THE NARCISSISM OF SMALL DIFFERENCES, posted properly at last

THE NARCISSISM OF SMALL DIFFERENCES
MICHAEL ZADOORIAN
Akashic Books
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A hilarious and poignant novel about growing up, buying in, selling out, and the death of irony.

Joe Keen and Ana Urbanek have been a couple for a long time, with all the requisite lulls and temptations, yet they remain unmarried and without children, contrary to their Midwestern values (and parents’ wishes). Now on the cusp of forty, they are both working at jobs that they’re not even sure they believe in anymore, but with significantly varying returns. Ana is successful, Joe is floundering—both in limbo, caught somewhere between mainstream and alternative culture, sincerity and irony, achievement and arrested development.

Set against the backdrop of bottomed-out 2009 Detroit, a once-great American city now in transition, part decaying and part striving to be reborn, The Narcissism of Small Differences is the story of an aging creative class, doomed to ask the questions: Is it possible to outgrow irony? Does not having children make you one? Is there even such a thing as selling out anymore?

More than a comedy of manners, The Narcissism of Small Differences is a comedy of compromise: the financial compromises we make to feed ourselves; the moral compromises that justify our questionable actions; the everyday compromises we all make just to survive in the world. Yet it’s also about the consequences of those compromises— and the people we become because of them—in our quest for a life that is our own and no one else’s.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: I think Author Zadoorian's Detroitophilia needed this book to come to a head...

It was a way for gray-flannel types to shed their inhibitions, go native, and get weird—uninhibited boozing, semierotic dancing to faux-exotic music, gaudy flowered shirts, sticky finger foods, unclad maiden flesh, and phallic tiki idols. At one point, Detroit had three Polynesian palaces, but when the city started bleeding honkies after the '67 race riot, all of them eventually closed.
–and–
Should you be going to tiki parties in your forties? Was it possible to maintain ironic distance for that long, or should you have outgrown it by then? How long before you needed an irony supplement?

Joe is an urban explorer, a man whose purpose in life is looking for something to look at; this isn't a tremendously profitable career, but he freelances as a local-music critic and spelunks the abandoned spaces of the city as his avocation. He has no mortgage and no kids, just a partner of over a decade, Ana. They're living an intentional life, but that ain't free. So Ana, his squeeze, makes the bills...in advertising, in a dead and dying city, that takes skill and luck which she abounds in.

And then, as it always will, Life happens. The two of them are wearing on each other. The thing about stasis is, no matter if it's tolerable or not, it has to end. Things in life are growing or dying:

“Truth like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.”
–and–
When is it going to end, this worshiping of ephemera? How long will our generation be obsessed with the past, with stuff that barely meant anything when it happened, that’s remembered only because it’s old or bad or weird or kooky?

There's nothing like the world for knocking your corners off...just sucks when the chunks go flying into those closest to you.

"You drop names and make references. You talk about songs, but rarely does a song speak to you. You laugh at cleverness because you recognize it's supposed to be funny, not because it is funny. You know about things for the sake of knowing about them, because you think you're supposed to, because you're afraid of being left out, not because they interest you. You're a dilettante, a potterer. You simply stopped trying to be anything more."
–and–
"It looks different through the lens, doesn't it?" {Joe's friend} said {to him}.
  "I don't know why. It just makes more sense this way. It's easier to take in."
"Uh-huh. Sometimes what I'm looking at is too intense for me to understand without a filter, a way to view it. The camera helps." Brendan leveled his camera...and squeezed off a shot.
  "Why is this so magnificent? What's wrong with us?"
"I told you...The verity of decay."

If Ana had wanted a sullen teenager, she would've had a kid...but here she is with a fractured man-child who resents her for winning their bread and whose friends are nasty pieces of White Male Privilege...Transphobia: one-half star off. N-word and repeated misogynistic bullshit use by white character: one-half star off. Yes, it's set in 2009...yes, it's not like these are people whose sophistication is meant to hold them up as examples. But this is ugliness and prejudice, and it doesn't get treated as such.

But the story is about more than that. It's about what it means to be You at last. These are forty-year-olds doing what the middle-aged literary characters of US while privilege are supposed to do: Reflecting on the emptiness of a life of getting and spending. And coming to terms with what they really, in fact, want from The System. Ana's decisions are less crowd-sourced...her one obvious friend isn't who she thought she was at exactly the wrong moment...than Joe's, but considering the caliber of his friends that's a good thing.

I found the story...exasperating. I found the dramatis personae...uncongenial. I found the ending...condign.

