THE VIOLIN CONSPIRACY, novel of greed, racism, and triumph

THE VIOLIN CONSPIRACY
BRENDAN SLOCUMB
Anchor Books
$28.00 hardcover, available tomorrow

Rating: 4* of five

One of NPR's Best Books of 2022!

The Publisher Says: A riveting tale about a Black classical musician whose family heirloom violin is stolen on the eve of the most prestigious classical music competition in the world.

Ray McMillian loves playing the violin more than anything, and nothing will stop him from pursuing his dream of becoming a professional musician. Not his mother, who thinks he should get a real job, not the fact that he can't afford a high-caliber violin, not the racism inherent in the classical music world. And when he makes the startling discovery that his great-grandfather's fiddle is actually a priceless Stradivarius, his star begins to rise.

Then with the International Tchaikovsky Competition—the Olympics of classical music—fast approaching, his prized family heirloom is stolen. Ray is determined to get it back. But now his family and the descendants of the man who once enslaved Ray's great-grandfather are each claiming that the violin belongs to them.

With the odds stacked against him and the pressure mounting, will Ray ever see his beloved violin again?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Want to know what people really think of you? Stand between them and a big, fat payday. You will get your actual, genuine position in their hierarchy delivered at express speed and before the varnish could be applied, still less dried.

Rayquan (usually "Ray") McMillian learns that there's nothing in this world like the benjamins to bring stuff into focus very early: He grows up without anything extra and the minimum was as cheap as it could reasonably be (often enough cheaper). As soon as it became possible, Ray was pressured to stop wasting time with his stupid fiddling and get a shelf-stockin' job to "help the family" (aka his selfish mother). Time to make horrible noises on his fiddle was more than merely grudged, it was a source of actual anger...seen as selfish, unproductive, the action of a loser. (All those fingers pointin' back from the accusatory poking one missed her notice, it seems.)

You knew there'd be a grandmother in here, right? One who Believes in Ray? You were right, there is.

And a more wonderful soul it's hard to conjure. I was all ready to Pearl-Rule this bad boy before Grandma Nora (she whose belief in Ray makes her "talk so sweet {about him} it could give you diabetes") came on stage, I was so pissed off at the Philistines and money-grubbers Ray has to call family! What malign genetic flub gave Grandma Nora a daughter like Ray's mom?! And there's no end to the nasty, of course, since this is a thriller/mystery. But that's the tour I signed up to take, and was ready for. A bracing dose of lovingkindness later, it was all gas no brakes and that finish line won't know what hit it.

Ray, as you'll have gathered, is a fine musician and to hell with his grasping, whiny mother complaining about the "racket" his practicing makes. He perseveres, Grandma Nora's staunchness in his corner, and actually begins to climb the ladder of classical violin's performance hierarchy. What he faces along the way is no surprise to anyone reasonably sentient, as his ethnicity is used by everyone around him. Only rarely to help him, I'm sure you'll be stunned to learn. His other shining light is his teacher, his one professional mentor, Dr, Janice Stevens. She makes school a haven, a place where someone really gets him and sees the music in his being.

Ray's early training in Keep Calm and Carry On within the loving bosom of his family pays off. That ability to focus is his superpower. It leads him to the *pinnacle* of a violin soloist's ambitions: the International Tchaikovsky Competition, a quadrennial classical-music Olympics that unquestionably makes a musician's career. Even competing there is a leg up...and for a Black man raised with nothing, it is damned near unprecedented for him to be there.

That? That's enough novel for most of us. But Author Slocumb said, "...now, what happens if the Black man happens to get a Stradivarius from his grandmother...?"

What happens is betrayal, heartbreak, and the kind of publicity you damn sure can't pay for. Broken hearts mend; wounds don't fester forever; a career launched into the stratosphere by a juicy scandal leads to a lifetime of opportunities. Ones Ray's absolutely up to taking full advantage of, coming away with a silver medal in spite of the horrors around his violin's rape from him. This one unique possession, it will surprise no one to learn, opens so many doors to him. It will not surprise anyone, either, that he walks boldly up to the doors expecting them to open...and they do.

Ray's search for the thief of his prized possession, his almost desperate desire not to believe where the search leads him, and his dogged perseverance through it all speak volumes for the value of adversity surmounted in creating character. I think Author Slocumb did exactly the right thing by enabling Ray to reach back, to offer a hand of fellowship from his place of privilege.

