PopCo by Scarlett Thomas

A clever fun read of a novel by a young British writer. The novel is about a company that makes products for kids and teens and it's at times too obvious in its critique of the marketing and corporatization of toys (easy easy target) but it's clever in that the protagonist is a code-maker/cracker and so naturally there are lots of codes and fun stuff included. The novel also references pretty much every bit of science and psychology that the average college freshman gets exposed to--Milgram, Turing, etc.--cocktail party science that I confess I enjoy. And then there's the math ... I don't object to math, I'm fine with math (my department recently mocked me for referencing prime numbers and how they relate to workshop--they don't! we split into groups!), but this math was definitely beyond me... and the novel has a clever way of dumbing it down. Thomas puts most of the math into the exposition. And so it is being explained to the protagonist when she is a little girl. So it can be explained really really simply. This trick could have backfired but the characters are set up to be people who talk about math in dialogue and so it works out just fine.

And there are some nice surprises in the end that make this a novel especially well suited to teenagers who haven't yet lost their idealism.

Nobody's Fool by Richard Russo

I love Sully. The elderly, stubborn pain in the rear protagonist of this novel is completely unavoidably loveable. And that's pretty much how all the characters react to him as well. They want to smack him (sometimes they do smack him) but they love him all the same. And the only way for that to feel believable--that such a jerk would be so universally loved--is for the reader to fall in love too. And how do you do that... it's a hard trick. Rabbit of Updikedom shares a lot of traits with Sully--cheats on spouses, sexualizes women constantly, abandons family members, behaves selfishly stubbornly and stupidly--and yet I want to smack Rabbit (twice) and don't love him at all. But Sully...I love Sully.

And I suppose it's because Russo makes Sully self-aware (he embarks the novel on a "stupid streak") and on the path to redemption (fresh start with grown son, good relationship with grandson), and a caretaker for quite a few members of the town (especially elderly women who he treats with great respect and affection). But it helps too that Sully is a working class guy who had a terrible father and who doesn't have a lot of prospects for the professional advancement that would get him out of this small town--which he doesn't want to leave anyway. Rabbit on the otherhand is an well-educated, well-off guy--and yes, that makes his behavior less forgiveable. Call it reverse classicism or maybe even condescension but it's real. The working class character--if treated fully and fairly (as in not stereotyped)--from small town America is probably almost always a more sympathetic character than the upper middle class guy from the suburbs.

Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick

This slim collage novel of an old woman's thoughts is full of gems I'd like to pull out of my pocket and study at will (in other words, I wish I could memorize paragraphs). It's really more like a portrait gallery than a novel--pictures line up next to each other in a deliberate order but placing it into a narrative is really up to the reader--like glimpsing someone else's consciousness without them organizing it first. A form that fits the subject well. It's also a novel that assumes a high level of cultural knowledge--no explanations but lots of references.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Often the phenom of connected stories bugs me--it feels publisher induced--but in this case the book really is all the stronger for having the title character star in a number of stories and appear in the rest. And Strout has managed to pull off stories that all feel individual and complete and link them together in a way that doesn't feel like she should have just expanded the links to write a novel instead. These need to be separate stories because they don't all center on Olive--but her brief appearances in those other stories still add dimensions to her character as we keep reading the book.

Basically Olive is a bitch. But she's more a bitch to her husband and son than to everybody else in town. To them she is the old woman who was once the scary elementary school teacher who sometimes reached out to them in ways that really mattered. So we see her struggle--humanely, she's a bitch you feel for--in the stories that center on her life, but we also see how compassionate and strong and loving she can be to those around her. The fact that she can't sustain that behavior nor play it out for those closest to her feels tragic and real in a way that's effective.

There's something Alice Munro-ish about Strout's writing, so part of me feels like, well, we've still got Munro, do we need Strout? but I'm going to go with yeah, we do. The more Munros the merrier.

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders

A funny very short novel (novella really) by the reigning master of satire. Phil is a robot-like creature who runs roughshod over the handful of residents of a neighboring country so small only one inhabitant--and only a part of that inhabitant at that--can fit in it at one time, so that the citizens all rotate, the rest standing as short term residents in Phil's land. And if that sentence makes sense to you, you've probably read Saunders before. If it didn't well, you should go see for yourself.

When I first read Saunders' early short stories, which largely mock corporate culture and mass consumerism, I really loved them, but over time began to feel if he didn't find some new aspect of the USA to make fun of, he was going to lose steam. And then Bush II came into office. And Saunders' fiction (I'm generalizing some here) and nonfiction seemed to focus mainly on the antics of our duly unelected government. And I don't have any problem with that, except for the fact that Bush II and co. are very easy targets--their actions, whether you agree with them are not, are so big. And in some ways I'm more interested in realist fiction and nonfiction about these times rather than satire--what is it really like to be profiled or spied on by your govt, what is it really like to go to war when all you wanted was a college education, what was it really like to live in Iraq under Hussein, what is it really like to live in Iraq now etc etc. So the moments when The BFR of Phil (which came out in 2005) works best for me are actually the least overtly allegorical ones--it's not the self-reporting media nor the goon drafting tactics of Phil--but rather the stranger aspects of the fiction that made me think and react the most. The stuff that goes well, you think what's going on is bad--just see where else it could lead.

Slaughter-house Five by Kurt Vonnegut

It's interesting reading books way late--as in long after the age when most people read them (in this case, lots of people seem to read Slaughterhouse-Five in high school) and also long after many other writers have written their own novels under the influence of this one (certainly Tom Robbins but even Tim O'Brien seems to have been affected). The great thing about Vonnegut though is that despite my having reached the age of almost-thirty-seven and of being aware of the novel and hearing people mention it for decades, I could never have predicted what was inside. I knew it was about prisoners of war and I knew it was by the author of the hilarious Cat's Cradle but I could never put those two things together and come up with a prediction of what would lie there in. And yet now that I have read it, it seems perfectly Vonnegutian. A serious but funny novel that uses the storytelling practices and philosophical beliefs of a group of aliens to perfectly depict post-traumatic stress in a soldier. If I had read this in high school (we read Cat's Cradle instead) I know there would have been much discussion of the Christ symbol of Billy Pilgrim and whether or not the aliens were real, but sometimes, I admit, it's nice just to feel a book rather than interpret it. And I definitely felt this book.

Desperate Characters by Paula Fox

Jonathan Franzen somewhat famously championed this novel back into print and I can see both why he did and why it was out of print. It's quite good, but it feels of its moment--the 60s--in a way that's sort of uncomfortable now. The 60s have been mythologized by the winners--the rock and roll generation--not by the losers--their parents (I generalize, of course) and this feels like a novel of the parents who were frightened by just how dirty and dangerous the coming changes felt (or so I hear, I'm not as young as I feel but I'm not as old as all that either). So it's a novel about people who are completely unnerved by the coming moment.

One of the things I admired was the novel's tight structure--it's short, 156 pages in my edition--and is centered around a three day period in which the protagonist is bitten by a cat and then waiting to hear if the cat is rabid. But the lesson therein is that the novel is not about the cat bite and the waiting. It's about all the things that were already going on in this character's life that coincided with--and were then framed and illuminated by--the cat bite. One of the mistakes student writers tend to make in planning a novel or even a short story is they have a concept--woman bitten by cat must wait to discover if she has rabies!--but confuse that with a plot. As Ron Carlson used to say (probably still does), into what life has this day come. In other words nobody is sitting around waiting for a cat to bite them (well, metaphorically I might be), they have stuff to do, things going on. That stuf is your plot. The bite is what brings it all into focus.