Book Review Roundup

Back in my grade school days, writing book reports always seemed like a grim and tedious task. Perhaps it was the way we were taught to write them as dry summaries of the plots, devoid of any real opinions of our own.

Nowadays, of course, it sometimes seem that sitting down and writing the report afterward is the best part. Particularly when the book is dull (hello, How to be a Victorian) or downright offensive (I'm looking at you, William Goldman and The Season. I knew there was a reason I never liked The Princess Bride).


Cured: How the Berlin Patients Defeated HIV and Forever Changed Medical Science
by Nathalia Holt
4 of 5 stars
The ability to explain complex scientific issues in layman's terms is a rare enough gift. Nathalia Holt's ability to explicate the intricacies of the HIV virus and its workings without condescending to the reader is nothing short of astonishing. In her assay of the various clinical attempts to analyze and develop strategies to rid the virus from the human body—or at least to effect a 'functional cure' for those affected by it—Holt manages to shed light into areas of medicine and biology normally murky to those of us with little exposure to the science of HIV and AIDS. In doing so, she has created a comprehensive and readable survey of current approaches to treatment—and identifies areas in which attention and funding is lacking.

Holt's book is also the only scientific work I've read in which a researcher is romanced by an Arab prince on a white horse. Thumbs up for that alone!

Miss Pym Disposes
by Josephine Tey
4 of 5 stars
Miss Pym Disposes is a curiously tough nut to classify among Josephine Tey's crime stories. There's no face-to-face murder, so it's not really a murder mystery. Miss Pym herself is a self-taught psychologist, so the novel's not a detective story per se (nor does it delve with much clinical rigor into psychology). No crime actually occurs until the eighty-percent point, by which juncture many readers might have forgotten that they were reading a mystery at all. There's no arrest, no confession from the murderer. Very few of the hallmarks of the actual murder mystery can be found in this one-off story.

Yet the novel, set in a young women's physical training college in post-war Britain, reads almost as if Tey was attempting in some abstract manner to subtract as many traditional elements of the cozy detective novel as possible and still come up with something identifiably of that genre. It's a wry comment on her readers' determination to make an amateur detective out of the most unlikely character, even as the author digs in her sensible heels and absolutely refuses to give them what they expect. Tey's unique readability shines through in the volume, though, and as in Brat Farrar, her many memorable characters give the narrative a timeless charm.

How Music Works
by David Byrne
4 of 5 stars
There's a little bit of something for everyone in this book by the former lead singer of Talking Heads. For music theorists and historians, there are chapters devoted to the how and why music takes the forms with which we're familiar, based on the prevailing modes of performance, the technology, and the ways in which people have listened to music during any given historical period. For fans of the celebrity biography, there's background and an exceedingly brief and glossy account of the rise of Talking Heads. Composers may be fascinated by the detailed accounts of how Byrne writes his lyrics. Aspiring musicians interested in how bands make money should read the comprehensive discussion of how the music industry has changed over the last century, and the current types of contracts available to those who want to make a living through song creation. Hipsters get a chapter of their own on how to make a 'scene' popular. And anyone vitally interested in Byrne's income from his last few albums—his accountants, perhaps—will find down-to-the-penny descriptions.

Ultimately Byrne's choice of title is telling; his book isn't so much about what music is, or can be, as it is a collection of essays on the business of music from creation to recording to distribution and beyond. Its episodic nature might cause a reader's attention to flag in some sections, but there's almost certain to be something of interest in Byrne's interesting and literate book that's half analysis and half autobiography.

Turnabout
by Thorne Smith
5 of 5 stars
Just as one doesn't turn to Wodehouse for deep thought or characterization, one doesn't pick up a Thorne Smith novel hoping for trenchant realism. From the former author we expect a merry cavalcade of simpletons, wise butlers, tart aunts, and cow creamers; from Smith you get bootleg gin, hip flasks brimming with rye, supernatural antics, courtroom scenes with crabby old judges, and, inevitably, women's step-ins.

The premise of Turnabout involves a husband and wife body switch, executed by means so trivial that even the author barely spends any time justifying it. The comic results, however, are snicker-out-loud funny, as the pair stretch and snap their gender roles to lengths greater than Silly Putty itself could bear. Sure, the effort is lightweight, but who really cares when Smith's effortless style elicits so many belly laughs?

