot summary of Perdido Street Station, as the twists and turns the story takes before settling into its main trajectory are a big part of the fun.  The back cover blurb is wonderfully misleading, but for good reason, so I'll try to mimic it. Perdido Street Station is sort-of about an unorthodox scientist named Isaac, who finds himself forced into new avenues of research when he's hired by a mysterious foreign visitor to research the mechanisms of flight.  Of course, that doesn't begin to explain anything.  In the first hundred pages or so of the book, the story seems poised to go in any number of directions, before finally committing to an eerie, thriller-esque plot. And that plot is fine, but it's not actually what makes Perdido Street Station shine. It's the messiness of the whole thing, the many imaginative tangents Mieville is willing to take for the sake of atmosphere and immersion, and the hundreds of seemingly unimportant details he tosses out along the way.  The man is apparently a fountain of knockout ideas.  Any given ten pages of Perdido Street Station could have formed the whole concept behind another novel, but Mieville somehow finds room for them all here. I cannot stress enough how vividly imagined this book is; it's what I really loved about it.  The Weaver, the ribs, the Construct Council, the moths, the Ambassador, Torque and all the rich history that's dished out just for passing conversation — Mieville doesn't seem to mind whether his creations affect the plot for five pages or 500, they're all inventive and interesting and actually suck you into this impossible city.

Because really, this novel is about the city where it takes place more than any one component of its plot.  All those details and tangents that seem irrelevant, or tangential, are not.  By the end, the city of New Crobuzon seemed more likely and believable a place to me than, say, Detroit.  In another, broader sense — embracing the themes rather than specifics of the story — Perdido is about the state of crisis.  Multiple disparate events, each as unlikely as the one preceding it, all joining impossibly to propel things forward.  Perdido Street Station could have had a very simple plot.  If it was made as a movie, it would seem like a standard genre thriller that just happens to have an interesting gothic backdrop.  Only a book this long and rambling could capture that theme, the sense that chaos often coagulates in unlikely ways, driven by its very unexpectedness.

Of course, as a messy book, Perdido can't be perfect — just really impressive.  I thought some of the plot threads resolved in unsatisfactory ways, and the book is definitely at its best when it's introducing all its inventive ideas, rather than shutting them down toward the end. Still, for a book this dense, it sticks the landing far better than most. The characters are interesting, if not particularly memorable, and Mieville's writing is consistently excellent, matching the tone of this dark-fantasy steampunk sci-fi horror hodgepodge. (A sidenote that I'd like to address, even though it's not directly relevant to the review of the book:  Fantasy novels always seem to take place in some technologically frozen world, where society has remained static for hundreds or thousands of years, never advancing beyond Medieval sciences.  This is rarely explored or mentioned outright, and I'd love to see some more deconstruction of the reasons for this, other than plot-necessity.  It almost makes sense, really: the introduction of 'magic' to a world would confound science, or even replace it. I loved that Perdido Street Station addressed this indirectly, once more tossing off a brilliant idea as if it were nothing. The novel features a society that seems to have integrated what we'd call 'magic' as simply another branch of science, creating an industrial age society that's in many ways as advanced as our own, its wildly multi-cultural society progressing and developing while still laboring under an oppressive authoritarian government.  Once again, it's a subtle, creative blend of ideas, where steampunk technology and old-world ideals lead to slightly-weird union labor strikes as often than surreal adventures.)

I rate Perdido Street Station five out of five Orson-Welles-slow-clap.gifs.

THE RUNNING MAN (BY) STEPHEN KING

Published 1982, 336 pages
Characters: B
Writing: B-
Plot: B+
Pacing: B+
Poignancy: B

It's not terribly important that I decided to pick up the Running Man because I read countless discussions online pointing out its similarity to the currently-popular Hunger Games trilogy, which I read in March. But out of the dozens of novels Stephen King has written — which I will probably never entirely catch up on — that's why I decided to pick up this one just now.

Though nearly three decades separate the publication of the novels, the similarities are pretty glaring. The Hunger Games is an almost perfect synthesis of The Running Man and Battle Royale. Stephen King's 1982 novel is only set in 2025, and as with the best, most convincing near-future sci-fi, not much is all the different — everything is just a bit shittier. The people tune in to a series of increasingly dangerous reality-TV show contests for amusement, run by a sinister government entertainment Network. A man named Richards, desperate for money to save his diseased young daughter, enters into the most dangerous and popular reality program in the country: The Running Man. It's pretty much what it sounds like, a nationwide manhunt which nearly everyone watches, and in which anyone can participate. If Richards manages to survive for 30 days, he's set for life, rich beyond meaning. In the history of the game, no one has ever survived more than 8 days.

