Favorite Halloween Books

I love a good scary story now and then, and today's the perfect time to pick one up. Here are my four favorite spooky/scary/Halloween stories:

In the Attic with Myla Goldberg

Originally printed in the Washington Post Express

If there's one thing Facebook stalking old middle-school classmates can teach us, it's that people change. Reconnecting with those ghosts of friendships past can provide some insight into our former selves, which is what Celia Durst learns in Myla Goldberg's third novel, The False Friend.

"Part of what inspired me was that I remembered something very mean I had done in elementary school," Goldberg recalls. "I remember being the kid who was picked on all the time, but one time I threw a pair of scissors at my best friend at the time and scratched her on the leg. She didn't tell anyone and I blocked it out, but as an adult I remembered having done that."

Kids don't always turn into the adults you'd expect. "You have people you knew in high school, like the guy you're sure is going to be a Hollywood star but 10 years later he's a podiatrist," she says. "You never know what course we're going to take."

Goldberg's third novel follows Celia as she pieces together the disappearance of her best friend, Djuna, who vanished when they were 11. At the time, Celia told everyone that Djuna got into a stranger's car. Decades later, Celia remembers that Djuna fell into a hole — and she told no one. When she returns home to confess, no one — family, old friends who were there that day — believes her. Celia has a difficult time realizing that her memory may be fallible, something Goldberg says we all have to accept.

"I think, ultimately, we can never know ourselves and people we love can never know us," she says. "Memory is not this sacrosanct, golden thing, and if you talk to other people about your past you can figure out what memory's failure can teach you. Memory's failure is as good a way to learn about ourselves."

Goldberg's husband grew up in upstate New York, where she set the novel.

"The area fascinates me," she said. "It's a place of fallen empire, which ascended when the U.S. was making stuff and factories — cites and cultures sprang up around that. Now the U.S. doesn't make as much stuff, and the area is dead, depopulated and boarded up. It tied with my thinking about the people we are now versus what we were."

She also drew on her own childhood neighborhood in Laurel, Md.

"I attended high school in Greenbelt and I used it in the book," Goldberg says. "The great thing about fiction is that you can make a patchwork and draw from wherever you want."

Review: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

In Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, food emits the feelings of the person who made it to 9-year-old Rose Edelstein. Distraught when she realizes that her mother is unhappy by tasting the emotion in a lemon birthday cake with chocolate frosting, Rose's happy-go-lucky nature begins to dissolve as she starts to question what's going on around her. Food, for Rose, lays bare the dark secrets of everyone she knows years before she should know them.

It's a strange family. Besides Rose, there's her oddball mother, who tries to follow various passions, her loving but distant father, and her unusual brother, Joseph. Joseph is older by a few years, and to Rose he's a genius who somehow can't get into the handful of colleges he applies to. Secretive and always irritated, he spurs the novel's tension with his disappearance shortly after he moves out.

Bender tracks Rose through those years when food tells her particularly startling things -- her mother's affair, her brother's strange disappearance -- ultimately until she's in her early twenties and trying to find a way to use her "gift" for good. It's been a barrier between Rose and a normal life, as she forgoes college and other things in order to save herself trouble, but she ultimately learns to accept both her taste buds and her brother's situation. His "gift" is one that divides the family and can't be hidden, as Rose's can. If the symbolism seems heavy handed, it can be at times, though Bender balances it with the mystery that each "gift" produces.

Food is a terrific character in its own right. Its personification is sometimes twee and at other times seems to mock food criticism and obnoxious food blogs, but its main role is the conduit for change and self-discovery as Rose grows up. There's nothing gimmicky about this, just a novel way of getting to the heart of family issues. As strange as Rose's abilities are, Joseph's are even stranger, but the family is unwilling or unable to talk about them. The one person who will listen, Joseph's friend George, is Rose's crush and the only character who provides some balance to the family's troubles. As a food writer reading this book, I wanted Rose to embrace her strange ability and launch a new type of food writing, one that explores the passion in restaurant's kitchens and whether they use locally sourced ingredients like they promise.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is engaging and Bender creates a world that's easy for readers to inhabit. I've always been drawn to magical realism, and this book is no exception.

Review: The Imperfectionists

In Tom Rachman's debut novel, The Imperfectionists, the newspaper staff of a dying international English language newspaper in Rome struggle to keep their professional — and personal — lives afloat. This isn't a new idea, since changing ideas about information render print publications obsolete every day, but what's intriguing is the motley staff (though speaking from experience, all newspaper staffs are rather eclectic). We meet them one by one, though many appear in other chapters before their own.  Each gets a chapter, and each provides insight into how their purview of the newspaper works.

Rachman reveals the paper's back story with a few pages slipped between chapters. Founded by an art-collecting millionaire, the first editors are a married couple from America. They're replaced by editors and publishers who alternately help the paper thrive or sink. These pages add yet another melancholy note to the whole proceedings — today's staff doesn't care about saving something that was vitally important to prior generations. Rachman is preaching to the choir.

About a third of the way through The Imperfectionists, I realized that each character's story is devastating. Everyone, from Lloyd, the kooky Paris correspondent, to Herman, the lovable corrections editor, faces cheating spouses, failed love affairs, or deaths in the family. Or, if they're truly unlucky, they're dealt more than one blow. This, of course, helps put the failing newspaper into perspective. The reasons why it's failing are clearly laid out: no web presence, a young publisher who simply doesn't care, a need to cut staff but the recognition that cutting staff cheapens the product and therefore loses readers. (There are hints that The Imperfectionists was written in the mid-2000s, before the worldwide recession but after the Internet had begun to destroy newspaper advertising and steal away younger readers.) But the reasons why personal lives are failing are more ambiguous in some cases; why family members lie to each other or why people carry on affairs are more complex, and Rachman often leaves them that way.

