The Fan Man by William Kotzwinkle (1974)

An aging hippie surfs the debris of society's underbelly.

Book Review: The Fan Man is a book in search of a superlative, because it totally deserves one. Grossest, funniest, weirdest, sickest, silliest ... so many might apply. It's impossible to pigeon hole this book, difficult to even describe. The closest might be A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) interleaved with Don Quixote (1605) and set in New York City, but even that isn't on the nose. Not for everyone and not always politically correct (our hero has an anachronistic and oddly comic antipathy for New York's puertorriqueños), this remnant of the Sixties is an artifact that shows the crumbling decline of that era in a ribald and futilely hopeful light. Our hero, the eponymous Fan Man, carries the unlikely name of Horse Badorties and is a nomadic hoarder (it makes sense in the book), living his "abominable life," who is in search of ... something ... everything: connection, dope, the perfect fan ("it's so cool"), the angelic voices of his own celestial choir. He is cleverly bewildered, incompetently functioning, always failing but always surviving. In his Introduction, T.C. Boyle acknowledges that Mr. Badorties may be "a caricature of the quintessential hippie stoner dropout," but he's also "the holy fool wholly fooled." I think The Fan Man might appeal particularly to those who have an affinity for the Sixties and the hippie ethos, but should connect with anyone who roots for the hapless undergod, the struggling idealist, for the one who tilts at windmills (after all what are windmills but giant fans?). All readers deserve the joy of being swept up in the slightly damaged stream-of-consciousness that is our protagonist:

At home: "What's this under here, man? It's the sink, man. I have found the sink. I'd recognize it anywhere ... wait a second, man ... it is not the sink but my Horse Badorties big stuffed easychair piled with dirty dishes. I must sit down and rest, man, I'm so tired from getting out of bed."

On the subway: "Lunatics everywhere. Happily I am fanning myself and wearing an overcoat so as not to be mistaken for a lunatic. I'm in the subway, man. What, man, am I doing in the subway?"

In the rain: "It is raining, man, at last. I have been carrying this gigantically heavy [hot dog cart] umbrella around for weeks ... and now the time has come, man, TO OPEN IT!"

The Fan Man is like nothing you've ever read (esp Chapter 21), endorsed by Kurt Vonnegut and T.C. Boyle, this is a novel that toils in obscurity, waiting to be read and make the reader laugh.  [5★]

Maus II: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman (1991)

The continuation of a son's effort to come to terms with the story and effects of his parents' survival of the Holocaust.

Book Review: Maus II has moments that separate it from the first book (e.g., the effect on the author's life of that volume's success), but generally the two are so intertwined that it's good they're now available as a single bind-up. As in the previous book, there are two timelines, the first describing the relationship of a son (after the death of his mother) and his Holocaust survivor father in the United States. The second revealing the father's life from his time as a young man in Poland through the years of World War II. The first volume concluded with the young parents being captured by the Nazis. The second volume picks up there, with the couple entering Auschwitz and extending the tale until the chaos after Liberation. The other story line consists of the son experiencing writer's block after publication of the first book and continuing to learn more about the War years and trying to ascertain his relationship with his father. Maus II focuses a little more on the father-son relationship, which is less necessary, for me at least, than discovering the time in the concentration camp. But all in all the books are really of one piece and there's no point in looking for distinctions between the two. In both installments there's a balance, there are no angels, moral and ethical decisions are made, sometimes wrongly, everyone is questionable in their human fallibility. Both volumes are valuable in presenting history accessibly and immediately, in a way that can't be done by history books, even oral histories. Perhaps some readers will go on to explore the histories and learn about times that cannot be repeated. Some readers may find parallels between moments of today and be warned of the dangers if we continue the way we are. And for anyone, for all the talk today of identity and difference, Maus II should show us that we all share a common humanity: we're all simply a body with a mind, trying to survive.  [5★]

First Love, Last Rites by Ian McEwan (1975)

The first collection of short stories by the author of Atonement.

