The BookReport

Chris is Reading: Sense of an Ending & Out of Oz

The Hampton holiday season is once again upon us, and we’d like to remind all of our far-flung and not-so-flung friends about our great new website, bookhampton.com, where your gift-shopping couldn’t be easier! You’ll feel like you're standing in one of our cozy stores: the same great selection, the same passionate recommendations, even the same gift-wrapping if you need it.  And don’t forget: you can get all of your eBooks on our site as well! Happy Shopping!

New novels from some of our best writers will make great gifts: Stephen King's masterful new novel 11/22/63 was reviewed here earlier this month.  

Julian Barnes has just won the Man/Booker Prize this year for his insightful new novel, The Sense of an Ending (Knopf). Again, time is an essential character in this tale of a man looking back on his youth, examining his loves and friendships, and trying to justify the actions of his younger self. Barnes deftly examines our tendency to remember ourselves in the very best light, and how emotionally dangerous this self-denial can be. Time, it turns out, can re-open old wounds instead of healing them.

 

Gregory Maguire’s The Wicked Years (beginning with Wicked in 1995) have thrilled and challenged readers, and Out of Oz (HarperCollins) is his enthralling finale in the series. Any reader who has followed the adventures of Dorothy, Elphaba, Glinda, Lirr, and Brr, will eagerly absorb the story of Rain, Elphaba’s granddaughter, as she takes up her grandmother’s broom to try and save a war-torn Oz from complete upheaval. Full of Maguire’s unyielding wit and crackerjack characters, Out of Oz is a heartfelt denouement.

Next up: The season's nonfiction highlights. Stay tuned!

— Chris Avena

Chris is Reading: 11/22/63

Stephen King, who I consistently consider the Dickens of his time, returns with his masterful new novel, 11/22/63 (Scribner). As usual, King's premise is ingenious: Jake, a schoolteacher in a quiet Maine town is approached by a dying man with a secret--a time portal located in his diner.  Can Jake travel back to 1958 and finish the job the dying man cannot? Can he prevent the assassination of JFK? So begins a relentless journey through decades, and a thought-provoking study of history, regret, chance, destiny, and the cruelty of time.

"Time is obdurate," King keeps reminding us, and we need to consider how every choice we make reverberates, creating ripples that flutter like a butterfly's wings. Ultimately, 11/22/63 is a passionate love story, the tale of two people from different eras and places who are determined to fight the indifference of time, only to discover that love itself, is timeless.

— Chris Avena

Jeremy is Reading: 1Q84

Just last night I finished Haruki Murakami's epochal, mind-blowing 1Q84 and must confess that I find it very daunting to try to write about in this space. Murakami is probably Japan's best-known author; his writing has special appeal to Westerners because so much of his frame of reference is European or American (for example cars, clothing styles, music) making it a bit easier to enter his unique world.

Until now, his "big" book — in all senses — was The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, a wonderful novel first published in English translation in 1997. While it can hardly be said that it is in any sense superseded by the new book — it certainly remains as wonderful as ever — 1Q84 is so large, so ambitious and so brilliant that it simply must dominate any discussion of Murakami's oeuvre from here on.
 
As in some of his other work (such as his most recent novel Kafka on the Shore and the earlier Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World) Murakami tells two stories in alternating chapters and then weaves them together in the course of the book. Each chapter is identified with the names of one or the other of the main characters: a man named Tengo and a woman named Aomame. Each is about thirty years old and living a fairly lonely (but not unhappy) existence in Tokyo; the year is 1984. The two of them had actually been in the same elementary school class when they were ten years old and made a lasting impression, although they have had no contact for the intervening twenty years and indeed have no knowledge of each other's existence.

Jeremy is Reading: The Marriage Plot

I think that everyone who read Jeffrey Eugenides' magisterial novel Middlesex has been eagerly awaiting his next book; this has turned out to require a lot of patience because it has taken almost a decade for his new novel, The Marriage Plot (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), to reach our shelves (in the respect of making his fans wait patiently for a new book for ten years or so, Eugenides resembles Jonathan Franzen). It certainly has been worth the wait.

The books are quite different: Middlesex had a broad historical sweep, with wonderful descriptions of the protagonist's Greek ancestors in Turkey and in the course of the emigration to the US (and specifically to Detroit). The Marriage Plot, on the other hand, is the story of a romantic triangle, two men and one woman, students at Brown University in the class of 1982, and takes place there and in the immediately following years.

The centerpiece of the triangle is Madeleine, an English major who grew up in a rather affluent suburb, is very beautiful, and is regarded as "normal", although the appearance is rather deceptive. Mitchell met her in freshman year and was totally smitten but also paralyzed from moving the relationship to something other than an intermittent friendship; he becomes more and more immersed in religious studies at school and winds up for an extended period in India helping at one of the hospitals operated by Mother Teresa (this section was recently excerpted in The New Yorker).

But Madeleine in turn is smitten with Leonard, a much wilder and much less stable type, who totally dominates her until he turns out to be incapable of caring for himself and submits totally to her care. We meet the parents of each of the three and some of their friends and colleagues, and learn how each became what they did. Each is quirky in some way, utterly original and fully fleshed out in Eugenides' wonderful prose. The "marriage plot" of the title is actually supposed to be a convention of Nineteenth Century fiction, in which the characters were always jockeying around to see who would marry whom; Madeleine actually writes a thesis on this topic, which of course is also very relevant to the plot of this book.

The book is also filled with wonderful references to a lot of earlier literature (especially of course those works exemplifying the "marriage plot"); clearly the reader sees the author's relationship to the grand literary tradition, while all the while remaining uniquely himself and writing a book that no one else today could write. As I said, The Marriage Plot was well worth the wait.

— Jeremy Nussbum