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: Yours Ever: People and Their Letters

To someone fond of the written word (and especially the hand-written word), Yours Ever: People and Their Letters should be a delight. Thomas Mallon, author of 2007's Fellow Travelers and other novels, has written a meditation on the (mostly) lost art of letter writing, and he explores what happened when people picked up a pen, or sat down at their typewriters, and composed thoughtful missives. What happened then was that the writer and recipient had a physical object worthy of saving, and they also had a written account of love, confession, war, or faith (four of the categories that Mallon files letters under). What happens now is that we're able to read these enduring accounts of the past and better understand what it was like to live then.

In the introduction, Mallon touches on the problems that e-mail poses to enduring intimate correspondence, but after the introduction, he uses snippets of letters to speak for themselves. It's clear from reading each chapter that most of the letters could ever have been sent as e-mail (or text messages). "Addictive gratifications have replaced the old, slow anticipation of the daily visit from the mailman," Mallon writes. But for all the virtues of letter-writing, while it's up to the letter-writer to pen something worth stashing away somewhere, it's up to the recipient to actually do that. Because of that, in some cases, only half-sides of correspondence exist, and Mallon pieces together the writer and recipient's relationship.

Some of the expected letter-writers are there -- Abelard and Heloise, George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell -- but Mallon digs deeper to fill the chapters with some surprising anecdotes. William Faulkner, newly arrived in New York, writes home that “things happen and then unhappen by the time I hear of them"; Scottie Fitzgerald pulls "checks and news" from her father's letters and then ignores the advice he penned within them (“Just do everything we didn’t do and you will be perfectly safe.”); Sullivan Ballou wrote to his wife right before going off to the Battle of Bull Run, which took his life.

But what should be a terrific read isn't one. Your Ever lacks a narrative drive, and the letters seem haphazardly linked, making reading this book trying at times. I wish that Mallon had printed the actual letters, as opposed to just snippets of them, to let the letters do the heavy lifting. Though not the most compelling read, Yours Ever is worth picking up and flipping through to mine for the insights that letter-writers like Oscar Wilde penned — if nothing else, Mallon has made me wish I had a handful of witty friends who wrote me letters.

Review: I Thought You Were Dead

It’s difficult for me not to take personally a book like Pete Nelson’s I Thought You Were Dead, a roman a clef set almost entirely in my hometown of Northampton, Massachusetts in 1998. This isn’t the first time Northampton has been featured in a popular entertainment; just this year, the action movie Edge of Darkness portrayed the quiet college town as a haven of terrorist activity (ha!) for Mel Gibson’s Boston police detective to uncover. Nelson’s portrait is remarkably close to my own reminiscence. When the novel’s protagonist, Paul, describes the teenagers bumming quarters and playing guitars on the unique sidewalks of my old stomping grounds, I find myself thinking, “I went to high school with those kids.” Paul eats breakfast at the same dim breakfast café I’ve frequented for my entire life and visit every time I go home.

The book is steeped in nostalgia for a time and place that I romanticize on a daily basis. Paul’s haunt is the Bay State, an old bar I’d always heard about but never got the chance to visit; it was renovated and transformed from dive to hotspot before I turned 21. As featured in Fountains of Wayne’s “Valley Winter Song,” I think of the Bay State as a fantasy home-away-from-home in a place I can no longer accurately call home. Nelson depicts the Bay State as a den of alcoholism and stunted growth but also a place where nobody will judge you, everybody will be your friend and everybody knows your name. The bartender, Silent Neil, hasn’t uttered a spoken word since Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. It’s lost in the past; it’s where you go to lose yourself in the past.

Paul is a struggling writer and serious alcoholic, hoarding nips in his suitcase from his flight to Minneapolis, where his father has been laid up in the hospital after a stroke. He’s a childless divorcé, the black sheep in his family and he openly shares his girlfriend with another man. The only rock in Paul’s life is Stella, who is half-German shepherd half-yellow lab. At sixteen, Stella is beloved and ancient.