So you have the evil corrupt government, the death-game, the reality-TV angle being used to control and manipulate the masses. The main reason I bring up these comparisons is because The Hunger Games utilized that reality-TV angle so poorly, when it was clearly a goldmine idea with a lot of potential. It was never clear who watched or who cared or what significance any of it might have in the world at large. King clears that problem here, making it all feel tangible and believable, with plenty of first-hand demonstration on what effect this reality-TV population control has, and why people in a society like ours might even buy into it. He does this while breezing through the action of the novel, too, integrating exposition with pacing and plot development. It's impressive, and only the beginning of the novel suffers for it, with the first few beats of the story seeming a little rushed and jarring.

The world is convincing, and the story is tight. There's really not much beyond that — like The Hunger Games, this is a lean book and a fast read. (I read nearly the entire thing on a four hour bus ride back to Lebanon.) It's appropriately gritty and uncompromising, and Richards makes for a sympathetic, jaded, smug, noir-ish narrator. I should note that The Running Man was written under King's long-defunct Richard Bachman pen-name, and thus there are some interesting and fitting stylistic differences from King's usual stuff. The prose is much leaner and harder, less folksy and rambling than typical. Richard the character fits Richard the pen-name, and everything fits this grim but sardonic world.

One last thing: that Arnold Schwarzenegger film of the same name is, in fact, based off of this book. I have never seen it. I doubt it's very similar but I'm curious to check it out. King doesn't pull any punches with the ending, and without changing that part around significantly, this is one story I can guarantee that Hollywood will never be tempted to remake.

MOCKINGJAY (BY) SUZANNE COLLINS

Published 2010, 390 pages
Characters: B-
Writing: B-
Plot: B
Pacing: B
Poignancy: B

Suzanne Collins Hunger Games trilogy could have gone either way for me after its second installment, the disjointed and choppy Catching Fire. Book one, The Hunger Games, was an unflinching speed-read, even if it wasn't particularly inventive or well written.  All those problems came to a head with the middle installment, but Collins makes an impressive effort to right them here.  The writing improves, just enough. The plotting improves, just enough.  The characters — alright, the characters are still either surprisingly dark or totally bland, but I suppose its forgivable.  These books were always about plot, and here again, Collins writes like she knows what she's doing.

After Katniss wins her first Hunger Games, wrapping up the main conflict of the first book, Collins was obviously in something of a bind.  The hero of the story needed something to do in the second installment, so Collins had her accidentally spark a rebellion — which, it turns out, is a surprisingly passive role anyway.  Still lacking anything direct to do with Katniss halfway through, Collins threw her into a second Hunger Games, which helped to develop the action, but not the story or the outside factors shaping it.  Finally, in Mockingjay, Collins figures out what to do with the larger world, forcing Katniss to participate in the war against the Capitol as rebellion sweeps across the land.  When the bad guys eventually crumble, it feels inevitable and unearned, but it's still exciting.  When Katniss and her pals launch one last huge offense against the Capitol itself, it feels satisfying, like the series is at last achieving what it was meant to, even if it's not doing so in particularly groundbreaking fashion.

The real strength of the trilogy was never Collin's originality, whether in the broad scope and direction of the plot, or the little details that provide the mayhem.  At its worst, the series could sometimes feel like a video-game, a series of arbitrary problems with arbitrary solutions that the characters never had to work for. What made the trilogy work — especially as a YA series — is how dark Collins was willing to go, and that's really the case here.  Mockingjay gets dark.  Never particularly visceral or gory, which would have almost been easier; some of the directions the plot takes are unnerving in a subtler, stranger way, things you wouldn't expect to pop up in a story meant for a younger age group.  What makes the plot here stand out — to become maybe the best of the trilogy — is how that sense of darkness and cynicism creeps into the background and tone of the story, creating a world where, remarkably, a battle of rebels against their tyrannical government doesn't just turn into an easy case of good versus evil.  It would have been simple for Collins to leave out the shades of gray, but she doesn't flinch.  The deeper into the story we go, the more clear it is that there are no good guys and bad guys. While Mockingjay may lack the nuance of social critiques like 1984, it also has the good sense to maintain a completely sincere "trust no one" cynicism.

