"Fifteen Dogs"

By Andre Alexis
ISBN No. 978-1-55245-305-6
www.chbooks.com

How's this for a pitch? Two gods give 15 dogs staying overnight in a veterinary clinic "human consciousness" to see if they'll be as happy or miserable as their owners.
With its clever ground rules for a parallel reality of thinking, talking dogs (reminiscent of the rules of the afterlife in "The Lovely Bones") and the conundrum of mastery over "lesser" creatures (reminiscent of "A.I. Artificial Intelligence"), "Fifteen Dogs" is the latest in a very long line of stories about what happens when dogs whisper back.
The 1975 cult film "A Boy and his Dog" starred Don Johnson as a slacker Mad Max wandering through a dystopian desert with his talking dog. The 1989 movie "Baxter" was narrated by a French-speaking bull terrier. In the excellent book "The Dogs of Babel", a distraught husband tries to find out why his wife died in a freak accident by getting the only witness - a dog - to talk.
Like all of those aforementioned titles "Fifteen Dogs" is a compelling crossbreed of everything from the deepest philosophy about what constitutes a happy life to the most basic emotions around the death of a pet.
When the writing's good it's really good. A blind dog sleeping outside was "easily seen by all the creatures that walked, flew or crept past him on their way through the gardens." And when the writing's not so good (as it is in the first 44 pages) it's almost Disney-ish in its apostrophe-free depiction of plucky canine teamwork. Even worse, the gods make their bet over a few brewskis in a Toronto bar. (I know Toronto sees itself as the cultural and business centre of Canada, but now it's the mythological and philosophical centre of the whole universe??)
Yet "Fifteen Dogs" is still a very clever and rewarding read. At only 171 pages, the spareness of the writing (considering the complexities of the plot) is a miracle of sorts. When a storyteller is this assured and confident he encourages us to trust him as well. Besides, it's nice to think that our lives are determined as much by choice and circumstance as they are by imperfect gods of fate making it all up between games of Foosball.
"The first [god] spins the thread of a life," Alexis explains. "The second draws out the length of thread each being will have. The third cuts the thread and ends that being's time on earth." Whew... And when the gods toy with the fates of the dogs and their owners ("Atrapos cut two of the three lives that were wound together, then added years to the one that was left by way of balance.") make sure you have some tissues nearby. 

Margaret Atwood ends her Dystopian Trilogy

“Oryx and Crake” (ISBN No. 978-0-3073-9848-2; Vintage Canada)
“The Year of the Flood” (ISBN No. 978-0-7710-0844-3; McClelland & Stewart)
“Maddaddam” (ISBN No. 978-0-7710-0846-7; McClelland & Stewart)

 There’s something unfair about using only 500 words to review 900+ pages of a dystopian trilogy but such is the state of blogging about books about the coming dystopia in our age of drive-by publishing and nanosecond attention spans.

To put it so the Millennials understand it, Margaret Atwood’s threesome is basically AMC’s “The Walking Dead” – without the gore, and with scientists, ciphers and their human-like creations as its survivors. And like TWD the start-up is thrilling and enthralling; the later stuff not so much.
In some action movies the budget is so large that the final half hour is nothing but special effects and explosions, a burning off of what’s left of the budget. “Maddaddam” applies a similar technique. Here Atwood burns off some of the most punishing back-and-forth dialogue I’ve ever read in order to use up the background she’d apparently written for her characters – but wouldn’t/couldn’t/didn’t use in the first two books of the trilogy. When a character says “needless to say” they’ve summed up three-quarters of “Maddaddam.”
To be fair there’s an emptiness here that eerily suggests a world suddenly uncluttered by pretty much everything - except the obligatory power struggles required in most dystopian fiction. There are “wow” moments about the book (I especially enjoyed the glowing rabbits, just one of the lab experiments of the future running wild when everything collapses) but for a writer of Atwood’s stature (and perhaps indicative of the disposable vampire/werewolf/teen romance content of Wattpad, the creative writing site she champions) the quiet assuredness of “Maddaddam” suggests a darker future for fiction. “Oryx and Crake” and “The Year of the Flood” were wonderful but “Maddaddam” is that most typical of millennial pursuits: elegant, empty art.

