Floyd Harbor (2019) by Joel Mowdy

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Floyd Harbor (2019)

by Joel Mowdy 

321 Neighborhood Road, Mastic Beach, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 16/26

New York: 93/103

   This book of inter-connected short stories is set largely over the course of a couple of days in the community known as Mastic Beach- if you Google "Floyd Harbor" you will learn that it is a kind of alternative place name in the area- the area town of Shirley considered changing their name to Floyd Harbor in the 80's but the decision was voted down by the local community.  It's a book that genuinely sent me to the map, since I was unaware of this colony of economically depressed white people (you could call them "white trash") living a proverbial stones throw from the wealthier communities of northern Long Island.  I guess you could call it south-central Long Island.

   Mostly, it reminded me of Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Beautiful, set a couple hundred miles north of Long Island, but with a similar case of wayward, damaged young people, doing their best to destroy their own future while avoiding responsibility in the present.   Recently, I've been homing in on the fact that I do not enjoy listening to most of these 1,001 Novels: A Library of America as Audiobooks and simply prefer checking a few out from the library at a time and running through them in a weekend.  I read Floyd Harbor on my Kindle- which is a good format/book fit- reading a series of interconnected short stories on the Kindle.  Short stories, generally speaking, go better with reading on a device, full length novels are better read as a book if possible.  Audiobooks are best for books the reader really enjoys and books that are so long that you will never read them. 

   In terms of understanding Long Island based on the books chosen for 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, the only time in my own life I've been to Long Island was to the northern part for Thanksgiving my freshman year in college because a high school relative had family who owned a home up there.  I remember smoking a joint and being freezing.  I've also been listening to the Power Broker, by Robert Caro about Robert Moses.  The first 15 hours of the 60 plus hour Audiobook is all about Long Island, since that was Moses' first major project- lots of talk about early twentieth century Long Island there.

      Mowdy only got a "new and notable" sentence in the New York Times which describes characters "struggling to overcome poverty and trauma."   At least they are somewhat interesting people and Mowdy does a good job describing the drug use- not always the case in trauma-lit.

   

The Book of Elsewhere (2024) by Keanu Reeves and China Mieville

 Book Review

The Book of Elsewhere (2024)

by Keanu Reeves and China Mieville

  Back in 2021 Reeves launched his personal IP project of BRZRKR or "beserker"- a comic book series about a deathless eternal warrior who is 77 thousand years old. I like Reeves well enough, but I haven't been a regular reader of comic books since high school and the logline didn't sound particularly inventive. Then, last month, The Book of Elsewhere was released as a "Keanu Reeves novel actually written by China Mieville."  That description caught my eye, as did several reviews which came to the conclusion that The Book of Elsewhere was way more interesting than one would expect.

  English author Chine Mieville has been on my radar for years but I haven't really honed in on him, maybe because this is his first novel in twelve years, or maybe it's because he has been categorized as a writer of fantasy instead of being properly categorized as a writer who bridges fantasy/science fiction/social science literature.  If I'd know what he was actually about I would have read through his bibliography years ago.  Based on The Book of Elsewhere, I immediately went to start with his back catalog.  \

   Somewhat confusingly, The Book of Elsewhere is described as taking place in an "alternate universe" of the BRZRKR comic, which suggests it's non-canon, but since canon is a twelve issue comic book about an immortal warrior who is also sad, my sense is that the alternate universe conceit isn't important.  The set up is that  B or UNrat- who you have to imagine as Keanu Reeves, exists in the present day as a "super soldier" for the US government.  He goes out on Black-ops, where due to the vagaries of his bezerker state, he sometimes kills both friend and foe indiscriminately.  When he comes out of his fugue state he is often sad about what he has done.  He is also sad about being unable to die.   Part of the back story here is that human civilization is actually tens of thousands of years old, and we just haven't found out about the part that came before ancient Mesopotamia.

    The book shifts between the present and the past.  Besides the main dude, there is the cast of contemporary characters, soldiers he fights with and scientists the government has recruited to study him.  There is a similarly eternal pig who has been trying to kill him over and over again for centuries. There is a "life-based" cult who worship the pig and seek to kill B/UNrat- again for millennia.  

   The main Audiobook narrator is Edoardo Bellerini who is also the Audiobook narrator for the My Struggle series by Knausgaard, which is pretty insane- just writing as someone who listened to the Audiobook for My Struggle.  This was actually a killer Audiobook because of the shifting voices back and forth through time.  As other reviewers have noted, it is, indeed, way better than it has any right to be.  I hope they make a movie/tv show out of this book rather than the comic.