These unexpectedly dark turns help to conceal what remains one of Collin's greatest weaknesses: the dullness of the series' side-characters.  As before, Collin's choices as an author remain more interesting than the choices her characters make.  Many side plots end in ways that I did not expect at all, despite revealing nothing new or interesting about the characters making those choices.  (The love triangle that strung out through the whole trilogy certainly ends differently than I was expecting, without resorting to cheap melodrama.) Ultimately, the trilogy works as a series of action novels, as long as you aren't expecting anything particularly clever. Here in the last book, Collins must have felt obliged to up the ante and add some craziness, but she just doesn't seem to have the imagination for it.  The last third of the book reads like a video game, with a silly, extremely-forced series of challenges set up to provide danger to the characters.  The big dramatic climax is something of a let-down as well, and kind of nonsensical — odd, considering how tight the action in the series generally was. Collins can't seem to break out of a certain formula of violent adventure sequences, even when those sequences make no sense to the world she's scripting.

Then there's the whole reality-TV angle the series takes — a major background device that I haven't even discussed before, because I honestly don't know what to make of it.  Collins seems to be attempting some sort of commentary on war as spectacle, the role of television in both controlling the masses and inspiring them. The idea is there, the basic framework to draw out some kind of statement, but she just never does anything with it.  It sits awkwardly at the fringes of the plot, like that weird college dormmate who would come into your room, sit on your bed, and watch you write from over your shoulder, and you were like, "Hey Zach, did you want something?"  But he didn't want anything.  He was just sitting there, with nothing better to do, like the reality TV subplot of The Hunger Games. There's the assumption throughout the series that everything Katniss does is going to be televised — first for the Capitols' benefit, because I guess they're into that real horrorshow stuff, and later to keep the rebellion going.  But once the Capitol is being invaded, the last battles are being fought, who's sitting at home still watching their TV?  And why?  Everyone we see is described as poor and overworked.  No one, in the entire series, is ever shown even watching a television, or owning one — they're just forced to watch some big screens in the town square when the Hunger Games are being broadcast. It feels like Collins is writing a device for our world, not this one — TV shouldn't have much impact on these characters, and she never even attempts to explain why it would.

With the nature of the world around Katniss so unclear, the actions and directions of the plot seem sort of context-less when you think about them too much.  Things just happen because, well, they happen.  So much here serves the action, makes the danger momentarily more thrilling, but actually reduces the overall coherency of the book. These issues didn't ruin any one of the books or the impact of the series as whole, but they were bothersome enough to keep anything from really resonating with me.  I was entertained, but not particularly impressed. Still — if I had kids, I would give them the series.  The Hunger Games trilogy may not answer any profound questions, but at least it sort-of, kind-of raises them.

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.

THE HUNGER GAMES (BY) SUZANNE COLLINS

Published 2008, 384 pages
Characters: B-
Writing: B-
Plot: B
Pacing: A
Poignancy: B

The many thousands of loyal readers of The Luxury Review may have noticed that it's been a long time since I posted a book review.  Well, that's because it's been a while since I've been able to finish a book. Pretty sad, I know; I feel nightly remorse about this. These last few months, I guess I just had too much on my mind.  Too much stress to detach from my own world and enter another.  I couldn't get through anything — dense, intricately-written literary medications were just not appealing to me.

I guess that's exactly why books like The Hunger Games remain incredibly popular.

Usually I don't spend much time writing out a plot synopsis for the books I review.  Here, I don't think I really could.  The plot of The Hunger Games is literally Battle Royale. Haven't seen or read it?  Well, here: Kids are drafted via lottery by the evil government, tossed into a giant playing field and forced to fight to the last-man-standing in a sort of reality TV brutal death game. Our heroine, the unfortunately named Katniss Everdeen, has to try not to die.  Boom.  It's straightforward. It's short and lean and uncomplicated. It is also, thankfully, riveting.