“Born Weird”

By Andrew Kaufman

ISBN No. 978-0-307-35764-9

www.randomhouse.ca

How’s this for pitch perfect for a pitch meeting in a publisher’s marketing department?
When they were born Grandmother Weird blessed each of her five grandchildren with a special power. Not “The Fantastic Four” or “X-Men” kind of power – but a weird, innate, appreciative ability, like always knowing the way home or being eternally hopeful. (Hey, I said they weren’t X-Men powers.) Over the years, however, each blessing has become a curse (“blursings” the grandkids call them). Predicting the date, hour and minute of her death in her Winnipeg nursing home, Grandma Weird instructs granddaughter Angie (blursed with the power to forgive, no matter who slights her) to collect the others so she can collectively lift the blessing/curses from them before she dies. 
What follows is a hunting and gathering of siblings that takes us from that Winnipeg nursing home to the island kingdom of Upliffta and then to a decaying mansion in Toronto. And with each new reunion comes an airing of grievances, disappointments, and an illustration of how some children – unable (or too able) to break away from a family legacy – are doomed from the start. “There was a moment when it could have gone either way,” the narrator says. “If just one of the Weirds had been able to see the absurdity in this tragedy…But none of the Weird siblings were…strong enough to be as outrageous as the circumstances they found themselves in.” Will all of the Weird kids agree to go back home? Will they make it to Grandma Weird’s deathbed in time to have their blursings lifted? Will removing them make any difference to their blursed and broken lives? 
As far as novels about family dysfunction go, “Born Weird” has a lot going for it, especially since the blursed grandkids are reminiscent of the family of boys appropriated by J.M. Barrie, the author of “Peter Pan.” Barrie told those five siblings that he created Peter Pan “by rubbing the five of you violently together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame.” And like Barrie’s boys – most of whom met tragic ends - the Weirds can’t seem to get a break. 
That doesn’t make the book any less funny or readable – just kind of familiar if you’ve watched a lot of TV shows about the misadventures of unlucky characters. 
This makes sense because author Kaufman (“All Of My Friends Are Superheroes”, “The Waterproof Bible”) shares both the same name as the late, oddball comedian of TV’s “Taxi” and the same birthplace as Alice Munro (Wingham, Ontario) which, according to press notes, makes him “the second-best writer from a town of 3000” people. But Kaufman also calls himself a screenwriter and his book is an easy, engrossing read and practically ready-made for the movies in the same way that Alice Hoffman’s “Practical Magic” read like the novelization of the movie it was about to become. By the time Grandma Weird wields telekinetic powers at her nursing home and Angie’s breath-catching crying jag is spelled out in scripted detail (“Everything’s…so…e…motional…right…now.”) you’ll be picturing Emily Blunt as Angie and Shirley MacLaine as Grandma Weird for the movie version. 

"Natural Order"

By Brian Francis

Anchor Canada

ISBN No. 978-0-385-67155-2

www.randomhouse.ca

Most books, once separated by genre, can then be further separated by how they relate to the other books within that genre. In fiction this second separation can sound like a recipe. And so it is with this new novel.

Using ingredients/formats/premises culled from other, recent and popular titles, the first third of a cup of “Natural Order” sounds an awful lot like “Water for Elephants” (the nursing home, the flashback, the sale of a family home), the second full cup sparks worries that “We Need To Talk About Kevin” (a son with secrets, a mother’s iron-clad maternal instinct). And the final teaspoon, well, it’s actually a surprise that I didn’t see coming. The result is a novel that’s quite satisfying – and that’s saying something these days.