The Illusionists
by Rosie Thomas
4 of 5 stars
Rosie Thomas' The Illusionists is a satisfying tale of late nineteenth-century stage magicians at the romantic height peak of the Victorian stage. The illusionists of the title are a theatrical troupe formed out of motley backgrounds—a flashy show-off with a humble background, a young woman desiring independence and modern freedoms, a dwarf with significant skills in legerdemain, a German maker of complicated automata, a technician with a broken heart, and a stage hand with an uncanny gift for mimicry. The illusionists' individual desires for fame and fortune often at odds with their intersecting love triangles, and their struggles for power over the theater and its audiences cause constant conflict among the group, yet Thomas manages to keep the tale afloat like a particularly gripping old-fashioned stage show—a literary light entertainment with thrilling interludes of danger.

Although it's not anywhere nearly as lavish with period detail as a Sarah Waters novel, and although there aren't really any twists or turns that a sharp-eyed audience member couldn't spot coming from the back of the mezzanine, The Illusionists is still a fun and more than occasionally touching read. For those who are, like myself, a sucker for either novels of the Victorian era or for tales about magicians and actors, it's a sure-fire bet.

Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal (Faber Finds)
by Roy Horniman
4 of 5 stars
Roy Horniman's 1907 novel Israel Rank is better known as the inspiration for the 1949 Alec Guinness film Kind Hearts & Coronets, as well as the 2013 Best Musical A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder. All three entertainments share the similar high concept, in which a low-ranking aspirant to a high-profile estate and title faces the gallows after concocting a series of comic murders designed to make him the sole inheritor.

Black comedy, indeed. What might be interesting to modern readers, however, is how much more thoroughly dark and nasty the novel is in comparison to the giddier pleasures of the film and musical. Horniman's creation is hornier as well, for while the heirs in the adaptations both juggle the sexual attentions of two women, Israel Rank manages to keep on the hook no less than three. Also, Horniman's titular hero is as unreliable and criminally self-deluded a character as his literary serial-murderer cousin, the narrator of James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner—and the results are undeniably comic. Still, the murders in Kind Hearts and Gentleman's Guide both tend to be bloodless—and Israel Rank never lets the reader forget that murder is a dirty, foul business with actual consequences.

In Israel Rank the main character's mother is expelled from the noble Gascoyne family for marrying a Jew; its adaptations graciously avoid the sticky issue and rather genteelly look down upon their protagonist's late father for being . . . shudder! . . . a musician. Horniman's approach, however, is a more aggressive means of challenging not only the gentry's abundant prejudices, but as well the assumptions of his contemporary readers as well. While it's not as lightweight a confection as either Kind Hearts or Gentleman's Guide, for lovers of visceral, dark period literature, this little-known novel might prove a gem.

The Magician's Land
by Lev Grossman
5 of 5 stars
Lev Grossman's Brakebills novels have always seemed a bit like multi-headed hydras. The first entry in the series, The Magicians, was a little bit Harry Potter, a little bit Narnia, and a little bit any of those novels from the nineteen-nineties featuring disaffected youths in big cities with too much money, time, and drugs on their hands. The Magician's Land is no different, really. It's story is part caper, part fairy tale, and a whole mess of Narnia.

It's a good read, though. The characters it reunites for one final go-round in the magical land of Fillory have softened considerably since their introduction—the main character of Quentin, in particular, is no longer as unlikable as he once was. The novel's many action sequences are as exciting as ever, and the stakes for this last entry in the trilogy have increased exponentially. It's something of a feat that Grossman manages to tie up as many loose ends here as he does, while still bringing the series to a satisfying and tender conclusion. Highly recommended—especially for readers who feel they're too cool for old-fashioned fantasies even as they have a secret sentimental soft spot for them.

Timeline
by Michael Crichton
3 of 5 stars
I'd forgotten there was a recipe for a Michael Crichton thriller: one part brief boilerplate character sketches, two parts regurgitation of science voodoo to get the premise across, followed by three parts of competently-written action sequences. Literature it's not, but it gets the pages turning in a hurry.