It would be tempting to say that writing a "young adult" book limits an author, since you can only get away with so much gore and sex and darkness and pain when you're writing for teenagers.  But it works both ways, and I think Suzanne Collins made a smart, calculated choice when writing this series for a youngish audience.  As a "regular" book, The Hunger Games would be accused of lacking complexity.  There's never a sense that there's much out there, beyond the walls of the arena or the simple narrative.  Granted, this is just the first book of a trilogy, a trilogy that was planned from the start, so maybe the scope opens up a bit with later installments.  Regardless, it seems okay — it's obvious that Collins set out to write this book for a specific audience, so it never feels like she's just being lazy  (I'm not saying teenagers all have short attention spans.  Obviously, the latter Harry Potter books were gigantic, but books trying to break in to a younger audience are expected to be fast-paced, quick reads, regardless of their length.)  Of course, writing a book this fast and lean and engaging takes skill too, just of a different sort than writing dense Pynchon-ian epics.  You have to know what to cut, what to leave, and how to make the little material left in your streamlined plot as engaging as possible. Short and lean can still be boring, but not here.  There isn't a dull moment or unnecessary page in this whole novel.  As simple as the tale is, Collins knows how to tell it well.

So while I found The Hunger Games entertaining, even refreshing, it's not without its surprises.  And it's certainly not without weaknesses.  Despite what I just said about YA adults not getting away with as much complexity as "regular" novels, The Hunger Games does get surprisingly dark.  This is a book about two dozen teenagers forced to brutally murder each other, after all, and Collins doesn't take easy outs even when she could.  Some of the scenes in The Hunger Games are genuinely disturbing, despite the characters driving them lacking depth.  In other ways, Collins does take the easy way out, tossing in a half-dozen deus ex machinas that she could have easily worked around.  The nature of the game itself is sort of a DEM, since the Gamemasters can control everything and anything within the arena, apparently — they control the temperature, the weather, the food, the animals, the water, etc.  And this is where the lack of depth in the world at large becomes problematic — when writing about an evil dystopian government, it helps to give them some context, some general clues as to the scope of their powers.  Cameras film every move of everyone in this vast forested arena, but no character ever mentions seeing a camera, or any piece of technology at all.  (I guess the cameras were some kind of omnipresent nanobot swarm or something.)  And while there's suspense, the book remains fairly predictable.  The surprises deal more with how than what, since the actions every character takes seem a bit pre-ordained by their generic types.  In other words, Collins' choices as an author hold more surprises than any of her characters do.

Still, The Hunger Games is designed to not need context most of the time.  It's kill or be killed, and everything is just solid enough to hold up that premise without cracking.  Side characters are archetypal, and never have enough page-time to develop the quirks and habits that might make them truly believable.  The world, too, is generic, but it's never the focus of the book, so it doesn't matter.  Everything here is so focused on what does matter — survival, etc. — that there's no chance to look away, and no point when you'd ever want to.

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.

THE LAST AMERICAN MAN (BY) ELIZABETH GILBERT

Published 2002, 268 pages
Characters: n/a
Writing: B
Plot: B+
Pacing: B+
Poignancy: B+

It's rare to find a biography as thorough and intimate as The Last American Man.  Of course, there aren't many subjects out there like Eustace Conway.  Since a very young age, Conway has taught and lived self-sufficient living, but he's more than just a naturalist and mountain-man.  He's a man that can conquer seemingly any goal he sets for himself, a man that seems to have nearly superhuman physical powers, and a mind to match.  At the age of seventeen, Conway left his parent's suburban home, built a tee-pee in the wilderness, made all his clothing out of deer-skin, and has more or less lived like that ever since.  Conway's is a complex story that could have easily been told through a lens of hero worship and idealism, but Gilbert does an excellent job of unraveling Conway's complicated motivations, aspirations and frustrations. The two have been friends for years, and it shows in her writing, which is deeply personal — affectionate, yet candid and critical.  In trying to demystify this man — who has already become a legend to many — Gilbert leaves out nothing.  No one this passionate achieves success without having a dark side, and The Last American Man takes the psychoanalytical risks to show why so many people idolize Conway from afar, then practically flee when given the opportunity to know him up close.

Eustace Conway is the owner of Turtle Island, a nature conservatory and ultra-primitive, self-sufficient farm in North Carolina; a sort of non-profit haven for preaching and teaching his message of environmentalism.  Yet despite building and running his own utopia from the ground up, Conway doesn't seem to stay in one place for very long.  He has broken multiple world records for long-distance horse riding and hiked the entire Appalachian Trail with only a small knife, wearing a loin-cloth.  He makes his own clothing out of animal skin.  He's hardcore, to the say the least.  Many would be quick to pin him as a hippie, a bleeding-heart liberal tree-hugger.  But Eustace Conway turns out to be far more complicated than that.  For one, he's shockingly conservative, and a brilliant businessman with a head for self-promotion.  He's a strict authoritarian, and often complains that he would run Turtle Island like a rigid military dictatorship if he could.  A man like Conway couldn't achieve success without being a control-freak.