Ray made it a point to highlight music by Black and Latinx composers. After all those years fighting and proving wrong the preconceptions that people who looked like him couldn't play the music of dead white men, he dove into the phenomenal music written by those people who did indeed look like him.

It is the thing that defines my memory of Ray McMillian, fictional character: He worked his ass off, he focused on the problem at hand, and he stomped the daylights out of the inner voices installed early that demanded he think about unimportant stuff instead of powering himself, supercharging his gifts with well-honed talents.

In the end, what matters in a life? Looking back, what difference does any of what we do make?

"Music's the gift. Caring's the gift. There are a lot of ways apart from a concert hall to make a difference in someone's life."

That's Dr. Janice Stevens, if you're wondering, having a ghostly chat with post-disaster Ray. Thanks, Janice. Whatever your name, wherever you might be...whichever one of us you reached out for, gave a hand to...Thanks to the Janices the world over who do something easy for them and priceless to the recipient.

Care.

DESTINY OF THE REPUBLIC, an excellent and unexplored alternate-history point of departure, a great President killed too soon

DESTINY OF THE REPUBLIC: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President
CANDICE MILLARD
Anchor Books
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: James A. Garfield was one of the most extraordinary men ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, and a renowned and admired reformist congressman. Nominated for president against his will, he engaged in a fierce battle with the corrupt political establishment. But four months after his inauguration, a deranged office seeker tracked Garfield down and shot him in the back. 

But the shot didn’t kill Garfield. The drama of what hap­pened subsequently is a powerful story of a nation in tur­moil. The unhinged assassin’s half-delivered strike shattered the fragile national mood of a country so recently fractured by civil war, and left the wounded president as the object of a bitter behind-the-scenes struggle for power—over his administration, over the nation’s future, and, hauntingly, over his medical care. A team of physicians administered shockingly archaic treatments, to disastrous effect. As his con­dition worsened, Garfield received help: Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, worked around the clock to invent a new device capable of finding the bullet. 

Meticulously researched, epic in scope, and pulsating with an intimate human focus and high-velocity narrative drive, The Destiny of the Republic will stand alongside The Devil in the White City and The Professor and the Madman as a classic of narrative history.

My Review: I knew next to nothing about this president. I'd sort-of known he was assassinated, but not much about why. “Oh, the one in the 1880s? Didn't some nut kill him?”

What a story this is. What a gargantuan loss to the USA his non-Presidency was. What an interesting, interesting man! We hear reams about presidents significantly less interesting than Garfield was. It's not right. But it makes sense...all he did as president was get killed a couple months after he was sworn in.

Garfield was a self-made man, from a poor family, with a troubled marriage. (Ring any more recent bells?) His wife was a chilly intellectual on whom he cheated once. (PLEASE tell me you've got it now.) And even more like the C-man, Garfield entered the race for the White House with powerful people strongly opposed to his winning. He was thwarted and stymied and made to do battle over things that were deeply entrenched and very wrong with the political culture of the day, and he only sort of won.

I trust my parallel is made.

So I was surprised to learn that Garfield was a Republican, and a populist progressive reforming one. (That sentence gave me vertigo to type. I'm not used to saying nice things about Republicans.) My, how things have changed! And the system he fought against actually, literally ended up costing him his life. In that time, presidents controlled all government jobs, and so the people who wanted to get security got in good with the party and made their case for a job to one harassed man, with maybe a secretary or two to assist him...good people got jobs, I'm sure, but more bad ones got good jobs than the other way around. In denying a very bad applicant a “spoils” job, Garfield signed his own death warrant.

Charles Guiteau, who shot Garfield in the back as he was to board a train in order to visit his recuperating wife, isn't his murderer. That person is the doctor who cared for him in the most backward possible way, Dr. D. Willard Bliss. Of evil memory ptooptoo. Despite Dr, James Lister's empirical proof of the germ theory's truth by means of reducing post-surgical mortality via sterilization of instruments and rooms, Bliss held to the old-fashioned view that it was falderol to say something you couldn't see could kill a man. Bliss, if you can believe this, stuck his finger in the bullet hole in Garfield's back in the train station, on the floor, with no washing!

