Michael Patrick Brady

I was abroad last week when the Boston Globe published my review of Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow, while Boston itself was dealing with the kind of unpredictable, worst-case scenario Rich’s book deals with.

Rich’s novel is a product of our early twenty-first century obsession with disaster and calamity. Those of us who grew up in the time between the fall of the Soviet Union and September 11th remember a time when large-scale disasters and terror attacks seemed like abberations. Unlike our parents generation, our childhoods weren’t overshadowed by the threat of thermonuclear annihilation, and unlike our younger siblings (and possibly children), we weren’t pummeled by one major incident after another, starting with 9/11, through the anthrax attacks, Hurricane Katrina, London, Madrid, the 2008 financial crisis, Superstorm Sandy, and now Boston. As the Onion put it, “this is just going to be a thing that happens from now on.”

The protagonist of Odds Against Tomorrow becomes fixated on predicting disasters; his formative experience is the destruction of Seattle by an earthquake while he is a college student (a scene that felt very familiar, as I was a newly minted college freshman on September 11th). In the review, I talk about the dangers of complacency, about letting these things creep up on you and ignoring the warning signs, but I also talk about the dangers of excessive vigilance, how a preoccupation with an unknowable, and perhaps inevitable future can be even more damaging. In the Bush years, it felt like our country was continually jumping at its own shadow, so determined to stave off another attack that it became a national neurosis; we likely did more harm to ourselves than any malefactor could have.

So far, I’m heartened by the response in Boston. As a city, we’ve held fast, and so far the reaction has been appropriately proportional to the event itself. My hope is that we don’t return to those dark times of the mid-aughts, and that we’ve learned from our mistakes.

Decades from now, when students and historians are trying to understand this troubled and turbulent time in our history, Odds Against Tomorrow will likely be on the reading list. It is a book of its time, and does a good job of peeling back the motives, fears, and anxieties of a society coming to terms with the true instability and uncertainty of life.

My review of Amity Gaige’s Schroder ran today in the Boston Globe.

Gaige’s plot is ripped from the headlines, borrowing from the real-life case of Clark Rockefeller. Like the fraudulent Rockefeller, her protagonist, Eric Schroder, is a German immigrant who borrows a famous name (in this case, Kennedy) in order to get ahead. When his dishonesty is revealed, he ends up on the run, kidnapping his only daughter. He’s not nearly as sinister as Rockefeller, however, more hapless and desperate, with an undercurrent of arrogance that leads him to make some terrible decisions.

Schroder’s personality, and his meandering road trip through upstate New York and New England, bear a striking similarity to Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert and the nomadic journeying in Lolita. I don’t think Gaige meant to intimate anything sordid about Schroder’s relationship with his daughter, but it’s also hard to not think about the connections if you’ve read both books. A quick, engaging read, Schroder manages to get you interested in a character who should be offputting, and asks some interesting questions about how much of our identity we’re capable of shaping, and how much we simply must accept as immutable.

My review of Robert O. Self’s All In The Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since The 1960s ran today in the Boston Globe.

The book is an amazing account of the evolution of American politics spurred by President Johnson’s Great Society reforms, as the emergence of feminism, gay rights, and anti-war sentiment was met with vociferous opposition by conservative traditionalists seeking to maintain their privilege and deny the full benefits of American citizenship to those they disdained. It’s a nice companion to Rick Perlstein’s extraordinary Nixonland. Where that book focused on the electoral consequences of the Civil Rights movement and the rise of “Law and Order” conservatism, Self takes aim at the nebulous concept of “family values” as defined by right-wing politicians over the last 50 years. He covers the impact that second-wave feminists, gay rights activists, and anti-war protestors had on the national dialogue, showing how their attempts to bring the America’s self-image closer to reality was met with fierce opposition by a privileged class with much invested in a national mythology of a white, male breadwinner and all the idealized trappings that came with it.

Self shows how “family values” became a cudgel with which conservative activists and politicians could batter the electorate, and shape the political landscape of the country. Though “family values” purport to be about returning America to a simpler time in which single-income, two-parent households were the norm (a fantasy that Self easily dismantles), in reality they’re about creating a multi-tiered citizenship in which only those with wealth and privilege are entitled to full enjoyment of their status as Americans. Everyone else is left to the mercy of the market, by design, and denied the full enjoyment of their rights.

While I was reading this book, Ta-Nehisi Coates published his excellent article, “Fear of a Black President,” at The Atlantic in which he wrote:

“For most of American history, our political system was premised on two conflicting facts—one, an oft-stated love of democracy; the other, an undemocratic white supremacy inscribed at every level of government.”

All in the Family hits on that same theme: the difference between our nation’s stated goals, its self-perception, and reality. Until we, as a country, come to terms with the systemic and institutional biases that are woven into the national fabric, we’ll never be able to tear out those stitches and reshape it into a system that works for everyone and treats everyone fairly.