No ‘spoiler alert’ here; just a lot of nuance to appreciate: the poignancy of an old Mother’s Day card, the leisurely grind of daily life that turns disappointments into golden-hued memories by virtue of time, and an uncomfortably spot-on illustration of the often difficult mother-son tug-and-push. In the bigger scheme of things “Natural Order” impresses more than the recent titles by such heavyweights as John Irving and Edmund White. Both of those “name” writers boasted their novels were about the whole arc of a person’s life – but their books ended up being a lot like everything they’ve written before (I’m starting to think Irving and White are writing about their own “arcs of life”). Certainly fiction is in a slump and only the rarest of writers can “re-invent the wheel” when it comes to combining the ingredients/formats/premises of popular fiction in a new and novel way. Given that recipe “Natural Order” is an original.

“In One Person”

By John Irving

ISBN No. 978-0-307-36178-3

www.randomhouse.ca

www.john-irving.com

I’m no fan of John Irving and have been consistently disappointed with each and every book of his that I’ve read. Promising storylines devolve into anatomical punchlines; profundities are the cast-iron kind; leitmotifs, leitmotifs, leitmotifs… Still, I always start reading an Irving book in the hope that this one will finally deliver on the promise that each of them suggests: that it’ll finally be a great novel in the Charles Dickens tradition. “In One Person” is a great novel – a great John Irving novel. Expanding on an aside he floated in his first book (“The World According to Garp”) of a “sexual suspect,” his new novel chronicles 50 years in a life of a bisexual man. This alone makes “In One Person” a talking point; Irving rarely writes about bisexuality and rarely in the first person, as he does here. Still, it’s that mention of THE Charles Dickens in the book’s first paragraph that raises expectations. The result – depending on what you think of Irving as a writer – is either an epic, socio-political examination of the libido, or a litany of the conceits Irving refuses to retire: dirty words, competitive wrestling, manufactured melodrama. Those are the same complaints people had about “The World According to Garp” when it was published way in 1978 (with different, coloured covers for its paperback edition). But “Garp” also won a National Book Award and Irving has spent his last 12 novels sorting through these mixed messages trying to prove the prize wasn’t an accident. The only difference now is that Twitter, texting and reality TV, have produced books by people like Snooki and that girl from “The Hills.” Thus, a novel like “In One Person” with its black-and-white cover and brief allusions to the classics becomes literature simply by default. 

“Benevolence”

By Cynthia Holz
ISBN No. 978-0-307-39890-1
www.randomhouse.ca

Attention all writers of fish-out-of-water, courage-under-fire, romantic-vampire-fiction: See how easy it is to write an original story?
“Benevolence” is an original – of sorts. It’s tempered by enough smarts (in character, motivation, plot) to compensate for its clichés (much of the book reads like script direction). The result is a book that feels oddly fresh and inventive.
We are audience to a childless marriage between a psychiatrist and a psychologist. The former assesses candidates for organ transplants; the latter is currently treating a phobic woman who lost her husband in a train crash. This pair of doctors might have been happy at one time but the daily grind of all things academic, highbrow and just plain petty have turned their marital bliss into blitz.
When they take in a boarder (and his secrets) as a kind of child substitute this dyad of a family takes on a whole new dynamic – one better left for the reader to explore at their own pace. Yes, the set-up might ring bells with those partial to stories about people building their own families of “chosen” relatives but the real pleasure of the book is its many illustrations of how people try, fail or succeed to connect with other human beings in a world full of cultural junk food.

"Pulse"

By Julian Barnes
ISBN No. 978-0-307-35961-2
www.randomhouse.ca
www.julianbarnes.com