It's a wonder he didn't die a lot sooner, with this kind of “care,” isn't it? As it is, the almost obnoxiously healthy and virile Garfield was shot on 2 July and didn't die until 19 September. Months of infections, months of idiot Bliss being wrong about everything (he said categorically that the bullet was lodged on the right side...it was on the left, it turned out...and he refused to even investigate the left side), and the potential great president died in agony. His vice-president was Chester Alan Arthur, that monadnock of probity and intellect. Oh dear, I fear my sarcasm gland is dripping again.

Well, okay, so it's clear I liked the story. I also liked the book. The author also wrote a book on Teddy Roosevelt, another Republican progressive and all-around fascinating man, called The River of Doubt. It's a really good story, and a very good read. She has an affinity for real-life drama, Madame Millard, and she has an excellent ear for the phrase that will illuminate it. In Chapter 14, entitled “All Evil Consequences,” this phrase in particular wrung my withers:

Had Garfiled been shot just fifteen years later, the bullet in his back would have been quickly found by X-ray images, and the wound treated with antiseptic surgery. Had he been able to receive modern medical care, he likely would have spent no more than a few nights in the hospital.

Such are the vagaries of history...the good wand worthy die, the evil and vile get new hearts at taxpayer expense.

Candice Millard writes a good yarn. If all you want is an exciting and interesting story, this book will satisfy you. If you're interested in history, it will enrich you. If you're excited by the odd pathways of fate, this could be the best of 2012 for you. I'm all of the above. I was sucked in from the get-go, and came out a happy, happy angry man.

MY LIFE IN FRANCE, culinary goddess Julia Child tells enough to keep the pages turning...but not all

MY LIFE IN FRNACE
JULIA CHILD (with Alex Prud'homme)
Anchor Books
$16 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Julia Child single handedly awakened America to the pleasures of good cooking with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, but as she reveals in this bestselling memoir, she didn't know the first thing about cooking when she landed in France. Indeed, when she first arrived in 1948 with her husband, Paul, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the country itself. But as she dove into French culture, buying food at local markets and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu, her life changed forever. Julia's unforgettable story unfolds with the spirit so key to her success as a cook and teacher and writer, brilliantly capturing one of the most endearing American personalities of the last fifty years.

My Review: Truth in advertising had no greater champion than Julia Child. Her book is called exactly and precisely what it is: The narrative of her life in France. She begins her book on November 3, 1948, with the Child family landing at Le Havre, getting into their gigantic Buick station wagon, and motoring off across northern France towards Paris. They stop at thirty-six-year-old native Californian Mrs. Child's first French restaurant, La Couronne, where her husband Paul (already fluent in French from his first stint living there more than 20 years before) consults with M. Dorin, the maitre d', and decides the young marrieds (relatively speaking, as he's 46 by then) will have a sole meuniere with a glass of wine! I mean! A nice Republican-raised gal from Pasadena, California, drinking wine with lunch! Who heard of this?! Mais certainement not Mme. Child, nee McWilliams!

It was the beginning of a life-long love affair between Julia Child and la belle France, and Julia Child and la cuisine Francaise. It led to several books, several TV series, and a long, happy life spent teaching, teaching, teaching. Mme. Child had found her metier, at close to forty, in a day and time where living past sixty-five was ** considered to be ancient. In the process, the person she became changed the American, and possibly the world as a result, culture surrounding food. Yet Julia Child wrote this book with her husband's great-nephew Alex Prud'homme, who tells us in his brief Foreword that getting his garrulous old relative to open up about the feelings and secrets that make up the majority of any human life. His degree of success was formidable, given the generational and gender-induced reticence he fought against to extract the juicy bits from her.

Bravo, M. Prud'homme, et merci bien par tout le faire.

Julia Child was a fixture around our house when I was young. I got the TV-watching habits I carry with me to this good day at a tender age, and part of the formative process was The French Chef. My mother didn't like Mrs. Child much. She was a fan of M.F.K. Fisher's food work, which wasn't in sympathy with Mrs. Child's careful and precise measuring and nice and accurate timing. Mama was a feast-maker, not a dinner-preparer, and that's why she watched Julia Child programs.

I learned about enthusiastic appreciation of food from my mother and Mrs. Child. I was never a picky eater, and only rejected a few foods. (I still hate corn on the cob.) It always seemed like the ladies were having so much fun making these weird dishes! It made sense to me that it would be fun to eat them, and so it proved to be.