You'll pick up echoes of Joshua Ferris' debut Then We Came to the End in the workplace drama built around a business going through tough times, but the similarities end there. Perhaps it's just because I've worked in newspaper and magazine offices, have always wanted to live abroad, and seriously lament the destruction of print media, but the emotional resonance in The Imperfectionists is stronger. It's less innovative, but I don't need innovation every time I pick up a novel.

Review: Special Topics in Calamity Physics

You love some books from the first page — they start with a bang and are wonderful until the last page. You love some books from the last page — in retrospect they're notable and important, but the process of reading them may not have been wonderful. Then there are some books that start off all wrong for you, but you stick with them and are rewarded when the author settles into her story and finds her voice — sometimes books just need to warm up.

Marisha Pessl's 2006 novel Special Topics In Calamity Physics belongs to the latter category. I was initially turned off by it, as I found overwhelming similarities between it and Donna Tartt's 1992 novel, The Secret History — some sentences are almost identical — but then Pessl saves her novel by doing something really unbelievable with the ending.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics is about Blue van Meer, a high school senior starting the school year in a small town in North Carolina. Blue has spent her whole life traveling around the country with her professor father (her mother died 11 years earlier), and narrates the tale from the future, when she is a student at Harvard. At school she falls in with a group of cool, beautiful students and their cool, beautiful film teacher, though they initially keep her at arm's length. As the fall semester progresses, Blue learns that her friends aren't quite what they seem, and, after the death of a man at a party, she realizes that everyone may be caught up in some dangerous activities.

This almost parallels The Secret History, except it takes place in high school instead of college and the teacher is a woman and not a man. But a third of the way through, Pessl shifts the narrative slightly and makes it entirely her own. The focus here isn't on the other students, though elegant Jade, beautiful Charles, ethereal Lu, and the others would be fascinating if Pessl actually did something with them — then again, Blue is the narrator, and the students are not the focus of her story. Instead the object of scrutiny is Hannah Schneider, a 44-year-old film teacher who "adopts" students, bringing them into her home each Sunday for dinner and encouraging their potential in any way she can. It's odd, though, how they all come together, and Pessl never really quite tells us the impetus for each character joining the group.

The best thing about Special Topics in Calamity Physics is that the ending is so incredibly unexpected. I do read mysteries from time to time, but never have a read a mystery (which this novel is, in part) that turned everything on its head so wonderfully — we learn that not a single character is as they seem.

Pessl is an engaging writer, crafting memorable characters (Blue's father is amazing. Lately I've been thinking about parental figures in novels, more on that later I'm sure.) and working with the canon (chapter titles are named for classic books and parallel the plots of those books). It isn't perfect — at times it strays into cliché (how many novels do we need about groups of outsider college students drawn together by a professor?) and if it weren't for the ending I wouldn't have liked it half as much — but I've already recommended it to someone, a sure sign that I like a novel.

Review: Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“this is why we call people exes, i guess – because the paths that cross in the middle end up separating at the end. it’s too easy to see an X as a cross-out. it’s not, because there’s no way to cross out something like that. the X is a diagram of two paths.” [sic].

So says Will Grayson, partial narrator of the new dual-authored novel Will Grayson, Will Grayson (out on Tuesday), making rare use of capitalization. Though he may not realize it, Will Grayson is describing the structure of the novel, which follows the X-like paths of two teenagers who have the same name.

Will Grayson is co-written by reputable YA authors John Green and David Levithan, each writing half the novel from the perspective of one Will Grayson. This is similar to Levithan’s work with Rachel Cohn in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List. The gimmick works here like never before, as the Wills collide together in a perfect storm of adolescent identity crises.

Levithan’s Will is a perpetually withdrawn closeted gay kid with a regiment of antidepressants and a lonesome, Pride and Prejudice-obsessed single mother. Green’s Will is similarly withdrawn although he fits into a less oppressive social caste than Levithan’s. Green’s Will withdraws by conscious choice, making two rules for himself: “1. Don’t care too much. 2. Shut up.”

Will has created this ‘seen and not heard’ defense mechanism in the social fallout of having publicly supported, in writing, his best friend’s open homosexuality. That friend is Tiny Cooper, ironically nicknamed (and flamingly gay) giant football player. Tiny will be the node at which the two Will Graysons intersect and also the novel’s thematic nexus.

Tiny is the rare openly gay high schooler; in the hallways he flaunts his homosexuality in a way that not only wears down the homophobia of his classmates but also wears down the patience of his best friend Will. When Tiny later gets close to the other Will Grayson, the moody, insular one who thinks in lowercase, he forces both Wills, already reflexively questioning themselves, to come up with some answers.

Within their contemporary suburban setting, Green and Levithan make expert use of the gadgets and Internets that keep teenagers (and adults, when you get right down to it) from making connections with others. It’s poignant and heart-wrenching to witness these poor kids desperately constructing extensions of themselves via Facebook, text message and chat room, but neglecting to reinforce the foundations of their actual physical and mental selves. At one crucial moment, a character stumbles upon an emotional truth by tapping out an e-mail on his cell phone that he will never send.