Fans of the long form in fiction who were outraged (outraged, I tell you!) that Julian Barnes won big prizes for the surprisingly slim “The Sense of an Ending” might want to sit down when they read this: his new (and eagerly awaited follow-up) “Pulse” is more of the same - many times over.
It’s a collection of short stories.
Certainly stories that span a mere dozen pages are easier to write. At that length the author can make sure characters and metaphors stay where they’re supposed to; that intent and execution are equally obvious – to both writer and reader. These days who in their right mind wants to bend and twist a sprawling 300+ page narrative into something meaningful for an Everyman whose attention span lasts as long as the latest viral video?
In “Pulse” metaphors and story arcs are kept in check, and serious readers of serious fiction will be hard pressed to find any disappointments – or errors. (Indeed, in “East Wind” I had an “A-ha!” moment when Barnes switched from second to third person – until I realized it was a conceit of the story’s narrator, not a mistake of the author.) Instead, we’re lucky enough to be in the company of a master storyteller. “At Phil & Joanna’s 1: 60/40” is all painfully cajoling dialogue. In “Gardeners’ World” the complacent commitment of a marriage is compared with the construction of a backyard garden. And so it goes. Each story is quite, and quietly, remarkable, if only because these days the public has to wade through so much to get to so little that’s meaningful – in their lives, at the workplace, in culture. Barnes has written a book that’s both indicative and anecdotal for our internet age: a collection of one-offs, a book of small miracles of writing.

“Lost Memory of Skin”

By Russell Banks
ISBN No. 978-0-307-40173-1
www.randomhouse.ca
This novel could be made up of headlines: “Youth Sex Offender Lives under causeway”, “University Professor exploits sex offender youth”, “university professor has secrets of his own.” Then – no spoiler alert here – each of those headlines is rolled out and folded into the developing plot in the same way that modern media “advances” a story: characters are cast, secrets are revealed, lives are redeemed or destroyed. That might seem calculated but given the demands of publishing these days (books need to be topical, readable and, most of all, marketable) even well-established writers are looking to the cultural zeitgeist and publisher’s publicist for their inspiration. Reading this book I kept thinking I was researching a story ABOUT the story in the book. Was this Russell Banks’ intention? (Some of the same themes – albeit litigiously – were covered in “The Sweet Hereafter.”) The only thing that kept reminding me it was a novel – and a good one - was the author’s trademark dour dialogue and drawn-out description. Few serious writers are as seriously talented as Russell Banks.

“The Leftovers”

By Tom Perrotta
ISBN No. 978-0-307-35638-3
www.randomhouse.ca

Tom Perrotta’s previous books were about high school politics (“Election”; great book, great movie), an extramarital affair (“Little Children”; great book, awful movie) and a censored sex education teacher (“The Abstinence Teacher”; great book, soon-to-be a movie). A reviewer called Perrotta “an American Chekhov” and the title fits. His view on the lives of quiet desperation being endured by your neighbours reaffirms your belief that literature still exists in a world where even the idiots from “Jersey Shore” publish books (books!) in the pursuit of media domination. It was only a matter of time before Perrotta took (another?) aim at evangelical American politics. As such, the title and plot of “The Leftovers” is depressingly appropriate. It’s vintage Perrotta, for sure (terrifically written with the most natural dialogue in books today) but it’s also an uneasy visit to Chuck Palahniuk territory (painstakingly detailed and weird for weird’s sake). When some Mapleton townsfolk suddenly disappear “POOF!”-style, the leftovers (or those “Left Behind” – to use the name of a series of movies about The Rapture made by a former child actor from TV’s “Growing Pains”) wonder if the explanation is scientific or religious, and adjust their lives belief-wise. In new mayor Kevin Garvey’s house, that includes his wife joining a homespun cult called the Guilty Remnant, his son trailing after a charlatan prophet called Holy Wayne, and the possibility of a new romance with a woman whose whole family went POOF!
What results is what usually results when a writer writes about religion – especially new sects. Perrotta spends so much text laying down – and then reminding us of - the ground rules of his story’s premise that the reader really works for that payoff at the end of an especially long paragraph about The Unburdening. Yes, it’s frequently hilarious, but sometimes you really do feel like The Leftover who “couldn’t sit still for lectures…the professor’s words blurred into a meaningless drone, a sluggish river of pretentious phrases.” Perhaps religion is already so melodramatic that it’s become un-parodyable.
Still, this is Tom Perrotta and the book is both a smart hoot and a witty indictment of the hypocrisy and stupidity that freely flows around our culture courtesy of too many internet connections, too many stupid people, and too few reliable news sources. The disappeared of the book aren’t just the figments of our religious culture, but also the smarts of a dying literature, as well as “The Disappeared” (to quote the title of Kim Echlin’s book) of far-flung exotic locales where young men and women just go missing for seemingly no reason at all and no one with any power seems to care. Perhaps the most distressing lesson learned from “The Leftovers” is how anyone envisioning a world of constructive thought, of actual ideas, a place where the Tom Perrottas of our world publish frequently and freely, is likely to be rewarded, instead, with a society still mired in the political dark ages of Fox News.