In reading this memoir, I immersed myself in the flow of Child's later-life awakening to the joy of food and the sheer exhilaration of preparing special and delicious and carefully thought-out meals for one's loved ones. While I understand the co-author's challenge in balancing the need to afford the famous personality privacy against the buying public's desire to know the dirt, I can only lament that Prud'homme either didn't or couldn't press Child on the topic of her childlessness. I suspect burying herself in research and in obsessive experimentation was a means of assuaging her sadness at not being a mother. She was, or at least she is painted in this book as being, a very nurturing person, and given the prevailing attitudes of the era, it is unlikely that this absence did not cause her pangs of regret. I would have liked to see some exploration of that, mostly because I think glittering surfaces (which this book limns in loving detail) are even more beautiful when seen with shadows. It's like sterling silver flatware: When dipped into a cleaning bath as opposed to hand-polished, it's true that all the tarnish comes off, but all the character does too, and the pattern is flat and blah for lack of a bit of dark contrast that is left by the more labor-intensive hand polishing method.

The delight of the book was in Child's almost orgasmic recollections of the foods and wines she and her dearly beloved husband Paul Child ate and drank across the years. In the course of learning to cook the haute bourgeoise cuisine that she made famous in her native land, Child came alive to the joys and thrills of sight, smell, and taste in a way that only truly delicious food can cause a person to become. It was the positive counterpoint to her manifold frustrations in collaborative cook-bookery. The travails of preparing the Magnum Opus that is Mastering the Art of French Cooking simply don't do enough to make the author come off the page and join me in my reading chair. I rate books based on this type of measure, this degree of ability to enfold and immerse me in the narrative and the emotional reality of the tale being told. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but I wasn't swept into it and away to France circa 1950, and that was what I came to the read expecting to happen. In fact, when I saw the film partially based on this book, Julie & Julia, I was completely swept away and eager to read the source material.

In the end, I got more out of watching Meryl Streep enact Julia Child than I did reading Julia Child reporting herself. I was disappointed.

And hungry.

THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME by Donald Ray Pollock is a fine novel about rough people

THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME
Donald Ray Pollock
Anchor Books
$16.95 trade paperback, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five

SEPTEMBER 2020 IS HERE! WATCH THE TRAILER AND MARK YOUR CALENDARS FOR THE DEBUT ON THE 16TH!

2020 UPDATE The film's Netflix debut comes in September, and here's a taste of what's to come. (Please overlook the source, the info is in fact good.)

***2017 UPDATE***A FILM IS COMING***starring Robert Pattinson as Reverend Roy. This will be interesting.***

The Publisher Says: “Take a man from Ohio who's worked blue collar, send him for an M.F.A., and set him loose. From the acclaimed author of Knockemstiff—called “powerful, remarkable, exceptional” by the Los Angeles Times—comes a dark and riveting vision of America that delivers literary excitement in the highest degree. 

In The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock has written a novel that marries the twisted intensity of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers with the religious and Gothic over­tones of Flannery O’Connor at her most haunting. 

Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrifi­cial blood he pours on his “prayer log.” There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial kill­ers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right. 

Donald Ray Pollock braids his plotlines into a taut narrative that will leave readers astonished and deeply moved. With his first novel, he proves himself a master storyteller in the grittiest and most uncompromising American grain.”

My Review: This is Donald Ray Pollock's first novel. After being mauled and kicked by Knockemstiff, his short-story collection, I was chomping at the bit for this book to come in to my village library. Today was my first wholly peaceful day, and what better thing to do with a peaceful day than to read about the broken and forgotten members of Murrikin society?

So I got on the Greyhound for Knockemstiff, garlic around my neck and an illegal assault rifle perched in the seat beside me, scared stiff that one of these Hill Williams was gonna start some shit with the fancy New Yorker getting' off the bus.

Funnily enough, that's exactly what happened.
.
Look...read Knockemstiff (my review here) and, if you feel the need to bleach your eyeballs and you want to scream, cry, and unswallow on average once a page, this isn't the book for you. It's not that worse things happen in it, although some do happen that made me scream, cry, and unswallow, it's that this novel is unremittingly grim and a lot less easy to stop reading than a story collection is.

