I’ve been asked to review many books for SORB, but more were started than I could finish. It seemed a pity to waste the thoughts I had conjured, so I am combining those unfinished sentences into one review, in the hope it will give the gist of what these probably fine books are about, the same way nearly-empty cereal boxes can be combined into perfectly edible Lucky Special Frosted Franken Krispies.
The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead (Doubleday, 2016)
Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance (Harper, 2016)
Thinking, Fast And Slow, Daniel Kahneman (FSG, 2011)
A Dog’s Purpose, W. Bruce Cameron (Forge, 2011)
The Book Of Joy, Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu (Avery, 2016)
The Abominable, Dan Simmons (Little, Brown, 2013)
A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James (Riverhead, 2014)
This book left me with a great feeling of not-being-able-to-understand-it-ness. Nonetheless, if it’s hillbillies you want, this book’s got ‘em. The girl is the best part, especially her many physical descriptions, which I added to with a Bic in the margins.
Surely we have by now read enough about sparrows. There are too many Everest things with weird names, like serac and Prusik, for anyone to follow a story there, let alone a whole expedition. The voices of places like Arkansas are seldom heard, with the exception of books like this and occasional clinic shootings.
The part with the rabbits may be too much for some readers.
I kept avoiding this review, assuming it was guilt about joy slowing my hand, but finally realizing I had a blob of sticky jam on my “J” key. Truly, as wiser men than me have said, we are guided by unseen forces. I bought this book for my girlfriend because I thought it said Thinning, Fast And Slow.
Many chapters raise the question: Why is there no “w” in Arkansas? Which makes you wonder: how come there are lots of slaughterhouses, but no slaughterhomes?
Dogs are probably our most pleasure-giving things that don’t run on batteries or have screw-tops. But then, on the big shelf called Forbidding, there is serious literature.
The Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu are at first glance an odd pairing, but then so were Mike Tyson and that guy he punched outside Wal-Mart. Many pages later, we get to the part about sincerity being important, which every child who wants a seventh cookie knows.
Literature comes and literature goes. Also, squirrels do that.
But it is in the language that this book really shines on the page, like small mirrors being carried in the mouths of a dozen snakes all headed towards you. Putting this book down before its “gripping” (New York Times) conclusion is a feat almost as hard as getting 688 pages out of a guy in Jamaica being shot.
For these are times that try men’s car doors while they’re shopping.
I recommend reading it with a dictionary open, or with Urban Dictionary, without which I wouldn’t know the meaning of a Slippery Bantu, which is surprising your girlfriend from behind with motor oil on your hands. Who would think a person could name so many types of jowl?
What, I wondered while prying the free nickel out of my United Way charity envelope, do we really know about financial incentives? I took from it the lesson that we must stand ever vigilant against those who profited from slavery, except when getting a great deal on a Brooks Brothers suit.
The source of man’s inhumanity to man is a mystery, like why it’s necessary for pies to revolve.
The paragraphs are nicely-shaped, like so many ornamental hedges pruned only at the bottom right edge. But where is the Pope, leading finger-wagger, in all of this? The narrative is a panorama told from many, often light-hearted, points of view, unlike life, which is a heartless daily beating in which you have to laugh or go insane.
Sometimes the plot can be as confusing as a large man with pliers yodeling at your door in a dream. Do you let him in? Might he represent your father before the hoarding and the rats withdrew him from worldly pleasures?
Economics is a subject that occupies us more and more, especially when our other books get left under the leaking patio awning. I started in the middle, later realizing this was a mistake, like taking my hospitalized grandfather the gag “ass sling,” of which he spryly asked, “What the fuck is this?”
This book also raised in my mind the question: if you can’t dance or garden, do you have two left brown feet?
It’s full of sentences that resonate with images like a tin plate full of paper clips balanced on the handlebars of a bicycle crossing railroad tracks. Above everything else, it reminds us that the list of unlikeable dogs is as short as the list of great jazz musicians who weren’t heroin addicts. We are reminded on each page that the righteous are steadfast in their appointed course, like mailmen in sleet and snow, or like a lonely divorced bill collector somewhere in Kansas who has to take a farmer’s last potato. Who in that case is the loser?
With each new horror described, the reader thinks, “That could have been me, except, call me crazy, I wouldn’t have climbed a mountain full of Nazis.”
In summary, this is the perfect book to give to a reader friend, especially if they happen not to know the person who gave it to you.
Christian Guthier
http://tinyurl.com/n82nz6c