The Marvelous Land of Oz
by L. Frank Baum
5 of 5 stars
The Marvelous Land of Oz is certainly the queerest of all the Baum Oz books. It would take nearly twenty-five years for another novel to be published—Virginia Woolf's Orlando—that would so prominently feature another transgender main character. Thrown in some explicit witch-on-princess lip wrestling and some Scarecrow-on-the-metrosexual-Tin-Man action in John R. Neil illustrations, and you've got yourself quite an interesting list of stereotype-refuting sexualities for a book published in 1904.

May I take a moment, though, to mention General Jinjur, leader of the women's revolutionary army against the Emerald City? Easily the most progressive and the coolest of all of Baum's characters—not to mention the most fashion-forward—she gets a bit of a short shaft here. After Jinjur uproots and remolds gender roles in Emerald City households to assert the equality of women fifteen years before they got the vote in the backwards U.S., she's deposed somewhat abruptly by the totalitarian forces of Glinda the "Good." And for what? Kicking back and enjoying a few caramels after her coup? Poppycock. Jinjur deserved a book of her own, if not a whole series.

The Paying Guests
by Sarah Waters
4 of 5 stars
With its obsession over the minutiae of housekeeping, its decidedly middle-class focus, and its nearly camp levels of stiff-upper-lip British earnestness, Sarah Waters' The Paying Guests is very much a pastiche—if not an outright parody—of the middlebrow feminine novel of the nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties. The genre, typified by such writers as Nancy Mitford or Elizabeth Taylor or Stella Gibbons, saw its writers straddling the fine line between modernity and conservatism as well as the vast divide between high ideals and so-called 'low' topics involving violence and sexuality. Particularly female sexuality.

Throughout its domestic first half, The Paying Guests remains true to the genre's breezy, chipper spirit as its protagonist, Frances Wray, faces social and economic change in post-World War I London—a world in which her household has been stripped of patriarchy and servants and in which she and her mother are forced to take boarders in order to make ends meet. But it's also a world in which Frances has almost unlimited opportunity to embrace the upheaval, particularly when it comes to her own lesbianism, which Waters and her heroine both present with unapologetic frankness.

That the second half of The Paying Guests appropriates many of the tropes of an equally popular form of literature of the period—the British murder mysteries of writers like Agatha Christie or Josephine Tey—should surprise none of Waters' fans. Most of the author's books focus on criminals, from the grand schemes of hardened pickpockets and thieves in the Dickensian pastiche Fingersmith, to the lurid deceptions of Affinity, to the almost too-subtle-for-most-readers manipulations of the narrator in the du Maurier-flavored The Little Stranger. The tension resulting from the unlikely amalgam of the two genres is inexorable as the gears of justice grind slowly away. Waters' novel may not have the dark twists of plot that characterize her other novels, but its sense of impending doom, and the questions it raises of whether the protagonist's seeming dismal fate can ever be overcome, are just as pungent . . . if not even more so.

Read as a literary novel commenting upon, and occasionally mocking, its genre forebears, The Paying Guests is actually something of a gem. I question, however, whether the feminine middlebrow novel is something with which most readers today are familiar, or even know exists. Without that context, to the casual reader Frances might easily come off as some unlikely tiresome creature who, despite proclaiming herself a lesbian, sticks doggedly and without much reason to a traditional middle-class morality. The crimes to which she is witness might be viewed as so much police procedure without payoff. The novel is still a great read—yet it admittedly lacks the intricate plotting and serpentine delights that have epitomized Waters' other ventures into playing with literary genres.

The Sundial
by Shirley Jackson
4 of 5 stars
Shirley Jackson's 1958 novel The Sundial would be a hard sell to today's publishers, none of whom would want to touch a misanthropical allegory involving the residents of a single estate, each more thoroughly dislikable than the last, awaiting a destruction of the world as revealed in a oracular epiphany. Jackson's claustrophobic setting, which rarely ventures beyond the front gates of her Halloran House, foreshadows her next work, the classic The Haunting of Hill House—yet it's deliberately neither as atmospheric or as chilling in construction.

