Category: Books

By J.K. Rowling. Published in 2007.

Warning: Many, many spoilers after the jump.

By Michael Chabon. Published in 2007.

The noirish style has an unfortunate reputation for being stylish yet shallow, just a lot of easily parodied purple prose and bleak underworld melodrama. But at its best, noir has a genuinely tortured soul that elevates it above those trappings. The genre came to prominence during the grim 1930s and experienced a film revival during the tumultuous 1970s because, at heart, it’s not so much about the gumshoe and the femme fatale as it is about disillusionment in the face of a world that seems all but irredeemable. Noir is about legitimate paranoia and the rot of corruption and brittle cynicism masking the last shreds of idealism. It’s about flawed people feebly trying to do something good under impossible circumstances. Noir is a genre that speaks to troubled times.

So given the many troubles and traumas of today’s world, it makes sense that writer Michael Chabon decided to play with noir in his latest novel. He is, of course, famously interested in muddying the boundary between so-called “literary” novels and genre fiction, but The Yiddish Policemen’s Union isn’t just an exercise, and though it dances lightly, even teasingly, around many hard-boiled detective tropes, it’s not a parody. Set in a fully realized counterhistorical world with dark parallels to our own, Chabon’s noir fantasia demonstrates just how resonant the genre can be.

By Jane Smiley. Published in 1998.

When my brother showed me an old Amazon.com review that described Jane Smiley’s 1998 novel as “Little House on the Prairie for grown-ups,” I had to read it. It was just a silly line, of course, but I adored Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books when I was little (I read my copies over and over until the spines broke), so even though I knew that phrase probably only referred broadly to subject matter, I headed to the library to check out The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton.

Frankly, the comparison is rather glib—the Ingalls family and the Newtons don’t share a motivation for moving West in nineteenth-century America, nor do they face the same hardships—but the books do have one key element in common: a compelling heroine with a strong, straightforward voice. Like Laura Ingalls, Lidie Newton is independent without being anachronistic, relatable and admirable to a modern audience while still convincingly inhabiting a long-past world. In Lidie, Smiley has created a memorable narrator: thoughtful, honest, and worth following through her many picaresque adventures.

By Mark Haddon. Published in 2006.

In his acclaimed debut novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon convincingly describes the interior monologue of an autistic boy. In A Spot of Bother, his subject seems more modest—four ordinary people—but perhaps that appearance is deceptive. After all, the vast majority of readers don’t know how it feels to be autistic, but they do know how it feels to clash with a parent or child or sibling or romantic partner, so they’re more likely to notice if the interior monologues in Bother seem off.

To my ear, A Spot of Bother did occasionally ring false—a bit too clean, a bit too pat—but the novel’s quiet, unassuming gentleness kept me absorbed nonetheless.

Reading Series Event at the Kaufmann Concert Hall, 92nd Street Y Tisch Center for the Arts, on Monday, December 4.

Sean is a graphic designer, and I work in book publishing, so the 92nd Street Y’s panel discussion of cover art intrigued both of us, particularly once we saw who would be on the panel: Chip Kidd, Milton Glaser, and Dave Eggers. The Reading Series organizers did an excellent job of assembling the panel, for the three men each come from different backgrounds and aesthetics, and each is an interesting, engaging speaker. The event ran for nearly two hours—and could have run longer—and I was never bored. (How could I be? Lots of slides with pretty pictures! Whee!)

By Sigrid Nunez. Published in 2005.

The idealistic radicalism of the 1960s and ’70s has always bewildered me. I remember watching The Weather Underground, a documentary about the Weathermen, a violent organization of that era that sought to provoke revolution against the United States government, and feeling overwhelmed by the surge of conflicting emotions it inspired. As much as I abhor the violence of 1960s extremists and sneer at their misguided strategies and pity their naïveté and disdain many of their goals (I don’t support revolution, so back off, Gonzalez), I envy their conviction that real change is possible and that they had the power to effect it. I can’t comprehend that kind of idealism because I myself have never known it.

But I’m not the only one who was born disillusioned; one could say the same of many if not most of my generation. That’s certainly the implication of the title of Sigrid Nunez’s book, The Last of Her Kind, about a young woman who comes of age during the ’60s and ’70s. The novel’s protagonist and narrator is not, however, the heirless paragon, Ann Drayton, but her erstwhile friend, Georgette George. We see Ann through Georgette’s eyes, and we, too, chafe at Ann’s self-righteousness yet respond nonetheless to her principled certainty and charisma. She might be sanctimonious, but she holds herself to the same standards she does everyone else, and that relentlessness makes her far more intriguing than your average holier-than-thou hippie.

By Jhumpa Lahiri. Published in 2004.

Names have fascinated me for more than a decade. When I was a teenager, I started collecting baby name books, a hobby I kept secret because people could easily get the wrong idea about a fifteen-year-old girl with a small stash of books for expectant mothers. How could I explain that my obsession wasn’t with babies but with what people name them and why and what that means?

I love studying names because thinking about names means thinking about cultural background, class, race, gender, and family history. Thinking about names means thinking about individual identity, collective identity, and the negotiation between the two. That’s precisely why Jhumpa Lahiri can use the name Gogol Ganguli, the name of the principal character in her novel, The Namesake, as a vehicle to address all of those issues. She doesn’t need to stretch; the issues are inherent in the name itself.

By Philip Pullman. Trilogy includes The Golden Compass published in 1995, The Subtle Knife in 1997 and The Amber Spyglass in 2000.

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is supposedly for “young adults,” teenagers, but the three books are so compelling, so powerful and thought-provoking and heartfelt, that they certainly should not be limited to a single age bracket. With beautifully drawn characters and a taut, suspenseful plot, the fantasy series makes for an electric, enjoyable read, and yet ultimately, the books are profoundly serious. As the story unfolds, Pullman’s true audacity becomes apparent: He has written a strange kind of sequel to Paradise Lost — unabashedly heretical but undeniably hopeful. By no means should teenagers have a monopoly on these books.

By Curtis Sittenfeld. Published in 2005.

Am I ever going to get to the point where I can read about the torments of adolescence without suffering flashbacks? I couldn’t ever make it through more than 10 pages of Curtis Sittenfeld’s story of a hyper-self-conscious teenage girl without having to set the book aside for a while, to remind myself that I’m 26 now and should be past this stuff.

Prep, Sittenfeld’s debut novel, has its faults. The plot meanders lazily, and Sittenfeld sometimes relies too heavily on stereotypes when sketching minor characters. That said, her portrait of the neurotic loner as a young woman is so spot-on, so well-observed, so fully realized, that it makes the book's flaws look utterly inconsequential.