While reading The Last American Man, it struck me how similar Conway's basic personality traits are to those shown by Mark Zuckerberg (as he was portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg) in The Social Network.  The lives of these men would seem to have little in common on the surface, yet both embody the same relentless drive, the need for absolute control, the perfectionism, the uncanny intellect and talent — and as a result, the tendency to drive away everyone close to them through the sheer intensity of their personality.  These men were born to succeed beyond measure, but might as well wear a plaque around their neck that reads: "... at what cost?"  What makes The Last American Man (and Eustace Conway) so fascinating is not just the adventures Conway has been on, but the way people react to him.  This includes the author, who can't seem to help interjecting her own thoughts and witticisms into the narrative, especially when deconstructing Conway's personal relationships (though to be fair, this might just be her writing style.)  That Gilbert is fascinated and perplexed by Conway even after knowing him so well — indeed, after writing such a thorough book on the man — is telling.  Many of the apprentices that come to Turtle Island to learn about the primitive life seem to look to Conway as a father figure and spiritual guide, and most end up leaving disappointed, jaded and even heartbroken.  Conway has had poor luck with his sexual relationships as well, though he seems to have had no lack of them either.  He is a man who is immediately and obviously compelling, who is described as constantly drawing people into his orbit before suffocating them through the intensity of his personality, the extreme demands he places upon himself and others.

As a book, The Last American Man is not perfect.  Gilbert's intimacy with Conway gives the reader access that few authors would have been able to obtain, or understand, but her tone is occasionally so casual that it's hard to take at face value.  Still, for this style of writing, she could do much worse, and the book has a nice flow and a vibrant, excited energy to match its subject.  The pacing suggests Conway's own trajectory, from capable young idealist to jaded, disappointed businessman.  This, in a way, makes The Last American Man an unintended but insightful commentary on the very nature of idealism, structured around an idealist who did not himself fail, like so many hippies and would-be-Utopians.  Eustace Conway tackled every goal he set up for himself, and he had just as high hopes for America — he truly believed he could save our country by teaching us how live a primitive, knowledgeable, hard-working lifestyle.  He really figured out how to do it, showed us that it works.  But most people are not like Eustace Conway, and the same problems he saw in his youth are looming larger than ever.  Watching this man recognize his own futility through the pages of a mere biography is a tremendously fascinating experience.

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.

I WAS TOLD THERE'D BE CAKE (BY) SLOANE CROSLEY

Published 2008, 228 pages
Characters: N/A
Writing: C+
Plot: C
Pacing: C+
Poignancy: C

In my recent review of The Thieves of Manhattan, I complained that maybe humor books just aren't for me anymore.  While my lament was certainly relevant to that novel, it was equally inspired by I Was Told There'd Be Cake, which I had started previously and, after struggling through a few stories, put down in frustration.  I almost never picked the book back up, knowing there was little chance I would like it.  But I have a blog, and therefore a mission, and thus an obligation, dammit.  The book had to be reviewed.  And guess what?  I did not enjoy it.  I Was Told There'd Be Cake is a collection of "humor" essays — modern confessional essays in the vein of David Sedaris, focusing on the wacky things that happen in the author's life and her self-deprecating reactions to said wacky things.  It's probably unfair to compare everything in this genre back to Sedaris, just like every other review of I Was Told There'd Be Cake does, but whatever — Cake is essentially a watered-down version of Sedaris without any of the insight or humor.

Ultimately, anyway, humor can't really be analyzed, since it's mostly subjective.  Nonetheless, I'm perplexed as to what in this book was meant to be funny at all.  I hate to be so cruel, but this collection reads like an assortment of LiveJournal entries that some college senior shipped off to a publisher.  It's choppy, banal and never says anything interesting or insightful.  Sure, any slice-of-life story can be funny if told the right way, with a strong voice, and Crosley doesn't go for cheap shocks or obvious hyperbole.  It's undoubtedly grounded in reality, no question.  But that's just the problem.  These are the sort of stories you tell your own friends, while wasted, to maybe get a few chuckles.  The sort of stories you write while pissed-off over the day's events and later read to your writing workshop so you can vent — and maybe get a few sympathetic smiles.  Crosley establishes herself as an average person from a wealthy suburban background, who's never had to work all that hard, who's suffered the same mild embarrassments and set-backs that everyone has suffered, but still manages to find time to condescend to those around her.  She's had bosses that were mildly irritating, and yelled at her — but don't worry, she found a new job the day after she quit anyway, the day after 9/11 no less!  What luck!  She's self-deprecating, in an attempt to make herself seem even more average, but self deprecation is an art that she can't quite pull off, and instead it just makes her sound self-absorbed. 