What The Sundial happens to have working in its favor is Jackson's abundant and subtle dry humor. It leavens the cynical proceedings, rendering them more wry than sour. Whether the Halloran family's prophesied utopian future comes to pass may be doubtful, but the workings of its insular and dystopian present are laid bare in Jackson's unique, deadpan style.

A Plague of Angels
by Sheri S. Tepper
4 of 5 stars
Sheri S. Tepper's 1993 outing is a bit of an oddity. Fairytale villages complete with creatures from fable mingle freely in its pages with gang-ruled dystopian post-apocalyptic cities seemingly straight out of a nineteen-eighties Pat Benatar music video extravaganza. The author takes the then-current topical hot buttons of sexually-transmitted diseases, women as sexual commodities, and the dangers of technological development gone wild, mixes in some of her favorite eco-feminist concerns, and finally throws in some talking animals and saintly former Native Americans with a what-the-hell authorial vim.

The recipe sounds like a bit of a mess. Although A Plague of Angels is one of Tepper's most sprawling novels—almost sometimes to the point of seeming unfocused—two decades on it still holds together quite well, thanks to its vigorous storytelling. As science fiction, it's nothing like anything anyone else has written. As always, however, Tepper's oracular urgency comes through loud and clear.

The Waters Rising
by Sheri S. Tepper
4 of 5 stars
I confess: in 2012 when I first read The Waters Rising, Sheri S. Tepper's sequel to A Plague of Angels, I thought it was the pokiest, most incredibly dull entry of all the author's novels. I found it slow-paced, confusing, pointless, and downright weird.

I'm a little surprised with myself, frankly, because when approaching the book again (with mighty low expectations), I found it engrossing. The parts I found sluggish now seemed paced with fine, deliberate intrigue. Sections that originally had seemed torpid now seemed subtle. Tepper's world-building is always weird, but that's one of the reasons I tend to like her.

Readers expecting a fast-paced Tepper novel like Raising the Stones or even one of her more hectic creations like A Plague of Angels will feel ill-served by The Waters Rising. Readers willing to accept the books intricacies and measured pace, however, will find it a rewarding investment of time.

Fish Tails
by Sheri S. Tepper
4 of 5 stars
It's fitting—and a little weird—that Fish Tails, Sheri S. Tepper's thirty-fifth novel, features a handful of major characters from her very first novels published over thirty years ago. Weird, because the connection between her The True Game series and the books in her most recent Plague of Angels trilogy seems tenuous at best. Fitting, because the interplay between the two knits together both ends of Tepper's career as a writer, and highlights the fact that for most of her career she's shown an unflagging passion for one central theme: bringing mindfulness to the human race's relationship to the planet and the diverse ecosystems of which it's a part.

Fish Tails is a picaresque escapade of sorts that follows the protagonists of The Waters Rising as they travel through their world to spread warnings of an impending watery apocalypse. Read as an exercise in world-building, it's an impressive feat; Tepper can go on at considerable length about the aerodynamic makeup of a griffin wing, for example, or the intimate details and mating habits of extra-planetary cultures. (And she does.) The book's garrulous characters spend so much time explaining their cultures, however, or acting as the orators of Tepper's ecofeminist brand, that the book is actually fairly free of Tepper's multi-threaded plots. Readers looking for a tense read with strong antagonists, as in Raising the Stones or her Marianne series, or any of the books from the height of her career, are likely to remain unmoved.

It's rare to encounter authors who, over the course of several decades, remain uncompromising and so focused upon a single message. Tepper's often faulted for being preachy. It's tough, however, to claim she's not right.

How to Be a Victorian
by Ruth Goodman
2 of 5 stars
Ruth Goodman's cross-class survey of life during the Victorian age is designed for the most casual of readers. Structured to follow the typical day of a British citizen during the era, it begins at dawn with the daily ablutions and breakfast, and ends after sunset with bed. And by bed, Goodman means with sex, which apparently she couldn't wedge anywhere else.