When they’re alone together, Paul and Stella converse in spoken English. This sounds like a gimmick but it never reads like one: Stella is the novel’s anchor as much as she is Paul’s, and she might be the most honestly, realistically developed character in the book. Stella’s demeanor is a comforting mixture of the ceaseless loyalty and charming naivete of Up’s Dug and the dry maternal sass of someone like Susan Sarandon. Her dialogues with Paul function as a device for him to work out his problems but they’re also a matter-of-fact portrait of friendship and co-dependence. On the first page, as Paul returns home from the bar in the midst of a snowstorm, Stella says to him, “I thought you were dead.” It’s a foreboding statement but it also lays the concrete for their relationship. Stella is a protective force and a symbol of every best intention.

With his father nearly paralyzed from stroke and Stella unable to climb the front steps, the shadow of his divorce and professional failure are almost small potatoes to Paul. It’s easy to understand why he drinks. The story is a by-the-numbers redemption arc, but at a swift 250 pages it never feels self-indulgent. Rather, it feels non-fictional. It feels honest.

Inevitably, I think of a night I spent with my then-girlfriend in an animal hospital five years ago. Her dog, Lucky, was there under dire circumstances and wouldn’t make it to the next morning. In the waiting room of an emergency veterinary clinic late at night, you will find only sad faces, and two particularly stuck with me from that night. One was a muscular thirty-something man dressed in Carhartts and the other was my girlfriend’s father: both the strange and the familiar were red-faced pictures of deep masculinity wounded to the core by a dying puppy. I Thought You Were Dead is a story of the fragility of masculinity.

Paul has never felt quite “man” enough to meet the requirements of adult life: he’s consistently losing to his war veteran father, his successful lawyer brother, his ex-wife’s new fiancé, his new girlfriend’s other boyfriend. In the course of the novel he will break out of his inertia and achieve peace – this is the clear path from the start. Nelson’s great achievement, though, is not the ending but the course he takes to get there. Rather than build a false optimism for the future (he comes close), the concentration is on putting your demons to rest. A necessary first step.

Paul’s (and Pete’s) Northampton is a waiting room, a place where you can drown your sorrows (or soak them, at least, as Paul suggests at one point) but also where you’ll have the time, the space and the community you need to work your problems out. Northampton, like a great dog, has stuck by me and made me the man I am (or try to be) today; it seems to have done the same for Pete Nelson and his fictionalized alter-ego. And like a beautiful hometown, a great dog is going to stick with you long after terrible circumstance has pulled you apart. I Thought You Were Dead is a dirge, an ode to the hazy, drunken past. Or at least, that’s what it is to me.

•••••

Todd Detmold, a native of Northampton, Massachusetts, enjoys comfortable, stable relationships with his family, his loved ones and the bars of his beloved hometown. To contribute a review or other literary musings to Attic Salt, e-mail atticsaltblog@gmail.com.

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.

•••••

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: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Let me get right to the point: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, a 2009 mystery by Alan Bradley, is pretty darn charming. And really, what else could it be, when you have obsessive stamp collectors, a 30-year-old mysterious death, a tiny English hamlet, and a narrator who is an 11-year-old chemistry genius?

Flavia de Luce (I forgot to mention that all the names are amazing), narrates the story from Bishop's Lacey, a small town in England. She lives in Buckshaw, a rambling old mansion complete with man-made lake and island. Precocious and witty, Flavia lives with her older sisters, vain Ophelia and bookish Daphne, and their father, Col. de Luce, who is retired and collects stamps. Rounding out the household are Dogger, a jack-of-all-trades who suffers from PTSD, and Mrs. Mullet, who comes each day to make the family some truly hideous pies.