“She Said/She Saw”

By Norah McClintock
ISBN No. 978-1-55469-335-1
www.orcabook.com

By the time you get to the line “…if you want to get the whole story…you need to pull the pieces together,” that comes maybe two pages into this book about the faulty memory of a witness to a gangland-style slaying, you realize you’re in the grip of a serious storyteller. When the narrator finishes her introduction with: “Here are the pieces,” we’re hooked. The “She Saw” part of this book is Tegan, the witness/survivor of a shooting that claimed two of her friends. The “She Said” part of this book is Tegan’s shaky recollection about the shooting. She says she doesn’t know why her friends were targeted, why she was spared or even who did the shooting. She also worries that the killer might come back to finish her off. No one believes her, of course. Even her sister, Kelly, is suspicious. She details and catalogues the facts in an effort to learn the truth – even if it incriminates Tegan. Because Kelly sees life “like a movie or a TV drama, or, sometimes, a comedy” parts of the story are told in the form of a screenplay. No spoiler alert here! All I’m going to say is that “She Said/She Saw” a triple good read of a suspenseful thriller – for kids (the book’s audience is aged 12+) and adults. Its topic is timely, its characters flawed but smart, and the screenplay format a great introduction to the discipline.

“Frumkiss Family Business”

By Michael Wex
ISBN No. 978-0-307-39776-8
Knopf
www.randomhouse.ca

The first thing you notice about this book is its cover. Okay, maybe not. Coloured an unappetizing hard blue-green, and featuring a rough-hewn etching of what appears to be a Dodo or turkey smoking a cigarette on the cover, you could be forgiven for judging this book by its cover. Usually, something like this would a major nitpick for me; I’d argue that while I can’t single-handedly smarten up slaves of the internet to read actual books, publishers of books need to make their covers as neat and sparkly as a Facebook page to lure internet eyeballs. Yet that’d be a mistake in this case. The book cover perfectly summarizes the tone of a tough, thoughtful, and oddly engrossing view of Toronto’s Jewish community. Our main characters are Vanessa, Randall and Rachel, the three children of Canada’s most famous podiatrist. Outwardly they seem like the perfect products of metropolitan Toronto, but each of them is constantly being affected and re-shaped by new revelations (and no spoiler alert; they’ll stay revelations for the reader) about their grandfather, Faktor. What makes FFB such a great read can be illustrated by Vex’s description of a character named Milner, who “dressed like a pushcart peddler in a photo from 1892…[dished] out a way of being Jewish so authentically rooted in the lives of real Jews that some of it hadn’t been written down or recorded until he came along.” The same could be said about Wex’s book. The characters, the culture, and storyline should be stale and well-worn (Wex’s previous title was “Born to Kvetch”) but they all feel fresh and inventive; like a Lonely Planet guidebook to a family history. Think of “Frumkiss Family Business” as “Moonstruck” + Jewish history X 2 Chers and 1 Nicolas Cage.