I started this book around 4pm. It's now 3am. I paused long enough to eat some cucumber and tomato salad and a wedge of watermelon around 10pm, and I think I piddled around midnight...but that was with the book propped open on the tank top. I'll mop the floor tomorrow...errrmmm, later today.

Pollock is the kind of writer Hemingway wanted to be. Simple, elegantly shod, carefully manicured sentences whip out their truncheons and, never mind the flying blood, wail on the innocent reader's brain-box. Dazed, in pounding agony from the grinding of severely fractured bone plates in the readerly skull, eyes absorb and record and flinch away from the matter-of-fact violence. It's not played for gore or shock. Pollock just...writes it the way it was in his head.

Mother of all the gods. That sentence scares me shitless.

The stories that make up the braids of the novel are, in themselves, good novellas. Put together, though, the effect is overkill. Oh dear. Bad choice of words. It's one bridge too far into horrorville. The last thirty or so pages, while well written, just didn't keep up the pace of revelation. In every other part of the book, there was a blood clot coming loose and causing fresh damage as the characters got closer to the inevitable ending...so I kept moving...and then, well, some of that sense of howcanhetopthis zomg he did it got lost.

And now I will be turning on the Snarkinator. Those whose tastes are for tomes lit'ry which ahhhr evah sew reefahayned, please seek the exits.

Pollock got an MFA. I find MFA writers are all much of a muchness to me. A bit like opening a box of dried dates hoping for something other than a sugar coma, permaybehaps a peppermint or a Red Hot secreted in amongst the sticky soft sweetness. I have my list of offenders, but I've puked on them elsewhere, so I'll leave it at Paul Auster Jeffrey Eugenides Jonathan Franzen Dave Eggers Jonathan Safran Foer et alii, none of whose books I can tell apart from the authors's various ouevres without a look at the spine or title page. Yes yes, nice sentence, lovely image, I'm sorry was something supposed to move me here, to reach across the gap between our brains and change me? Cause it sure as pork rinds didn't. And it never does, all the mooin' and carryin'-on y'all groupies do aside.

And the last, well, last six or so chapters of this novel? They're the first time I felt Pollock's MFA intrude into his writing. He's still got more potency in his keyboarding fingers than those boys. I knock off a whoppin' tenth of a star from perfect because of that. It's a little like complaining that the blowjob didn't last long enough (I don't have any idea what the equivalent is for women, sorry ladies but I am just not anxious to know either). Describe the worst sex you ever had: It was marvelous, as the old joke goes.

And, not a small consideration, is it me, or is it he? I could simply be grumping about this because the way things turn out isn't the way I want them to. But hang on! The ending, you'll recall I said above, is inevitable. And it is. The only ending this book could have. I liked it!

So maybe, just maybe, it's that bloody degree reefahayneeng the gasoline-and-pigshit essence of this wonderful book. I sure as all get-out hate that idea. I suspect it's true. But, and this is KEY, do NOT let this discourage you from visiting the bottom of the heap with Pollock. This is the real deal.

The real deal.

EDITED TO ADD 10/25/2012: The novel has won the Best Foreign Crime Novel prize in France!

KNOCKEMSTIFF by Donald Ray Pollock...reposting 5-star 2010 review

KNOCKEMSTIFF
Donald Ray Pollock
Anchor Books
$16.95 trade paper, $5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this unforgettable work of fiction, Donald Ray Pollock peers into the soul of a tough Midwestern American town to reveal the sad, stunted but resilient lives of its residents. Knockemstiff is a genuine entry into the literature of place.Spanning a period from the mid-sixties to the late nineties, the linked stories that comprise Knockemstiff feature a cast of recurring characters who are irresistibly, undeniably real. A father pumps his son full of steroids so he can vicariously relive his days as a perpetual runner-up body builder. A psychotic rural recluse comes upon two siblings committing incest and feels compelled to take action. Donald Ray Pollock presents his characters and the sordid goings-on with a stern intelligence, a bracing absence of value judgments, and a refreshingly dark sense of bottom-dog humor.

My Review: Published in 2008, this collection of eighteen interwoven stories about the lives of the men and women and children caught in rural poverty is the first work by Donald Ray Pollock. He lived in Knockemstiff, a real, honest-to-goodness place. He escaped, sort of, by working for thirty years in a nearby town's papermill.