Book Review: First Love, Last Rites is a workshop in eight stories. Ian McEwan exploring, testing, experimenting. Trying to see what the work should look like, how will it fit -- is it a play, is it a novel, a story? What's a given throughout that he is a magnificent writer and every story is written with confidence and mastery that few writers have in their first published book. Perhaps because First Love, Last Rites was his first book, he still has a youthful (read: adolescent) obsession with the twisted, perverse, sexual, the macabre. Incest, murder, pedophilia, obscenity -- all on offer. People who are just barely people, without normal emotions or feelings. Either McEwan simply had an unhealthy interest in these subjects, or he was feeling insecure: he knew he could write but had not yet developed the belief that people would be interested in his own subjects, so he went for the grotesque. In one story a character asks a question applicable to every story here: "Was she very wicked or very mad?" Later another character provides the proper description for this collection: "It will be formidable, fantastical, awful, but never nice, nothing we ever do will be nice ... we'll have the time of our lives, aren't you excited?" Like Spielberg, McEwan makes the fantastical seem normal, in his careful everyday, deadpan writing. First Love, Last Rites has eight great stories, not a clunker, but it's also a historical insight into Ian McEwan himself. [4★]

The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick (1989)

A short story and a novella about two Holocaust survivors, a woman and her niece, the first story taking place during the worst of times and the other occurring 30 years later in the United States.

Book Review: The Shawl is an interesting construct. This slender book contains two short works: the eponymous short story describing a horrific event in a camp involving a mother, Rosa, and her niece Stella. The subsequent novella, Rosa, continues the now more-distant relationship between the two in latter day America, when the effects of the past overshadow the present. So much Holocaust literature is based on memoir, eyewitness, reportage, trying to express the horror of the time, to make it real, to bear witness to what happened, to sound the warning of history. The stories in The Shawl take it another step, the intelligent sentences and clever language show Ozick creating art: "someone who is already a floating angel," "a pocket mirror of a face," "an elfin tombstone," "the duct-crevice extinct, a dead volcano, blind eye, chill hole," "her eyes were horribly alive, like blue tigers," "the sunheat murmured of another life," "the whole of Magda traveled through loftiness." There is no crime in creating art from horror, if it was illegal we'd never have had the immense brilliance of Toni Morrison. The purpose of art is to achieve meaning (even if just that all is absurd), to help show how we're located in our troubled lives. Here I felt a distance. This is horror at a remove, horror seen through glass, seen through beautiful sentences. Ozick isn't trying to accomplish the "make it real" of memoir and reportage, this isn't the work of someone who lived through the experience. This is someone trying to create literary fiction, to bring the multi-faceted lens of art to bear on tragic events. But I couldn't find what Ozick's art adds to what we've already read in Holocaust literature, what new thing it says about those times. I liked how the two stories (as in the graphic novel Maus) show the effects of the horrors on lives today, even unto the next generation. Lovely, creative, cinematic writing, muscular word choice ("her knees were tumors on sticks"), but what is the author saying about it? That it was horrible, that there were lingering effects, an attempt to fix blame ("took the shawl away and made Magda die"), that privation breeds resentment, that teenagers are selfish, that the instinct for self-preservation is stronger than maternal instinct. The Shawl is well written and beautifully done, but I felt insulated from the feelings articulated. At the key moment of "The Shawl" Rosa is analytical, logical, unhindered by emotion. This is not the story we heard when young. I'll leave it to the readers of other Holocaust writing to determine the verisimilitude of concealing a 15-month old child in a concentration camp. Well written, well done, intelligent, but for me The Shawl didn't create an emotional connection to the fiction.  [3½★]

Not To Disturb by Muriel Spark (1971)

The downstairs staff prepare to benefit from the failings of the folks upstairs, which will change everyone's lives.

Book Review: Not to Disturb once again amply demonstrates that Muriel Spark yields to no one in piloting her course. This book is too long for a short story, too short for a novella, but for Spark it's exactly the correct length so that's what she publishes. It's also an archetypal story line for her: a group of people, loosely related, face a shadowy other, expecting something to happen that Ms. Spark will share with the reader only when she's done with the foreplay and is ready to spring the moment. Not to Disturb is really Spark having bit of fun with dark, edgy, avant-garde farce. Here she's being adventurous and experimental in her own way, all tongue-in-cheek. It's meant to be a brief entertainment, a humorous tidbit, an extended melange of absurdity and the bizarre mixed with dark comedy. The plot, such as it is, is class warfare taken to an absurd conclusion, in a parody of expected fictional genres: British manor novels, mystery stories, a Gothic visit to Thornfield, though here cleverly and unexpectedly transported to Geneva. The butler, the commander-in-chief of the downstairs staff, is obviously better read than his superiors upstairs, and capable of taking advantage of that. Characters spout philosophical thoughts, but it's merely the characters talking, it's not Spark herself exploring these concepts. She's taking a break. Not to Disturb is meant to be read as just good fun, Spark's version of Noises Off. Expect laughs, but there's no need for much more.  [3★]

Moderato Cantabile by Marguerite Duras (1958)

A wealthy, married woman explores beneath the surface and limitations of her life while drinking wine.

