Parenthood. Discuss.

We Need to Talk About Kevin

By Lionel Shriver

An outstanding novel powered by what so few novels manage to achieve: authenticity. Kevin’s detractors complain that they find it impossible to believe how a mother could feel so coldly towards her son, as does Eva in this novel. But I enjoyed the book precisely because I found that so believable.

It is perfectly reasonable that most mothers love their progeny (although I would argue that few love them unconditionally, which is almost always a tautology). But within the complexity of human nature and experience, let’s face it: there will be some parents who dislike their kids, who hate them, whose paternal relationship lacks love from both sides, and who feel distraught that their crime is among society’s unmentionables. Anyone who argues that it is unnatural for a mother not to love her son misunderstands nature, which is messy and experimental and never, ever immutable.

So I found Eva to be not just believable and authentic but utterly captivating for the way she represents a phenomenon (no matter how small) that must be true but is also vilified to the point of being ignored. This is the central reason why Kevin works so brilliantly. It is truly fresh and wonderful.

But there are a great many other things right with this book. The prose is lucid and witty. The plot is tightly controlled and delicately threaded – winning the effect of gripping the reader. I was lucky enough to read the novel while on a break; if I was supposed to be working, I would have had to fudge the time sheet.

Kevin is a stunning novel with a shocking dénouement. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Perfect for a quiet night in alone

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

by Richard Yates

Richard Yates’s level of perception is so deep, and brought to the page with such grace, that even his most poignant and gloomy stories fill mewith joy. This collection of shorts is such a work. Each story in this remarkable little volume is carefully observed, each a study in loneliness. And yet Yates is able to lead the reader through them without feeling the same pain as his characters. His skill as an observer of the human condition is such that you feel connected to these sad characters, but able to sympathise from a distance at the same time. You feel like their psychiatrist: calculating a diagnosis, while understanding their character on every level.

And that does not mean that these stories come off as cold or distant. Just that Yates’s style affords you a kind of objectivity. It is not true objectivity – you still feel something for the lonely teacher who never quite hits it off with her class – but it is objective nonetheless. Yates has lifted the lid on these people’s homes so that you might look in on their lives. You can see and feel them with the professional detachment of a counsellor.

The collection is also a canny, if demographically narrow, perspective on twentieth century America, as is Yates’s Revolutionary Road. The intriguing social experiment of American modernity is portrayed with Yates’s characteristic pathos and clarity. For that alone, these stories are excellent.

A year at the zoo

Zoo Station

By David Downing

I haven’t read much from war-time Berlin, and I think this was a good introduction. Not because of the story, but because of Downing’s vivid evocation of the time and place.

Hairy, natch

Greybeard

By Brian Aldiss

Some writers build complex worlds and populate them with countless philosophies and cultures. That is the Tolkien school of storytelling. Other writers take a single, original idea and tell a straightforward story that hints at the big ideas someone like Tolkien would focus on. As a proper sci-fi writer, Aldiss is one of the latter kind. Greybeard is an exemplar of Aldiss’s school of thought: a lean, controlled, character-driven story with an easy idea at its heart.

Flying high

The Last Kestrel

By Jill McGivering

It would be easy to dismiss McGivering’s debut novel as ‘me-too lit’. She and her publishers spotted the success of The Kite Runner and, driven by McGivering’s personal experiences as a frontline war correspondent, hatched a plan to produce another book about Afghanistan for Western readers. This approach may indeed be what happened. But the product nevertheless surpasses any cynical design the audience may wish to infer.

Why not? There’s fun to be had in comics

Y: The Last Man

By Brian K Vaughan and Pia Guerra

It is somewhat ironic that a comic book in which 99% of the characters are female focuses on the sole male character. But that is the world we live in, and I give the authors of Y: The Last Man credit for inventing a very simple but enthralling scenario. The situation is this: an unknown virus has killed all mammals on Earth that carry a Y chromosome – ie, all men – except for Yorick, an American loser, and his pet monkey, Ampersand.

In Courtney’s man’s world, this cannot be a feminist’s book

It’s a Man’s World

By Polly Courtney

Some would say that an author’s decision to ditch her publisher over charges of sexism just as she needs publicity for her new novel are cynical. Having read It’s a Man’s World, in which shrewd capitalist nous rules, I can see why Polly Courtney did it. She’s a smart businesswoman. And while I don’t doubt her good feminist intentions, I cannot help but question her methods.

The ballast of great American literature

The Ballad of the Sad Café

By Carson McCullers

The first book I reviewed on this blog was The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers, over two years ago. I knew I’d return to her writing some day, so I was delighted to find a copy of Sad Café for sale in a charity shop, charging 10p. It’s probably the most undervalued book I own!