Notably absent is Harriet de Luce, Flavia's mother. She died in a mountaineering accident when Flavia was three, and she continues to haunt every character in the novel. It isn't a literal haunting, but her presence is everywhere, from her old car that Flavia and the Colonel sit in when they need to think to her untouched sitting room, which serves as a sort-of shrine. But more on her later.

Flavia's life takes an exciting turn the day she finds a dead bird with a stamp impaled on its beak on her doorstep, and she witnesses her father arguing with a strange man. Later that night she hears the strange man's last words as he dies in the family's cucumber patch. Flavia decides to investigate the mystery herself, and she rides her bike all over Bishop's Lacey, making several visits to the archives of the library and interviewing townspeople who met the dead stranger.

As Flavia pieces together her investigation, she learns that her father went to school with the dead man, and that the two were involved in some very shady dealings relating to a missing stamp. This connection leads to her father's arrest, and Flavia goes right to the police station and hears his side of the story. Learning of his innocence fuels her desire to complete the investigation and clear his name. She's one step ahead of the detectives on the case at all times, and while I stayed ahead of Flavia on a few points, the solution was satisfying.

There are flaws here, to be certain, including the writing. I have never seen such an incredible use of similes in my entire life, and some are laughably bad. Some examples:

"Taking care not to jiggle the curtains, I peeked out into the kitchen garden just as the moon obligingly came out from behind a cloud to illuminate the scene, much as it would in a first-rate production of A Midsummer Night's Dream."

"Feely and Daffy were sitting on a flowered divan in the drawing room, wrapped in one another's arms and wailing like air-raid sirens."

"At first Father's unaccustomed words came slowly and hesitantly — jerking into reluctant motion like rusty freight cars on the railway.'

Besides the distracting nature of the constant barrage of comparisons, Bradley needs to do more with Harriet. She is a thoroughly compelling character, in part because her death seems mysterious — she was climbing mountains in Tibet with no one else from her family. As more Flavia de Luce mysteries are on their way, I forsee Bradley delving into her life and influence on her husband and daughters.

Despite its flaws, The Sweetness of the Bottom of the Pie is fun. Read with tea and don't put it down until you finish it.

Review: Scar Tissue

With the exception of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, I don't read much poetry. But after I kept seeing Charles Wright's name pop up various places, I checked Scar Tissue, his 2006 collection, out of the library. Wright, who won the Pulitzer Prize for 1998's Black Zodiac, has published 19 volumes of poetry, two since Scar Tissue.

In Scar Tissue, Wright explores nature and God, though language is also a subject here. He writes in long lines, uses inventive metaphors and regularly employs assonance. Wright's poems have a lovely lyrical quality and share observations and ideas that seem almost preternaturally wise.

Wright was born in the South and spent time in Italy both in the army and later as a Fulbright scholar. In his poems, Italian cities and landscapes intertwine with Southern ones — the two locations factor in to the theme of nostalgia that's an undercurrent in some poems and front and center in others: Nostalgia arrives like a spring storm, / Looming and large with fine flash, / Dissolving like a disease then / into the furred horizon, / Whose waters have many doors, / Whose sky has a thousand panes of glass.

Wright's work is lovely and deeply visual — it's easy to imagine someone painting a picture to match his words — but the sound of his words together is even more beautiful. It was all I could do not to read the entire collection aloud.

Review: Talking About Detective Fiction

In Talking About Detective Fiction, P.D. James deftly explores the history of detective novels in both Britain and America, and posits that contemporary unrest will lead to a renewal of interest in detective writing. James roots the genre in Wilkie Collins’ 1868 The Moonstone and traces its growth through the years, concentrating on the “The Golden Age” of detective writing – the period between the World Wars – and discussing the women writers she feels were instrumental in establishing the genre’s current reputation.

James is perhaps the best person to write a history of the genre that she’s been so prolific in, and she folds in her own writing experiences – important, since leaving out her own contributions would be an oversight. She does so casually, never making her work the focus of any one section, and explains why certain facets of the genre – such as never writing in first person, since that way readers only get one perspective of the case – work for her.

