Book Review Roundup

I’m making another roundup of books I’ve read and reviewed on Goodreads.com. My Mindy Kaling review has been oddly popular. It’s not even that vicious.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)
by Mindy Kaling

A quick warning about an otherwise good book: the last third of The Office writer Kaling's memoir is a scattershot, hit-or-miss affair. With short essays like "Why Do Men Put on Their Shoes So Slowly?" and "In Defense of Chest Hair", which graze their topics no more deeply than the titles suggest, Kaling almost sounds like she's half-heartedly trying out for the late and perpetually cranky Andy Rooney's vacated gig on 60 Minutes.

It's a shame, because the first two-thirds of Kaling's effort is an engaging memoir chronicling a thoroughly conventional upbringing and an unlikely rise to notoriety and television scripting fame. Her circuitous route to her career is both affable and a fun read—which makes it all the more disappointing that once she reaches the heights at NBC, the rest of the book sputters out when it has nowhere to go.
It seems unfairly reductive that the memoir will inevitably undergo comparisons with her same-network compatriot Tiny Fey's Bossypants. I found Kaling's effort the more charming of the two, and the less labored.

Little Dorritt
By Charles Dickens


Little Dorrit's opening chapters begin with long stretches of dialogue in which the speakers remain nameless and unintroduced. Yet it's a book obsessed with names—characters obsessed with keeping their names out of the mud, characters with false names, or infamous names, with exalted names that lead dozens of the book's protagonists to financial ruin. Tattycorum, a young woman in the book, runs away from home primarily because of the awful name her benefactors have given her. The titular character prefers a mawkish nickname given her by a complete stranger to the name of Amy, given her by a failure of a father.

There are parts of the novel that bog down—I had great difficulty getting through any of the lengthy chapters about the Barnacles and the Circumlocution Office. For every Barnacle (and there are plenty) there's a delightfully-comic Flora, or a heartbreaking young John Chivery or sweet-natured Maggy to balance it out. And by the time everything comes crashing quite literally down at the end, it's almost impossible not to marvel at the complexity and satisfactory conclusion of Dickens' creation.


11/22/63
by Stephen King

A disclosure: I haven't read a Stephen King novel since high school, when Cujo came out and I thought it was lousy. That said, King managed to push enough buttons with the premise of his latest novel—Time travel! Someone attempting to prevent the Kennedy assassination! A secret wormhole in Maine that travels to the Mad Men era!—that I was intrigued enough to give it a look.

I confess that there were parts of 11/22/63 that I enjoyed. The mini-novella that forms the book's first third, in Derry, is tense and atmospheric. The romance that overwhelms the latter half of the work is sweet; its resolution is unexpectedly touching.

But that's really about it. The book's set-up is bafflingly underdone—so much so that it makes the protagonist seem a little more dim-witted than King intends. The hero has no personal obsession with preventing Oswald from killing JFK in Dallas. He merely undertakes the task, with remarkably little persuasion required, because some guy he barely knows who owns a restaurant where he occasionally eats, tells him it'd be an awesome idea. Nor is it really explained why the Kennedy assassination is the lynchpin of the modern era that so desperately needs to be undone. Why not the Cuban Missile Crisis? Or Watergate? Why not 9/11? Intriguing as the premise might be, it's laid out so arbitrarily, and given such an easy out if the time-traveling thing doesn't work, that it's difficult to care much.

King's pacing can be terribly off, too. The scenes involving Lee Harvey Oswald grind the book to a halt, and sometimes read like the determined regurgitations of an author who did a lot of research, dammit, and who intends to use every last bit. An episode of coma-cum-amnesia right before the climax was so transparently a ploy to zip through a few months straight to the confrontation in the Texas School Book Depository, that I felt a little embarrassed for the author for stooping to use it.
There's some excitement here, and some sweet moments, but there were also more points in which picking up 11/22/63 felt like a chore than a pleasure. And I still think Cujo was pretty lousy, too.


Charles Dickens: A Life
by Claire Tomalin

Brisk, thorough, and wisely free of ephemera, Tomalin's biography of Dickens manages to be informative without either lionizing the author, or ignoring his greater domestic lapses and faults.

The Brontë Myth
by Lucasta Miller

Miller's book isn't a biography—all the Brontes are dead and buried by the end of chapter two. Instead, it's an examination of the ways in which a manufactured and tweaked familial biography has informed and, at times, overshadowed the literary accomplishments of the three Bronte sisters.