I don't want this review to sound like a character critique when it's a review of a book, but such things are hard to get past when dealing with confessional essays — the writer's personality often is the story. The main problem with Cake, and my primary confusion with how Crosley got this published in the first place, is that Crosley is just not a very good storyteller.  Her tone is generic and predictable; her every-day subject matter is never elevated to anything else.  She's not witty; she just sounds exasperated.  Her narratives jump around clumsily and rarely have anything like a satisfying resolution.  Some of the stories here are strangely hard to follow for lightweight humor essays, and others end so abruptly and pointlessly that I began checking my copy for missing pages.  Without humor, without poignancy, without gripping storytelling or well-crafted prose, there's simply nothing here.

THE CITY AND THE CITY (BY) CHINA MIEVILLE

Published 2009, 312 pages
Characters: B-
Writing: B
Plot: B+
Pacing: A-
Poignancy: A-

Unfortunately, I don't think any book could ever be as badass as the cover of The City and the City suggests, but China Mieville's intricate, atmospheric mystery gives it a pretty good go.  Though the story is framed around a political murder, and never strays too far from other noirish police procedurals in scope of plot, the setting that steers most of Mieville's novel is unlike anything I've ever read.  With the feel of very dry magic realism and gothic dark fantasy, Mieville's style has been described as a cross between Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and Franz Kafka, and I can't really improve upon that.  That, I hope, should be endorsement enough.

The two cities of the title are Beszél and Ul Qoma, conjoined but separate cities somewhere in Eastern Europe, each essentially its own country.  Parallels to real-life separated cities are obvious, like Berlin during the Cold War, but Mieville pushes well past social commentary and into elaborate mind-game.  Beszél and Ul Qoma — though distinct cities with their own unique cultures, languages and histories — share the same, overlapping physical space.  Rather than divided down the middle, each city is spliced together with the other, necessitating a complicated system so that citizens of one town do not "breach" into the other.  The population learns from birth to "unsee" the other city, memorizing which streets exist in which jurisdiction, what shops belong to their nation, and even which cultural signifiers make citizens of the "other" place practically — though not literally — invisible.  It sounds like an outlandish concept, but there is no magic or fantasy involved, only politics.  Mieville plays it so dry that it's easy to accept this scenario as plausible, even if no government could ever realistically make it work.  For obvious reasons, a good deal of the novel is expository — sort of like Inception, which I seem to be referencing a lot lately, in that both are standard thriller plotlines, easy enough to follow on their own but tied to a complicated central structure.  Those anticipating many layers of strangeness and surrealism beyond the basic pitch will be disappointed, but Mieville is able to extract so much from his premise that it really shouldn't matter.

The setting is easily malleable enough to provide its own twists and turns, and therefore a great deal of the narrative is spent establishing the nature of Beszél and Ul Qoma.  Mieville is clever enough to make these the focus of the book — really, its main characters — without ever going off on tangents, or driving his story into the absurd.  Unfortunately, his other characters are never quite as strong, and the structure of the story prevents them from developing much beyond their occupational roles.  This is not to say that the characters are unbelievable or poorly written — they are bland and not particularly deep, but in the way that many real people are bland and not particularly deep, and their actions are always well-scripted and fully convincing.  If The City and the City suffers from one chief weakness, it is that the ending fails to impress after the steady brilliance building up to it.  The conclusion simply lacks the imagination of everything preceding it — many of the red herrings tossed out along the way might have led to a more interesting ending, and the final showdown requires so much exposition as it's unfolding that any tension or suspense is lost.  I had hoped Mieville might have taken the metaphor inherent in his setting a bit further, or add more layers to the many he had already concocted, but the climax is true to the grounded tone the rest of the novel takes.  Mieville has defended this arc as a sort of anti-fantasy — after being given a glimpse of potential, a hint that the book could expand into entirely new worlds, the narrative instead dips down and touches ground again, adhering to the boundaries of reality.  Even if you, like me, are frustrated by this less-exciting turn, The City and the City is still one of the more adventurous, interesting novels to come along in years.

