THE BOOK REVIEW: THE CORRECTIONS

Everyone has that one book that they love; that one book that they feel is a high point of literature and they want to rush to the nearest mountaintop and tell the world to read this book immediately. For your humble book reviewer here, my mountaintop is this column, and that book is The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. No book I have read published in the last 10 years captures Americana quite like this one. It is a tale of morality, greed, social criticism, lust and the deterioration of old-fashioned American values and the creation of a new set of American rules as we enter the new millennium; all told through the backdrop of a dysfunctional American family.



Franzen had published two novels previously to limited critical acclaim and even more limited sales. When sample chapters of The Corrections were sent to publishers and critics, they were floored by what they were reading. Franzen was being hailed as the one new author who could bring literary fiction back to the bestseller list, something not really seen since John Updike. Oprah Winfrey had decided to name The Corrections as her book of the month selection and as any writer knows, when this happens, that means one thing: MONEY AND VAST READERSHIP! However Franzen did not really see it this way. The Oregonian newspaper published an article citing Franzen’s uneasiness with the selection of his book. He said that he didn’t want his book slapped with the Oprah logo on it as he saw it as representative of “corporate ownership”. He also lamented the fact that the selection by Oprah would result in diminished male readership. Soon after the article came out, his invitation to the Oprah Winfrey show was rescinded. While his words caused Oprah some embarrassment, she kept the book on her list. Financially, the book did not suffer however, becoming a monster bestseller and one of the best reviewed books of 2001, winning the National Book Award and becoming a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

I’m stressing the fact that this novel is literary fiction, because I feel it can stand right up there with other great works of fiction. What separates this is the fact that it is contemporary. Characters chat via emails, they perform internet searches, they search for new methods of medicine; this novel takes place in today’s America. For all the greatness of a book like The Great Gatsby, it is trapped in a time capsule of the roaring twenties.



Witness the Lambert family! Born in the Midwest in a town called St. Jude in an unnamed state, Alfred and Enid Lambert have been married for years and have borne two sons and a daughter. They raised their children with typical Midwestern values and sent them off to the world while staying behind. As Alfred slowly descends into Alzheimer’s, Enid is left to run the house, the finances and care for a man who she starts to question whether their love for each other was ever truly real. Gary, the eldest, runs off to Philadelphia and marries Caroline, a woman who is a complete antithesis of the world he grew up in. They have three sons who are being raised in a completely alien environment.

Caroline is the epitome of a new age, modern, liberated woman. She throws maternal instincts to the wind in favor of books to raise her children. She supports her one son’s hobby of installing surveillance cameras throughout their house simply because she read once that encouragement is the key to raising a healthy son. She withholds sex from Gary to get her way. She hates Gary’s parents and refuses to accompany Gary to visits to St. Jude and refuses to let their children be exposed to the Lamberts without her supervision. Denise, the sole Lambert daughter, follows Gary to Philadelphia, but rarely socializes with him in favor of her career as a top chef in one of the fanciest restaurants in the city. She is hopelessly single, a fact that her mother not only disapproves of but simply doesn’t compute in her mind that a beautiful woman would not want to make marriage a priority. Denise is a woman who oozes sexuality and uses it to both her benefit and to her eventual downfall. Chip, the youngest child, is a neurotic man who was once a college professor in Connecticut, but after unfortunate events, moves to New York and eventually Europe to participate in a money scam fully backed by the Lithuanian government.



Enid, whose doubts are becoming large by the day, tries to organize one final Christmas celebration in St. Jude with the entire family. What follows is a complete emotional breakdown for all parties involved. Grievances are brought to the forefront. Gary both hates and loves his father and has nothing but contempt for his mother, someone he views as a doormat for her father’s emotional abuse. However Gary’s confusion delves from the fact that he comes to realize soon that perhaps his family is not the perfect unit he believes them to be. Denise battles with her mother regarding her liberated view of women in society. Chip is the one child who accepts his parents’ values, but simply might be too weak to even question them. Enid light be the true protagonist of this novel, but I leave that for you to decide.