The novel’s most sweeping example of this is the arc of Tiny’s original musical, Tiny Dancer, which goes from page to stage over the course of the book. The musical is an overhyped epic autobiographical tale of growing up out and proud, but of course there’s more to Tiny’s self-possession than pride. The play, like most of the characters’ actions, represents a desperate existential plea for validation.

Tiny forces the Wills into a love triangle that contrasts romantic love with platonic by questioning which is easier to fall in to or out of. Upon meeting each other, the two Will Graysons must confront their own demons head on:  not only are you not very good at being you, but suddenly you have to compete. Who are you, really, if you aren't even the only one who's you?

The solution they find — that the self must be defined both in terms of the people who love you but also in terms of, you know, yourself — may be a little contrived and easy for a group of humans as realistically flawed as these, but it’s also touching and, more importantly, instructive. The tale of two Will Graysons becomes a fable about the essential need to be okay with yourself before you can be okay with other people. I wish I’d had this book when I was in high school.

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Todd Detmold is the proprietor of My Favorite Gum Commercial. Were he ever to confront a second Todd Detmold, the universe would likely collapse in upon itself in a cloud of passive aggression. To contribute a review or other literary musings to Attic Salt, e-mail atticsaltblog@gmail.com.

Review: The Girl With Glass Feet

Ali Shaw's The Girl With Glass Feet is one of the most beautiful debut novels I've read in some time. The layered fable, which takes place in the past and the present, is set in St. Hauda's Land, an archipelago way up north (we never find out where exactly it is) where strange things happen. It's a dark and evocative novel about transformation, loss, and the things that trap us in the past.

The girl with the glass feet is Ida Mclaird, a visitor to St. Hauda's from the mainland. On her first visit she runs into Henry Fuwa, a hermit, and sees him with a small moth-like creature that has the body of a bull. He also mentions, in passing, "Would you believe… there are glass bodies here, hidden in the bog water?"

Ida returns home and realizes that her lower extremities are turning into glass. Thinking that Henry may have a clue about her condition, she heads back to St. Hauda's to find him. While there, she meets Midas Crook, a young, shy, photographer whose help she enlists in finding Henry. It's a simple premise, as many fairy tales are, but Shaw wraps the past around his characters in a way that makes the narrative neat but the relationships messy.

On the archipelago, Ida is staying in the cottage of her dead mother's old friend Carl, who was in love with her and knew Midas' father. We also learn that Henry had an affair years ago with Midas' mother, who turned into a recluse after Midas' father committed suicide. Shaw uses flashbacks to explore the relationship between Midas and his father (also named Midas), and gives readers insight into why Midas senior did what he did (he was also turning to glass, beginning with his heart), information that his son never learns. We see how quickly opinions can be formed without access to all the necessary information, and how difficult, even impossible, it can be to let go of these initial impressions.

Ida's mysterious plight is, like any serious illness, a catalyst for confronting long-held beliefs and finally talking about those things buried beneath the surface. In this novel, that includes Midas' overwhelming anger against his father, a tentative love affair between Ida and Midas, and Carl's suffocating love for Ida's long-dead mother. But Shaw, by giving Ida a strange problem, acknowledges that this isn't simply a metaphor for ilness; Henry tells Midas "This isn’t a disease. The glass is now a part of her." Turning to glass, becoming see-through and open to the world, isn't necessarily a bad thing if viewed symbolically, as Shaw makes his characters realize in different ways throughout the novel. It also roots his work in the tradition of fairy tales, making the novel feel like it was glossed over by Hans Christian Andersen — in a good way.

It's a compelling work, steeped in meaning and told elegantly. I had difficulty with Shaw's early chapters, which were heavy with description of outdoor scenes, white animals, and dark shadows. But these descriptions, less frequent as the book progresses, serve both to create a stark, harsh setting for the novel and to offer us a metaphor for the crushing isolation that can occur when you don't follow your heart, as none of the characters in the novel are wont to do. The color at the end of the book, for both the characters and us, makes it all worth it.

Review: On Beauty

I didn't read E.M. Forster’s Howards End, a novel about the relationships between different social classes during turn of the (20th) century England, before opening Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, an homage to and riff on Forster's work. But I quickly realized you don't have to catch all the parallels between the two works to appreciate On Beauty, an elegant and funny satire about two academic families – the Belsey and Kipps clans – and their tragic affairs.

Published in 2005, On Beauty was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize that year, and while it seems to be Smith's debut novel, White Teeth, that endures in popularity, On Beauty is a much more confident effort. Set in Wellington, a fictional suburb of Boston, On Beauty concerns art history professor Howard Belsey, a white Englishman married to Kiki, an African-American nurse and the novel's moral center. The couple lives with their three children, newly-religious Jerome, overachiever Zora, and Levi, a high school student striving to break free of the constraints of the liberal elite and develop street cred.

Their counterparts are the outspoken and reactive Kipps family, headed by art history professor and cultural critic Monty Kipps, a black Englishman by way of the Caribbean. Kipps' unusual wife Carlene and beautiful daughter Victoria develop relationships with members of the Belsey family, creating both inter- and intrafamilial strife.

Beginning with an ill-fated affair between Jerome and Victoria, which sets off a chain reaction of relationships and wished-for relationships between all the main characters, On Beauty is an examination of love and lust — and equally, between the demise of love and lust — glossed over with a satirical sheen. The affairs here aren't passionate or fulfilling, since each affair compensates for something missing in the lives of its participants and often destroys stable relationships with others in the process; the affairs themselves are fleeting, their impacts are not. By focusing on the internal effects of the collapse of Kiki and Howard's 30-year marriage, Smith rightly grants more weight to, essentially, the only acceptable pairing (I can't spoil who actually gets together) in the whole novel.