None of the information Goodman presents is unavailable elsewhere, and her survey format has been done before—and better, including in Daniel Pool's What Jane Austen Ate & Charles Dickens Knew The author, a social historian who has been a presenter on historical re-enactment television programs for the BBC, doesn't bring anything particularly special or insightful to the table here. In fact, I find her hyperbolic assertions, such as that a diet of bland Victorian fare with no seasonings stronger than an onion awakened her palate to a sensory rainbow of subtleties, to be absolute hogswallop. Take How to Be a Victorian for the light social history it is—but you'd do better to get your information elsewhere.

The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway
by William Goldman
2 of 5 stars
There's a moment every gay man dreads—the split second when the topic of sexuality arises and somebody's smile turns into a snarl. It might happen when a relative unknowingly drops some sexual slur; it might come when a friend makes a cutting aside about gays, or a stranger on the street letting an epithet fly. Or for gay readers, it might be the moment that a book turns sour when the author makes his prejudices known. Even though a particular insult might not be directed at us—especially when we're merely a reader—it still stings like a slap across the face. And for gay readers of a certain age, we remember well a time when we were expected to shut up, take the slaps, and keep our opinions to ourselves.

William Goldman's The Season, a nonfictional play-by-play account of the 1967-68 Broadway theatrical season, is a relic of that age. Hoo boy, does it show. The first hard slap arrives barely before the first paragraph's conclusion, when the author sneers at 'a flutter of fags' who've arrived to see Judy Garland in performance—then, for readers who didn't quite get the jargon, adds that they're 'obvious homosexuals.' A scant couple of paragraphs later, he has someone opine that it was a pity they didn't get all the fags at Auschwitz.

It's the kind of opening that, forty-five years after its publication, makes one grateful for all the progress since.

Because it really doesn't get any better, as the book progresses. Goldman asserts once that there's "nothing remotely wrong with liking plays that have homosexual themes, productions, or performances", except "when homosexual taste becomes distorting to the play itself"—but just about everything he dislikes about the theater—heck, about the entire world—boils down to what he imagines as distorted homosexual taste. He's worried when an actor "swishes too much." He's upset at plays in which women change their minds and switch from one love interest to another—because switching partners for novelty is what the fags do, he explains. He gets into a lather about a spate of plays that examine the institution of marriage as fundamentally unsound, because that's what the sneaky homosexuals want it to be.

Goldman's angry that the New York Times has features of "no real news value" that are included because homosexuals like them. He spends several pages scribbling angrily about pop culture ukulele sensation Tiny Tim, whose high falsetto and stringy hair obviously reveal him to be a blatant and unapologetic homosexual. (Was he? I don't know.) He's thoroughly flummoxed by the fact that in a Cosmopolitan article talking about Jacqueline Onassis' friends, "at least four of the men listed are internationally famous homosexuals." (When I start a rock band, by the way, Internationally Famous Homosexuals will be the name.) Even a manly man's man like writer Ernest Hemingway isn't masculine enough for Goldman. Hemingway, in his autobiography, said something or other that proved him to be, and I quote, "a bitch."

By the time the book nears its conclusion, Goldman is frothing at the mouth at how Hair is an utter failure primarily, as he explains in exquisite detail for three pages, because it actually and relentlessly forces him to endure, at face level, actor's penises. Goldman doesn't want or need to see those! But it's fairly clear that he has other targets as well. He's not particularly fond of women—he has little to say of noted theatrical females except that a few of them "really need to lose some weight." He loathes intellectuals, and goes out of his way to present some pretentious twaddle that he passes off as dialogue from a lauded play with snob appeal, invites his readers to sneer at it, and then reveals that he wrote it himself—as if to prove that any ol' regular Joe could be a playwright. And most of all he dislikes critics, giving them a vicious savaging (especially if they work at Newsweek, which in 1970 was apparently flush with internationally famous homosexuals) that seems less the work of Goldman the dispassionate journalist, and more an act of Goldman, novelist and screenwriter with a few grudges against critics under his belt.

When Goldman takes the time to examine what makes a play work or not work, he makes a compelling case—as he does in the outstanding chapter on the musical Golden Rainbow, in which he dissects all the ways a musical involving Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme went terribly wrong. When he squanders his opportunities, it's disappointing. In a chapter ostensibly about the classic play, Loot, he notes in the space of a single sentence that Loot opened and on Broadway and that it was authored by Joe Orton, then proceeds to write a couple of dozen unrelated pages about corruption in the box office in which Loot is never again mentioned. When he's supposed to be writing about Edward Albee, he instead carps for an entire chapter about the depravities of internationally famous homosexuals. As interesting the topic and as readable the prose, I found The Season too full of slaps to retain appeal.