Miller chronicles how, after the shocked and repulsed reaction of their contemporaries to the collected pseudonymous works of Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell, Charlotte Bronte immediately began fabricating a public image designed to thwart her critics. Her own ability to present herself as a modest paragon of humble womanhood, haunted by a remote upbringing, was amplified further by Elizabeth Gaskell's posthumous biography, which largely disregarded fact in favor of myth-building. By the late nineteenth century, the Bronte cult was so captivated by a romantic (and largely inaccurate) picture of the Bronte's upbringing, that any sober consideration of their actual works seemed beside the point.

It was a myth that, in more modern times, Miller shows to have been transformed by changing tastes and the needs of popular culture. Twentieth-century reinterpretations of it sexed it up, used it as a mirror for its own theoretical lenses, and even thrust what they perceived as dowdy Charlotte into the background in favor of neglected and modern-spirited Emily. It would seem that to every era, the story of the Bronte family becomes what it needs to become—regardless of what it actually was.

Given her focus on myth-building and on sorting out the facts of the Brontes' upbringing from the fictions that have since accumulated, it seems churlish to wish for more of a consideration of the novels than Miller makes in this volume. But to decry previous generations for the same neglect she exhibits herself, by and large, seems to undo a tiny bit of the good work she's done here in this engrossing volume of social and literary history.

Changes (The Collegium Chronicles, #3)
by Mercedes Lackey

I find insulting the suggestion that Lackey's latest Valdemar entry is more suitable for young adults.
Insulting to the YA audience, that is. They're better than the weaksauce plotting here, and the book's bland characters. Nor would they tolerate the protagonist's spoken dialect—an apostrophe-laden mess that makes Mark Twain's use of dialect in Huckleberry Finn look positively light-handed, and which had me praying for chapters at a time that the protagonist would be gagged, rendered mute, or would sleep so that I wouldn't have to read it. And any generation raised on Harry Potter would see through Kirball as the blatant Quidditch rip-off it is.

I rather enjoyed the first two books in Lackey's return to Valdemar. It's a shame that the third not only progresses the series not an inch, but makes absolutely no sense at all .

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective
by Kate Summerscale

The Road Hill murder case, in which three-year-old Saville Kent was abducted and killed under mysterious circumstances in the dead of night, in his family's remote yet overcrowded home, so scandalized Victorian England that the fascination surrounding it continued for years. During that time, the incident laid the foundations for not only the Victorian novel of sensation, but a more enduring literary form: the British detective novel.

Many of the literary tropes we take for granted in the genre arise from the detectives investigating the case--particularly the Mr. Whicher of the title. The Road Hill case had it all: a senseless murder with no apparent motives, a thorough search for evidence (the first appearance of the word 'clueless' in the English language stems from the case), the 'hunch' of the detective, the suspicion of innocents, ruthless courtroom drama, and even a murderer's confession. Throughout her thorough narrative of the events of the Road Hill case and its outcome, Summerscale carefully delineates how the murder and its investigation sparked the literary imaginations of Braddon, Dickens, Collins, and an entire generation of novelists who capitalized upon the case's notoriety.

Yet Summerscale's own surprising twist of how she imagined the night of the murder, and the years following, to take place appear as something as an afterthought. It's supported on the page not by any evidence collected at the time, but more by the authors and novels that came well after the murder. It's not at all unreasonable to trace these novels as arising from the Road Hill events; to suggest an almost sentimental solution to the crime based on a reading of nascent literary archetypes is a little silly.

I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan
by Alan Partridge

A-hah! Finally, Norwich's most inescapable talk show host has released a biography that shines a light on one of one of history's most underrated and misunderstood broadcasters. (1) True—his notoriety rests almost entirely on the fact that during the last minutes of the last show of his BBC2 series, Knowing Me, Knowing You, With Alan Partridge (2), he shot and killed one of his guests. After that bombshell (3), what the BBC overlooked, as Alan Partridge points out in his scathing exposé, is that in none of the previous five episodes, no one got shot at all. (4)

The fictional Alan Partridge was one of the UK's most infamous and funny forerunners in the Comedy of Discomfort epitomized later by the original version of The Office. He's also one of its most long-lived, having survived a roller-coaster career that hit rock-bottom during a debilitating Toblerone dependency, and soared to heights attainable only by judicious use of a sturdy stepladder. Peppered with the wry humor that made his radio and television outings so successful, I, Partridge is a must-read for fans of Alan, though it might be incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with his several series.
Do not skip Partridge’s footnotes, which are as amusing as the text itself.

