Reviews

Review: Daniel Fights a Hurricane

Book by SHANE JONES
Reviewed by LINDSAY STERN

Daniel Fights a Hurricane

Daniel Fights a Hurricane, Shane Jones’ third novel, takes place in two worlds. One is an unnamed American town made concrete by its familiar landmarks—Target, McDonald’s, Dick’s Sporting Goods. The other is the phantasmal world of the protagonist, Daniel Suppleton—a thirty-two-year- old employee at a Stuart Services LLC, a pipeline construction site—who develops a crippling paranoia: that a Hurricane will descend and “erase everything.” The book chronicles Daniel’s retreat from the familiar world into his imagined one, and the struggle of his ex-wife Karen to coax him back to sanity.

Review: Daniel Fights a Hurricane
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Review: The Orchardist

Book by AMANDA COPLIN
Reviewed by ANNAPURNA POTLURI

The Orchardist

Amanda Coplin’s debut novel, The Orchardist, takes place in the Pacific Northwest, a land of dusty rural outposts, ancient forests, and cold deserts. We begin in 1900, in the fruit orchard of William Talmadge, on a farm his mother founded years before in Oregon Country by leading her children “north and then west, west and then north, as if drawing toward a destination already envisioned…”  There are rows of apple and apricot trees on this grand, but desolate, estate. Talmadge is a bachelor and an orphan. Talmadge’s solitude is heightened by the many years of his youth spent fruitlessly searching for his dearly loved sister, who went missing shortly after their mother’s death, leaving only her bonnet and basket as clues. This early trauma foreshadows the losses to come. Talmadge has only two friends: a mute Nez Perce man named Clee and a local midwife-cum-apothecary, Caroline Middey, who has long helped him with minor ailments and the embarrassing venereal afflictions of his younger days.

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Best of Reviews

During this holiday week, The Common is presenting highlights from the past year. Today’s highlights come from “Reviews.”

Read Melinda Misener’s review of Townie by Andre Dubus III, here, and Sarah Malone’s review of NW by Zadie Smith, here.

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Review: Collected Poems

Book by JACK GILBERT
Reviewed by DREW CALVERT

collected poems

The San Francisco Renaissance, that loose federation of poets and novelists who gathered in the Bay Area after World War II, is most famous for having organized the first public reading of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (and thus given birth to the Beat Generation), but its influence was more far-reaching than that.  It was also more varied.  As with any renaissance, this one was cliquish, even factional: while Ginsberg cultivated his image as a twentieth-century Whitman and Kerouac descended from madcap literary celebrity to middle-aged alcoholism, a lesser-known group of near-surrealists gathered at the State College of San Francisco for a workshop called “Poetry and Magic.”  Taught by Jack Spicer, the workshop combined a modernist aesthetic with elements of ‘theosophy,’ a strain of mysticism that, earlier in the century, had captured the imagination of William Butler Yeats.  “Poetry and Magic” occasioned a kind of sub-renaissance (sometimes called ‘the Berkeley renaissance’), and it had a notable influence on a number of successful American poets, including the young Jack Gilbert, who died in mid-November at the age of eighty-seven.  His Collected Poems were published in March, 2012, not long before his death.

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Review: NW

Book by ZADIE SMITH
Reviewed by SARAH MALONE

NWAsked in Granta to compare her writing process in her latest novel, NW, and in her previous novel, On Beauty, eight years before, Zadie Smith responded:

It’s my feeling that the process of being edited by American journals improved my sentences. It was like going back to school. And with a tighter sentence I was able to writer a tighter book.

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Review: This Is How You Lose Her

Book by JUNOT DIAZ
Reviewed by MELINDA MISENER

This Is How You Lose HerThis is How You Lose Her is the title of Junot Diaz’s new short story collection, though it feels most accurate to call it an exposition: this is how you lose her. And this is how you lose her. And her.

You get the picture.

As a whole, the book serves as a highly specific, painfully obvious example of how to wind up entering middle age not only single but feeling very alone, the last few decades of your life littered with romances that failed because of you. Because you couldn’t stop cheating.

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Review: The Cat’s Table

Book by MICHAEL ONDAATJE
Reviewed by SHASTRI AKELLA

The Cat’s TableWelcome Aboard

My childhood years were marked by the roar of sea waves. I would wake up early on Sunday mornings to the sound of the waves rushing forth and striking the shore before withdrawing. The growth of coconut trees outside my window meant that I could not, from my room, watch the Bay of Bengal—for that I would have to climb up the staircase, a task that, to a ten-year-old, is not even conceivable on Sunday. So I would lie there, blinking in the leaf-filtered sunlight, listening to the waves. I fancied they had a dialogue: saying I am there, when striking the shore, and then I am not there, when withdrawing.

So years later, it was a windfall when I bought Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The Cat’s Table—that is about a sea journey—and on the same day, a little ship that had been put together by a Turkish artist from scraps found along the sea: driftwood, sail, and mooring hooks.

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Review: Townie

Book by ANDRE DUBUS III
Reviewed by MELINDA MISENER

Townie

Townie is a book about fighting and writing. But it’s mostly about fighting: wanting to fight, learning to fight, training to fight, getting in fights. In the end, it’s about learning not to fight. (I’m not giving much away: a whole lot happens in the middle, and the final scene in which Dubus peels himself away from the urge to fight is lovely and stirring.)

Andre Dubus III spends his boyhood getting beat up a lot. Still scrawny at fourteen, he tells himself:

“I don’t care if you get your face beat in, I don’t care if you get kicked in the head or stabbed or even shot, I will never allow you not to fight back ever again. You hear me?”

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Review: The Barbarian Nurseries

Book by HÉCTOR TOBAR
Reviewed by MATTHEW HARRISON

The Barbarian NurseriesWhere does Los Angeles begin and end? A response to that question stammers when faced with the infamous concrete sprawl of the city without a center. The hazy boundaries of the metropolis would seem to resist any effort at a comprehensive and coherent portrayal in novel form.

The wide maze of highways, the omnipresent gloss of billboards, the horizontal swarm of neighborhoods and business parks and shopping centers that resemble each other, and the army of cameras transforming the city into a vast stage set have led writers to describe LA as a projection of surfaces that blurs reality and fantasy. The long-established connection of LA to the film and television industry makes it easy for visitors to view the hybrid architectures of the city as mere props and the multicultural residents as typecast actors and actresses always “in character.” In Nathanael West’s seminal LA novel, The Day of the Locust, the protagonist Tod Hackett sees “people of a different type” standing apart from a passing crowd costumed in the latest fashions. About these marginalized onlookers, Hackett understands “very little…except that they had come to California to die.” By “California,” Hackett means southern California, Hollywood land—the living spectacle he aspires to depict in a painting called “The Burning of Los Angeles.” The moribund folks on the sidelines of LA’s trendy masquerade have recently migrated from the midwestern and eastern U.S., lured by the elegance and leisure depicted in movies and advertisements. The American migrants in West’s tale have “eyes filled with hatred,” an expression likely owing to the disenchanting realization, upon arrival in LA, that most occupants of Hollywood land do not live forever in the glimmering form of an image.

Review: The Barbarian Nurseries
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