Yes, this is a dysfunctional family, but not in the cliché sense of divorce and un-wed mothers. Their dysfunction rises from a deep emotional level and all characters are either too weak or too strong to come to terms with their feelings in regard to each other and their rapidly deteriorating father. Flashbacks are used to illustrate what growing up in the Lambert household was like and serves as a reflection to the current state of affairs. What I truly love about this book is the amount of themes it covers, yet never overwhelms. Two people can read this book and draw two wildly separate conclusions as to what the book says about society. If there is only one book that any of you readers would pick up from my column, make it this one!

THE BOOK REVIEW: JUNOT DIAZ'S THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO

My original feelings after I finished this heartwarming (and heartbreaking) book were to envelop myself into my arms and go to bed dreaming of life’s possibilities and downfalls. Any book that can spark an emotional response in you is a rare breed in today’s world of mass market fiction and Harry Potter nonsense. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a book that tugs your emotions in many different directions, sometimes in the same sentence. It can be laugh-out-loud funny and it can also be somber and depressing. What I found so tremendous about this book is that it reflects life so beautifully, in terms of running the gamut of emotions and the moments that make life worth living (and unbearable).

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2008. That, in and of itself, should put it near the top of any reading list you have. Now I’m not saying that every book that wins this prize is a masterpiece or even the best book by that author. I liken the Pulitzers to the Oscars in the sense that they get it right most, but not all, of the time. I still haven’t forgiven the Motion Picture Academy for naming Gladiator best picture, but they got it right with Million Dollar Baby. Nor do the Pulitzers even award the best books by a certain author. In 2007, The Road by Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer, but that was viewed more as an apology award, as in saying, “Sorry about Blood Meridian and Suttree, here’s the award you finally deserve for those books.”



The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao tells the story of a fat, ugly, scifi fantasy, comic book reading geek who has never kissed a girl. Oscar’s family is from the Dominican Republic and he and his sister are the first generation born in the U.S. The novel’s protagonist is Oscar, but the entire family is given equal time as the book tells the stories of his headstrong sister Lola who loves him unconditionally, his mother Belicia who fled the Dominican Republic under VERY unique circumstances, his one and only friend Yunior, Lola’s sometimes boyfriend who hates and loves Oscar at the same time, and at last of Fuku, the ancient family curse that followed his family from the Dominican Republic to Paterson, NJ. The novel splits time between New Jersey, where Oscar grows up and goes to college, and the Dominican Republic, where the Fuku began.

The family’s history, going back a generation or two, is vital to the shaping of Oscar’s life and his struggles. We feel Oscar’s pain as his weight increases, and so does his desire for women that he has no chance of ever getting with. There’s Ana, Jenni, Ybon…..the list goes on of women Oscar falls in love with. The more he gets rejected, the further his depression gets and he buries himself more and more into his safe world of comics, science fiction, role playing games and writing. Amidst flashbacks is the telling of the sordid history of the Dominican Republic under the reign of dictator Trujillo, who murdered, raped and ruled the country with an iron fist for decades, all under the approval or the United States government.



The primary characteristic of Diaz’s writing is his matter-of-fact sentence structure combined with his English-Spanish slang and urban dialect, creating a smooth flow as well as providing instances of humor. However, different chapters are told through different narrators, thus different voices and styles are used. Lola narrates a chapter, Yunior narrates most of them. Oscar is never given a chance to narrate his own story. Everything we know of Oscar is told to us from those that love him the most. The chapters that Yunior narrates are the most poignant, and the most heartbreaking. Yunior tries to teach him how to approach girls, tries to get him to exercise and lose weight, and tries to wean him off science fiction, all with disastrous results.

Now that I’ve described all the virtues of this novel, onto the flaws, and there are flaws. The tough part of being a book reviewer is that I have to contend with the issue of personal taste. I think part of the reason I loved this book so much was that it spoke to the nerd in me. I’m a science fiction and fantasy reader. I read graphic novels and comic books. The novel is filled with countless references from the world of geekdom and the first flaw of this novel is that it depends on a prior history. Diaz writes as if he’s assuming that his audience has a track record of being nerd-literate and goes with that assumption. Luckily I have read all the books that were referenced and I found the style to be quite hilarious, but this won’t play as well for the reader who has no idea what a Bene Gesserit witch is (a Dune reference).



