WordSmith

Another odd, but good, novel from Boyle. Historical fiction, it tells the story of a Scottish explorer attempting to “discover” the Congo River in Africa. Of course the explorer is oblivious to the fact that the river has already been discovered by thousands of black and Muslim Africans. Just part of the irony that Boyle loves so much, and which he is so good at.

A novel from the pages of tonight’s news, telling the story of an illegal alien couple juxtaposed with an affluent southern California couple. Ironic in a way that T. C. Boyle is famous for, the story is riveting and moving. An excellent read.

An odd novel, telling parallel stories in different time periods, from the colonial America of the Patroons of New York to post World War II to recent history. The poor modern hero cannot catch a break, as history seems to repeat itself over and over. An intriguing read if you can keep all the characters and timelines straight!

Great book! It really sucked me in with the contrasts between the characters, the irony of the situations, and the tragic-comic coloring of everything. It tells the story of a Japanese sailor who jumps ship off the shore of Georgia and meets an array of odd characters, some that help him and some that hurt him, as he struggles to make sense of America and find a place for himself. One of the people that “helps” him is an ambitious female writer at an artist colony on a secluded island off the Georgia coast. Boyle draws her with a deft touch, hilarious in places and sadly ironic in others. An excellent novel.

A sensitive portrayal of the lives of two poets, one who is successful, wins awards, teaches at a university, and is married with a child, and one who works on a single poem all his life and lives a quiet, minimal life. This is literary fiction, concerned with the characters relationships to poetry, each other, and their friends and family. It’s well written, insightful, and probing.

It begins slowly, however. A BAM! POW! opening is not to be expected from a novel of this type, and things do pick up and become interesting as the novel progresses, but the opening is particularly bland – it could do with an interesting sentence or a unique situation to draw the reader in. I’m afraid many readers who pick the novel up and read the opening may put it down again and miss out on a good read.

I’m a big fan of T. C. Boyle, and this book is well-written and meticulously crafted, as I have come to expect from Boyle, but, I was just disgusted with two of the main characters. The novel tells the story of Professor Kinsey and his inner circle of sex researchers. Kinsey and his wife are historical figures, the rest of the characters are fictional. Kinsey is portrayed as overbearing, authoritarian, obsessed, domineering, abusive, and borderline perverted – all of which is probably close to the mark historically. And I really hated him.

The other major character, and the narrator, is John Milk, the first researcher that Kinsey hired. He is weak and easily led, treating Kinsey as a god, to the detriment of his own marriage. I’m sure Boyle, in the manner of Dickens, chose Milk’s name on purpose – he really is a milquetoast. I wanted him to stand up to Kinsey, quit his job, maybe buy a gun and take some revenge, but he could never bring himself to do much of anything.

So I liked the writing but hated the two most important characters! What a dilemma…

An excellent novel on so many levels. It tells the story of the discovery of the planet Pluto, from the viewpoint of the people involved and their friends and family. The characters revolve around and influence each other in much the same way that the planets revolve and perturb each others orbits. The characters are real, interesting, and varied. Several times I was surprised by their actions, only to realize in retrospect that the author had done an excellent job steering their behavior.

The plot, most of which takes place in 1929-1930, is framed by a begging and ending in the current time, which was also well done. The beginning sets the stage (literally) and gets the reader engaged in the story and anxious to find out what really happened.

Highly recommended.

An odd book, one of that sub-genre of fiction that borrows characters from another work of fiction, in this case Melville’s Moby Dick. The best recent example I have read of this sub-genre is “March” by Geraldine Brooks – an excellent book that borrows characters from “Little Women”. “Ahab’s Wife” centers around the women who was barely mentioned in “Moby Dick”, the wife of Ahab.

The writing is excellent, the author a real craft person, but the big is big and loose and self-indulgent. Melville’s book is also big and somewhat self-indulgent, but it had the focus of a harponeer on it’s destination. At times I had to wonder where “Ahab’s Wife” was headed – it wandered all over the literary landscape. But still, it is a good read and worth the time.

An interesting book, the Pulitzer prize winner for fiction in 2009. Interesting and fun to read. A series of related short stories that at least mention the character of Olive Kitteridge, a crusty New Englander that taught school for years. The stories involve people that knew her or were influenced by her, her husband, son, and so on. They are all finely crafted and suspenseful. Well worth a read.

This is a pleasant enough book, basically a reminiscence of 1919 Butte, Montana. Morrie Morgan, a character from Doig’s earlier novel, “The Whistling Season”, blows into Butte, penniless and without prospects, and becomes a peripheral character in a conflict between the miner’s union, a communist worker’s group, and the mine owners. The conflict can be summarized as: union good, communists bad, capitalists evil. Only the union viewpoint is examined – none of the characters belong to any of the other groups.

There is not much depth here. The plot is thin, the characters are not surprising or even very interesting, and the ending is blah. Doig’s earlier novel, “The Whistling Season”, was much better.