Dominicana (2019) by Angie Cruz

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Dominicana  (2019)

by Angie Cruz

Audubon Ballroom,  3940 Broadway, New York

Manhattan 34/33

New York: 92/105

   Looks like I miscounted both Manhattan, which is now at 34/33 and the Brooklyn etc area, which is down to 26 from 28.  I was under the impression Dominicana, about a child-bride (15) who is brough from the Dominican Republic as the wife of a Dominican immigrant, was set in Brooklyn or Queens.  If I knew more about New York I would have caught my mistake, since she ends up living across the street from the famous Audubon Ballroom, sight of the Malcolm X assassination.   I was more inclined to read this book as a horror story than any other genre, though it's clear the author has no such intent in mind.  Dominicana is another example of the "dim bulb" narrator problem in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  In seeking to present a complete geographic socio/economic portrait of America, one is forced to read about the legions of citizens with little formal education and limited economic/social success.  Nothing against Ana, who seems almost overly bright considering her situation: brought to the US at 15 with little formal education and literally locked inside her apartment, where she is subject to emotional, mental, physical and sexual abuse on what is essentially a daily basis.

  Clearly, the point is to show Ana as a hero, and she is that, but she is also a young woman who doesn't speak English and is literally locked in her apartment for more or less the entire book.  I'll tell you something else, which is that Dominican men come off extremely poorly in the pages of A Library of America.  Oscar Wao is a sympathetic Dominican but the rest of them are portrayed almost universally as wife-abusing brutes, obsessed with their code of machismo.  I can't believe how matter-of-factly domestic abuse is accepted by the women in these books, and that's speaking as someone who has worked dozens of domestic violence cases in criminal court.  I mean these are novels, not real life, can't there be some hope for these poor women?  

   I listened to Dominicana as an extremely tedious thirteen hour audiobook.  Locked inside the voice of 15 year old Ana, the listener suffers along side her in a most unpleasant fashion- and I'm saying that as someone who is 50 plus novels deep into this type of trauma-lit as a result of this particular project.  If I could do it over I would have read the book.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) by Junot Diaz

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) 

by Junot Diaz 

Paterson, New Jersey

New Jersey: 9/14

  Another Pulitzer Prize winner out of New Jersey.  The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is also another 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die/1,001 Novels: A Library of American cross-over book.  I read it in 2015- I think I read my girlfriend's copy that she kept on the shelf of her apartment when we first met.  It's a good pick for 1,001 Novels list- about Dominican immigrants, and a prize winner and all that.  I was pretty critical in 2015.

Published 4/28/15
The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)
 by Junot Diaz

  Junot Diaz is one of those contemporary authors who I managed to miss over the past decade.  I knew that Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 2008.  I noticed the Audiobook edition was read by none other than Hamilton the musical writer Lin-Manuel Miranda- another cultural phenomenon I've missed.  Which is all in the way of saying I had long suspected that I wouldn't like this book, but I wanted to give it a fair shot, especially since so many other people love it.

  I'm sure there isn't a lot of advantage to be had in trashing a decade old Pulitzer Prize winner.  Diaz isn't the first person to tackle the Trujillo Dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, and this book often references The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa.  The travails of  life under the Trujillo regime are similar to the travails suffered by others under Third World dictators- or the mid twentieth century totalitarian dictators of the World War II era. 

   The other part of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao involves the life of young immigrants in America, Oscar and his older sister.    I can't remember a book I've enjoyed less.  I think it was probably the combination of Diaz' "street smart" jargon- which I believe is a major reason people love it- and the voice of Lin-Manuel Miranda who I clearly do not appreciate in any way shape or form.  I'm not saying this book or Miranda is not good, the popularity of both and the general universal critical acclaim would indicate that they are both excellent at they do. but no, not for me. I'm also going to take a pass on Diaz' other books because I just don't think I could take it.

Exhalation (2019)by Ted Chiang

 Book Review

Exhalation (2019)

by Ted Chiang

  What is crazy about author/intellectual Ted Chiang is that he has 125 reference in the New York Times data set and none of them are a full-length book review of Exhalation, his 2019 short-story collection.  Only five years later he's been hailed as a genius-level thinker about the potential impacts of AI on our society.   I believe Chiang's real break-through outside the science-fiction community was the success of Arrival, based on a short story from his first collection.  Arrival hit theaters in 2016, so that makes it doubly surprising that Exhalation didn't rate a full New York Times book review.

  You'd have to chalk it up to the double prejudice against genre fiction and short stories.  It's interesting to me that Chiang is known as an AI expert, because I think his most interesting stories are the ones that deal with religion.  In this collection Omphalos- which won a Locus Award in 2020- is a good example.  Omphalos takes place in a world where "young earth creationism" was proved true and accepted as scientific fact in a world that is otherwise similar to ours.  Basing science fiction stories on religious concepts or themes is a particularly interesting approach to science fiction- and you could almost call it a different genre, one I think that Chiang may have invented?  I certainly can't think of another example- maybe Chabon's alt-history The Secret Yiddish Police-Man's Union.  But the AI stuff is good too- in this collection The Lifecycle of Software Objects was a particularly interesting take on the after life of digitally created "pets."  That story caused me to think more about AI then I have in months.