I don't remember who introduced me to the term “hillbilly noir.” Authors like Bonnie Jo Campbell of American Salvage fame as well as Pollock fall into this category of writers who mine the vein of American underclass misery worked so brilliantly by John Steinbeck and Erskine Caldwell. Noir it certainly is, thematically and in its laconic, almost kabuki play-like, emphasis on grotesque surfaces, implying that every action and every gesture is born out of unfathomable darkness and unbearable pain. The Publishers Weekly review of this collection compares Pollock's work to Winesburg, Ohio. I agree, from a structural point of view, but Sherwood Anderson's grim stories are the comedy stylings of P.G. Wodehouse compared to this collection.

Pollock is brilliantly successful at portraying the...no. Scratch that.

Donald Ray Pollock is brilliant.

I've been bitch-slapped by this writer's ten-inch dick of the imagination. The stories treated me the way those hillbillies treated Ned Beatty in Deliverance. No part of my brain will ever again be clean and unviolated.

There is one story in this collection that, in my humble (!) opinion, doesn't measure up and doesn't belong: “I Start Over,” about a trip through the Dairy Queen drive-through, would be the star turn of any other writer's collection of stories, but here it merely fills up page count and takes the book over 200pp. Left out, no one would notice or feel a lack.

There are two stand-out stories for me, two that should be in high-school literature anthologies and passed from reader to reader with whispered injunctions just to read it, read it: “Schott's Bridge” is the bleak and horrifying story of a young gay man and his fate in this grim, grim world; and “Bactine,” the shortest story in the collection, a quick hit of despair and decline, as two young men escape the present into a futureless fog. They are, in simplest terms, heart-stopping.

But the story that made me hurt the most, though it's not the finest structurally or stylistically, was “Knockemstiff.” Two strangers in a Cadillac convertible, husband and wife, pull into Maude's store for gas, and for the wife to take photos of the “Welcome to Knockemstiff” sign. The husband makes small talk with the clerk, commenting that “[i]t's hard to believe there's people that poor living in this country.” Their condescending words and actions are invisible to them. It's simply inconceivable to these privileged people that others are not, well, envious but impressed by them. They're blind to their cruelty.

I am that California goon, insensitive lout that he is. I've driven through countless places like Knockemstiff in my expensive car, looked out my window, and thought, “No way. This is a movie set. No one lives here, lives like this.” I've stopped for gas, bought a bag of chips, made inconsequential chat with the clerk, wondering the while how he drags himself out of bed to face another day in that kind of place.

I don't want to believe it's true, you see, and I don't like to think that it's not the subject of outrage and outreach and action.

It isn't. Donald Ray Pollock is their voice, these people in the hollers, shouting at us to look, to look, to see the cost of indifference. He's singing an old song. He's doing it well. He's making art, and seducing the susceptible into seeing the invisible, the ignored, the ignoble and unrefined. His artistry is superior. His eye is unerring. His ear is emotional sonar.

Donald Ray Pollock is brilliant.

BALZAC AND THE LITTLE CHINESE SEAMSTRESS by Sijie Dai

BALZAC AND THE LITTLE CHINESE SEAMSTRESS
SIJIE DAI (tr. Ina Rilke)
Anchor Books
$14.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this enchanting tale about the magic of reading and the wonder of romantic awakening, two hapless city boys are exiled to a remote mountain village for reeducation during China's infamous Cultural Revolution. There they meet the daughter of the local tailor and discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation. As they flirt with the seamstress and secretly devour these banned works, they find transit from their grim surroundings to worlds they never imagined.

My Review: I don't, like so many others, think this book is brilliant or even particularly original. I do think it's fascinating as a cultural document of a time and a place that I know zero about and find very intriguing.

The Cultural Revolution was inconceivably vast, like everything else about China. The notion, from whence we shall never know, that Mao had of causing all the haves to be reduced to the status of have-nots, and the resulting collapse of anything describable as culture, took so many good and worthy people from China's body politic and ground them into nothingness that it's a wonder there is a shred of history left to them.

The agonies of our narrator, the son of enemies of the people sent to a remote location for re-education, are told not shown. This is ordinary in a first-person story. But I found myself irked at the elisions this produced. The people around the narrator are one-dimensional, even his childhood friend Luo and the eponymous seamstress. The narrator's inability to see much past the grimy surface of the people in his world wore on me.