The most famous detective in literature, Sherlock Holmes, shares a chapter with G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, and James presents Holmes as the “unique, the unchallenged Great Detective, whose brilliant deductive intelligence could outwit any adversary, however cunning, and solve any puzzle, however bizarre.”

James discusses Arthur Conan Doyle’s publication history, and explores the relationship between Holmes and Watson, noting that the Watson prototype — “the stupid friend of the detective… should be slightly, but no more than slightly, less intelligent than the average reader, and his thoughts should not be concealed” — doesn’t appear in as many detective novels as he once did. (You should also go read this great article on Holmes’ London that appeared in the January issue of Smithsonian Magazine)

She also notes Agatha Christie’s popularity while downplaying her effect on detective novels:

Agatha Christie hasn’t in my view had a profound influence on the later development of the detective story. She wasn’t an innovative writer and had no interest exploring the possibilities of the genre. What she consistently provided is a strong and exciting narrative, the challenge of a puzzle, an accommodating and accessible style and original detectives in Poirot and Miss Marple, whom readers can encounter in book after book with the comfortable assurance that they are meeting old friends.

James later writes that “rereading a selection of her stories to affirm or modify my existing prejudices I found some lost even their ability to keep me reading. Others surprised me by being both better written and more ingeniously puzzling than I remembered." James prefers the work of writers like New Zealander Ngaio Marsh, who was deft at characterization.

After she presents Collins, Edgar Allan Poe and Conan Doyle as innovators, James traces how more contemporary authors have put their own spin on things – Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler wrote hard-boiled novels with a distinctly American flavor, and Dorothy L. Sayers wrote about murder in a new, realistic way – but she fails to identify any detective novelist from the last 50 years who has had a profound influence on the genre. While science has demanded an update in the way detectives use DNA evidence, it hasn’t changed the way they locate suspects. Detective novelists may have updated and adapted the formula for their time and country, but no one has stormed in and upended the genre.

James believes that an interest in detective fiction is on the rise, as “its popularity suggests that in the twenty-first century, as in the past, many of us will continue to turn for relief, entertainment and mild intellectual challenge to these unpretentious celebrations of reason and order in our increasingly complex and disorderly world.”

Talking About Detective Fiction is a quick read and a nice, historical look at the genre for those who are familiar with it or want to know where to start. James doesn’t unearth anything new or groundbreaking, but she shows that despite the changes in technology, society and law enforcement in the last century, a quaintness remains in the detective novel, and it can survive because it offers a sense of comfort and escape for readers.

Review: When You Reach Me

When I was younger I used to try to read my way through the list of Newbery Award winning books, and I've probably read about half of the winners. In recent years, though, I've fallen off — the last I read was Kate DiCamillo's 2004 The Tale of Desperaux. But the buzz about Rebecca Stead's 2010 Newbery winning book, When You Reach Me, encouraged me to pick up the title, which has parallels and references to another Newbery winner, Madeleine L'Engle's 1963 winner, A Wrinkle in Time.

Set in 1979 Manhattan, When You Reach Me is about Miranda, a sixth grader who lives in a dodgy neighborhood with her single mom. One day Miranda finds a strange note that seems to come from the future, and the letter writer asks Miranda to tell him about her life so she can help prevent a tragedy. Suddenly unusual events start happening: Miranda's best friend stops talking to her after he gets punched on the street, Miranda's mother earns a spot on $20,000 Pyramid, the spare apartment key disappears, Miranda makes some new friends (and gains a crush), and an eccentric "laughing man" takes up residence on her corner. Any one of these events would be monumental to a 12-year-old, but combine them, and Miranda is on one heck of a ride.

So are readers — the more I think about it, the more I like this novel. Miranda's voice and narrative style remind me of an older version of Opal from Because of Winn-Dixie: inquisitive and friendly, she's very likable.