Book Review: Moderato Cantabile is an impressionist painting, where nothing is clear, everything is blurred, distorted, seen through veils. This is a book that may be better understood emotionally than intellectually, and certainly isn't for the plot-addicted. Yet for those who enjoy literary analysis, Moderato Cantabile will provide an abundance of food for thought, depths to plumb and threads to unravel. It would be an excellent thesis subject. Marguerite Duras' writing is spare, sparse, spartan. Restrained and controlled. The story is intense and focused, working toward a key emotional moment, a visceral epiphany, that centers the story. The book is modern, allusive, but it's not difficult to divine this story of a wealthy woman who wants to venture beyond her current life, but knows the tragic result of risking that journey even before she begins. Class, women's roles, appearance, intoxication, individualism, are just a few of the issues explored during a single week as a young mother accompanies her son and entertains tentative discussions while drinking wine with a working-class man in a tavern. Throughout Moderato Cantabile there is a building tension, suspense, stalking, a fear of violence. In a sort of authorial wizardry, all elements function simultaneously as symbols and as all-too-real complex flesh and blood people. Duras has paradoxically created something both intricate and deceptively simple. Quietly, subtly, thought-provoking.  [5★]

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman (1985)

The graphic story of a family of Polish Jews during the Holocaust, as seen through a son's relationship with his survivor father thirty years later.

Book Review: Maus may be a graphic novel, it may be memoir, probably both. Regardless, it's a powerful and hurtful story amplified by poignant drawing. Just as without music, song lyrics can seem mundane or prosaic, so here the art enhances and strengthens the straightforward dialog. The drawing adds to the words to make a story that it is better than either alone. Synergy. I.B Singer covered some of the same ground in many of his books, and while his sentences are light years past Spiegelman's simple writing, I suggest the emotional effect may be comparable. That said, I truly appreciate Spiegelman's direct, believable words, as stripped-down and honest as he could make it. While the initial focus is on the Holocaust narrative, gradually the reader is also drawn into the narrator's relationship with his father and other characters, enriching and expanding the main arc. Maus is honest and balanced, not portraying the Jews as perfect victims, but showing collaboration and human confusion as well. Although I do not read many graphic novels, when I do I wish they could all be as good as Maus.  [5★]

Shirley by Charlotte Bronte (1849)

Two young women navigate life and romance in Northern England during the changing times of the Napoleonic Wars and the Industrial Revolution.

Book Review: Shirley was Charlotte Bronte's third written, second published, novel, after the success of Jane Eyre. Here Bronte set out to do something different from the story of Jane and Rochester and in that she succeeded. The result is a Victorian novel with themes of social change (shades of Elizabeth Gaskell). Shirley has all of Charlotte Bronte's talent (it's evocatively, beautifully written), but not her genius. Not much sets this apart from some other novels of the time. There is the proto-feminist (verging on androgyny -- at the time "Shirley" was a male name) character of Shirley (of course, it doesn't hurt for ground breakers to be wealthy), willing to challenge the world and confront conventionality. But she is not such a captivating character as to be irresistible. Her more timid, less extroverted friend Caroline was at least equally beguiling. Except for the quality of the moody sentences and occasional moments of brilliance, this didn't have to be written by a Bronte, unlike the family's four works of genius that are indelibly stamped with the Bronte brand. Instead, plot lines and characters come and go for no apparent reason (Shirley herself doesn't appear until page 190), seemingly essential elements are introduced but then forgotten, plot-changing characters magically appear and others vanish when their purpose is completed. Bronte can always write, but the story here wanders in search of a purpose. Not until page 167 does it seem a Charlotte Bronte novel. When romance takes the lion's share of the story, too often it only consists of cloying protestations of the worshipful admiration of angels wooing saints. The grubby human element is lost in white robes, harps, and sanctified romance that I'm sure was rare even then. English reserve only goes so far, or the race would've died out long ago. Her consistent English xenophobia (against the Irish, Belgians, French, &c.) raises its head, but is less disturbing than in other books. Bronte does keep, up a much appreciated drumbeat of girls and women seeking better perception, roles and rights in life. There's also periodic moments when the real Bronte peeks out, there's governess named Agnes Grey, there's clear eyed statements: "We were born in the same year; consequently, he is still a boy, while I am a woman." But then romantic setbacks also have a habit of sending women to their sickbed and near-death experiences. Bronte also experiments with the third person in Shirley, a narrator who pops in for the occasional visit and comment, but I'm unsure whether the third person well-suits such a passionate writer. While still worth reading for Bronte completists, this was my least favorite of her novels.  [3½★]