Re Jane (2015) by Patricia Park

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Re Jane (2015)

by Patricia Park

6138 Gates Ave, Flushing, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 25/26 

New York: 102/103

  Re Jane is an at times excruciating re-telling of Jane Eyre from the perspective of a Korean-American orphan who was raised by her all Korean uncle in Queens, New York.   I...didn't actually get that it was a retelling of Jane Eyre until after I finished the book and looked it up online, which shows you how much of an impression Jane Eyre has made on me.  It does, however, explain why I found Re Jane to be so particularly difficult to read/listen to- I had to give up on the Audiobook version right around the time she fell for the adopted father of the girl of the family she was Nannying for in Brooklyn.   The 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project puts this book on the location of the family grocery store in Queens, but it just as easily could have placed in Brooklyn, where her nanny-family lives, or for, that matter, Seoul, where Jane decamps after the aforementioned sexual encounter with the father of her charge.

 

  

Beautiful Days (2024) by Zach Williams

 Book Review

Beautiful Days (2024)

by Zach Williams

   Beautiful Days is the debut short-story collection by American author Zach Williams.  I checked out the Audiobook from the library after reading the New York Times review earlier this month referred to him as a "genuine young talent...who deftly palpates the dark areas of human psyche." while at the same time making many of the same points I've made here about the difficulty of writing about short-story collections.  My favorite was "Ghost Image" about a divorced dad type slouching towards the end of the world at  Disneyworld type resort.  I also liked "Wood Sorrel House," a riff on the Groundhog Day theme featuring a terrifying infant toddler and some fine descriptive work.   The Audiobook I read was well done- most of the stories (all?) feature a narrator/protagonist type with a single point of view expressed in each story, which makes for a good listening experience.  I wouldn't exactly recommend Beautiful Days to all and sundry, but if you are someone who likes short stories and edgy milieus then Zach Williams is going to be your guy!

Motherless Brooklyn (1999) by Jonathan Lethem

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Motherless Brooklyn (1999)

by Jonathan Lethem

6138 

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 24/26 

New York: 101/103

  True confession: I get Jonathan Lethem and Paul Auster confused, all the time.  Perpetually, as it were. Motherless Brooklyn was a popular and critical breakthrough for Lethem after several books of sci fi/fantasy/lit fic at a time when that wasn't really a thing. After Motherless Brooklyn broke out he's published regularly though none of his books have gone canonical post-Motherless Brooklyn.  Personally, I read his post-apocalypse/published during the pandemic book about Maine, The Arrest, which I enjoyed but didn't love.

 I've never had any inclination to go back and read the rest of his bibliography, as indeed I had not actually read Motherless Brooklyn. One aspect that stuck out to me is that this is one of the last canonically New York books to be published right before 9/11, and it is, simply put, a more innocent era, when an American author could spin together a genre detective story with literary fiction qualities and leave out the global war on terror, or the terrific/terrible impact 9/11 had on everyone in New York City.   I listened to the Audiobook- which was a good Audiobook, not great, but good. It was much appreciated after umpteen Audiobooks of bildungsroman's narrated by pre-teen girls born to immigrant parents, but like Paul Auster's meta-detective fiction I didn't find Motherless Brooklyn compelling.

Brat (2024) by Gabriel Smith

 Book Review

Brat (2024)

by Gabriel Smith

   I've run into people who join multiple libraries so they can get popular books faster, on the theory that people living in dipshit Arkansas aren't going to be interested in the latest- not sure if that actually works or not, but I think about every time I have to wait three months for the latest work of hot literary fiction. Such was the case with Brat by English author Gabriel Smith, which had the good fortune to be released at essentially the same time as the Charli XCX record of the same name.  He even faked an email which purported to say that Charli XCX named Brat after the novel, but that has been debunked.  Still, google this book and the first 10 returns on Google all mention the serendipity of sharing a title with THE album of the summer.

 The numbers haven't been great in the US- I imagine they are better in the UK.  Gabriel, who I surmise is the titular Brat- though the only reference is to a shirt his ex-girlfriend owned that had brat written across the front- is a writer, in his 20's.  He owes his publisher a novel, his Dad just died and his brother and sister in law want/need him to clean up the house for sale in the aftermath of Dad's death, Mom being in the later stages of dementia and confined to a home.