When You Reach Me jumps around temporally at the beginning, mirroring the theme of time travel that runs throughout the book, which means that the plot is revealed slowly at first and you feel nearly as disoriented as Miranda. But as the book goes on you realize that past, present and future are all happening at once and that Stead's work is that expertly plotted.

Stead sets When You Reach Me within a few blocks — the action takes place in Miranda's apartment building, at school, and at Miranda's part-time job — a small world, but a world large and full of possibility for a 12-year-old. It's also set 30 years in the past; it feels like of retro, like From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler or Harriet the Spy, which were actually written decades ago. So it's also part-historical novel, and kids can see what it was like to grow up without the Internet and those little gadgets adults carry around constantly.

All these aspects make When You Reach Me a great novel for kids, but it is just as enjoyable for adults. And you can read it in an afternoon — how many great books geared towards adults can you say that about?

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.

Review: Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

I pulled Ben Fountain's 2007 book Brief Encounters with Che Guevara off my bookshelf this week — I was looking for a volume of short stories to read, and I had read only the first, wonderful story, Near Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera, quite some time ago. The choice was a timely one, as Fountain has spent a great deal of time in Haiti and the earthquake-ravaged country factors into most of the eight stories in the book.

Fountain's treatment of Haiti is fascinating (he visited the country over two dozen times before writing the volume), and he writes in an essay in the back of the book that he conceived of Haiti as "the New World paradigm, ground zero for the confluence of forces that exploded with the coming of the Europeans. Empire, politics, power, economics, race, plus the more recent catalyst of environmental degradation… the sum total of five hundred years of complex history seemed to be coming to a boil in Haiti."

The dangerous, complex history of Haiti reaches its boiling point in stories like Rêve Haitien, in which an O.A.S. worker helps smuggle Haitian paintings out of the country, and Haitian traditions appear in The Good Ones Are Already Taken, when a soldier returns to America from a stint in Haiti to surprise his young wife with the news that he has also wed the voodoo goddess Erzulie.

Fountain also sets stories in Sierra Leone, where an aid worker gets involved with smuggling blood diamonds, and in Myanmar, where a Texas golf pro teaches generals how to golf and unwittingly helps facilitate deals between them and immoral businessmen. The final story, Fantasy for Eleven Fingers, written as a biographical essay, focuses on two European piano prodigies born with 11 fingers who are able to play a difficult piece. This story doesn't quite fit topically with the others, but Fountain's depiction of the pianists focuses on their outsider status, the same position that protagonists in the other stories hold.

In each of Fountain's stories, the protagonists are well-meaning, but often naive, men and women who end up ensconced in dangerous or seedy affairs but come out all right in the end. Fountain writes both sides of each conflict convincingly, offering insight into where both sides are coming from. While all of the stories are terrific, the ones depicting Haiti are the strongest, with Haitian politics, history, beliefs and culture all factoring in. Though the Haiti of today and the next several years may no longer resemble the Haiti in these stories, Fountain's work is a thoughtful and intelligent primer for those of us who know little about the country. It's also impeccably written, with long, beautiful sentences and unconventional metaphors. I'm eager to see what Fountain does next.

Review: Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession

Julie Powell, the author of Julie and Julia, in which she cooked her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French cooking in a year and then blogged about it, is back with a new memoir, this one about her foray into learning butchery. Unfortunately, Cleaving is also about the collapse of Powell's marriage to the "devoted" Eric and her affair with the charming D, a story that she would have been better off not telling — though it gives her opportunities to use meat metaphors to explain the decline of her marriage.

Unlike Julie and Julia, which had a structure (one year, cooking through a single book) and a goal (finishing the book), Cleaving has no such structure, and no clear goal (other than making sense of her relationships and learning butchery) and the book suffers for it. In the first part of Cleaving, Powell works as an apprentice for six months at a butcher shop in upstate New York, learning the ins and outs of cutting up animals. In the second part, she travels to Brazil, Ukraine and Tanzania to ostensibly learn about their butchery traditions, but those only merit a mention — she devotes more time writing about making out with one of her guides in Tanzania and getting her BlackBerry stolen during an attempted rape.