  

American Pastoral (1997) by Philip Roth

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

American Pastoral (1997)

by Philip Roth

Newark, New Jersey

New Jersey: 8/14

  I read American Pastoral in December, 2017 for the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die project.  'Twas a simpler time, ha ha.   I wouldn't say I "discovered" Roth through the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die project, but I certainly conquered his bibliography thanks to the start 1,001 Books gave me.  Roth amazingly placed eight books on the 1,001 Books project- a truly astonishing amount and even including  a lesser work like The Breast, among its selections. If you want to pick one major difference between the construction of the two lists (besides the obvious difference in area covered), it's the decision by 1,001 Books editors to include multiple picks for MANY authors, while so far editor Susan Straight hasn't done it once.  

  As I said back in 2017, American Pastoral was from his series of Nathan Zuckerman novels- his suburban everyman character, though in this book he is merely the narrator and the book is about a his neighbor and his 60's radical-bomber daughter.  Roth is a great pick for New Jersey but personally I would have preferred The Plot Against America which, like many of Roth's books, is also set in Newark, New Jersey.

Published 12/19/17
American Pastoral (1997)
by Philip Roth

  Man, the hits keep coming for late career Philip Roth. American Pastoral won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 and even though he inevitably seems to write about weird old guys from New Jersey, he never writes the same book twice, dabbling in meta fiction, speculative fiction and the roman a clef despite having established his initial literary reputation on the back of realistic portraits of urban life in the northeast.   American Pastoral is also one of Roth's Zuckerman novels, about Nathan Zuckerman, successful novelist generally assumed to be the alter ego of Roth.

  Despite American Pastoral being narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, the book is about Seymour "Swede" Levov, a Jewish-American student athlete of vast renown, grown old and successful, but tormented by the 1960's radical inspired bombing of the local postal office by his 16 year old daughter.  Although Zuckerman narrates from the present, most of American Pastoral takes the form of Zuckerman imagining Levov's life, culminating in the bombing, but moving back and forth within different periods in the past.

  I thought it was a little strange that this was the book that won Roth a Pulitzer.  By 1997 he had been a prospective Nobel Prize for Literature winner for a decade, and he still had not won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  Ultimately, American Pastoral derives its strength from the well observed horror of a parent at the choices made by a child.  That is under developed literary territory.

The Saint of Lost Things (2005) by Christopher Castellani

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Saint of Lost Things (2005) 

by Christopher Castellani 

Wilmington, Delaware

Delaware: 2/3

   The Saint of Lost Things is volume 2 of a four or five volume saga about an Italian American family living in Wilmington, Delaware.  Author Christopher Castellani is the director of Grub Street, the arts organization that was embroiled in the 'bad art friend' scandal last year.   Like many of the authors on this list he has a decent reputation and a job teaching the arts but no real hits.  I mention it because while I was reading The Saint of Lost Things it occurred to me that the author was trying to give Italian Americans the kind of serious family/immigrant novel that they lack.  It was a supposition that was born out by the New York Times review of the next volume in this series, where the reviewer quotes Castellani as being motivated by the degree to which Italian-Americans have been ignored by the more intellectual parts of American literary culture.

 Welp. Not to make things worse, but my main thought while reading The Saint of Lost Things was precisely how uninteresting this particular group of characters turned out in the pages of this book.  The main character is the Italian immigrant/matriarch of the clan, here she is a young bride, recently arrived from Italy, who is struggling to fulfill her function as a bearer of healthy children (preferably a son) and make her way in the confusing world of America.  Her husband works at a Ford Factory and dreams of opening his own restaurant.   There's also the brother of the husband and his non-Italian wife and a single man (also Italian American) who lives by himself after the death of his parents.  Besides the ongoing obsession with this lady having a child, the rest of the plot largely revolves around attempts by the locals to scare the sole African American family into moving out of their Italian American neighborhood.   They all come across as a bunch of uneducated assholes.  Not sure if that was the point, but that was the message I received.

  Reading The Saint of Lost Things did give me cause to consider the "dim bulb" narrator problem and how it might apply to Italian-Americans, a group that largely eschew intellectual accomplishments in favor of "hard work," however that may be defined.   Probably a legacy of millennium of being under the boot of Catholicism and being told to keep their mouths shut and to not ask any questions of authority, I'd guess.