Review of A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan's latest novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, is not your typical novel. And that was fine with me. In many ways, the novel reminded me of movies like Babel and Crash. Various people become interconnected and their lives collide, creating a complicated tapestry.

The book follows the lives of two main characters-- Bennie, a musician turned music executive, and his former assistant Sasha. We get glimpses of their lives as children, as teenagers, and as full-fledged adults. We often get these glimpses into their lives from the viewpoints of others who come into contact with them. We read about Alex, who dated Sasha, and later ends up connected to Bennie. We read about Ted, Sasha's uncle, who hunts her down in Italy. We read about Stephanie, Bennie's wife (for awhile) and a PR executive. These stories cover the past, present, and the future. The stories happen in California, New York, Italy, an unnamed foreign country. One chapter of the novel is done in Powerpoint by Sasha's 12-year-old daughter.

What Egan does well is capture the sadness and sometimes the desperation of people's lives. Identity, a theme in her writing, shows up again here. Who we are, she seems to say, is an amalgam of what people think we are.

Egan is one of my favorite contemporary writers. I highly recommend A Visit from the Goon Squad. For another excellent book by Egan, check out Look at Me, which is also about image and identity.

Just One Pink gives A Visit from the Goon Squad a 9.

Review of Alone With You by Marisa Silver

Alone With You, the latest book of short stories by Marisa Silver, was a quick read. The book is made up of 10 stories. Isolation, illness and parental issues, sometimes all at once, pervade Alone With You. Overall, I thought the stories were uneven. Some of them were sparkling, and others fell flat. I did find that the further I got in to the book, the more I liked it.

"Temporary," the first story, is about a small-town girl who goes to Los Angeles and moves in with a dramatic young woman. This story really didn't work for me-- it didn't seem to go anywhere. I didn't like "Three Girls," either. It's the story of three sisters with problematic parents and an unexpected knock at the door on a cold night.

But there were stories I did like. In the title story, a woman goes to the Sahara to ride camels with her husband, her son, and the son's girlfriend while on a quest to figure out who and where she should be. In "Night Train to Frankfurt," a 30-something woman with career and relationship problems travels to Germany with her cancer-stricken mother to visit a clinic. In "In the New World," a Polish immigrant to California grapples with an Americanized teenage son.

As for the writing style, sometimes I was in awe, and other times, I thought the language didn't work at all.

Just One Pink gives Alone With You a 7.5.

Review of The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall

Brady Udall 's latest novel, The Lonely Polygamist, weighs in at almost 600 pages. As the title suggests, it's the story of a polygamist living out west and how he deals-- or doesn't deal-- with his four wives and twenty-plus children. He's also working on a construction project in Nevada which requires him to be away from home for extended periods of time. He tells everyone he's working on building a senior center. Brothel, senior center, those are pretty much the same, right? No wonder the book is 599 pages. That's a lot of ground to cover.

Udall knows of what he writes. The Udall family is one of the most well known Mormon families in the U.S., and one of the most prominent in the western part of the country.

Golden Richards, the main character in the book, ends up becoming a Mormon-- and a polygamist-- through a series of events. His four wives, of course, play a prominent role in the book. Each one is very different from the next. Beverly, the first wife, is strict and severe. Nola and Rose-of-Sharon are sisters. And Trish, the fourth and youngest wife, has a backbone, not what we'd expect in a polygamist household. Add in nearly 30 children and there is major bedlam all the time.

Golden also looks back on the several children he's lost, and those parts of the book were the most poignant for me. What also struck me were the sections on Rusty, one of Golden's sons. Rusty is ignored by everyone in the family and desperately wants to be noticed. I have no idea what it's like to be a "plyg kid" as Udall calls them, but I got a good sense from reading about Rusty.

Large chunks of the book take place in Nevada, where Golden is working. While there, he has to contend with a boss from hell and his love for another woman, who happens to be said boss's wife. Toss in some other characters--thugs, wayward Mormons, religious Mormons-- and you have a book which is bursting at the seams.

In the course of the book, Golden never seems to make a real decision. Things just "happen" to him. And it was interesting to follow the course of his life-- and the lives of his family-- to see where they would end up.

This book is dense and descriptive. It's funny and sad. It gets to the core of human nature. It seemed like it was trying to be the "Great American Novel-- Polygamist Version." In many ways, it succeeded, but there were some threads that I couldn't quite grab on to.

Just One Pink gives The Lonely Polygamist an 8.

Review of The Theory of Light & Matter by Andrew Porter

Simply put, The Theory of Light & Matter is one of the best books of short stories I have ever read. Andrew Porter's collection is made up of 10 stories that take place across the U.S. Several of the stories feature an adult narrator looking back on an incident that occurred in childhood/adolescence or early adulthood. Siblings play a big role in this book-- brothers and sisters can often be confidantes and downfalls at the same time.