What do Powell and the reader learn by the end of the book? That Powell may not have come to terms with her relationships by the end of the book, but that she has proven to be obsessive and crazy. She continues to contact D, even after he breaks things off, waiting outside his office building for an hour and a half to give him a present she bought while on vacation with Eric:

The Monday after we return from France, I pull my first actual, for-real stalking. I easily convince myself it's only fair, after I've tried for so long to reach him in all the more usual, less invasive ways. I warn him ahead of time, via text, that I'll be there, with a gift. I wait for an hour and a half outside the door of the building where he works. When he finally comes out, my face melts into a soppy smile that I can't prevent at the sight of him But he merely grimaces as if in pain and keeps walking...

Though Powell and Eric have remained together, despite a separation period, and still spend holidays together, Eric is having an affair of his own — though why he doesn't just leave Powell is difficult to understand — that is continuing at the end of Cleaving.

While some of the sections where Powell writes about butchery are interesting and entertaining, for the most part the subject matter is appalling — pages of wallowing over D, pointless recaps of her travels, trying to convince the reader and herself that Eric is actually important to her — and painful to get through. But the writing is also a travesty. Powell's book is disorganized, makes countless attempts to explain things through Buffy the Vampire Slayer (fine if you're a fan, but I've never seen the show, and it seems silly for so many of your life's philosophies to come from one TV show), and includes many, many juvenile jokes and asides. Reading Cleaving feels like leafing through a sexed-up adolescent's journal, which she abandoned writing halfway through and never intended anyone to read. Stick with Julie and Julia, which, if not the best-written memoir out there, at least has an admirable premise.

Review: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

In Elizabeth Gilbert's new book, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, she begins her narrative at just about the same point she starts Eat, Pray, Love — firmly against the idea of marriage — but the surrounding circumstances in each book couldn't be more different. In the first book she is at the end of a disastrous first marriage and about to embark on a trip around the world to get over it, while in Committed, she is happily coupled with a man she met on that trip, yet unwilling to marry him since they both suffered through nasty divorces. A wrench is thrown into their plan to live unwed and happily ever after when Felipe is detained at at the Dallas airport for not having a visa; the quickest way to obtain one, to the horror of both parties, is through marriage.

The couple decide to go for it, but have to wait nearly a year before they're allowed to do so. Unable to be in the U.S., they head to southeast Asia, where they have little to do and Gilbert has plenty of time to warm up to the idea of marrying again. To do this, she decides to interview people she meets and read books about the history of marriage, in order to take a more intellectual approach to the idea. This is where the book is interesting — learning about marriage customs of the Hmong people, or that in ancient Rome two men could legally wed is pretty fascinating stuff. So is the story of Gilbert's grandmother, who suffered from a cleft palate and was allowed to obtain an education, travel, and have a job, since her family did not think she would wed. Lo and behold, she did wed, but in doing so, she gave up her autonomy. That's a point that Gilbert makes again and again — marriage only seems to hurt women, in that they earn less money than single women, their life spans are shorter, etc. But for men, they only seem to benefit from marriage, living longer and earning more money than single men.

Gilbert's own story does not pack the punch that her experiences in Eat, Pray, Love did. Being forced to marry the love of her life does not have the same emotional resonance that suffering a terrible divorce and subsequent depression does, and her narrative is less compelling. In the first memoir, there are real questions that the reader wants Gilbert to answer — will she move on from her divorce? How does each leg of her trip benefit her? But here, the only question is whether Gilbert will marry, a question we never doubt will be answered "yes," even when Gilbert is outlining how terrible marriage is for women. The main plotline doesn't have needed tension, and these sections just come across as awkward. It's lucky for her, then, that she includes as much research as possible, and disseminates this information in an approachable, casual way.