My review of Our Lady of Alice Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif ran today in the Boston Globe.

Hanif’s protagonist, the strong-willed, vibrant Alice Bhatti is almost too incandescent to bear. At times, her portrayal strains credulity, edges slightly toward a Pakistani version of the manic pixie dream girl, but ultimately I was won over by the character and by Hanif’s lovely depiction of her. She’s irresistible—which is her biggest problem. The book follows Alice as she starts her job as a junior nurse at Karachi’s Sacred Heart Hospital, the bloody, chaotic emergency ward serving as a microcosm of bloody, chaotic Pakistan. Alice must fend off the interest and attacks of the men who surround her, always fighting against the current of her culture’s dismissive or degrading treatment of women.

Hanif approaches these touchy subjects with an irreverence that makes them palatable. I admit there were times when I felt his attempts to comment on the persistent male gaze Alice is subjected to veered a little to close to the kind of objectification he ostensibly was criticizing. But ultimately I believed in his commitment to the feminist theme, and the book’s ending is sincerely emotional, a truly heart-rending, beautiful finish.

My review of With the Animals by Noëlle Revaz ran today in the Boston Globe.

There’s been an unintended similarity between the last few books I’ve reviewed lately. There was the desultory Norumbega Park and its focus on family and property in the suburbs, then the grim Wish You Were Here and its transfer of those themes to a rural English farm. Noëlle Revaz’s With the Animals is also rather grim, and also concerns the struggles of a farm family, but it’s utterly unique in its approach, a challenging, harrowing tale that is an incredibly rewarding read, if not an enjoyable one.

The narrator of the story (for he almost certainly cannot be described as a protagonist, or even an anti-hero) is Paul, a Swiss farmer who visits unconscionable violence and brutality on his wife and children. Such explosive means are all he has at his disposal; he seems incapable of processing emotion, showing empathy, or even understanding that the people around him are people. The story is told through his voice, a remarkable construction of slang and malformed words that gives insight into how Paul’s warped mind works (or doesn’t work). Reading in his voice is troubling, as the limitations of his thought begin to feel claustrophobic and oppressive; the roughly-hewn argot creeps into your mind and gums up the works. It’s a testament to Revaz’s skill as a writer and storyteller that she was able to use language in such an effective and disturbing way.

When Paul hires Georges, a Portuguese farmhand, the new arrival attempts to teach his boss some degree of decency and compassion, and their uneasy friendship drives the narrative. With the Animals is an unflinching portrayal of callous masculinity run amok, and Revaz never opts for easy characterization or neat plotting; the ambiguous nature and addled point-of-view of the narrative poses difficult questions to the reader, and I think when most people finish this book, they’ll discover that the book is not finished with them.

My review of Traveler of the Century by Andrés Neuman ran today in the Boston Globe.

As the review makes clear, I really loved this book. It’s a smart, well-crafted novel with rich characters and a great sense of humor. Set in the early-to-mid nineteenth century, on the boarder of Prussia and Saxony, Traveler of the Century is a novel of ideas, many of which are teased out through the lively, engrossing dialogue that takes place in the salon of a charming socialite and in the cave of a wise old organ grinder. It was nice to read this book in parallel with Swann’s Way, as it was reminiscent of the “Swann In Love” segment (not so much in prose style, but in sentiment and subject matter).

There’s a lot going on in the book, but one thread that stuck out to me was the subtle and barely-noticeable mystery surrounding the main character, Hans. I’ll try not to spoil it, but I want to draw some attention to it since I think it’s easy to overlook. Throughout the novel, small details crop up that seem to make Hans uneasy. He possesses very old books that someone of his age and station would be unlikely to have. He is very concerned that people might see what’s inside the trunk he keeps in his room. He stops short of revealing details about his past to his paramour, Sophie, which he seems to indicate would be difficult to accept. Toward the end of the novel, Sophie’s father reveals that the one solid bit of biography we have of Hans is false.

The key to this mystery lies in the novels epigraph, a brief quotation from Franz Schubert’s Die Winterreise, an adaptation of poems by Wilhelm Müller, that points toward another literary traveler.

Traveler of the Century is a rewarding and enjoyable read, and like all great stories, makes you wish you had more time to spend with its characters and its vibrant world.

My review of Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here ran in today’s Boston Globe.

What a gloomy, gloomy book, but one whose gloom is earned and makes for a compelling (if, at times, challenging) read. It actually bears some similarity to Norumbega Park, in that it concerns family legacies, the importance of heritage and property, and the often unspoken emotions that drive relationships. Unlike that book, it’s raw and emotional, with a story that deals with matters of consequence, rather than petty frivolities. The protagonist, Jack Luxton, is plummeting into despair, haunted by the deaths of his parents and loss of his ancestral farm in Devon, England; his brother’s death as a solider in the Iraq War; and the unraveling of his marriage to the strong-willed, but icy Ellie.