A RIVER CALLED TIME, slow and inexorable and deep...but not a good trip

A RIVER CALLED TIME
COURTTIA NEWLAND
Akashic Books
$28.95 hardcover, available now

SHORTLISTED for the 2022 Arthur C. Clarke Award! Winner announced 26 October 2022.

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A monumental speculative fiction story of love, loyalty, politics and conscience set in parallel Londons

The Ark was built to save the lives of the many, but rapidly became a refuge for the elite, the entrance closed without warning.
Years after the Ark was cut off from the world, a chance of survival within its confines is granted to a select few who can prove their worth. Among their number is Markriss Denny, whose path to future excellence is marred only by a closely guarded secret: without warning, his spirit leaves his body, allowing him to see and experience a world far beyond his physical limitations.

Once inside the Ark, Denny learns of another with the same power, whose existence could spell catastrophe for humanity. He is forced into a desperate race to understand his abilities, and in doing so uncovers the truth about the Ark, himself and the people he thought he once knew.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Author Newland is definitely a Writer. There is a gravitas to the ways he expresses his ideas, a fullness to the meanings of his phrases in their context. For the first third of this book, I thought I was looking at four, four and a half if he got the lead out and pushed the story along faster, stars. The idea of a man who can travel across the multiverse...African cosmology the dominant spirituality...decolonizing reality! I am down. But then the cracks appeared.

It is awful to write this: After working on this amazing, delightful idea for twenty years, Author Newland gave us half a great book.

The Ark, a domed city, isn't the amazing thought that the author appears to think it is. The image of the Insider/Outsider trope is very well-worn a path to walk. The ghettoized lower class, the generational wealth transfers that absolutely determines the lifestyle you and your descendents will have, the self-sacrificing mother who expects her child to support her when he gets inside...these aren't new. The truth is that the author's writing career has not been in the genres of sci fi, fantasy, or alternate history (is it a genre or a setting? I won't wade into that here), so what feels of itself fresh to him is bog-standard stuff to old genre hands. What *is* fresh and cool and amazing is the worlds he sends his main character to, and it is those Author Newland isn't giving us enough of.

The alternate, uncolonized world that our hero travels to is fascinating. The continent of Africa has so very many indigenous relgions and spiritual traditions...how wonderful to have them foregrounded for once. But the author's choices of spiritual traditions represented didn't feel in any way organic to his main character. That meant the points of divergence between his character's home timeline and the one he travels to aren't as clear to me as a reader. The astral travel factor can be blamed for part of it. Is it technological, spiritual, either, both? Why? This fuzziness kept my focus diffuse. I think it kept his focus diffuse, too. His admirable inclusiveness leads to too many faces and each with too little time to make the experience as enfolding as it could, and should, have been.

I am able to slide past most of that, getting into a four-star mindset, when sexual violence against a woman is used to motivate a man into action. And the perpetrator suffers no consequences. And the main character? All but shrugs as he moves on with his life.

Fiction reflecting the ills of society back to us should not, in my view, continue to use outdated and harmful tropes unaltered. It isn't the author's best choice, and that along with other areas of niggling dissatisfaction brought me down to three and a half stars where I'd badly wanted to give four.

It's a shame. I hope you'll take the book out of the library at some point, give it your time and attention. I'd love to know if others feel my criticisms are misplaced or too harsh.

Beautiful Tropical Getaway (to 1845!) for Snowed-In Folks 10 December 2013

AS FLIES TO WHATLESS BOYS
ROBERT ANTONI
Akashic Books
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In 1845 London, an engineer, philosopher, philanthropist, and bold-faced charlatan, John Adolphus Etzler, has invented machines that he thinks will transform the division of labor and free all men. He forms a collective called the Tropical Emigration Society (TES), and recruits a variety of London citizens to take his machines and his misguided ideas to form a proto-socialist, utopian community in the British colony of Trinidad.

Among his recruits is a young boy (and the book's narrator) named Willy, who falls head-over-heels for the enthralling and wise Marguerite Whitechurch. Coming from the gentry, Marguerite is a world away from Willy's laboring class. As the voyage continues, and their love for one another strengthens, Willy and Marguerite prove themselves to be true socialists, their actions and adventures standing in stark contrast to Etzler's disconnected theories.

Robert Antoni's tragic historical novel, accented with West Indian cadence and captivating humor, provides an unforgettable glimpse into nineteenth-century Trinidad & Tobago.

My Review:

We sat in silence, exhausted, filled-up. We didn't move. We couldn't have moved--not a muscle--because we didn't exist yet. Neither me nor him. Only the story existed, during those few final moments of silence after my father's voice had come to a halt.

Catnip. This book was catnip for me, pure uncut catnip of the finest grade. Robert Antoni teaches master's degree fiction-writing classes at the New School. Lucky men and women who take the classes, to hear him tell his stories!