Beyond the plethora of romantic and sexual relationships depicted here, Smith engages in a minor study of race, partly through the character of Carl, a boy from a neighboring town and an aspiring rapper/poet, the object of desire for many of the main characters, and partly through the mixed race Belsey children, who wonder the extent to which their race defines them.

Smith has a lot to say on these topics, and much of it is great. My problem with On Beauty is that it's simply too long — my copy ran 464 pages — and many scenes could do with a bit of streamlining. Despite that, On Beauty is a reminder that Smith is one of the great novelists of our time.

"The Cults of the Famous and the Dead"

Todd submitted this article in response to two recent novels about men out of place in the modern world. He fears the Internet and disavows new technologies; follow him on Twitter! To contribute a review or other literary musings to Attic Salt, e-mail atticsaltblog@gmail.com.

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I finally got around to Audrey Niffenegger’s oft-recommended The Time Traveler’s Wife this week. By coincidence, this immediately followed the new Joshua Ferris, The Unnamed, making two-in-a-row post-White Noise novels about the effects of debilitating disease on otherwise loving and fruitful marriages. What I’m left with is that Ferris knows his pathos, while The Time Traveler’s Wife gets added to the list of wildly popular entertainments that make me feel like I’m living alone in a nation of people speaking a different language.

What do people see in The Time Traveler’s Wife? I’d love to know. Is it the sense of accomplishment at getting through a 500-plus-page book that spells everything out in the first 50? Is it the on-the-nose statement of themes? Niffenegger treats book-club hot topics such as “free will v. predestination” and “true love v. adversity” with all the nuance and subtlety of a slasher flick serial killer opening wounds with a large kitchen knife. “…sometimes you tell me something and I feel like the future is already there, you know?” muses the 13-year-old Clare to the 36-year-old Henry, her future husband, early in the book. “Like my future has happened in the past and I can’t do anything about it.” Henry replies, “That’s called determinism. It haunts my dreams.” Much later, when adult Clare has taken up painting pictures of birds in cages, Henry wins the lottery for her. Hooey.

In Niffenegger’s unwillingness to toy with her “chrono-impairment” premise, she sets up an internal logic where the entire story is laid out in the first 50 pages of the book. She uses the rest of her ink telling you things you already know, throwing around dramatic miscarriages that are all the more unbearable for the knowledge that Henry and Clare will, in fact, have a beautiful, perfect, time-traveling daughter. This is a love story wrought with tension but devoid of mystery or possibility. The dual narrators’ extreme angst is borne of a happy and loving relationship that actually lasts quite a bit longer than most (from Clare’s age 6 to age 82, at least). I fail to see anything interesting in this, especially when stretched over 500 sensationalist pages.

Niffenegger, presumably paid by the word, fills entire chapters with thinly-veiled semi-autobiographical indulgences. Step-by-step descriptions of Clare making fancy paper in her art studio regularly perforate the already-flimsy forward momentum of her story. Niffenegger also gives Clare her own hometown (South Haven, MI) and adopted home city (Chicago) to serve as the two major settings. The book regularly reads like a series of Yelp reviews, detailing “Clare’s” favorite restaurants, museums and clubs in the Chicagoland area: “The waitress arrives, and we hurriedly consult our menus. I don’t want to bicker in Katsu, my favorite sushi restaurant, a place we eat at a lot. I reflect that Henry is counting on this, in addition to the intrinsic happiness of sushi, to placate me. We order goma-ae, hijiki, futomaki, kappamaki, and an impressive array of raw things on rice rectangles.” It’s one of the more graceless attempts that I’ve read by an author to shoehorn irrelevant agendas into a fiction— the book will even give you directions to some of these places, and their owners all get thanked in the acknowledgments.

But if you want an example of successfully integrating the setting into the mood and character of a piece, go to Ferris, who used Chicago pretty decently in his first-person-plural debut, Then We Came To The End, and sets most of The Unnamed in and around New York City. The hero here is Tim Farnsworth, an over-worked lawyer who doesn’t spend enough time with his family anyway but spends even less when afflicted with an unheard-of illness that drives him to set off on compulsory, involuntary walks. His legs have minds of their own, and his disease is weird, hilarious, pitiful and impossible to diagnose or cure.

The Unnamed takes the right note from White Noise, the paranoia-fueled college campus of which mirrors the suburban upper-middle class malaise of Tim and his wife and daughter. Pre-apocalypse looms throughout the book; nature itself seems to be whispering in Tim’s ear that though he may feel alone, he is not. The city of New York is Tim’s comfort zone and he is often stricken to leave it, on foot, to nowhere and for no purpose.

You take these two afflictions at face value and they are pretty much the same thing:  Tim and Henry are forced to cope with implausible, unbelievable diseases that threaten to destroy their marriages. The compulsory walking and the compulsory time travel relentlessly destroy everything from their physical bodies to their emotional well-being. But even as Henry’s chrono-impairment is unlikely to ever strike in our real world, Tim’s walking takes on a fantastical quality that actually anchors the story in its dying-world setting. The phrase for this is “internal logic,” in which Ferris could give Niffenegger a lesson or two. The Unnamed feels like a more inventive fiction than a story about time travel, and then manages to strike at our very real heartstrings in the exact same way The Time Traveler’s Wife fails to. The threat to Tim’s marriage, sanity and body is palpable, the dénouement heartbreaking. The Unnamed is a fable of our times, dealing in personal disconnection, technophobia and globalization with a deep empathy. The Time Traveler’s Wife is just cheese, and Swiss at that, full of holes and short on ham.