The book is largely an exploration of Jack’s memories and inner turmoil; a loose framing story provokes the reminiscence, but is of little interest. Swift is a capable writer, and his ability to create heartwrenching setpieces makes Wish You Were Here both an engaging read, and hard to stomach. It’s a brutally dark book, but just manages to escape being oppressive.

My review of Norumbega Park by Anthony Giardina ran today in the Boston Globe

It tells the story about a family in suburban Massachusetts who… well, they don’t do a whole lot. There’s angst, and plenty of sexual anxiety (though very little consummation). At first, the story seems to be about the father, Richie Palumbo, moving his family to an idyllic, New England small town in the hopes that they would become part of a more refined segment of society. It’s set up to be about the hopes he’s invested in this town, and a particular house he sets his sights on. And then Giardina jumps ahead to tell the rather banal stories of the two Palumbo children.

I was pulling for this book till about halfway through, when the daughter, Joan, is tempted away from her life as cloistered nun by an attractive young man who Giardina, apparently in a fit of ludicrous unsubtlety, named Angel. It was a real throw-the-book-across-the-room moment. Nevertheless, I stuck with the novel all the way to its sluggish, unsatisfying ending. There’s just no sense of humor in this book, and never any compelling reason to care about the dull, emotionally-stunted characters. It’s a weak melodrama, and a real chore.

My review of Edna O’Brien’s James Joyce: A Life ran today at PopMatters.

A few years ago, I picked up Richard Ellmann’s massive biography of Joyce, which is considered to be the best literary biography ever written. I still haven’t read it. It’s so big, so imposing, I’ve yet to find an opportunity to fit it into my life. Someday.

Order James Joyce: A Life at Amazon

For now, Edna O’Brien’s compact, 179-page biography will be just fine. O’Brien’s slim book manages to traverse the entire life of this complicated, brilliant man, detailing his adolescent struggles, creative breakthroughs, and personal relationships, in particular his rocky marriage with Nora Barnacle. O’Brien sets out to help the reader understand and appreciate Joyce’s difficult, rewarding body of work, and does an admirable job of making Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake seem approachable without spoiling the mystique that surrounds and enhances them.

It’s a nice survey, slight but elevated by O’Brien’s fun, playful prose style. For a more specific look into Joyce, I’d recommend checking out Ulysses and Us, which is a great, down-to-earth walkthrough of Joyce’s magnum opus.

My review of Lou Beach’s 420 Characters ran today in the Boston Globe.

The book is a collection of short, micro fiction that Beach wrote as Facebook status updates back when the maximum character count for updates was 420. It was later raised to 500 and today it’s 5,000. While there were some fun moments in his stories, overall it seemed like a rather weak experiment. The stories make no use of Facebook’s unique social features; I would’ve liked to have seen Beach examine how instant publishing, instant feedback, and a direct, one-on-one relationship between and author and their audience affected his writing or shaped the project. There’s really nothing to distinguish the stories in 420 Characters from any other flash fiction project. It seems like a big missed opportunity, and the resulting stories just aren’t strong enough in total to stand on their own.

My review of Becoming Dickens by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst ran today in the Boston Globe.

Douglas-Fairhurst does an excellent job portraying the world young Charles Dickens grew up in, showing how the “novel” aspects of the Victorian era enabled the artistic and commercial viability of the literary novel, and thus provided an outlet for Dickens’s genius.

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The economic expansion of that time created an upwardly-mobile middle class, which gave poor kids like Dickens an opportunity to raise his station in life. Art was no longer the province of the wealthy or those lucky enough to secure patrons. The new, middle-class jobs of the Victorian economy provided a respite from energy-sapping, working-class vocations like factory work; as a clerk, Dickens had free time to pursue his hobbies, a comfortable, adequate salary, and connections to people who could aid or facilitate his career as a writer.

Becoming Dickens shows that talent is not enough to achieve success. A stroke of bad luck like, say, having been born into a world with a shrinking economy where the divide between rich and poor is widening, could have destroyed any hope of young Dickens being able to put his talent to use.

My review of Saladin by Anne Marie Eddé ran today in the Boston Globe.

I’ve been looking for a good biography of Saladin ever since I read Richard and John: Kings at War. This one, however, did not really do it for me. Eddé deconstructs the very nature of biography, untangling fact from fiction and asking whether we can truly know or understand figures of the past. It’s an intriguing premise, and the work she does in detailing how the “legend” of Saladin was cultivated by the sultan himself, and then modified by subsequent generations (both Arab and European), is enlightening. But the disjointed, fractured nature of the book was frustrating. There was just no excitement, no sense of narrative. Saladin is dry, academic, and while full of fascinating detail, it’s not tied together in an entertaining manner.