At its heart, this is a simple tale of greed, passion, and the lifelong effects of believing in a dream. Chicanery is always a worry for the True Believer, because the promise of a dream come true is ever the best bait to lure them into disaster, personal and financial and, not infrequently, mortal. Something dies when a person's True Belief is taken from them, or lost, or simply abandoned (as if this abandonment is ever simple). Many times, I suspect, the pain of it is unendurable and the bereft believer sees no reason to go on...disease or despair carry him off.

Others, like our narrator Willy, live on and make life, actual life, work for them without dreams, but with some weird, warped hopes left, hopes that don't see much daylight as the ex-dreamer isn't likely to chat them about. Willy doesn't really want to have hopes. He wants to find his dreams. I think all of us know that quest's end. But the novel, well, a novel is a place to work out the truths of endings and the frailties of beginnings. This novel's truth is in the ending, and it stings the soft places of a tender soul. It also rings perfectly true and wistfully beautiful. A family, once created, is a hard thing to leave, to destroy; even death doesn't do the job.

But most families have invisible members. Some have more than others. Willy...Mr. Tucker, as he becomes...carried the invisible members of his family until, exhausted, he lost the eternal battle with gravity. How, and why, and what he made, these are all the subject of the novel, and the meat of life as we all live it.

Only most of us don't have beautiful words to wrap our truth in. Fortune smiled on William Tucker. His truth comes enrobed in lovely, lovely language, satisfyingly musical in the inward ear.

A pleasure of a read. A lovely artifact of a book. A delight on many levels, and a deeply felt, deeply moving novel.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

LONG ISLAND NOIR, latest in Akashic Books' bestselling short thriller fiction anthologies

LONG ISLAND NOIR
KAYLIE JONES (ed.)
Akashic Books
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Stories covering Long Island's extremes, from the comfortable rich to the horribly poor, and all the darkness between.

Launched with the summer '04 award-winning best seller Brooklyn Noir, Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the geographical area of the book. KAYLIE JONES, JULES FEIFFER, REED FARREL COLEMAN, SHEILA KOHLER, and others reveal how Long Island has always been a playground for the rich and famous—and while it used to be that only a select few could afford it, now everyone wants a piece of the pie.

The McMansions pop up like mushrooms, limiting resources and destroying an already taxed environment. It feels a little like Rome in its last days—a kind of collective amnesia and blindness to the outside world has taken over. Everyone knows this, but no one wants to do anything about it, because big money is being spent—and made. And as the rich grow richer, the poor grow poorer and more disenfranchised; and greed only breeds more greed and violence.

These stories cover the range of Long Island's extremes, from the comfortably rich, to the horribly poor—people pushed to desperate acts in order to protect what they already have, or to try to take what they don't from those who do.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: This series of anthologies is always welcome. It's a darn good series, well edited and clever in its conception and execution. Original stories by an array of people from, or who live(d) on, Long Island, all very talented writers though not always of thriller fiction; that did not work perfectly in this anthology's case but hey, it got a lot of great stuff in front of us.

I'm using the Bryce Method of giving a short assessment of the individual stories so you'll be able to assess the whole as well as the parts.

Home Invasion starts us off with a bitter, angry generational bang. The silences within families are probably scarier than anything that a stranger could dream up. 4 stars

The Shiny Car in the Night is probably the best piece in the collection. It's a slightly less domestic, yest still family centered, tale of men whose losses are no less horribly disfiguring for being self-inflicted; a son whose father can't find a way to escape the funhouse-mirror lined labyrinth of rage and regret against his brother, ends up...ending up. 5 stars

Anjali's America is an immigrant woman doctor's story of how narrowly she escaped the horror of being a woman locked in a joyless prison of motherhood and victimhood and subservience to the men who couldn't understand anything she's ever thought. Nor would they try...she exists to serve. Nightmarish, intense, and vivid. 4 stars

A Starr Burns Bright is a grifter's wet dream of The Big Strike, if he can just pull it off. He needs the strike for sure, but he's not the sharpest tool in the shed...the secrets he now knows aren't the best way to stay healthy and alive for a long time. Hijinks, as hey must, ensue...4 stars

Mastermind really made me sit up and take notice, it's by Reed Farrel Coleman and it's got the biggest heart and the scariest fall. When someone knows he's not top-drawer material for his particular corner of the world, and he keeps working his ass off to Make It anyway, it's poignant and it's admirable in a weird way even when he's not a nice guy. But the world knocks the best over, imagine how bad it is when they're not close to the best...5 stars

