Read 52 books in 2006

I don’t feel like writing a review of this book at the moment, but go out and read it! It’s a book that makes me want to read everything this author has ever written. Incredibly clever story of academics and their eccentricities, gypsies, lost manuscripts, sexual deviance, murder, angels and devils, and a really intelligent female protagonist. If you’re smart and you know it, and you ain’t afraid to show it, this is the book for you.

This book is great for a brainy beach read. A series of events that take place shortly after the Restoration of Charles II in Oxford, England are told from the perspective of four different people. Not surprisingly, they all have a very different take on it. A very clever use of the unreliable narrator tactic, and the well-researched details are superb.

This is a really good book and I recommend it to people who are familiar with Irving’s work and to people who have never read him before. I don’t recommend it to people who hate John Irving for all those Irving-y things he does, because he does a lot of them in this book. Yes, there’s an older woman seducing a too-young boy, lectures about how great wrestling is, a host of characters with larger-than-life personae, crazy stories that would probably never happen in real life but you get the feeling that they probably did happen. All those Irving-y annoyances and what have you.
But! This is a great book. There’s an amazing moment in the book where all of the personal myths and legends that the main character has told himself about himself, the wacky characters he knew in his childhood, his missing father, his eccentric but good-hearted mother, his place in the world, everything – comes crashing down. The whole expensive set piece for the lyric opera gets trashed and burned. This is something new for a John Irving novel, and this is what makes it so much more personal and a deeper, more important work than some of his tighter and better-told stories.
The bad reviews you will read of this book complain of the following: it’s too long and it has too many characters to keep track of. (to which I say, Oh come on! The Simpsons has far more characters than that, and you remember all of them, don’t you!) It’s got silly John Irving themes. (Where’s the dancing bear? Yuk hyuk hyuk) It’s a John Irving novel about John Irving and is therefore too self-involved and annoying. The main character has no personality of his own, and he just lets crazy things happen to him and doesn’t try to stop them like a logical person would. All of these things are true, somewhat.
But the final criticism in that list bothers me, because the fact that the main character has no personality is a MAIN POINT of the friggin’ book. The book is, in large part, about child sexual abuse. It’s written from the point of view of the victim, who for most of his life has no idea that anything out of the ordinary happened to him. He talks about his sexual encounters in a matter-of-fact way because it’s all part of what he considers normalcy. This book carries in its heart a dark, sad, broken reality that has finally come into the light of day. It’s absolutely heart-rending to read it, and the story is made more real by its complex layering of finely drawn characters and Jack’s relationships with them.
This book is not all sadness and heavy themes, though – in fact, the lightness of the book is part of what makes it so surreal. There is a lot of genuine joy, too – and a virtual travelogue of northern european cities, a comprehensive look at the world of tattoo art, and a celebration of organ music. The end of the book is the only part that rings somewhat false, but this does not render the whole book any less satisfying to me. I highly recommend this book, warts and all.

My first book of the year is The Gate to Women’s Country by Sheri S. Tepper. This is sort of cheating, because I’ve read the book before, about 6 years ago. But as I re-read it, I realized that I had forgotten almost the entire plot and cast of characters, though I remembered the gist of the story. I would say there is a lot to discuss here (and argue over!) about traditional male and female roles, eugenics, building an ideal society, transparency in government…. all wrapped in an interesting and engaging story. It took me a while to get into her style of writing, it’s a little overwrought at times. The descriptions of the setting are a little too wordy and lavish, without giving us a really good mental picture of the scene. You know it’s a sci-fi/fantasy novel if the word “darkling” appears more than once, yo. Let’s try to break out of the mold when we write our speculative fiction, OK? One thing I really did appreciate about the book is Tepper’s use of a re-imagined Greek tragedy about Iphigenia at Troy as the society’s central myth. (the ghost of Iphigenia, obviously.) The gist of the play is that in the Greek tragedies and epics, the focus is on the heroism of the men, and no thought is given to the women and children who are sacrificed and swept away in their male path of destruction. Of course, anyone who’s read Aeschylus’s “Agamemnon” knows that this is not the case – Clytemnestra certainly doesn’t get lost in the shuffle! Neither does Medea, who kills her children rather than give them over to Jason, which would be a fate worse than death. The thing that is most interesting to me is not how women are represented in Greek tragedies versus the society in Women’s Country, but the fact that the characters in Greek plays are pawns in the larger game of the gods. They do horrible things because it is their fate to do so. So a Greek play is an interesting choice for the central theme of this book, which is about a society that is not heavily religious, in which women shape their own fates and the fates of men. Hmmmmm…..