“New York”

By Edward Rutherfurd
ISBN No. 978-0-385-66427-1
www.randomhouse.ca
Readers of a certain age can be forgiven for getting a sense of déjà vu when they read the jacket copy of this brick of a book. The last time I read “a rich, engrossing saga, weaving together tales of families rich and poor, native-born and immigrant – a cast of fictional and true characters whose fates rise and fall and rise again with the city’s fortunes,” it was the late 1970’s, the story was set in New York, and the book was E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime.” Well, we’re still in New York, but given the demands of the Internet generation and an audience of Twi-hards and Potter-heads used to 800-page sequels, the canvas of the contemporary novel now demands a certain length and breadth to satisfy the easily dissatisfied. Often, this results in writing that needn’t be written at all; most of these new books are just run-on descriptions of the same places described in the previous installment of the series (always a series, it seems) dressed up as new episodes. Rutherfurd has the length part down. His “New York” doesn’t just cover an era in the city; it encompasses an almost biblically long eon of time. From New York’s start as a tiny fishing village right up to 9-11, the novel is worth reading if only to admire its mechanics. It’s frankly amazing how far the author can take you in only a dozen pages. Story-wise, it’s an epic, all right. Rutherfurd wisely invests his tale with enough novel twists and clichéd plot points to keep the eye dancing and the brain clicking. The only thing that suffers – as it does with all epics – is the writing, which has to be understated, stately, proper and functional and get you to where you need to go with minimal flourish and description. But as luck would have it, that impersonality gives “New York” a real and suspenseful poignancy. Michael Cunningham (“The Hours”) has publicly expressed a desire to write a novel about the history of a place, the people who gathered there; essentially the dichotomy of the concrete of the structure and the impermanence of the people who built it. Until Cunningham writes it, “New York” is that book.

“Krakow Melt”

By Daniel Allen Cox
ISBN No. 978-1-55152-372-9
www.arsenalpulp.com
You know how when you group your books in your bookcase by genre and there’s always a few of them that defy easy cataloguing? “Krakow Melt” is such a book. Even though it’s only 151 pages the book requires reams of text to explain even its minor plot twists. Simply put, it’s about two Polish firebugs fighting homophobia in Krakow in 2005. Wrapped up in that sales pitch, however, is the firebrand POV of its renegade author. Gender roles, sexual orientation, socio-political commitment and materialism are given valentines or bull’s-eyes in the galvanizing prose of Cox. An author’s second book is usually his safest but Cox, proving that his first book, “Shuck” was no fluke and that he still has a masterpiece in him, seems even more reckless the second time around. The characters are smarter, the dialogue is sharper and the words themselves seem to come straight from Cox’ unconscious. The book is so conversation-worthy that you don’t want to spoil it for other readers by quoting anything at all. But still, like a song stuck in your head, lines linger and demand sharing: “She then returned to her reading, which I found ridiculously sexy,” he writes. “A book lures you into a state of bodily comfort and then, once your limbs are placed just right, finger-f---s your insides. I wanted to be the book, stretching her open a little wider with very pithy sentence.” Whew… Is there a literary genre called Mental Hook-up?

“Missouri”

By Christine Wunnicke (Translated by David Miller)
ISBN No. 978-1-55152-344-6
www.arsenalpulp.com

First things first, this is not a sequel to “Brokeback Mountain.” An homage maybe, but not a sequel. There are similarities, of course. Both books are slender, written by women, take the name of a place for their title, and are about gay cowboys in the American Midwest. After that, they’re completely and totally different books. Sort of.
Whereas “Brokeback Mountain” was set in the 1960s, “Missouri” takes place in the wild west of the 19th century. And whereas ‘Brokeback’ began with a sad memory, “Missouri” begins with a makeover. Yes, a makeover. Here, Douglas, a poet and intellectual sodomite of Oscar Wilde dimensions has come to cool his heels and change his hair colour after a nasty bit of scandal has driven him from England. Things look bleak in this drab little town of landmarks with hee-hee names like Bone Bank and Wabash River and New Harmony. That is, until Douglas fulfills every sex tourist’s dream by being both robbed and taken hostage by a scruffy, young outlaw by the name of Joshua. I’m not giving anything away when I say that the two men click because that’s what it says they do on the book’s back jacket (well, actually a bit more poetically: “a remarkable secret is revealed, these two very different men grow closer”) or that their relationship is threatened when Douglas’s brother tries to save him from his uncivilized surroundings (or as the book jacket says: ”Douglas’s brother tries to ‘save’ him from his uncivilized surroundings”). In-between all that is a love story of surprising delicacy. Still, I guess the biggest curiosity of “Missouri” is just how far the sex scenes go (one thing I won’t be giving away) which is a pity because while “Brokeback Mountain” re-wrote the Marlboro Man mythology of the old west, “Missouri” means to re-write the pop cultural mythology of “Brokeback Mountain.” Sad ending or not (and I’m not saying it is or isn’t) the characters in “Missouri” learned a lesson from ‘Brokeback.’ The result is that they all seem to know how short a life can be and that every second – especially in a book this thin – counts.