The second flaw is that Diaz intersperses English with nuggets of Spanish to create what is affectionately known as “ghetto slang”. The majority of the novel is in English; however he’ll throw in a phrase or two in Spanish. That worked for me because I am Latino and understand Spanish. Since I am fluent in both languages, the combination sometimes made me laugh out loud, simply because it is a reflection of my personal childhood growing up and if you know one crazy Latino mother, you’ve know them all. For me, easy enough to decipher what is trying to be said, however I feel that a non-native Spanish speaker won’t get the 100% enjoyment of the prose that I did.

Now comes the star review portion of this column. This is a hard book to quantify because of the flaws I spoke about. For someone like me, this is a 4 star book immediately. But being a reviewer, I have to review for all of you, not just for the Hispanic, science fiction nerds out there. I want to say 4; I probably should say 2….let’s split the difference, albeit with a wink and a nudge.

THE BOOK REVIEW: CORMAC MCCARTHY'S BLOOD MERIDIAN

Blood Meridian is a masterpiece of literature. Published in 1985 and not immediately hailed as any grand work of fiction (in fact it was panned slightly by critics as too verbose and too long), Blood Meridian has been selected by The New York Times and Time as their greatest novels. This book has the staying power to be among the American canon for decades to come and Cormac McCarthy is probably the greatest American writer living today. No other author can match his prose or his unique writing style. Not since Hemingway or Faulker have I encountered a writer whose mere style, punctuation and word choice render the prose immediately distinct.

Blood Meridian tells the story of the Kid and his travels throughout the southwest with the Glanton gang, a posse of scalp hunters who collect scalps and body parts of Indians and Mexicans for profit in the lawless west of the mid-1800’s. There is Glanton himself, a violent man whose code of conduct is predicated only on how violence can earn a profit. There is also Judge Holden, a bald, white, hairless man who is presented as violence personified, but who also carries with him a strict code of conduct that only he seems to understand. He is an intelligent man, a religious man, a law man, a philosophical man, a pedophile and a stone cold killer all rolled into one.



This book is a western, a fact that delayed my reading of it for several years. While I love the western in the scope of the film genre, a book of a western intimidated me for one reason. Western films are very much a product of their terrain. What distinguishes a western from any other film is it’s visual capture of deserts, mountains, hideouts, and the desolation of the American West. However, a book must rely on detailed description to illustrate the landscape, and I’ve long viewed description as a mere necessary evil.

But I finally mustered the courage and was well rewarded. McCarthy’s novel is a treatise of the American violence that plagued and helped shape our nation. It is a regrettable fact that the forming of our nation did come at the cost of the near complete genocide of the indigenous Indians. We took their land, raped their women and killed so many of them that their proud descendants are pockmarked throughout the country on reservations. Along with slavery, the extermination of the American Indians is the greatest embarrassment in the history of the United States. This novel serves as a portrait of the frightening mindset of Americans during this period of extermination.



McCarthy’s description is both beautiful and vital to the storytelling. Many critics have used the word biblical to describe the prose of Blood Meridian- which is also indicative of McCarthy’s style. He throws grammar and punctuation to the wind, relying on words to set a mood. Perhaps his most famous grammatical device is his lack of quotation marks to signify spoken dialogue. He relies of the context of his sentences to indicate to the reader whether new dialogue has started. This can take some getting used to, but once you get a feel for his prose and his tempo, the book flows.

This is the most violent book I have ever read. Think of this book as The Passion of the Christ meets Pulp Fiction. The book serves up scene after scene of depraved violent acts interspersed with scenes of dialogue that is both poetic and simple, yet revealing of the times and the environment. What is original about McCarthy’s prose is his consistency. He can narrate a scene where the Judge is showing Glanton’s posse how to make gunpowder with urine or the aftermath of a bloody battle with the same steady voice.