Gilbert says at the beginning that this won't be another Eat, Pray, Love, but it's a book that she needed to write and get out of her system. While it's nice to see some closure for Gilbert, I can't imagine that Committed is going to be a popular choice for book clubs.

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.

Review: The Liars' Club

Has there ever been a truly happy memoir of one’s childhood? Most seem to look back at the usually sad events of one’s early life with wit or nonchalance, as with Mary Karr’s first memoir, 1995’s The Liars’ Club. The overwhelmingly positive responses — including being named to the New York Times Book Review’s top ten books of 2009 — to her third, Lit, impelled me to start at the beginning. Her second, Cherry, was published in 2000.

The Liars’ Club is named for a group of her father’s friends, who spun tall tales while drinking beer when they weren’t working in Texas. But the name comes to include nearly everyone who is part of Karr’s childhood, from the mother who keeps hidden her former marriages, to her grandmother, dying of cancer, who wishes to erase the years of lying. Her older sister Lecia is her fellow traveler, and the two live briefly with their mother in Colorado after she divorces their father. But they return to Texas, to a town that is a producer of Agent Orange, and a black spot on the cancer frequency map.

It’s a tragic tale, filled with death and drinking and rape, but an eloquently told one. Karr is a poet, and her prose takes on a poetic lilt that occasionally betrays the gravity of the scenes she’s describing. This downplaying is expected; the elegance with which it is done is not.

With series and sequels I always take a break between volumes, not wanting them all to run together, and I will here as well. And I’ll likely have to — I had to wait several weeks for The Liars’ Club to arrive on the “C” hold shelf at the Mount Pleasant Library, and Lit hasn’t made a single appearance on the “New Arrivals” shelf.

Eating the Dinosaur

Todd contributed this post on Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman. To contribute a review or other literary musings to Attic Salt, e-mail atticsaltblog@gmail.com.

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According to the copy on the back of Chuck Klosterman's new collection of essays — copy he presumably wrote himself — the "larger theme" of Eating the Dinosaur is "something about reality… most of the core questions dwell on the way media perception constructs a fake reality that ends up becoming more meaningful than whatever actually happened."

Klosterman is a pop culture pundit. He makes his living writing about and discussing various aspects of our modern world that range from politics and the Internet to Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo and the television show Survivor. This is his sixth book, after two memoirs, an anthology of previously published journalistic essays and interviews, a novel and another collection of original essays. I've been following the guy for quite a while now and my opinion of him used to rise and fall by the extent to which I agreed with his opinions on a given film or band.

In Eating the Dinosaur, Klosterman has come into his own as a philosopher for the modern age. While he's previously been indispensible as a thinker and talking head in the consumption and analysis of popular culture, I think he has advanced now to a point where I would say his work is finally "Capital I" Important.

There is an overarching theme here, as stated, that was missing in his previous book of essays, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. From the quoted description, you'd think he might just be discussing cable news and the Internet. However, while those certainly come into play here, they are but two of several topics that get strung together in surprising and confounding theses that actually affect a deeper and more complicated engagement with the pervasive culture in which we all have no choice but to inhabit.

In "Oh, the Guilt," Klosterman draws a lengthy comparison between Kurt Cobain in his final days as a rock star and David Koresh, leader of the Branch Davidian sect that was burned alive at Waco. Both men, he posits, were victims of an iconography that they only kind-of asked for and couldn't handle, emotionally. In the final section of the book, "FAIL," he issues a lengthy treatise on the prophetic nature of Ted Kaczynski's manifesto "Industrial Society and Its Future." Klosterman ties this into a feeling, reflected throughout the book, that in the Information Age we have lost control of our technologies and are now slaves running along a superhighway with a minimum speed limit far beyond our reach.

