Mary Jane (2021) by Jessica Anya Blau

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Mary Jane (2021)

by Jessica Anya Blau

205 Hawthorne Road, Baltimore Maryland

Maryland:  5/9

 Mary Jane is the biggest hit I've read from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America: 13 thousand plus Amazon reviews and a movie rights deal announced last year.  It's a coming-of-age novel from the POV of a teenaged girl living in suburban Maryland.  Her life changes forever when she takes a summer nanny gig for a "Jewish family"- still an exotic thing at that time in place (70's suburban Maryland).  The father of that family is a psychiatrist specializing in substance abuse disorder.  Mary Jane's life is turned upside down that summer when it is revealed that rock-star Jimmy and his tv-famous-musical-family wife Sheba (just "Sheba") are going to be living there for the summer while Jimmy tackles his heroin addiction. 

  The book is written relentlessly from the perspective of the eponymous protagonist- this was the Audiobook that broke me in terms of listening to adolescent female narrators in the Audiobook format- no more after this book!  Mary Jane, as you would expect, is a bright, curious girl with many questions left unanswered by her waspish housewife Mom and incommunicative country-club Dad.  Given the Baltimore location and the "Parents just don't get it" setting of the early 1970's, it was hard not to think of John Waters, specifically Hairspray, the first movie version.  Mary Jane was kind of a fun-house mirror (or not-fun house mirror, in the case of Mary Jane's parents home) of the same kettle of influences that spawned Waters' distinctive vision.

   Another book I was thinking about while listening to Mary Janes was another title from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, The Dakota Winters,, which is another coming-of-age story with the introduction of a celebrity element.  The other title that keeps popping up is Daisy Jones and the Six, which I refuse to read, but understand is very popular. Seems to me the idea of weaving a celebrity element into one's otherwise normal-people coming-of-age story is a solid technique for generating marketplace interest in a manuscript that might otherwise not exist.  Editors will ask, "What does the protagonist LEARN from the celebrity element in your book?"

Toward Eternity (2024) by Anton Hur

 Book Review

Toward Eternity (2024)

by Anton Hur

  Before Toward Eternity was published last month I only knew Korean author Anton Hur as a translator of Korean Fiction into English.  Specifically his translation of Cursed Bunny, Bora Chung's 2021 collection of short stories, put him on my radar.  Thus, when I read that his debut novel was a mind bending work of science fiction, I had to have it and indeed I bought it during a recent visit to Powell's City of Books in Portland. 

   The plot starts out as a borderline philosophical inquiry into the nature of being: If you replace a sentient being molecule for molecule with something else (here the "something else" is called a "nanite"), is that new thing the same as the old sentient being, something different entirely, what?   Hur then abruptly shifts to a far future world where the sentient androids created by nanites have eradicated natural humanity- or close to it- the only thing standing between natural humanity and extinction being a dissident bloc of nanites who seek to preserve diversity in the universe.

   It is a...wild ride and a clear example of the result when speculative fiction and literary fiction collide.  I really enjoyed Toward Eternity and highly recommend it for the cosmic science fiction reader. 

Nova Swing (2006) by M. John Harrison

 Audiobook

Nova Swing (2006)

by M. John Harrison

Read by Jim Frangione

   Nova Swing is a 2006 science fiction novel that won the Arthur C. Clarke and Phillip K. Dick awards.  It's the second volume in a three volume series that traverses the future-noir/new weird territory that readers associate with China Mieville, Jeff VanDerMeer, J.G. Ballard and the Stugatsky brothers from Russia.  Also the films of Tarkovsky.  Which is to say that it isn't as good as any of those reference points, but is in the same ballpark.  I found it because I plugged the name of Mieville and VanDerMeer into Facebook AI and this popped out as an option- I'd never heard of M. John Harrison, who is an incredibly prolific writer of both genre fiction and non-fiction

   Unfortunately, Nova Swing was not a great audiobook for a couple of reasons. First, it's the second book of a three volume set, so if you haven't heard volume 1, you don't know anything about the underlying scenario which is some kind of future universe where some kind of interdimensional incident has generated a set-off landscape where "tourists" bring back "artifacts" helped by tour guides, including the main character in the case and policed by local detectives who act like they are in the 1940's, even though it is set in the far future.

   The other issue with the Nova Swing audiobook is that all the name and proper nouns are made up gobbledgook words- the interdimensional locale is called the Saudade Event Site, the larger area is the Kefahuchi tract and the characters have names like Vic Serotonin and Liv Hula.  And even though I don't see the comparison anywhere, much of the vibe of Nova Swing reads like a straightened-out, genrefied version of William S. Burroughs non-sensical cut up sci fi landscapes like those in the similarly named Nova Express.   