But, and this is the saving grace of the book for me, it's such a bizarre and topsy-turvy world that even their surfaces are intriguing, and the rather unexceptional story the narrator (never named) is telling shines with that exotic glistening strangeness.

This is really a book about books. The narrator, his friend Luo, and the seamstress go to great and dangerous lengths to get, read, and absorb lovingly the precious contraband books they're sure are hidden. Finding them, reading them, telling the stories contained in them to others...well, who could possibly NOT love a character who risks hideous tortures to do that?

The seamstress's final act in the book is exactly the right touch to set off the reaction that the narrator very oddly presents to us BEFORE reporting that action. Wha...?

Recommended. Oh, reservations attached to that, but really recommended!

ELLA MINNOW PEA, Mark Dunn's progressively lipogrammatic send-up of rigidity

ELLA MINNOW PEA
MARK DUNN
Anchor Books
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: There are two book descriptions, both good; this first is for the hardcover, published by MacAdam/Cage, that I read years ago:

Ella Minnow Pea is an epistolary novel set in the fictional island of Nollop situated off the coast of South Carolina and home to the inventor of the pangram The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog. Now deceased, the islanders have erected a monument to honor their hero, but one day a tile with the letter �z� falls from the statue. The leaders interpret the falling tile as a message from beyond the grave and the letter is banned from use. On an island where the residents pride themselves on their love of language, this is seen as a tragedy. They are still reeling from the shock, when another tile falls and then another.... Mark Dunn takes us on a journey against time through the eyes of Ella Minnow Pea and her family as they race to find another phrase containing all the letters of the alphabet to save them from being unable to communicate. Eventually, the only letters remaining are LMNOP, when Ella finally discovers the phrase that will save their language.

The second is for Anchor's trade paper edition, which seems to me to give a better flavor of the book:

Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram,* “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island’s Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel. The result is both a hilarious and moving story of one girl’s fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.

*pangram: a sentence or phrase that includes all the letters of the alphabet

My Review: This novel is about the unintended bad, and ridiculous, consequences of a very good idea. Nollop, an island off the American mainland, is a society rational and reasonable in its organization and actions. Its usage of the English language rests on the existence of the pangram, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." The founder of Nollop invested the pangram with great significance.

And now, in Ella's time, the letters of the pangram start falling off the founder's statue! And the leaders say, "It's a sign! A sign! Whatever letters have fallen may no longer be used, in writing or in speech! An omen, a sign!"

And the people nodded, smiled, and did nothing to stop the madness. After all, it's the leaders' job to lead, right? And why would the leaders want bad things for us? After all, we all want the best and the brightest to flourish, right?

Of course! Now, take your Soma. Dr. Orwell will be along soon.

Delight. Dialogue, description, the lot. It's fun to read the book because the story is so very absurd. Imagine an entire country that's established around the veneration of a weirdo who invented a sentence to exercise your typing skills with! And imagine further the populace of such a place, held in thrall to language, ruled by a council of puritans who do their damnedest to make sure the entire island respects the gift of the English language...to the exclusion of all other considerations, personal, practical, political.

The book was published in 2001. That was, for those of failing memory, the year (in my never-humble opinion) Shrub Bush stole the presidential election for the first time. It was clear to anyone not conservative and/or christian that there was a bad set of rapids ahead, and a lot of it would turn on public and private discourse, its nature and its tenor. The novel foretold the increasing gag effect imposed from Above on reporting and discussing the various wars, the various and nefarious doings in and around the Oval Office, and on and on. Dunn could see it coming, and he pointed and hollered the best way he could, via a highbrow high-concept novel that would fly above heads and under radars.

I lapped it up like it was the dust on the mirror and began begging people I knew to read it, even buying several of them copies. (I had a good job in those days.) And to my increasing despair, not ONE of them so much as read it until poked; after reading it, not one of them was even lukewarm.

Ella and her family living like Anne Frank and her family, Ella making the discovery of a new pangram, Ella obeying the lipogrammatic tyranny of the Council in her letters to those who have left, escaped, the madness engulfing Nollop...this was sunshine and I was heliotropic in following it wherever it led. And not one soul to keep me company.

And now, eleven years on, someone reviews it, and I am all back in the fray. Please, do everyone involved a favor and get a copy so you can revel in the pleasures of an honorable woman telling a surreal, Dali-and-Kafka-have-a-baby kind of story and, in the end, revel with her in the joy of open and free speech.