Review: The Post-Birthday World

The Post-Birthday World, Lionel Shriver's 2007 "what-if" tale, hinges on a single moment in the life of children's book illustrator Irina McGovern. Irina, an American living in London with her long-time partner Lawrence, is spending an evening out with snooker star Ramsey Acton on his birthday when she's struck by an overwhelming desire to kiss him. From that point in the narrative, Irina's story is told in alternating chapters — one storyline in which she kisses Ramsey and the other in which she does not.

In the version in which Irina kisses Ramsey, she leaves Lawrence and embarks on the snooker circuit with the charming Ramsey, following him to tournaments all over the world and failing to get her illustration assignments in on time. The alternate story sees her remaining with Lawrence, a boring terrorism expert, and renewing her devotion to him. Set in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Princess Diana's death, September 11, and unrest in Northern Ireland all play in to the story, with different responses from Irina in each version.

The idea of a "what-if" story isn't anything new, but in telling the two possible outcomes of Irina's life, Shriver has written a jewel of a book with compelling characters and intricate plots. The alternating chapters feature many of the same events — such as Christmas in New York with Irina's domineering mother, a snooker tournament, and a literary awards ceremony — turned on their heads, and the same lines are often repeated, but different characters say them. Every major choice brings with it both good and bad consequences — in one version, Irina wins a major award, in the other she doesn't, in one version Ramsey wins a major tournament, in another he doesn't, and on and on. While we'll never know what could have happened if we chose something differently, and it's waste of time to consider the path we didn't take, it's to our benefit that Shriver decided to do that here.

Favorite 2009 Reads

As it is now the end of December, we're being inundated with "Best of 2009" and "Best of the Decade Lists." I've written many of these articles myself and usually find them to be little more than space fillers, but I do appreciate a chance to look back over the past year.

In 2009 I read 38 books, though most weren't published this year. I wouldn't pick up the majority again, though many of them were great reads. Herewith, the 10 best books I read in 2009.


1. The Magician's Elephant, by Kate DiCamillo

I've said many times how I find DiCamillo's writing luminous, moving and beautiful. In The Magician's Elephant, she takes it to a whole new level, telling the story of an orphan in search of his sister.

2. The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, edited by Vendela Vida

The writers featured are a mix of well-known and up-and-coming authors, and the intelligence of both the interviewers and interviewees makes this a dynamic read.

3. The Member of the Wedding, by Carson McCullers

After trying and failing to read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, I picked up this novella and immediately fell in love with 12-year-old Frankie, her cousin John Henry West and her maid Berenice, the main characters in this tragic tale.

4. Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace

Reading Infinite Jest is the most ambitious reading project I ever undertook, and for that reason it is on this list. It's not the best book I read all year, but it was great, as was the satisfaction I felt when turning the last page.

5. City of Refuge, by Tom Piazza

The story of two very different experiences with Hurricane Katrina, City of Refuge is a heart-breaking, gorgeously-written story. I loved it.

6. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson

I rarely read thrillers, but like to pick them up on occasion. Larsson's intricate, electric tale is terrific.

Honorable mentions: The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz; Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, by Wells Tower; Looking for Alaska, by John Green; and Garlic and Sapphires, The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise, by Ruth Reichl.

Review: Netherland

The cover of the paperback copy of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland declares that it is not only a national bestseller but also the winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award and a New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year, accomplishments that make it both a critical and popular success. Plus, President Obama loved it, and who doesn’t want to take book recommendations from the President of the United States? It recently took me a couple weeks to read Netherland, despite being a volume of 256 pages, and while there were points where I was ready to declare O'Neill my new favorite writer, at many others I was lost, wondering why he was writing what he was.

Netherland is the story of Hans, who is from The Hague, but is working in London's financial sector around the turn of the 21st century, when he and his wife Rachel, a lawyer, decide to relocate to New York. We know what that means — September 11 is going to play a role. In New York, Hans begins to play cricket, a sport he played in his youth, and which unearths memories of his childhood in the Netherlands.

Hans’ friendship with Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian immigrant, cricket umpire and businessman, and his relationship with Rachel, which is beginning a slow decline into irrelevance, are smashed together in Hans’ chronologically mixed up tale. O'Neill weaves the stories together in such a way that neither feels like it is being fully told — not necessarily a problem, but here I wished for more.

When I began Netherland, I was sitting in the library and read the first 10 pages before dinner. Afterwards, I told everyone at dinner how I just started the most brilliant book, one reminiscent of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, like this passage from the second page:

Now that I, too, have left that city, I find it hard to rid myself of the feelng that life carries a taint of aftermath. This last-mentioned word, somebody once told me, referes literally to a second mowing of grass in the same season. You might say, if you're the type prone to general observations, that New York City insists on memory's repetitive mower — on the sort of purposeful post-mortem that has the effect, so one is told and forlornly hopes, of cutting the grassy past to manageable proportions.