  Gabriel is grief-stricken, handling everything badly, and to make matters worse, large sheets of his skin are peeling off.  It sounds grosser than it actually is: the skin peels away to reveal...more skin. Gabriel haphazardly tries to figure out what is going on with his skin while he deals with a couple of neighbor teens with bad attitudes, a frightening deer-man who may or may not be stalking him with grievous intent, and his bitch sister-in-law.   There's also his Dad's marijuana grow in the attic to attend to, manuscripts and video tapes that change their content with every reading/viewing, black mold and a collapsing roof. 

  In the end there is plenty of atmosphere but only the loosest outline of a plot.  Smith is not concerned with a cohesive narrative, plainly.  It's a fun, hipster-type read and enough to keep interested in his next book, which is hopefully neither a short-story collection nor a memoir, but not a fantastic book.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) by Betty Smith

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943)

by Betty Smith

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 23/26 

New York: 100/103

  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the 1943 hit by author Betty Smith, was a great find from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  Like many of the popular novels from the earlier parts of the 20th century, I'd never heard of this book and certainly would not have if it were not for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  I'm sure, if I lived in NYC, or grew up there, etc, I would have read it as a kid, since it's probably the first and definitive Brooklyn based bildungsroman written from a female POV.  According to the foreword of the anniversary e-book I read,  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was originally written as an autobiography of Francine/Betty Smith before publishers asked for changes.  Smith seems like an interesting dame- certainly for her era, with the rags-to-riches backstory and three husbands.

  I went in skeptical/uninterested but the I was convinced by the end. It was nice, at long last, to get a book where the New York City based working-class protagonist actually escapes in the end instead of just continuing the cycle of never-ending misery.  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was written before the YA category existed but there is no doubt its a YA title- and a good example of why an adult might want to read a YA title. 

Netherland (2008) by Joseph O'Neill

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Netherland (2008)

by Joseph O'Neill

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 22/26 

New York: 99/103

  Netherland, Joseph O'Neill's 2008 novel about the aftermath of 9/11 and, of all things, cricket, is the only book representing Staten Island on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list.  That seems a trifle unfair, but it's hard to get upset considering I've never been to Staten Island and I doubt I'll ever go.  If one was looking to break down New York lit, I would propose the following time-based categories:

1.  Everything before the publication of the Great Gatsby in 1925.

2.  1925- through the end of the World War II.

3.  End of World War II to 9/11

4.   9/11 to the pandemic.

5. post-pandemic (ongoing)

 

    By this analysis, Netherland is a post-9/11 book, about a wealthy Dutch oil and gas analyst who sees his marriage to an English attorney (who is, quite, nonsensically, practicing as a US attorney after being educated in the UK- something which is, to my understanding, impossible.) fall apart after 9/11 forces the couple and their infant son to move into the Chelsea hotel while their way-downtown condo is repaired after 9/11.   Netherland also falls squarely into the category of rich people and their problems, a group I have little empathy for and no sympathy with.  I'm not, personally, a rich person, but I've been close enough to them to know that the wealthy tend to be way less interesting than one might expect and that wealth is often unearned or randomly bestowed on people who have no business being rich.  

   I did enjoy the cricket angle, and the parts about cricket, and the cricket-based community that this rich financial analyst falls into after his marriage falls apart kept my interest where his relationship with his wife did not.  If there is one character type in American fiction I can't stand it's the well to-do young mother who suddenly decides that she just can't make a go of it in her marriage, often for reasons that appear opaque and/or non-sensical to others.  I'm a feminist all the way down the line, and no huge fan of child-bearing, but personally, I feel that women in the upper echelons of the socio-economic pyramid should stick it out for the 18 or so years child rearing requires, in the absence of some actual incident of domestic abuse or abandonment.  Suck it up, lady, that is what I wanted to tell the wife in this novel.  Certainly, she doesn't do her child any favors by abandoning her husband in New York and moving back to London. 