The first story in the book, "Hole," features a 20-something narrator who looks back on a childhood summer when he lost a close friend in an accident. The title story, one of the strongest, follows a woman's two love interests, who couldn't be more different, and her choice between them. "Merkin" is about a man who pretends to be his neighbor's boyfriend to spare her father the truth about her sexuality, but there are real feelings lurking beneath the surface.

The writing is spare, clear, and lyrical and incredibly evocative. Porter won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction for this book. These short stories are incredible, and I hope to read more from Porter.

Here is an excerpt from "The Theory of Light & Matter": Later that evening, when I returned from Robert's apartment, Colin was waiting in the hallway outside my dorm room. He was wearing his swim team sweat suit and reading a book. When he saw me approaching the door, he stood up and smiled. I could see in his eyes that he was concerned about where I had been, and when he took my hand without a word and kissed me against the wall, I realized the full extent of both his fear and his love for me.

Just One Pink gives The Theory of Light & Matter a 9.8 (because nothing is perfect...).

Review of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen

Truth is stranger than fiction, the saying goes. And Rhoda Janzen, in her memoir Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, proves that. Soon after turning 40, Janzen, a poet who teaches at Hope College, has major gynecological surgery. And not long after that, Janzen's husband, Nick, leaves her for a man. The same week Nick leaves her, Janzen is injured in a serious car accident. It sounds like a soap opera, but it's true.

Janzen decides to take a well-deserved breather at her parents' home in California. The kicker is that her parents are Mennonites, a faith she has tried to distance herself from for years. Her mother is always upbeat, while her father is more austere. They welcome her home with open arms, and Janzen does her best to try to heal.

This memoir is not just the story of Janzen looking back on her childhood and the Mennonite religion. It's also the story of her failed marriage to a man who was bipolar and bisexual-- that's a lot of bi. And her memoir is also about coming to grips with the life that she has chosen. An academic, Janzen strays from her upbringing, where too much education is considered a bad thing.

The tone of this memoir is light. Too light. I know that Janzen wanted to have a light-hearted tone, but in some places, this works against her. This is serious stuff she's tackling-- surgery, faith, divorce, mental illness. And yes, she can find humor in it, which is great. But all of this is deserving of a more serious tone on occasion.

All in all, though, I enjoyed the book, especially Janzen's interactions with her mother-- an always cheerful woman who suggests her daughter date a cousin-- and the various Mennonites in her orbit. I also found it interesting to read about Janzen's relationship with her siblings-- her brothers continue to follow the Mennonite religion, but her sister does not.

I admire Janzen for bouncing back from such adversity and for being so honest about everything that has happened to her.

Just One Pink gives Mennonite in a Little Black Dress a 7.5.

Review of The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle

If there is one word that comes to mind after reading Aryn Kyle's novel, it is "hushed." The God of Animals is the story of a young girl, Alice Winston, growing up on a horse farm in Colorado. Alice's life is far from easy-- her older sister has run off and gotten married, her depressed mother stays upstairs in her bedroom, and her father tries to keep money coming in and his home and business in order.

Alice is an unusually observant and smart girl. The novel opens with her recollection of a classmate's death. How she spins this death to her advantage was an interesting part of the book. It was also interesting to see how she dealt with social issues that came up at her school, how she tried to deal with her mother's illness, and how she tried to soldier on in light of so many troubles at home.

The quietness of this novel was one of its strong points, but I thought it moved too slowly. I would have liked to see a bit more action-- most of it came in the form of horse riding and training.

Kyle is a lyrical writer, and I thought the novel flowed nicely. She created an utterly believable narrator in Alice Winston and clearly has first-hand knowledge of life on a ranch.

Just One Pink gives The God of Animals a 7.5.

Review of In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin

We've seen an explosion of Indian literature over the past few years, but we haven't seen much Pakistani literature. Daniyal Mueenuddin's book of short stories, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, has changed that.

Mueenuddin's linked short stories tackle class issues in Pakistan. We see the viewpoints of the rich, poor, and those who used to be rich and are now poor. We meet an electrician who struggles to support his large family, a servant who uses sex to gain favor, an embittered Lahore judge, a spoiled and wealthy young woman who marries and moves to the countryside, among others. I found myself feeling empathy for all the characters, no small feat when many of them were manipulative and dishonest. Though I have never been to Pakistan, I got a good sense of the country from reading Mueenuddin's stories.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was a finalist for the National Book Award last year. This book was one of the best books of short stories I have read in years, and I highly recommend it.

Here is an excerpt from the story "About a Burning Girl": I am a sessions judge in the Lahore High Court. I should tell you at the start, so that you understand my position regarding these events, that despite my profession I don't believe in justice, am no longer consumed by a desire to be what in law school we called "a sword of the Lord"; nor do I pretend to have perfectly clean hands, so am not in a position to view the judicial system with anything except a degree of tolerance. I render decisions based on the relative pressures brought to bear on me.

Just One Pink gives In Other Rooms, Other Wonders a 9.5.