Contents of House was a bitter pill indeed, bad sex and smashed-up love and revenge all stewed in a heart that simply isn't up to the task of coldness and instead succumbs to shame. 4 stars

Snow Job is hilariously wicked. It's short, but twisty, and it's got the sheer narrative drive of an entire novel...the pace does not let up, the stuff that happens is terrible but you just can't help laughing...schadenfreude, thy name is me, when people who deserve it get come-uppances...and, by the time it's done, I wanted to start over again. 5 stars

The other pieces, eg "Semiconscious," "Blood Drive," "Jabo's," and "Terror," were three or more star decent efforts but didn't rise to the heights the others did. A few, eg "Seven Eleven" and "Boob Noir" by Jules Feiffer, just weren't up to the standard set by the superior works. Still, there are seventeen stories in here, so a few not-to-my-liking ones are more than likely going to sneak in. It's definitely a very good way to spend your Sunday afternoon at the beach! Labor Day has lots of hours in it. Spend some here.

AMERICAN HONOR KILLINGS, revolting crimes committed by disgusting people

AMERICAN HONOR KILLINGS: Desire and Rage Among Men
DAVID McCONNELL
Akashic Books
$15.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: In American Honor Killings, straight and gay guys cross paths, and the result is murder. But what really happened? What role did hatred play? What were the men involved really like, and what was going on between them when the murder occurred? American Honor Killings explores the truth behind squeamish reporting and uninformed political rants of the far right or fringe left. David McConnell, a New York-based novelist, researched cases from small-town Alabama to San Quentin's death row. The book recounts some of the most notorious crimes of our era.

Beginning in 1999 and lasting until the 2011 conviction of a youth in Queens, New York, the book shows how some murderers think they're cleaning up society. Surprisingly, other killings feel almost preordained, not a matter of the victim's personality or actions so much as a twisted display of a young man's will to compete or dominate. We want to think these stories involve simple sexual conflict, either the killer's internal struggle over his own identity or a fatally miscalculated proposition. They're almost never that simple.

Together, the cases form a secret American history of rage and desire. McConnell cuts through cant and political special pleading to turn these cases into enduring literature. In each story, victims, murderers, friends, and relatives come breathtakingly alive. The result is more soulful, more sensitive, more artful than the sort of "true crime” writing the book was modeled on. A wealth of new detail has been woven into old cases, while new cases are plumbed for the first time. The resulting stories play out exactly as they happened, an inexorable sequence of events—grisly, touching, disturbing, sometimes even with moments of levity.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM AKASHIC BOOKS. THANK YOU.

My Review: It is no secret that I'm a leftist, anti-religion queer. I loathe the existence of the systems of "Rightness" that the murderers in these crimes use to justify their actions. The mere ability of a person to point to a bible and have any segment of society secretly or not-so-secretly justify or even agree with the heinous crime of murder is shameful to us as a society.

That said, it's still true. These accounts of the motives and actions of some seriously mentally ill young men, certain that they are Right and they are Correct in the actions, are enlightening and chilling. The cases are appalling...Scott Amedure was shotgunned by a man he confessed to having a crush on on national TV, and his killer is now walking free after serving twenty years...the legal teams for the prosecution of the hate criminals are hampered by public sympathy for the killers, and the culture changes so so slowly....

I spent most of the time I read this book alternating between scaring my dog with loud, rasping screeches of outraged indignation that such stupidity is allowed to exist by this gawd person most of these boys, their families, and their communities profess belief in, and miserable, hopeless weeping of sympathetic pain at the agonies of loss, grief, and longing that the families, the parents, the loving friends of the murdered men will spend the rest of their lives experiencing, because the so-called "Holy Bible," actually full of holey babble, and its hellspawn idiot-friendly "christian values culture" don't like the idea of men having sex with each other.

Who cares what you think? Did someone ask you? Drag your mind out of the prurient gutter of thinking about what other people do in their bedrooms. It's often this fear of People Knowing that motivates a hate criminal to kill a gay victim...take the Matson and Mowder murder committed in 1999 by the Williams brothers. They were Living Faith Fellowship zealots who got too violent for even those yahoos. They ended up with an anti-semitic hit list, a list of synagogues to burn down...motivated in part by questions around their sexuality. Can't have people thinking we're fags...let's go kill the unclean scum infesting the world!

McConnell has written a book as horrifying and as necessary as In Cold Blood, and as likely to stand the test of time as a document of the consequences of sociopathic thinking. I can't recommend that you read it; but really, you should. Depressingly, most of you won't. It's not YOUR friend, brother, cousin, so why bother?

Because until people confront the horrible consequences of their smug, exclusionary language of "salvation" and the like, this won't be the last time a book like this is necessary.