But it's not all as heavy-handed as that summary might imply. At his most serious, Klosterman drops references to pop music and reality television and keeps the tone light and digestable. He also never preaches. As I closed the book I was left with a definite sense of paranoia about the world I live in, but simultaneously my fears were assuaged by Klosterman's optimism and intellectual bonhomie.

At the same time, what makes the book so important is that any conclusions reached about society or popular culture will vary wildly from reader to reader. Klosterman isn't afraid to say "I don't know;" he's merely in the business of asking questions that need to be asked. It's easy to write an essay about the inherent stupidity of the sitcom laugh track; Klosterman asks us to consider the laugh track's relationship to an American's daily dosage of 'courtesy laughter,' and what it says about us as a people that the device perseveres, like a cockroach, to this day.

I generally try to promote discussion of those aspects of our popular culture that generally go ignored by the intellectuals. The high-brow must consider the low-brow, and vice-versa. Survivor may be a bread and circus show for middle Americans condescended by coastal liberals, but it's also a thrilling examination of rat-in-a-maze sociology. At the same time, left-wing hero Ralph Nader must be considered as the swing of the 2000 election that sent America down the rabbit hole. We must consider all sides; we are all, in fact, in this together. In the simple battle to keep a conversation going, Klosterman is my brother-in-arms. Fight the good fight, man.

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 Invention of Hugo Cabret

The Invention of Hugo Cabret, with its hundreds of charcoal illustrations, film stills and hefty length, may be an atypical children’s book but the 2007 tome received much-deserved praise — it was awarded the Caldecott Medal last year and is being adapted for the screen.

Author Brian Selznick made a name for himself as an illustrator of children’s books, but The Invention of Hugo Cabret should make him a household name in the world of children’s literature. But with complex narrative structures, a richly imagined plot and more than 500 pages, The Invention of Hugo Cabret holds appeal for adults as well, particularly those with an interest in early cinema, a topic Selznick explores with a combination of deftness and whimsy.

The story, which is set in the 1930s, follows 12-year-old Hugo Cabret, who lives in a Paris train station, repairing clocks. An orphan, Hugo lives with his uncle, who mysteriously disappears one night, forcing Hugo to maintain a façade that his uncle is alive so he will not be sent to live in an orphanage.

Keeping him going is the fact that he holds a notebook bequeathed to him by his father, who repaired an automaton that he discovered in an old museum and wrote step-by-step instructions on how to do so in the notebook. A fire at the museum destroys the automaton and kills Hugo’s father, so for Hugo, finding and repairing the mechanical figure is imperative, since he is convinced that his father will be able to send him a message through the automaton.

Unfortunately for Hugo, who has brought the broken automaton to the station, he is forced to hand over the notebook to the man who runs the toy shop in the train station after he tries to steal toy parts. Hugo is unable to fix it until he meets a young girl, Isabelle, who wears the key to the automaton around her neck. Isabelle lives with the old man who runs the toyshop and she steals the notebook back for Hugo. Once repaired, the automaton draws a picture that sets the lives of all the characters in flux as strange histories and relationships emerge.

Words and illustrations pick up where the other left off seamlessly: pictures don’t illustrate the text; rather they stand alone, carrying the story forward. This device allows Selznick to tell a story that blends the literary and the artistic, appealing to the senses and drawing the reader further into the imaginative world that the author inhabits.

Selznick’s style, consisting of short paragraphs and sentences, is perfect for the 9-12 range, but The Invention of Hugo Cabret is more Hemingway novel than Dick and Jane book. Selznick writes:

Sometimes I come up here at night, even when I’m not fixing the clocks, just to look at the city. I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the world is a big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret is closely tied to the early days of cinema — Selznick delves into a semi-fictionalized plumbing of early French filmmaker Georges Méliès, who appears as a character in the book, and includes film stills from Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon, a classic 1902 short. The focus on early film, coupled with illustrations, gives the book a cinematic quality that filmmakers will likely find easy to harness.

Adapted from a review originally published in the Washington Blade.