Is there more to this book than violence? Of course there is. My favorite scenes are the ones where it is night and the posse sits by the fire and they just talk. Through these conversations are enclosed the themes of the book. Is violence an inherent characteristic of man? What function can the law serve in a lawless land? Is America a lawless land?

A last word to you, the reader of this column and possible future reader of Blood Meridian: this is NOT an easy book to read. This book will challenge you. This is not a book you can read snippets of here and there while waiting at the doctor’s office. This book demands complete, full attention. It requires at least an hour of quiet, under your bed covers, with your table lamp on and no other distractions. If you make it to the end of this book, drop me a line and we can talk about the controversial ending. There are numerous theories.

INTRODUCING A NEW COLUMN & A NEW WRITER, HEMINGWAY'S SHOTGUN

Welcome to the first of many book review columns, exclusively on X RETICENT REVIEWS, a website your humble narrator is sure you managed to stumble upon through sheer accident (or you happen to personally know one of the writers). But since you’re here, please sit back in your chair and allow your humble narrator to explain why a book reviewer was added to the already exceptional staff at this website, and what I will be attempting to do with this column.

First off, yes, I am indeed quite the book nerd. Ever since I picked up a worn out copy of Tales of a Fourth grade Nothing by Judy Blume from my Catholic school’s library in the third grade, I was hooked on the power of words to tell stories. From there, I devoured more books and little by little, the fiction section of the library at said Catholic school became obsolete (the selection being pretty slim considering it was a CATHOLIC SCHOOL). What is an emerging book nerd to do when no more books can be read? Turn to video games? Watch more Charles in Charge reruns? Dare he… play outside? The horrors!!

No, what I did was discover that timeless bastion of knowledge, the town public library. For free, one could have access to the entire world! A wealth of knowledge readily accessible to a young mind! Of course, I went straight to the fiction section and discovered books like The Outsiders and Hatchet. Soon I was to discover the one man that would alter his life forever….Stephen King.



Sure, after graduating from Penn State University with a degree in journalism and a minor in English, I learned to appreciate, and even love, writers like Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the list goes on and on, but one never forgets their first love. Stephen King was my first love. Which brings us full circle to the quote that led off this brief (long) introductory column.

What I believe is that fiction is a way to expose truths through lying. Yes, Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby never existed, but that doesn’t mean that capitalism isn’t flawed and money can buy happiness. An old man probably never went out on a small boat off the coast of Cuba, hooked the greatest marlin in history, simply to watch sharks devour his prize catch as he sailed back to shore, but many a man have grasped their dreams just to see them whither away by forces out of their control. That’s what I think Mr. King was talking about truth being inside the lie.

So what books will I be reviewing for you, the grand readership of xreticentreviews? I will try to review books that aren’t commonplace in the literary canon, but feel they deserve to be. Current literary fiction combined with some popular fiction and some non-fiction thrown in. Authors like Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Lethem. These are names that some of you may have heard of, but haven’t dared pick their work up yet. I hope to help you in that respect.



This is the inherently hard part of being a devoted reader. Movies are a different beast because they are more mainstream, therefore much more accessible to reviews. One can go to rottentomatoes.com or rogerebert.com to get a feel if a movie might be worth their $9, but what about books? I can spend 3 hours in a book store and leave empty handed because I couldn’t decide. Why couldn’t I? I didn’t have a guide. I hope that I can be some sort of guide for you.

So sit back and I hope I don’t bore you to death. This looks to be a bi-weekly column. For the first months, I’ll be reviewing books that I have read in the past two years, so expect a lot of four star reviews. Once I start getting into the books I am currently reading, expect to see a more balanced review list. So two weeks from today, the review will be Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

ANNOUNCEMENT COMING

Grand Readership,

Stay tuned for an exciting announcement about X RETICENT REVIEWS this coming THURSDAY, APRIL 2ND! Here's a teaser to tide you hungry ones over...



And coming up this weekend will be the MONSTERS VS ALIENS 3D review. Our other current review writer, comedy&chaos, is in a bit of his own chaos (moving in manhattan is not easy) and we all eagerly await his return next week.

Cheers!