Big Brother

Big Brother is my first exposure to a Lionel Shriver novel.  My first impression, one that hardly changed for most of the book, was that Shriver is a good storyteller who populates her novels with a cast of interesting, well-developed characters.  Her characters, flawed human beings that they are, are all the more realistic because making them “likable” is not a goal - rather, Shriver wants the reader to understand and remember them. I had a feeling that I would be exploring Shriver’s earlier work soon.

And then it happened.  I reached the book’s final few pages and got a surprise that made me see Lionel Shriver and Big Brother very differently.  It was one of those “aha moments” that made me realize there was a lot more going on here than I thought.

Successful businesswoman Pandora Halfdanarson has made a nice life for herself in Iowa where she lives with her husband and his two teen-aged children.  Pandora, who spent summers in the area with her grandparents when she was a child, enjoys the relative simplicity of her lifestyle there.  Her big brother, however, has taken the opposite approach with his own life.  Edison, a talented jazz pianist, enthusiastically adopted his television-actor father’s screen-name, becoming Edison Appaloosa in the process, and moved to New York City to make his name.  And, especially to hear him tell it, Edison has done quite well there.

But, as Pandora learns when Edison pays her a long-delayed family visit, all is not as it seems.  The handsome brother she expects to collect at the airport is nowhere to be found.  Instead, Pandora finds a morbidly obese version of Edison she barely recognizes as her brother.  Edison is so big that, strictly for the convenience of complaining passengers, he has been carted to baggage claim in a wheelchair.  When she gets him home to her family, Pandora and her husband are dismayed to find that all of Edison’s numerous bad habits have grown in proportion to the rest of him.  He is the houseguest from hell.

Lionel Shriver

Big Brother is most obviously about the obese and how they are perceived and treated by others – despite the fact that obesity is so common in this country.  Shriver’s portrayal of their self-esteem problems and physical limitations is blunt; she does not shy away from any aspect of their daily lives, including cleanliness issues.  She is equally blunt about the callous reaction to the grotesquely overweight that so many of us do not even try to hide from “big” people when we see them.  But that is just the beginning of what Lionel Shriver wants to say.  Big Brother is also about family loyalty, bad parenting, personal courage, blind love, depression, dieting, and chasing fame for fame’s sake.

And then there’s that surprise that I can’t tell you about. 

Bottom Line:  This one, particularly because of one or two memorable scenes, might not be for everyone, but those who stay with it will most likely consider themselves to have been well rewarded for the effort.

The Other Typist

Suzanne Rindell’s The Other Typist, the author’s debut novel, is a highly atmospheric book set in New York City in the midst of the Roaring Twenties.  As seen through the eyes of Rose Baker, the book’s narrator, however, nothing much is really happening.  Certainly, for Rose, a young police stenographer who was raised by nuns in an orphanage, this is pretty much the case.

Rose sees herself as somewhat of a groundbreaker when it comes to women in the workplace.  As one of the few women working so directly with the NYPD, she takes pride in her ability to stomach even the goriest details contained in the confessions she transcribes for the official record each day. But at the end of the workday, she is content to haul herself back to her boardinghouse, where she shares a room with a rather unlikable young woman, for dinner and another evening of reading.  Rose Baker is a sober, responsible young woman vey much formed by her childhood. 

Everything, though, changes the day that Odalie, a beautiful and charismatic young typist, joins the office pool.  Be it for entirely different reasons, Rose is as taken with the new girl as are any of the men in the department, and she almost immediately begins plotting subtle ways to gain Odalie’s attention – and, ultimately, her friendship.  As the story progresses, and Rose, Rindell’s  narrator, reveals more about herself, what she is able to learn about Odalie’s past, and the unusual nature of their evolving friendship, it seems more and more likely that none of this can end well.  Now it becomes more a question of how badly damaged Rose will be by the process of reaching that end. 

Suzanne Rindell

But it is precisely at this point that The Other Typist becomes something other than what the reader has come to expect. Rindell shows us that she has more than one pitch in her arsenal.  She, as it turns out, also has a pretty decent changeup, and she saves it for exactly the moment she has her readers expecting just another fastball.

Bottom Line: This one, although it begins rather slowly, soon enough becomes enough of a mystery to keep readers turning the page.  Rindell’s writing is likely to remind readers of some of the genre’s masters – but this might be seen as a bit of a negative when the book’s ending leaves the reader with at least a sense of déjà vu.  

The Bookman's Tale

Reading novels about books, bookstores, and book collectors is something that I have a long history of enjoying, particularly those novels that immerse the reader into the world of antiquarian book collecting.  So Charlie Lovett’s The Bookman’s Tale seemed like a perfect choice for me.  But because I also have a history of not enjoying conspiracy theory novels, especially those that depend heavily upon coincidence to make the plot work, this one did not work out as well for me as I had hoped it would.

Peter Byerly is a recluse by nature.  Because he has preferred his own company since he was a child and has always felt awkward in one-on-one conversations, Peter is both shocked and thrilled to finally meet his soul mate.  Amanda is the perfect woman for Peter, someone who brings out the best in him and completes him in a way he never dared dream possible.  And then she is gone.