What a brilliant collection of stories this is. The novella that lends its title to the entire collection is a perfect study of Miss Amelia, her hunchbacked companion Cousin Lymon and her ex-husband Marvin Macy. The novella contains some wonderful descriptions of these characters: as is true with friends in life, you feel as if you know them deeply and yet they remain enigmatic at the same time. You can’t ever know someone completely. McCullers gives us just enough of her protagonist, Miss Amelia, to understand her motivations in life. And yet the author holds something back, making Miss Amelia mysterious and unfathomable in the final analysis. It makes for an intriguing story.

As with Wedding, the stories here are filled with exquisite evocations of place and time. Sad Café occurs in a small, wood shack of a town, dusty roads, nosy residents. McCullers puts you in the middle of it – in the café itself, among the moonshine swillers and the hefty wooden furniture. The other stories are equally capable of dropping the reader into their setting, perhaps none more so than A Domestic Dilemma, in which a man confronts his wife’s alcoholism. Arguably a much crisper representation of suburban domestic horror than The Women’s Room, albeit from the husband’s perspective, this story manages to suggest that the home is no cruise ship. The husband sees his wife’s problem, tries to protect their children from it and even tries to help his wife. And yet the heartbreaking conclusion is his apparent admission that he can’t do much for her and that perhaps this is the way it is. The story is a much more nuanced way to address the domestic question than The Women’s Room. It is not combative from the outside; it merely shows from the inside of these characters how awful the social structure of marriage and family can be.

Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland is a brilliant title, and the story contained within it just as good. The tale is a brief exploration of one simple observation: that some people lie for the sake of lying. We all know someone who does this and, while McCullers can’t answer why people do it, she outlines its effect on those around them. Enlightening observational stuff, McCullers. Will it be another two years before I find you again?

Originality squared

Slaughterhouse 5

By Kurt Vonnegut

Every so often you come across a novel that is so dazzling in its originality and imagination that it leaves you breathless. Slaughterhouse 5 is one such novel. Its uniqueness comes not in the way its characters behave or what they say or where they live. Any writer who tries too hard on creating new modes for these elements is going to forget how to tell a story. No, in this novel, Vonnegut’s originality is much more insidious. It’s the way that Vonnegut sat down one day and said to himself, ‘I’ll write a book about the bombing of Dresden and about a man who is kidnapped by aliens with no concept of time, and it will show the horror and futility of war.’

Now, that’s a man after my own heart. There’s the originality. It’s not imaginative to call your aliens ‘Tralfamadorians’; anyone can make up silly names for alien races. It’s not even imaginative to kidnap a human and display him on a distant planet as a kind of zoological specimen; anyone could probably think that up – and I’m sure hundreds of sci-fi writers have done just that. No, Vonnegut’s imagination is much broader: in less than 300 pages, he tears apart several genres and even changes the concept of the novel.

It is a great thrill to read such a book, because it is so different from all your other experiences of reading books. And yet it is grounded in some very real facts – the bombing of Dresden being the main one. The beauty of centring a story about one such awful event is that it becomes relentless and unavoidable. You know Dresden is destroyed and that it’s a bad thing, and so the build-ups to it, connected through our protagonist’s time travelling-alien-adventure plot, become more and more devastating. Moreover, it allows Vonnegut to retain his focus and not to be concerned with every other horrible war. He doesn’t need to do that. Dresden is bad enough. Focusing on that is almost as brave as writing a novel that the booksellers won’t know how to categorise. This book is great fun and a real thrill.

A new world of noir

Lost World

By Patrícia Melo

A succinct noir thriller from a talented writer, this book. It was not what I would call ‘tight’: the plot occasionally became tangential. Although Melo used these digressions for important character development work, I think that can be achieved at the same time as relentless action. Instead, Melo opted for an almost leisurely pace, a road trip more than a chase. That’s not to say that there is no chase. Her novel contains plenty of action and adrenaline. And she’s brilliant at creating a sense of claustrophobia felt by a fugitive: freedom is his (for now), but there are people after him. The great thrill of this novel is that you hope he gets to achieve his objective before his pursuers catch up with him. Even though he is in many ways the moral baddie, you want the protagonist to succeed. That might be because he’s our narrator, but also because Melo is careful to characterise his opponent (whom the newspapers would describe as the ‘goodie’) as conniving and manipulative and greedy.

Some things I particularly liked include the following. First, the feeling of being on the road – that’s mostly because our man is being chased and is chasing someone else himself. Second, one of the least likely accomplices in noir fiction: a mangy, sick and rather useless dog, who humanises our fugitive and becomes a central character in his own right. Third, the narrator’s voice is clipped and full of character, but does not resort to cliché. As with all good noir, the ending is particularly significant and filled with moral uncertainties. Melo has done a fine job – and what a thrill to read a noir novel set in Brazil and Bolivia, too!