The next time I picked up the book, it felt like an entirely different work, one without the same magic I found in the introductory pages. I found myself caring less and less about Hans' mid-life crises and about nearly anything that involved Chuck. O'Neill devotes less time to the motley crew that resides at the Chelsea Hotel than I would like. But I kept reading, and there were sections where 50 pages would slip away with little effort, and I found myself re-reading lines, the surest sign that I admire an author's writing. While Netherland isn't the impeccable gem I thought it would turn out to be, it is a wonderfully-written novel, and a melancholy assessment of post-9/11 life.

The Boyfriend List

Todd, who is also known as my boyfriend, contributed this post on The Boyfriend List by E. Lockhart. To contribute a review or other literary musings to Attic Salt, e-mail atticsaltblog@gmail.com.

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A friend of mine (and contributor for The Misfits' Book Club) has been relentlessly throwing young adult fiction at me all year. Her most recent recommendation was the work of E. Lockhart, who's had her name on seven books in four years with an eighth due in 2010. Her 2005 debut was The Boyfriend List, which follows the exploits of high schooler Ruby Oliver as she suffers through a particularly heartbreaking sophomore year. This is the first in a series. If you told me last week I was going to get really into the four-book saga of a heartsick fifteen-year-old girl, I might've doubted you.

The book is structured against Ruby's list of the fifteen boys that have been, in one way or another, subject to her affections. Each gets his own chapter as Ruby dissects the relationships (or lack thereof) with her therapist. Sure, it sounds groan-worthy, but the novel, like any good work unfairly ghettoized onto that "young adult" shelf, quickly transcends its gimmickry thanks in part to expert plotting but mostly to Lockhart's uncanny ear for her young protagonist's voice.

Ruby is a dazzling creation. She makes coy use of footnotes and slang and has favorite words that she overuses. Ruby is the most lifelike narrator I've read in a while, flawed and selfish yet self-aware, in pursuit of self-improvement and validation. She's also profoundly sad and misunderstood, the victim of a social network that emphasizes labels and hierarchies and flourishes through texting and emailing but fails to promote any kind of real communication.

As with most high school-set stories of heartbreak, teenagers' inability to communicate honestly with each other is the thematic focus of The Boyfriend List. Ruby allows herself to be groped in a movie theater by a jock she barely knows (she discovers she kind of likes it); she responds to a sincere display of friendship by Boy #14 with a harmful and cruel "Fuck off." It's one in a string of devastating moments, leading me to desire throughout the story that I might sit Ruby down and impart some brotherly advice.

But the mistakes of adolescence are as easy to rue with perfect hindsight as they are to make, blindly, in the moment. The book is filled with astonishing set pieces that are far more exciting and suspenseful than I would've expected from a first-person coming-of-age story such as this. One breathless sequence revolves around the day the senior class is passing out roses and carnations ordered by friends, crushes, lovers and secret admirers among the underclassmen. Ruby waits all day in the hope that she will receive the right flowers, watching as friends count their stems like so much loose change. It unfolds like the final-act heist in a crime movie.

The Boyfriend List comes across as Mean Girls without the satirical sheen — the harsh truths imparted here with comic relief as opposed to the other way around — and it works just as well. In fact, there are several plot points which mirror that film. It leads up to a girls' room confrontation by two former best friends which poses Ruby on her knees, her lap soaking wet. As symbolism goes, it's pretty weighty for a YA book, which just goes to remind you that you can't ignore something just because you're not in the marketed-to demographic. I have a hundred other books to read, but the sequels to this are going to leap high in priority just as soon as I pay off my overdue fines at the Chicago Public Library.

Her Fearful Symmetry

I really do like a good ghost story now and then, and Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger’s (The Time Traveler’s Wife) book, fits the bill. Set on the edge of Highgate Cemetery in London, Her Fearful Symmetry is the story of two pairs of twins, one set middle aged and living apart (one on London, one in Chicago) and the other set the daughters of the Chicago twin. When Elspeth, the London twin, dies, and requires that her nieces come live in her apartment without their parents for a year in order to inherit it, the events of the novel are set in motion.

When Valentina and Julia arrive in London, they begin to take over their aunt’s old life. They meet her neighbors, like Martin, an obsessive-compulsive crossword puzzle maker, who can’t leave his apartment, and Robert, Elspeth’s younger boyfriend, who is writing his doctoral thesis on Highgate. They’re also haunted by Elspeth, who declares — “a bad thing about dying is that I’ve started to feel as though I’m being erased. Another bad thing is that I won’t get to find out what happens next.” — and then sticks around to find out what does.

There’s the ghostly mystery of Elspeth’s haunting Robert and the twins, but the living mystery about what happened to cause a rift between Elspeth and her twin Edie is much more interesting. The answers lie in Elspeth's old journals, which she leaves to Robert, but he is unable to let himself read them.

The world and underworld in Her Fearful Symmetry are populated by truly awful, selfish characters — Julia won’t let Valentina finish college or attend design school so she can remain with Julia forever, Martin’s wife runs away to Amsterdam since she can’t handle his obsessions, Elspeth isn’t quite the friendly ghost she seems at first — but they manage to pull you in, much like they pull various characters into their webs of deceit.

About three-quarters through, the novel takes a rather morbid turn, but Niffenegger is a brilliant plotter and her text, which is fantastical from page one, gets even more so. She uses the supernatural in her books, but it never seems like it actually is, and Her Fearful Symmetry evokes 19th century sensation novels. Dark, eerie and often funny, Her Fearful Symmetry is meant to be read while curled up under a blanket on a cold winter's night.