The Lottery Winner Cometh...

"Ragged Company"
By Richard Wagamese
ISBN No. 978-0-385-25694-0
www.randomhouse.ca
Welcome to a new genre: Recession Reading. First the plot: A group of homeless people squatting in an old movie theatre find a winning lottery ticket worth 13+ million dollars. Trouble is they’re homeless and only someone with a fixed addy can claim the prize. Can they trust – I mean, REALLY trust – a burned-out journo who just happens to be in the movie house (but has a house of his own) to collect and share the winnings?
The economic crisis, the homeless problem, the coming winter. Together they’ve created the perfect storm for a book that’s equal parts moral parable, cautionary tale, and wish fulfillment. Even better (or worse?), living in Vancouver, Canada, the book conjures up images of our poorest neighbourhood, the downtown east side. And the book’s movie theatre? It sounds just like that neighbourhood’s Lux Theatre. Political. Personal. Popular. What more could you ask for in an engrossing page-turner?
There are things about the book to nitpick, of course: each character in this ragged company fulfills a certain thematic niche and represents a particular socio-political issue. For instance, the journo who’s going to be the mule for the lottery ticket is named “Granite” because, well, he’s the closest thing to a rock these vagabonds have. And the others? They’re the kind of characters you saw in movies like “Crash” or “The Breakfast Club”: stereotypes complaining about being seen as stereotypes – except these stereotypes are sick and tired of being seen as stereotypes and their anger and frustration gives the novel a potent push that’s irresistible to anyone who’s read a lot of books or seen a lot of movies. For a good long while the characters really are dangerous and unpredictable and you’re curious to see how their story ends.

Gay Titles

“Got ‘til it’s Gone”
By Larry Duplechan
ISBN No. 978-1-55152-244-9

“Shuck”
By Daniel Allen Cox
ISBN No. 978-1-55152-246-3

Both available at www.arsenalpulp.com

If two things can start a trend then it’s safe to say that Fall Fiction has just gone gay.
"Got 'til it's Gone" really is about the love that dares not speak its name - if only because so few books speak about the midlife gay black man experience. The man doing the speaking is Johnnie Ray Rousseau and “Got ‘til it’s Gone” is his fourth appearance in Larry Duplechan’s series of Johnnie Ray books.
This time around Johnnie is having a midlife crisis and being a Daddy to a much younger guy. What follows are lots of Johnnie’s contemplations on life, love and popular culture. The best part of the book? Oddly enough, when Johnnie is cruising online. I dunno, there’s something novelistic and solitary about reading about characters separated from each other and typing away in chat rooms. Duplechan does a great job conveying this sense of being in a big city and still feeling lonely; of having all your options open and still feeling trapped. Unfortunately, his characters keep distracting themselves from the Big Sadness by watching TV, listening to music or reading magazines. They’re not pioneers; they’re archivists.
Remember the young man with the Daddy issues in “Got ‘til it’s Gone”? Well, he could be the narrator of “Shuck”, if he were just a bit more nihilistic, self-deluding and full of himself.
“Shuck” has the best beginning of any novel I’ve read in a long while. Its narrator plays anthropologist for us, re-writing the cruising ritual at the local supermarket.
“See how he cruises you like a piece of fruit, and how disappointed he is when you don’t give him the signal,” he writes. “He dumps the taco shells and ice cream in the magazine rack, and leaves empty-handed.”
Unfortunately, our narrator spends a LOT of time at the magazine rack himself; either mentioning the products he wants to place (“Star Trek”) or ticking off the things he thinks readers of gay fiction want to read about (a young guy appraising his own genitalia). Eventually the narrator’s neediness exhausts the readers’ interest. Yes, some of it adds to the 1990s New York time period. And some of it is left over from Bret Easton Ellis. You’ll finish the book; it’s that interesting. It’s just that it could have been so much better.
And therein lies the problem with “Got ‘til it’s Gone”, “Shuck” and a lot of gay fiction.
They so want their readers to be in sync with their sentences that they shortcut their way to any emotional impact by referencing movies, music, magazines and – in the unforgiving case of “Got ‘til it’s Gone” - Idiot Rapper, Flavor Flav! Even the first-person narration seems a bit calculated. What should read like friendly chat or deepest confession comes off like a sales pitch, a product placement shopping list. Yes, I know the technique suggests an over-stimulated culture and its resulting pessimism but it doesn’t make it any easier to search between the lines for the stuff that makes these books deserve to be books: the human stuff.