Still stunned by his loss, Peter moves back to England to ease his way back into the rare book business he has been so badly neglecting.  There, Peter is contacted by a man hoping to sell some of the books that have been in his family for generations.  While assessing the value and collectability of the man’s books, Peter makes what could be the discovery of a bookman’s lifetime.  He may, in fact, have just stumbled upon the “Holy Grail” of the book-collecting world: indisputable proof that William Shakespeare was truly the author of all the works attributed to him.  Some scholars still argue that a man of Shakespeare’s education and background would not have been capable of such complicated and distinguished writing.  Peter knows that by ending the “did he or didn’t he” debate once and for all he can link his name to Shakespeare’s forever.  His discovery could be that big.

Charlie Lovett

But first he needs to prove that his documentation is authentic and not the work of one of history’s master forgers, an investigation that seems to get the attention of someone willing to kill in order to make Peter go away for good.  Peter Byerly has inadvertently involved himself in a multi-generational two-family feud he could never have imagined when he stumbled upon what appears to be a Victorian era watercolor portrait of Amanda inside a nineteenth-century book.  Now, getting to the truth might be the only way he can save his own life.

Bottom Line:  The Bookman’s Tale is fun for a lot of reasons.  It offers in-depth insight into the closed world of rare book dealers, the techniques and history of document and signature forging, and the whole Shakespearean authorship debate.  But, while the premise of the book and its main characters are intriguing, the book’s plot relies too much on coincidence to make it plausible.  I was unable to suspend my level of disbelief to the degree required of a reader to buy into the book’s ending - and that disappoints me.

One Second After

Probably because I was a child during those dark days during which teachers still had students climb under their desks as practice for what they should do when the Russians nuked our little town of 12,000 people, I have been a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction for as long as I can remember.  As it turns out, there is still plenty of it out there, and it does not always involve nuclear bombs falling from the sky.  This time around it takes only a split second for every electrical device in what appears to be (at least) most of the United States to be fried into permanent uselessness.

The premise of William Forstchen’s One Second After is that a hostile government or well-funded terrorist organization manages to explode a nuclear device over the United States at precisely the correct altitude needed to unleash an enormous electromagnetic pulse that will do just that trick.  All anyone in John Matherson’s little North Carolina town knows is that they are instantly off the grid: no radio, no television, no telephones, no anything electrical - including all of their computer-chip-controlled cars and trucks.  It takes a while to hit them, but when people finally realize that no one is coming to help them, society begins to break down.

After the initial panic and scramble for available groceries, medicines, cigarettes, booze, and anything else still on store shelves, someone has to bring order to the chaos if any of the townspeople are to survive for more than a few months.  John Matherson, a local college professor with years of military training, calling upon the help of dozens of his former students, is the town’s best chance.

William R. Forstchen

The threat of electromagnetic pulse warfare does not exist just in books; it is a very real possibility in the real world, one that Forstchen does not believe authorities in this country takes seriously enough.  One Second After (which includes a forward by New Gingrich) is the author’s attempt to place the topic into mainstream awareness and conversation.  One can only hope that this 2009 novel caught the attention of a few people in the right places.

Bottom Line:  Readers will be fascinated by the ingenuity of the novel’s characters as they attempt to reconstruct the things they were taking for granted only a few days earlier.  At the same time, they will be appalled by how quickly the elderly and those with certain chronic illnesses begin to die off when life-sustaining drugs are no longer to be found.  But most disturbing of all is the realization that there are people out there who desperately want to turn One Second After into reality.  This one will scare you.

Bootstrapper

Bootstrapper, Mardi Jo Link’s new memoir, threw me a bit of a curve.  The book’s subtitle reads this way: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm, leading me to believe that its focus was on the difficulty of eking out a living from one of today’s small American farms – a topic that intrigues me, especially as seen from the female point-of-view.  Instead, Bootstrapper is more the story of one woman’s struggle to survive the breakup of her marriage to a Weak Ass from Northern Michigan – a much more common and less intriguing topic.

Link’s husband, when the couple first split up, moved only a few hundred feet away from the mortgaged acreage and family home in which Mardi Jo continued to live with their three sons.  This made it easy for Mardi Jo and her soon-to-be ex-husband to hand the boys off so that they could spend time with each parent.  But Mr. Ex, for the most part, was surprisingly invisible even as just across the road from his new place, it should have been obvious to him that Mardi Jo and her boys were struggling to put food on the table. 

Mardi Jo, though, saw life on the family farm as “living the dream” and refused to give it up even when she and the boys were largely living on peanut butter and the free bakery goods they won in a zucchini-growing contest.  She had one huge problem: she really knew very little about growing her own food, raising the meat that would sustain her family over the long Michigan winter, or keeping the chickens that would supply the family with fresh eggs.  Eventually, she learned these things, but she learned them the hard way.

Mardi Jo Link

The best thing about Bootstrapper is meeting Mardi Jo’s three sons, each of whom seems to have a unique personality and a different set of life-skills that combines perfectly to help their mother keep things together just long enough for the family to survive their near-disastrous first year of single-parenthood.  Mardi Jo, determined to save her farm despite the numerous sacrifices this will require from her and her children, is lucky to have these boys.

Bottom Line: Bootstrapper is an interesting memoir about a woman who, despite the tremendous odds stacked against her, refuses to give up her dream of living on the family farm.  Regardless of its subtitle, however, this is a book about a writer who happens to live on a farm, not a book about making a go of a twenty-first century small-time farm.