The Girl Who Played With Fire

When I finished Stieg Larsson's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo in August, I wanted to run right out and get its sequel The Girl Who Played With Fire, but I decided that I should wait a little while and read some other things first. I hate when books in a series start to blur together, and I wanted to keep these separate. I was able to dive right back in to the underworld of Swedish crime, since Larsson picks right back up where he left off.

The Girl Who Played With Fire revisits the main characters from the first book — Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist, Lisbeth Salander, a computer hacker, Blomkvist's colleagues at Millennium magazine, and Salander's former boss at a security company. Here, Millennium is working with a couple who are writing an exposé about sex trafficking in Sweden, and when they wind up dead, Salander's fingerprints are on the gun. When Salander's former guardian also ends up dead, there's a country-wide manhunt for her.

Larsson once again is an intricate plotter and master of suspense — he takes us into seedy worlds with kidnappings and has Salander and Blomkvist communicate via his hacked computer. And the books are high tech without being confusing for those of us who don't understand hacking.

I didn't think this book was quite as good as Dragon Tattoo, but that's partly because these were already characters we were familiar with, and we weren't introduced to any great new characters. But it's satisfying that Larsson picks up right where he left off and gives Salander and Blomkvist another rousing adventure.

I'm sure I'll read The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, though I'm not going to run out and get it when it is published in the U.S. I want to give myself another little break, since these books are so satisfying they should be read sparingly.

Dead Until Dark

Emmyjean contributed this post on Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris. To contribute a review or other literary musings to Attic Salt, e-mail atticsaltblog@gmail.com.

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"'I have taken some night classes in psychology,' said Bill Compton, vampire."

This should give you an idea of what we're facing in Dead Until Dark, the first entry in Charlene Harris' Southern Vampire Mystery series.  Exposition so clunky it had me barking with laughter in public.  The incongruous pairing of would-be courtly language with present-day buzzwords.  And of course, vampires. Fucking vampires. 

When our grandchildren look back on the early 21st century mass cultural orgasm over vampires and ask us what that was all about, I'll have no good answer for them.  Sure, one could spin together a nice tale about fascination with vampires dating back to tales of Vlad the Impaler, told 'round a crackling Carpathian peasant's fire.  Bram Stoker would surely get a entry, trying to justify the vampire fascination as being part of a powerful literary tradition about the seductive power of evil.  

And then when I got to the Southern Vampire Mysteries, I'd blame them all on George W. Bush. 

This book, ostensibly about the collision between two exotic worlds, is in fact a celebration of their mutual mediocrity. Bon Temps, Louisiana is stuffed with unloveable losers.  There's our heroine Sookie, a waitress with few aspirations beyond sunbathing and slinging beers at Merlotte's. Her brother Jason is beautiful but proudly dumber than the sacks of asphalt he spreads as a road crew worker. Pity poor Arlene, beer slinger and single mother incapable of learning from her (many) encounters with bad men that she is not, in fact, an actual doormat. Sookie's lug of a friend from high school is still holding onto old football rivalries. Her Gran's old lady friends salivating over shared memories of the "Glorious War."  Even the vampires themselves, supposedly dripping in glamor and mystery, spend their nights at a bar in a Louisiana strip mall. Denizens of Bon Temps, undead or otherwise, aspire to nothing greater than their next beer or roll in the hay and/or coffin, yet they wear their stupidity, provincialism and prejudices as badges of pride. It's easy to imagine Sarah Palin referring to them as "real Americans." At least Twilight eventually sent its heroes to Italy. 

Speaking of Twilight and its feminist critiques, Dead Until Dark at least has the decency to grant our heroine a life outside of her vampire paramour.  Sookie may claim to be all boobs and no brains, but she is also a telepath (a "gift" or "curse" depending on the requirements of the scene).  That we would praise our narrator having experiences or thoughts outside of those immediately related to her boyfriend seems ridiculous, but in a post-Twilight world this makes her uniquely self-possessed.  Of course, it is Sookie's odd inability to read Bill's thoughts that draws her to him.  Because the key to a relationship is stony silences and unanswered questions. 

It bears mentioning that True Blood, the HBO series based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels, is everything the books want to be but fall short of. Cameras linger over titillating sex scenes that on the page cut away to a moonlit sky and wind in the trees; characters drawl with hilariously overdone Louisiana accents; the opening credits teem with images of Southern Gothic tropes like menacing Klan members and tent revivals. Where the Skinemax-inspired show prances about with tongue firmly in cheek, the amatuerish writing of its source material comes off as cut-rate fanfic. True Blood is lusty, campy, and in on the joke where Dead Until Dark remains, well, bloodless.

The Mysterious Benedict Society

Though the third book in the Mysterious Benedict Society series was released on October 6, I didn't hear of the books until late September while browsing at D.C.'s Kramerbooks. The cover of The Mysterious Benedict Society (2007) was a draw, as it, and the illustrations in the book, are done by Carson Ellis, who does artwork for the Decemberists.

I ordered the first book from the library shortly thereafter, and tore through it in a couple sittings. It's the story of a group of children who take a series of obscure tests to see if they qualify for "special opportunities." The four who pass end up at Mr. Benedict's house, where he briefs them on a secret mission in which they must go undercover at the Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened and expose evil.

That's all I'm going to say about the plot (and it's nothing you wouldn't learn from the blurb on the inside jacket), since this is a book you want to discover for yourself. It's witty and funny, scary and sad, clever and imaginative. Stewart has created characters that have forbears in other classic children's tales (The Boxcar Children, A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Bobbsey Twins), but his world requires more mental gymnastics and derring do than in other books.