On Such a Full Sea (2014) by Chang Rae Lee

 Book Review

On Such a Full Sea (2014)

by Chang Rae Lee

  I read Native Speaker, Chang-Rae Lee's 1994 debut as part of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list, where it is part of the New York/Manhattan chapter.  I enjoyed Native Speaker, so when I saw he had written a dystopian-fiction/literary fiction cross-over book a decade ago, I checked out the B.D. Wong narrated Audiobook from the library.   I enjoyed the listening experience and I guess I would call On Such a Full Sea an interesting failure- again my own feelings were echoed by the contemporaneous review in the New York Times, by now Pulitzer Prize winning author Andrew Sean Greer.  I actually wanted to quote his paragraph of the state of dystopian sci-fi, literary-fiction cross over circa 2014:

Colson Whitehead, Cormac McCarthy and Margaret Atwood (in her recently concluded MaddAddam trilogy) have all tackled this genre. Doris Lessing’s “Mara and Dann” is a classic, as is Anthony Burgess’s “Clockwork Orange.” Further back in time, one has only to think of Orwell, Huxley and Wells, even Jack London and Mary Shelley. -New York Times(paywall)

   Amazing that Greer would single out the MaddAddam trilogy at the expense of The Handmaid's Tale, but otherwise that's a good summary. I think you'd have to put Kazuo Ishiguro in there in 2024, but besides those two things.  

  If I had to focus on one reason On Such a Full Sea wasn't a hit, it would be the choice of the author to use a collective second person tense to narrate- as in the, story is told from the collective perspective of the citizens of B-more, a post collapse Chinese colony occupying the ruins of Baltimore.  The protagonist is Fan, daughter of B-more and a "tank diver"- someone tasked with maintaining the aqua-culture tanks that Bmore uses to cultivate fish which they then sell to the "Charters"- enclaves of wealthy post-Americans who exist largely cut off from both colonies like Bmore and the unorganized "counties"- which is a mild take on the Mad Max/The Road idea of society in the aftermath of a total collapse of government. 

  Fan's adventures start out after she leaves Bmore in search of her disappeared boyfriend, whose child she is carrying.  Because of the second person narrator, we never get inside Fan's head and her twin desires- to find her boyfriend hopefully via her brother, one of the few colonists who have been elevated to charter life, never separate out.   Time is a little imprecise because of Fan's adventures, but there is no denying that at the beginning of the book she knows she is pregnant, and by the end she is still pregnant and not one person has noticed, so we're talking a couple months tops. 

  But I thought the world building was interesting, and Lee is a no-doubt writer of literary fiction, so the overall quality level of the prose was very high. Not a book I would go around recommending, but I personally enjoyed the Audiobook experience. 

Sophie's Choice (1979) by William Styron

1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Sophie's Choice (1979)

by William Styron

Brooklyn, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 21/26 

New York: 98/103

   I was really dreading Sophie's Choice, the 1980 National Book Award winner about a doomed romance between Sophie, a Polish-Catholic holocaust survivor and Nathan, a brilliant though erratic Jewish New York city scientist and their relationship with the narrator, a Thomas Wolfe admiring would-be writer from the upper south, who handles narrating duties.  After reading the book, I was proud to announce that I was wrong to dread reading it and in fact it may be my favorite book from the entire New York subchapter- certainly it's a top 10 pick.  Really, Sophie's Choice is two books in one (and at 600 pages that is not an exaggeration) .  

  The first book is Stingo's (the narrator) story.  He is southerner, seeking to become a writer in New York City in 1947.  He moves into a Brooklyn boarding house, attracted, like other southern intellectuals, to the idea of Jewishness.  There he meets sad Sophie and brilliant and erratic Nathan and becomes intertwined in their tumultuous relationship.  The second story is Sophie's recollections about her experiences during World War II, namely being sent off to Auschwitz from Krakow after being caught in possession of a contra-band ham. 

  Sophie's story is gradually revealed over the course of the book, in dribs and drabs, until she finally reveals her famous "choice" (to save one of her two children from the ovens) near the end of the book. Styron expertly intertwines the two tales for maximum dramatic effect- I was not surprised to learn after finishing the book that he won the National Book Award in 1980.  I was totally surprised by the amount of explicit sex, drugs and insanity that Styron portrays- and really enjoyed it.  Sophie's Choice is a no-doubt Holocaust lit classic for the ages and I'm glad the 1,001 Novels project finally forced me to read it!  Recommended!