Portly Adolescence

Rating: B/B+

Another round of short book reviews. Everything here was mostly enjoyable, but nothing was especially incredible.

Kobo Abe – The Face of Another (1964)

Abe followed up The Woman in the Dunes (highly recommended) with this philosophical “mad scientist” tale that’s told in a semi-Victorian epistolary style in the form of diaries to the scientist’s wife with a few more post-modernish touches like some corrections and reactions to earlier sections. After a lab accident that causes his face to burn off, a scientist puts all his energy into creating a mask. 

Once he does, he becomes obsessed with doing bad things, especially to his wife. Mainly this is a lot of thinking about the faces people wear and not a lot happens. I saw the movie years ago and wasn’t that crazy about it and wasn’t that into this either, though it does have interesting qualities (Rating: B-).

Blake Butler – There Is No Year (2011)

I’ve long enjoyed Butler’s Vice columns, but this is the first of his books I’ve read. It’s kind of like House of Leaves mixed with Tao Lin and Harmony Korine. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s structured as a series of vignettes about a mother and father who move with their son into a new house after he recovers from a mysterious illness.

Soon all sorts of weird things are happening like insect infestations, “copy” families, mysterious rooms, and never ending commutes. Butler plays around with adding footnotes without referents, questions, and page layout. It’s interesting, bizarre, and often hilarious, but goes on for way too long (Rating: B). I’m reading his latest 300,000,000, and it seems like a winner. I’ll let you know later.

Mark Z. Danielewski - The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May (2015)

Danielewski’s first novel in nearly a decade is his first in a planned 27-novel series, which is just insane. As the title implies, it takes place on one day and jumps back and forth between a bunch of different characters who don’t seem to be connected at this point (we’re not quite in Sense8) territory just yet. Most of the time is dedicated to an epileptic girl named Xanther who is on her way to pick up a dog with her father.

Other times we’re with her father or mother, a detective, a gang member, two old people on the run with a mysterious orb, and a weird section in the middle where either the narrator or an observer takes control. The style and font changes with each character; in the case of a man in Singapore, it’s rendered in broken English that makes it nearly impossible to decipher.

This is a much more linear novel than House of Leaves though with some interesting touches like this narrator that interjects at times, some “coming attractions,” and a “next time” section, and his characteristic attention to the placement of the text. I don’t really know what to think so far about this first part in the series, but I’m intrigued for what’s next (Rating: B+).

Don DeLillo – Cosmopolis (2003)

DeLillo’s short follow-up to the even shorter The Body Artist follows Eric Packer, a young billionaire taking a private limo across NYC to get his haircut on a crazy day that sees him losing his money and stalked by a crazed former employer. A sort-of takedown of rich Wall Street Elites, DeLillo fills the novel with terse, edgy prose and ridiculous scenarios like Packer getting a prostate exam in his limo while having a business meeting. There are some moments that approach American Psycho hilarity, but it’s too scattershot and the ending feels like of forced like he just needed to end it so here you go. Just okay and so is the David Cronenberg adaptation (Rating: B).

Kim Gordon – Girl in a Band (2015)

Kim Gordon’s memoir following the breakup of Sonic Youth and the end of her marriage to Thurston Moore reads more like a collection of biographical essays, but is essential reading for fans of the band. Gordon opens up more about her personal life, especially detailing how an abusive relationship with her schizophrenic brother let her to bottle up her feelings and use art as a way of creative release.

She touches on most of the major touchstones in her and the band’s career, details the highs and lows of her marriage, and talks about relationships with people like Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, though it feels rushed at times like Gordon was trying to connect all the dots without quite fleshing everything out (Rating: B+).

Zadie Smith – White Teeth (2000)

I’ve kind of gotten tired of the multi-generation family saga, but I enjoyed Zadie Smith’s debut novel quite a bit for its very complex, developed characters and the sharp writing. The book follows the friendship between a British man who marries a Jamaican immigrant along with his friend from WWII, a Bengali Muslim who has an arranged marriage with a younger Bengali woman. There are four sections with the first half focusing on the two men starting to raise children and the second half focusing on their teenage kids.

Smith uses a lot of White Teeth’s multi-generation saga to look into the push-pull of the immigrant experience which involves both trying to stay true to your roots while also assimilating and finding the new culture to always still see you as the other. The characters react to these tensions in different ways, most notably with one of the son’s who is torn between his love of western culture with his more fundamentalist Muslim friends.

The narrative tries to get too neat and tidy towards the end by pushing all these characters into one place for a potentially explosive finish, but doesn’t have many faults other than that. This was my first Zadie Smith novel, and I enjoyed it quite a bit (Rating: B+).