Recently in Books Category
What I've been reading lately
Now that I'm done my MA, and my evenings are woefully free with Kirsten being in NS, I've started catching up on my reading. Here's what I've most recently read.
Kill Whitey
Ken Harvill, 2005Amazon summary: In Butchers Harbor, two mob families fight for control of the sick city's criminal trade. The upstart Borisova syndicate-a self-styled Eastern-bloc version of the Godfather film family-has been decimating the leading Irish Lynch gang in cruel, inventive ways: from mason jars filled with hornets to exploding pimps embalmed with nitroglycerin. Now it's time for the Lynches to strike back, and family patriarch Increase Lynch believes that only his estranged albino son Whitey can do it. Friendless and isolated, Whitey spends his time selling adrenaline boosters, memory erasers, dream amplifiers, and zombie potions. Desperate to reconnect with the world, he accepts his family's offer. But how far over the line is Whitey prepared to go? Armed with a stash of potions and goofballs, he must contend with the mayhem of his family and his world, taking this mystery into darkly comic, acid-noir territory and over-the-top violence.
Kill Whitey is Harvill's first novel, written in a style he refers to as 'acid noir'. It was a fun read. Whitey is an outsider in the book, struggling to find his place not only in Butcher's Harbour, but within his family as well. Harvill does a great job of illustrating this alienation, and also creating some great comedic moments in what is otherwise a story of the mob. The book wasn't the least bit predictable, and there's some palpable character development there. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes a bit of black humour.
The Wasties
Frederick Reuss, 2003Washintonian review: In DC writer Reuss’s highly original third novel, narrator Michael “Caruso” Taylor announces he has the wasties, “a disease of the soul.” Externally, it costs him the ability to work, speak, and act as an adult; internally, it gives him a strangely acute and delightful perspective on the world around him—in this case, New York’s Upper West Side.
The Wasties was a really interesting read. It's a challenge to write a book that has no real dialogue in it. Caruso's (a name that has later meaning in the book) utterances are carried out through a notepad, an IBM ThinkPad, and a label maker. This actually gives the book some of its charm, since Reuss uses different typography for Caruso's outward communication (a handwritten font for his notepad, and white-on-black labels later in the book). We also get a lot of Caruso's internal commentary.
Reuss does an interesting thing with the composition of the book, in that Caruso's internal commentary starts degrading as he does. What starts out as a coherent story with some whimsical episodes (Caruso often interacts with literary and historical figures in his daily life) starts breaking down. As his condition progresses, so does the decoherence of the story. Instead of a linear narrative, Reuss starts jumping around in the story. We're never quite sure if the order of events in Caruso's life in the latter part of the novel. I don't want to give away the end, but Reuss closes the circle neatly; the ending has a nice symmetry to it that leaves things nicely.
The Gum Thief
Douglas Coupland, 2007.Wikipedia: The Gum Thief is Canadian author Douglas Coupland's twelfth novel. It was published on September 25, 2007 (2007-09-25), by Random House Canada in Canada and Bloomsbury Publishing in the United States.An epistolary novel, The Gum Thief is written as a collection of journal entries, notes, and letters written by various characters. Among these are regular installments of the character Roger's novella, called Glove Pond.
I have to confess, I think I've burned myself out on Douglas Coupland. It's not that he's not a great writer; it's more that I read too much Coupland all in a row (jPod, Eleanor Rigby, Hey Nostradamus, and The Gum Thief). Coupland seems to try something new in every book, but there's an undeniable "Douglas Coupland" quality to everything he touches. In small doses, it's refreshing. When you read 4 books of his all in a row, it becomes a little predictable. This is what happened for me in The Gum Thief. "Great," I thought, "another book about workers in jobs they don't really like, pontificating on life, the universe, and everything."
That being said, The Gum Thief was still a fun read. Coupland tries a new method of plot delivery in this book, by making it a series of journal entries (this isn't a new device for fiction, as John Mills tried it in 1978 in his book Skevington's Daughter, and there's a rich history of epistolary novels to draw from. It is new for Coupland, and he does some very interesting things with it (the ending, although abrupt, was pleasantly unexpected). The conceit does fall apart a little, though -- the book starts out in a single journal, but starts to add letters into the mix. I generally enjoy Coupland's plots though, even when I'm distracted by his structure, and The Gum Thief is no exception. It was an enjoyable read made better by the way it was delivered.