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.

CLOUD ATLAS (BY) DAVID MITCHELL

Published 2004, 528 pages
Characters: B+
Writing: A
Plot: A
Pacing: B+
Poignancy: A

When I'm walking around a bookstore scouting for something to read, it's always irritating when books are missing a summary — as if publishers are knowingly trying to kill impulse buys and give Amazon more business. A lot of times, of course, the summaries on the backcover are so vague or poorly written that they might as well not be there anyway.  It would be difficult to tell what kind of book Cloud Atlas is just by giving it a quick look-over, so while the back cover summary may seem frustratingly elusive, this happens to actually be the kind of book that can't be captured in Marketing Speak.  With Cloud Atlas, the events that occur aren't as important as the structure of the narrative, the way the pieces fit together.  Because this book isn't one story, but five separate narratives nested within each other like Russian dolls.  Each takes place in a different time period, moving forward chronologically, and therefore each is written in a radically different voice, style and genre from the others. The first is a sort of Victorian adventure novel, the second a novel of letters set in 1931, both written in the style of their time, and thus distinctly archaic sounding.  The following two pieces are the closest to modern novels — the first, set in the 70's, mimics a pulpy paperback thriller; the next is the only tale set in the present day, a first person account from a cantankerous old man trying to escape his life's many debts.  After that we move into the future, and finally, the distant future.  Making a plot summary even more impossible, the first four "threads" of the novel are split in half, each ending in a cliffhanger before jumping to the next time period.  Only the fifth and final tale is told in one piece, and when it ends we travel back to the previous stories in reverse chronological order, so that the novel ends where it begins, having spanned a few hundred years of human history.

Difficult to explain, of course, and after all that I've not even attempted to summarize what actually "happens" in Cloud Atlas.  It's somewhat beside the point, but if Cloud Atlas is about anything, it's reincarnation.  Smaller threads and minor themes begin to tie each of the five stories together, and it's strongly hinted that many of the protagonists are the same soul, reincarnated.  It's a remarkably bold concept, and Mitchell executes it brilliantly.  Though he at times spells out the reincarnation bits a little too explicitly, he has a lot of fun throwing clues to the reader here and there.  After crossing the halfway point and realizing I would again be returning to each of these worlds to discover its unique conclusion, the experience became one of the most satisfying and thrilling I've had with a novel.  Mitchell builds up his themes gradually, letting characters make their points as best they could based on their lives and social atmosphere, but these personalities all add up to a few stunning, beautiful statements about life and the burden of being human.

Mitchell's ability to switch between styles and genres is nearly superhuman, and though he never holds back, it doesn't seem as if he's showing off either.  He plays these genres against each other, and against themselves, often re-appropriating tired genre cliches by placing them adjacent to a wildly different storyline, adding new meaning through context.  Read any other way, one would not think to compare the smaller details, the universal constants — but here, together, Mitchell is able to draw attention to the fundamentals of each world by the reader's natural tendency to force comparisons, instead of heavy-handed narration.  If one were to critique some of these stories on their own, a few of them likely would not hold up... but that's okay.  "Half-Lives," the 70's thriller about a corrupt nuclear energy company, is written like an airport novel, and therefore bears all the faults of the genre — awkward 3rd person narration, internal monologues delivered in italics, dastardly villains that seem to know everything at every turn, a preposterous conspiracy that seemingly everyone and their mother is in-on.  It may appear to be poorly written at first, but it's done intentionally, and in the context of the novel, it works.  The first section, "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing," is somewhat tedious to get through, as it reads like a journal from the 1850's actually would, and is certainly the slowest-paced thread in Cloud Atlas. None of these issues are necessarily flaws, and they don't detract from the novel's overall impact.  Mitchell's writing in other places ranges from deadly accurate to beautiful.  His plotting is precise and creative, and it's impossible not to admire the easy grace with which these stories were assembled.

Mitchell doesn't necessarily have one direct message to impart, or one clear story to tell, and the significance of the novel may accumulate in your mind rather than dropping on you all at once.  Themes of slavery, oppression and endurance somewhat tie everything together, but hints of reincarnation and the vast scope of the novel make everything more profoundly melancholy than any of it would seem on its own.  Indeed, simply struggling through each character's individual problems knowing how encased and limited their lives are, both physically and existentially, is quite affecting.  While Mitchell could have taken this concept in any number of directions, the result is pleasantly subdued, letting the results speak for themselves without getting too flashy in their delivery.  I have never read another novel quite like Cloud Atlas, and while it's often a challenging, strange hybrid of styles, it's also one of the best books I've read in recent years.