Atwood's Grandest Gamble

"The Year of the Flood"
By Margaret Atwood
ISBN No. 978-0-7710-0844-3
http://www.mcclelland.com/

If there’s one thing writers love to write about it’s the end of the world. Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, the editors of US Weekly; all soothsayers and truthseekers, it seems, have taken a turn picturing what the next world will look like. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we get a book that keeps proving itself readable and prescient (“Brave New World”). If not, we get Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” And if we’re really, really lucky we get Margaret Atwood playing Mother Nature herself.
As you’d expect from Atwood, “The Year of the Flood” is as elegantly intellectual as her previous book, the dystopian chiller, “Oryx and Crake.” And if you already know that “Oryx and Crake” is a biomedical nightmare love story set in the future, then all you need to know about “The Year of the Flood” is that it’s sort of a continuation of “Oryx and Crake.” It’s usually at this point that the reviewer goes into spoiler alert mode but I’m going to limit my synopsis to a very brief, publisher-okayed description of three characters from “The Year of the Flood”: Adam One, the meek leader of God’s Gardeners (a faith that marries science and religion), Ren, a young trapeze-dancer, locked inside a high-end sex club; and one of God’s Gardeners named Toby, who is barricaded inside a spa. That’s it. That’s all anyone who hasn’t read the book needs to know because a book this good should be read, not read about.
Great books of fiction are so few and far between these days that a reviewer gets protective when dealing with even a decent title. In an effort to not give anything important away we end up talking about what book writers’ rightly fear most: the nuance stuff, the paragraphs that set the tone and establish a set piece; the easily nitpick-able stuff. But Atwood – again working in the most overworked genre of sci-fi - does a remarkable job here of getting her story’s little asides wow-worthy spot-on. You can picture the streets, the buildings, the clothing, even the jellyfish bracelets. Sure, there are some clunky moments; a few too many generalizations about how things will “look” (yes, yes, they’re needed to make the book accessible for the fantasy- and sci-fi-challenged) but Atwood’s clunks trump most other writers’ triumphs and add to the story’s discussion value. For instance, in “Oryx and Crake” I thought she clunked big time with the description of the McNuggets of the future (you’d think animal rights would trump all by then) and then I thought she got it so perfect when a character is trapped by roaming warthogs of the future that I can still see her words in my mind.
Even better, the sense of dread in “The Year of the Flood” is delightfully, perfectly well-timed for the start of the new school year and the run-up to family holiday get-togethers with others of your gene pool. The greatest compliment I can give “The Year of the Flood” is that I wished I could have saved it to read on my off time. I wish all books could be this wondrous. “The Year of the Flood” is that rarest of fiction titles: the creation of a new myth on a biblical scale.