(1) Himself, if that wasn't clear.
(2) Also known as KMKYWAP, as Alan pointed out to a guest who immediately told him that his name was an anagram of 'Anal Prat Dirge.' Ungrateful lot, those guests.
(3) Not literally.
(4) Insulted, yes. But shot, no.


Patti LuPone: A Memoir
by Patti LuPone

It's tough for anyone not actively sharing a stage with the diminutive star to determine whether Patti LuPone is as difficult to work with as her reputation would have it. Too often, 'difficult' is a label applied not only to entitled divas of both genders, but also to artists who dare to protest when wrongly abused by directors or producers and their sometimes shady money-making tactics.

After reading LuPone's memoir, however, it's tough to want to side with anyone other than the woman who originated the American Evita. Though she's capable of throwing tantrums with the best of them, LuPone is disarmingly candid about her own shortcomings, including her temper and her seeming inability to tell composers and directors to send offers to her agent, rather than asking her commit to new projects before it's wise. She's earthy: she calls still-living actors 'assholes,' and bluntly says things of other professionals such as, "He sucked." She's frank about her heartbreak over the much-publicized feud with Andrew Lloyd Webber over being denied the American debut of Sunset Boulevard, and her cold detente with Glenn Close, who supplanted her. Underlying the barbs is LuPone's wry sense of humor, though, in addition to a remarkable grasp of the drive and discipline needed to maintain a career as a working actor—much less the stuff of legend.

LuPone's frank memoir is a quick and fun read that crackles with gossip and an insider's view of the Broadway and London stages. Even if LuPone is a bit of a diva . . . well, it's still awfully tempting to cheer her on.

The Magicians
by Lev Grossman

I know that saying The Magicians is like the bastard love child of the Harry Potter books and Donna Tartt's The Secret History would compel a certain subset of my friends to rush out and read it, if they haven't already. So let me amend that slightly by emphasizing that this grown-up fantasy novel about youths matriculating through a school of magic is indeed very much like those—if all the youths were from Slytherin.

Grossman's cast is largely overprivileged and seemingly determined to squander their advantages on alcohol, whoring, and dissipation; his hero is moody and unsympathetic, and largely unable to grasp or appreciate the wonders to which he's miraculously made privy. I'm usually the last to insist that a protagonist be entirely appealing, but even my patience was tried.

And yet The Magicians has a richness of detail and texture that makes it a compelling read, despite the mopey and largely stiff cast. Its land of magic is not only believable, but has the alluring scent of the many classic worlds, from Narnia to Hogwarts, from which it derives.

The Magician King
by Lev Grossman

The big attraction to many—including myself—of Grossman's first novel in this series, The Magicians, was the fussy pedagogical narrative involving the protagonist's matriculation at Brakebills, an institute for the magically talented. There's precious little of the imaginary Brakebills in The Magician King, and yet oddly, the sequel manages to be more confident, and more lyrical, without the expected and much-trodden literary tropes of tales of school days.

I originally had little affection Quentin, the protagonist in The Magicians. I found him and his set of friends too moody, too overprivileged, too emo. That Grossman allows Quentin to ripen here, as he makes adult decisions about which quests are for him, and which to be left unapproached, is remarkable. There's a grace to his maturation that's both unexpected and breathtaking. As wild and far-flung as the book seems upon a first read, there's a wicked coherence in its structure that should leave any reader moved by its final pages.


I Still Dream About You
by Fannie Flagg

Subtle, this book ain't. Rather than let any mystery of character or plot accumulate throughout the book, Flagg stops the proceedings immediately to insert flashbacks that explain everything that happened in the previous chapter. In a novel that hinges on a girl-detective-style discovery of a literal skeleton in a closet, it's like reading a Nancy Drew mystery written for those with the shortest of short-term attention spans.

As for the decades-old mystery at the center of I Still Dream About You—it's tangential, unfocused, and largely unintegrated with the rest of the story. Nobody solves it; it scarcely matters that they don't. Flagg's done better in the past.

Still. Flagg's primary virtues as a writer are an abundance of effortless charm, and the ability to fashion stories around communities of nice, polite people with nice, polite intentions . . . and to make characters that could be homogenous seem quite real. As whisper-thin as the plot might be here, its cast is engaging. Flagg has an unparalleled ability to immerse readers into her fictional communities, and make them wish they resided within the pages of her gentle Southern comedies.