  

  

Your Face in Mine (2014)by Jess Row

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Your Face in Mine (2014)

by Jess Row

Baltimore, Maryland

Maryland: 4/9

  Susan Straight, editor of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America calls Your Face in Mine, a 2014 novel about racial reassignment surgery a "sharp satire" but I would have to disagree.   I found Your Face in Mine neither particularly sharp nor satirical.  Your Face in Mine is also another 1,001 Novels example of an author who hits a dead-end-  this novel was published in 2014 after two well received collections of short stories, the New York Times gave it a highly favorable review and compared Row to Jonathan Lethem.  Since then?  Row has been working as a non-tenured creative writing professor at NYU and being a Dad in NYC.  

  It's crazy to see how many authors make it to the point where their first novel gets a good publisher (Riverhead for this book) and a favorable NYT notice and then that is it- nothing to follow.  What is the point of all that work if only to abandon it.  It suggests to me that many SUCCESFUL authors only have one or two ideas and if it isn't an idea they can write over and over again endlessly, they are through. Shouldn't writers of literary fiction be able to come up with plots and characters that don't draw directly from their own experience?  Isn't that the point of fiction?

   This links to a larger idea I've considered recently:  That 90% or so of SUCCESFUL artists are really just telling their personal story to the world, and once they've done that they have nothing left to say. 

  This book though is strange, at least, in contrast to the domestic banality that editor Susan Straight has favored thus far, 200 books and seven states into the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project. I listened to the Audiobook- a good pick since the narrator sounds like me and the book is written with a narrator-protagonist- that's the best format for an Audiobook.  Complicated plot dynamics sink Audiobooks since you can't flip through what you've previously read to make sense of what you are presently reading.

The Power Broker: Volume 1 (1974) by Robert Caro

 Audiobook Review

The Power Broker: Volume 1 (1974)

Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

by Robert Caro

Read by Robertson Dean

(2011)

   Lists like the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America and 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die commonly keep fiction and non-fiction books separate.  For example, in the two lists I just cited, there are zero works of non fiction.  At least with the 1,001 Novels project the bias is in the title, but the 1,001 Books list has no excuse.   One recent list to buck this separation is the recently published New York Times Top Books of the 21st Century, which combines fiction and non-fiction.   Such an approach might have benefited the 1,001 Novels project.   You can see why if you listen to the Audiobook of The Power Broker: Volume 1, which is just about as New York a book as one could possibly imagine.  Indeed, there is an argument that its inclusion is required if a reader wants to really know New York, city and state.  No single person has had a greater impact on how the entire state LOOKS than Moses.   

  Volume 1, which lasts 22 hours in Audiobook format, handles his rise, and takes us to the cusp of his monumental bridge, tunnel and freeway building projects that remade Manhattan in his image.  We learn that Moses came from a patrician upbringing- a key element of his success is that he never needed to make money from his work and that his vision was inspired by the idea of a non-partial bureaucratic technocrat, who overcame all obstacles to benefit "the people."  Caro presents it as an idea he came up with while he was doing post-graduate studies in Oxford University, and his school-child dreams of a core of highly disciplined, uncorruptible state employees was about as far from the facts on the ground in New York City as could be possible.

   After some early career missteps, he was rescued from obscurity by a friendship with Belle Moskowitz, a reformer and early supporter of future Governor of New York Al Smith.  Moskowitz recommended Robert Moses to Smith as a man who could get things done, as someone who could help Smith implement the progressive ideas he wanted to advance to distance himself from the Tammany Hall political machine from which he sprang and get him in the running for a run at President.  Smith and Moses were an odd couple to be sure, and the depiction of their friendship is the unquestionable highlight of the book.   

   In Volume 1, most of the action is stage setting, as Moses begins to develop his vision of parks and freeways to drive to those parks.  Most of the action takes place on the tip of Long Island, where Moses spent the 20's and 30's in endless litigation with the land barons who owned all the property out there.  Parks were really popular with the general public and the press, particularly when those standing in the way are wealthy captain of industry.  It's clear both from the action of the book and Caro's relentless foreshadowing that the combination of power and lack of public accountability would turn Moses into a monster, but by the end of Volume 1 that moment is still on the far-ish horizon.

Clockers (1992) by Richard Price

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Clocker (1992)

by Richard Price

Jersey City, New Jersey

New Jersey: 13/13

  HUZZAH it is the end of Chapter 3 of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, edited by Susan Straight.  Chapter 3 is called "Empire State and Atlantic Shores," or you might just say NY/NJ. Like the last chapter (New England), Chapter 3 is a culturally and geographically cohesive area. You could make an argument that far upstate New York is more contiguous with New England geographically speaking, but there is no denying that upstate New York is still New York state.   New Jersey, meanwhile, is essentially a suburb of New York City- though Southern New Jersey, with it's urban proximity to Philadelphia, is like the converse of upstate New York: It's part of the state of New Jersey, but there are argument for lumping it with Pennsylvania.  