THE NEW YORK TRILOGY (BY) PAUL AUSTER

Published 1990, 308 pages
Characters: B+
Writing: A-
Plot: A
Pacing: B+
Poignancy: A

When I first read Paul Auster's New York Trilogy two years ago, I did not know what to make of it.  It's a purposefully obscure book, with each of the three interconnected novellas offering its own difficulties, despite each telling similar stories.  I thought I liked it, but I could not have told you specifically why.  To appreciate the Trilogy, you should probably enjoy detective fiction, meta-narratives, elaborate, abstract metaphors and writers writing about writers writing about writers (often with more layers and levels than Inception).  After this second read of the Trilogy, I still can't claim to understand everything that Auster was trying to convey, but I can say that the New York Trilogy is probably now on my list of favorite books. It's difficult, it's depressing and bleak, it's slowly paced and full of possibly impossible riddles, but Auster writes with confidence and deliberation that few other writers can match.  There is always the sense that he is simply that much cleverer than you — the Trilogy is willing to hold on to its secrets, but you could unravel them with enough effort.  As the narrator reiterates throughout, there is never a wasted word, never an insignificant thought.

It would be nearly impossible to describe the plot of these novellas without sabotaging the book's meticulous construction, but there are general themes and structures that hold each together.  Each story is, in a way, the same story: that of a detective stuck on a dull, uneventful case for such a long time that he eventually turns his analytical eye upon himself and faces an existential crises.  In two of the novellas, the "detective" is only a writer forced by chance to play the role of a private eye.  By necessity, then, nothing happens for long periods of time, so it's easy to see how some could become bored with this.  (It's almost inevitable that you will be frustrated, if not bored — I certainly was, even the second time around).  The Trilogy has all the trappings of a noir at the start, but it's only a detective novel in the meta sense, turning the conventions and grittiness of noir on their end in order to unravel the identity of character, writer and reader.  It's a brilliant move by Auster, and though the book is certainly paced on the slower side, I was never once bored.  Everything is so carefully constructed, literally no image or abstraction is wasted.  It's certainly a complicated novel, but the narrative itself moves forward linearly, and it's never difficult to discern what's actually happening — it's only difficult to figure out the significance of what is happening.  The mysteries here are of a vague, internal sort, sprinkled with strange subplots and metaphorical overtones.  One side character is obsessed with the Tower of Babel, and a detective is forced to follow him on cryptic scavenger hunts throughout the city as this man attempts to create a new, perfect language.  In the second (probably most obscure and frustrating) story, every character is named after a color: Black, Blue, White, etc.  The narrator of the third story claims that he wrote the first two, and elements from each bleed into one another — sometimes names, mostly themes, and surely the anxiety each narrator faces.  Another winking discussion involves the true author and significance of Don Quixote, and its many implications — characters-as-writers and writers-as-characters, duplicity and subversion — likely serve as a linchpin to unraveling the meaning of the entire Trilogy.

Auster is as careful with his language as he is with his plotting, and his assurance that every obscurity has its secret meaning is what keeps the Trilogy from becoming another pretentious exercise in lazy ambiguity.  His workmanlike prose fits the style of the stories, and though I would call his writing poignant and sharp, it rarely tries to be beautiful on its own.  This is not a poetic novel, and Auster wisely refrains from stacking metaphors and similes upon each other in order to describe the difficult world of his characters.  The prose is descriptive, clean, precise, but grounded in reality, making the strangeness of the plots seem all the stranger.  In this sense, The New York Trilogy could almost be considered magic realism, a genre that should contrast sharply with noir.  Yet it works, mostly because Auster has something to say.  So much to say, in fact, that it doesn't seem to matter if you miss a lot of it.  Unlike a detective novel, it's not the specifics that are meant to add up.  It's the general feeling of unease, the realization that there's more than you can possibly keep track of, more details than you can make sense of — there is significance in this, not the specifics themselves.  The feelings that the Trilogy leaves are not comfortable ones.  This book is never graphic or disturbing in the conventional sense, and there's almost no violence at all, but certain scenes and thoughts left me feeling unsettled and unhappy, even horrified.  It would be easy to transpose those negative feelings back onto the novel.  But then, you realize what Auster has done.