The Mysterious Benedict Society also resulted in one night's sleep and a nap in which my dreams involved complicated adventures and puzzles. I think that's an indication that I want to fall right into Mr. Benedict's world. I'm going to read a couple other books, then will be picking up The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey (2008) and The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma (2009).

That Old Cape Magic

Richard Russo's latest novel, That Old Cape Magic, published in August, doesn't quite have the magic that his 2002 book Empire Falls effortlessly exudes. Here we have the story of Jack Griffin, a screenwriter and professor in his late fifties, whose marriage is starting to disintegrate and who is haunted by his parents, one living and one dead (and rattling around in an urn in Jack's trunk).

The novel is based around two weddings, one of his daughter's childhood friend on Cape Cod, and his daughter's in Maine. Together they bookend a year in which Jack must deal with his failing marriage and his inability to move past his parents' problems. Jack's parents were also college professors, but they were unable to secure jobs at East Coast colleges and were instead exiled to a large university in the Midwest. They spend summers on the Cape, staying in a different town and different house each summer, always looking for something better.

That something better never comes, and they are never able to buy a property of their own. Jack's parents' marriage falls apart as well, and when Jack marries he keeps his wife and daughter away from his parents, who are snobby and pretentious. But his mother is also a firecracker.

Russo just doesn't seem to have it here. He's created his expected funny scenes, and a wide cast of characters that are for the most part endearing (especially Jack's parents, who save the book). He's also a lovely writer. But Jack is aggravating and the plot is predictable. The lessons Jack has to learn are obvious to us from the start, and when they finally hit Jack over the head, we're just as relieved that it's over.

The Magician's Elephant

Kate DiCamillo's new book, The Magician's Elephant, which was published in early September by Candlewick Press, follows in the tradition of her other books in several ways. We see, as we've seen in at least one of her other books — The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, The Tale of Desperaux and Because of Winn-Dixie — animal characters, lonely children, understanding adults, an important journey and life lessons. We also see, as we've come to expect from DiCamillo, exquisitely wrought prose and a heart-rending tale.

The Magician's Elephant is about an orphan named Peter, who is being raised by an old soldier determined to have Peter follow in his footsteps. One day Peter learns that the sister he thought had died is actually alive, and a fortune teller instructs him to follow the elephant to find her.

Meanwhile, a magician attempting to summon flowers out of thin air summons an elephant instead. The elephant breaks a woman's legs, and the magician is thrown into prison.

The stories of Peter and the magician are interwoven with those of Adele, Peter's sister, the couple who live below Peter and the soldier, an hunched-over stonecutter, and others. In each of her books, DiCamillo creates a half dozen characters who would be worthy of books on their own. She does it again here — each story depends on the others, but is also wonderful in its own right.

DiCamillo is a marvelous storyteller, and an equally skilled writer. The Magician's Elephant may be a fable, but I think it's her most sophisticated work yet.

In the Attic with Nicholas Sparks

Nicholas Sparks is the best-selling author of books like The Notebook and A Walk to Remember. His new book, The Last Song, was released September 8, and a film version of the book hits screens in January. He will be in D.C. this weekend for the National Book Festival.

You haven't participated in the National Book Festival before. What are you looking forward to?

It's always nice to meet and talk with the readers who enjoy my work and tell those who are interested and show up to my talk a little bit about what I do and who I am. And honoring reading and literacy in general is always a wonderful thing.

What was the inspiration for your new novel, The Last Song?

Always when I sit down to write a novel, I try to write something different from anything readers have read from me before. There are many ways to do that — structure, setting, or one of the easiest is the ages of the characters in question. In my previous books, characters range from their 20s to 40s, and Nights in Rodanthe was 40s and 50s. So I said I didn't want to do a novel with characters age 20 to 50, and said I could either do another teen story, which I hadn't done since A Walk to Remember, or a more mature story, since I hadn't done that since The Wedding or The Notebook. I was leaning toward a teenage story, and since A Walk to Remember was about a boy, I wanted to do one about a girl.

Coincidentally at that time, Offspring Entertainment called and said that Disney had a two-option movie deal with Miley Cyrus, who was currently doing Hannah Montana. She loved A Walk to Remember, and they asked if I had anything that Miley might be interested in, and I said 'no, but funny you should mention that.'

What was it like writing a screenplay and novel so close together? Which one did you write first?

I wrote the screenplay first, and it was easy. Screenplays are easy and I don't find them nearly as challenging as a novel. They're much, much shorter and are all about the story. The hard part is coming up with the story. Once you understand the screenplay structure, with three acts, plot points, and understand the mechanics, it's just writing. Then when I finished it, I sent it off two Disney, wrote two revisions and sat down to write the novel.

You’ve seen so many of your books turned into movies. What’s it like to see stories and characters you create on screen?

It's a lot of fun. I've been very fortunate that the movies have been good ones and very close to the spirit and integrity of the novel. They've also been well received at the box office.

What do you think about the state of literacy in this country?

My opinions are just that, my opinions, but I think that one of the goals in education in general, at least at the high school level, should be to encourage reading, whether fiction of non-fiction. I understand everyone reading common literature, but it is a narrow set of books written hundreds of years ago that students are supposed to read. I'm not sure those encourage the joys of reading. Schools would be well served to broaden their curriculum and allow students to read books by modern authors, classics that aren't on the curriculum yet, so to speak, to encourage reading in general. And that's best served by having students pick the kind of books they want to read.

Photo credit: Alice M. Arthur