Perhaps at the time of the book's publication it might've been argued that Goldman was fairly progressive in his stance. He does, after all, refer to gays as a "persecuted minority group." But then he'll turn around and administer a backhanded rebuke, like making the grandiloquent generalization, "If homosexuals have an enemy, it is age."

No, Mr. Goldman. If homosexuals have an enemy, it's guys like you and your buddy who wanted Auschwitz to finish the job.

Time and Time Again
by Ben Elton
3 of 5 stars
Aside from some subtle comedic flourishes, there's precious little in Ben Elton's time-travel extravaganza, Time and Time Again, to betray the author's substantial fame as a humorist of both stage and many a screenplay. What Elton has produced, however, is a fast-moving science fiction adventure that, while competently told, isn't really much more.

Most time-travel tales fall flat for me in the initial set-up; it takes a delicate balance of explication and believable motivation. In Stephen King's 11/22/63, for example, I never really bought into the reasons why an ordinary Joe would travel back to the Kennedy era merely on the say-so of a stranger in a restaurant. King managed, however, to wrangle a touching ending from a weak foundation. Elton, on the other hand, grapples with the opposite problem: though his book provides a rock-solid reason and basis for its hero to take the leap from 2024 to 1914 in order to prevent World War I, he fails to make much of anything that happens afterward. Along the way to his vague and unsatisfactory conclusion, Elton does manage to bring up one or two interesting alternate-history mind-distortions, but it's not really enough.

It's a shame when a book has a ripping first and second act, but fizzles completely in the third. Although it's eminently skippable, for curiosity seekers or for fans of the most lightweight of alternate history sagas, Time and Time Again is at least a quick and easy read.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
by Alan Bradley
5 of 5 stars
The juvenile heroine of Alan Bradley's not-at-all juvenile mystery series reads like a hybrid of the naively charming Cassandra Mortmain of I Capture the Castle and of the poison-obsessed Merricat Blackwood of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. And that's just fine with me.

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag
by Alan Bradley
3 of 5 stars
Eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, expert both in the chemical analysis of poisons and the art of detection, is as sharp and charming as ever in her second outing as amateur sleuth.

The book suffers, however, from a problem in pacing; the murder itself doesn't take place until near the midway point, leaving Flavia for much of the volume a fairly passive observer to the fairly dull antics of the adults around her. The real charm to the first book in the series was watching the girl detective's mind at work as she puzzled, connived, and charmed her way to the solution. Having the good stuff all confined to the rushed chapters in the book's second half is a bit like having to eat a heck of a lot of undesirable veg in order to have a few bites of pudding.

A Darker Shade of Magic
by V.E. Schwab
4 of 5 stars
A Darker Shade of Magic is a rip-roaring fantasy adventure set in a series of parallel-universe Londons—apocalypse-torn Black London, magic-hungry White London, magic-rich Red London, and the magicless Gray London.

As compelling and relentless as the writing is here, however, and as richly-described the various Londons, I'm more than a little baffled at how little a sense of period and time Schwab lends to the book. The year is supposed to be 1819, and even Gray London—the equivalent of our world—seems barely to be of that decade, much less of the nineteenth century. Little inconsistencies abound; even given the flexibility afforded a totally different parallel universe, I seriously doubt any monarch of any world's 1819 London would utter as banal a sentence as "Everything going to be okay."
Nitpicking aside, the novel's a swift-moving and vividly-imagined gem.

Vicious
by V.E. Schwab, Victoria Schwab
4 of 5 stars
V. E. Schwab's take on college students granted superpowers after a lab hypothesis gone terribly wrong is chock-full of unlikable and deeply unsympathetic characters. That's perfectly fine, given that the novel is one of the most tense, most fun-to-read page-turners I've had in my hands for years. Intensely blinkered as her super-villains are, and as impure their every motive, Vicious progresses at such a pace that it's nearly impossible to put down.