   The last book in this chapter is Clockers, the 1992 crime verite novel about a crew of cocaine dealers working out of Jersey City, and the cops who stalk them.  Clockers was a hit in its own right, spawned a generally well received 1995 movie version courtesy of Spike Lee AND was the direct inspiration for HBO's The Wire, which Price also wrote for, in 2002.   I'm sure I read Clockers around the time it was first published- I would have been in high school when it was published and I'm sure I read it either then or while I was in college- probably the paperback edition.   Landing at close to 600 pages, Clockers is really two novels interwoven, the novel about the cocaine seller, Ronald 'Strike' Dunham, who favors yoo-hoo to self-medicate his ulcer and the novel about Rocco Klein, a police investigator working for the District Attorney homicide squad.   Their paths intertwine when Strike is tasked by his boss to kill Darryl, his second-in-command, and assume his position.  The murder happens outside the fast food restaurant where Darryl works, and Klein gets involved when Strike's younger, hard-working brother, confesses to the crime and claims self-defense. 

  The confession doesn't sit right with Klein, who spends the rest of the book trying to get the bottom of the murder and what he believes to be a false confession.  Strike embodies the "tortured drug dealer" archetype, though reading Clockers reminded me of the insanity of the economics of inner-city cocaine street level dealing.  As an experienced criminal defense lawyer I can say that the only thing dumber than selling drugs on the actual street is bank robbery.   It's funny because Clockers is chock filled with Strike reflecting on the impossibility of working a "straight" job, and I often think how, personally, working a shitty fast-food job would be WAY better than working as a street-level criminal.

  I'm so glad to be done with NY/NJ.

Bright River Trilogy (1984) by Annie Green

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Bright River Trilogy (1984)

by Annie Green

Hooke's Crossing, Maryland

Maryland: 3/9

    Bright River Trilogy is as obscure as it gets- a one-off author, published in the 1980's to no acclaim, and author Annie Green vanished from the public sphere without a trace.   It's also not a trilogy in the sense that it is one novel, under three hundred pages long.  The "trilogy" refers to the trio of main characters who live in the middle-of-nowhere, Maryland.  I didn't even know there were rural parts of Maryland for most of my life.  I had some idea that somewhere, Maryland had generated a "southern" culture with plantations and such, but I feel like they hush it up.

  Bright River Trilogy is not set on one of these erstwhile plantations, rather it's a small town filled with characters who- yes- you guessed it- never go anywhere.  In this way this book reminds me of several novels from upstate New York and rural New England- sad characters, often from a once well-off, now decadent/failed wealthy family of the area, slouching towards their eventual extinction.  Here you've got the well-meaning grandma whose stern husband hung himself after being implicated in a real estate fraud, the prodigal son, who goes off to Vietnam and returns with a wife who he literally picked up at the Port Authority bus station (and is an alcoholic).  Other protagonists include the whorish daughter of a local yokel- she's got a book with the 50 dudes she's banged.  Her dad spends his days reading the "M" volume of an encyclopedia to her deaf, drug-addled younger brother. 

  Besides the M volume, nobody in this tale picks up a book or appears to have any interests what so ever besides self-destruction.  You'd be forgiven if you thought this book was published last year as part of the "deaths of despair" trend, but you'd be wrong- 1984!  

Mother of Sorrows (2005) by Richard McCann

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Mother of Sorrows (2005)

by Richard McCann

1600 St Camillus Dr, Silver Spring, Maryland

Maryland: 2/9

  When I was in undergraduate in Washington DC, a couple of our friend group moved into a 10th floor apartment in one of the big, nice apartment buildings that line some of the avenues out this way.  My memories of Silver Spring are limited to the drive to and from that apartment and being inside the actual apartment, since I didn't own a car and there was nothing a young college student would do in Silver Spring besides sitting in a friend's apartment and watching NFL football and/or the Simpsons.   Editor Susan Straight locates this book in one of the single-family home communities that is more typical for the area than the apartment building I frequented, but Mother of Sorrows could have just as easily been located in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington DC, where half of the connected short-stories occur.

  The description that Editor Straight provided for this book left me questioning if she actually read the same book I did:

An elegant, lovely novel-in-stories, set in 1950s America, when a young boy, after the loss of brother and father, finds solace in the complicated faith of his mother, while realizing his own gay identity.

   This sentence isn't wholly inaccurate, but the narrator is the adult version of the "young boy," and the father plays a very minor role.  Rather, Mother of Sorrows is largely about the relationship between the author-narrator and his real-life brother, Davis.  Both of them were gay, but Davis self-destructed and killed himself accidentally with a heroin overdose in his 30's.  Richard McCann, meanwhile, became a moderately succesful author and teacher and didn't die until 2021.  Mother of Sorrows is about the brother and his relationship with the author, more than anything else.

  McCann pairs a light, elliptical style with the dark themes of a gay identity denied by a parent.  While the book does begin in the 1950s/60's when the two brother are kids, by the end of the book is well into the modern era and Mom is still denying the gay identity of both her children.  Sure to be at the top of my Maryland list if only because it isn't a book about an adolescent girl.