I devoured Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. I sat down and read it and did not get  up for anything. This book is great. Estep’s charming and down-dirty story about lucky and plucky Alice, her clumsy sister Eloise, and their dog-rescuing, ex-junkie mother, presents the hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking ways people intertwine, overlap and just plain run over each other in the acts of love, friendship, sex, and gambling — and all other acts of resistance.

This book is wonderful because of its fabulous characters and delicious plot, all sprung from Estep’s original and uninhibited mind.  The people of this novel are maybe not wholly believable but I took them as mythical members of the wild and crazy New York universe and went willingly along on the spin-of-the-wheel ride of their lives.  Free will — and these women are wilful — meets those little flips of fate that round out into destiny, or sometimes just a one-night stand. The struggle facing our characters is the age-old mandate to connect (”just connect”) and the obstacles they face are the tried and true Guilt, Pleasure, and Duty.

The characters didn’t need the catalyst of the mother’s big secret to get moving.  They are never static and their movement brings change: forward marching, then retracting, then forward again, they  lurch on, rapacious and certain, then stop, regroup, become subdued and questioning.  All three of them face their own crisis of the heart and confrontation of the soul.  We admire them (I loved them) for being forced to look into the mirror and reacting so very honestly to what they see.

Estep is adept with words.  Her sisters and their mother are each narrator of different chapters and they all speak with distinct cadences and linguistic choices: we know them as well as by their rhythms and words as by their actions. Estep’s physical descriptions are right on and perfect: “The sky over Aqueduct was the color of dead television.”  She is often hilarious: “Her eyes were bright and her big curly hair had, I swear, gotten bigger and curlier.  She was verging on looking like Malcolm Gladwell.”  Estep can write great one liners, real Oscar Wilde zingers, like my favorite: “She has led an unconventional life and it has agreed with her.”  I wouldn’t mind that as my epitaph.

Read this great book about sisters and mothers and friends and lovers, and sex, dogs, food, and gambling.  It will leave you reaching out and grabbing hold of someone or some dog or some idea.  You’ll bake yourself a cake with white icing, you’ll commit to skinny dipping at least once a summer, and you’ll never, ever bet on a race unless you’ve done the homework.  Alice Fantastic will inspire you to take the gamble of your life and run with it.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch on readallday.org

Published by Akashic Books - paperback  -978-1933354811 - $15.95

Six novels in one.

The word genius is bandied about in several of the reviews I read of David Mitchell’s fourth novel, Cloud Atlas, and so I decided to read it, thinking Shakespeare, Beethoven, Einstein, Michaelangelo, etc., people who in my opinion, fill this billing. I found no genius in Cloud Atlas, but what I did find was a courageous attempt, including many brilliant moments, to write an apocalyptic novel for our times.

Let me start, and dismiss, the structure: six separate narratives linked by a comet-shaped birth mark, a music manuscript and probably a couple of other props that I missed. These are not in any event significant (if they are I missed the point) and the narratives are not really related except in the overarching sense that mankind has done and will continue to do bad things, including destroy the planet, all because of the will to wealth and power by the bad people among us. An old theme but one that bears scrutiny and, as I say, takes courage to address.

The heart of the book is the novella entitled, Sloosha’s Crossin’ An’ Ev’rythin’ After. This is a brilliant evocation of the world after the fall, a subject that has always fascinated me (think Alas, Babylon, A Canticle For Liebowitz, On The Beach), and one that Mitchell utterly dominates. His creation of language, culture, artifact, religion and poignant myth-like memories of the world before the fall, along with a compelling story line about a simple man caught up in the battle against evil, is brilliant and the work of a wildly creative yet disciplined imagination.

Two of the other stories come close to Sloosha’s, but do not quite hit the mark. The first part of The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, which is where Cloud Atlas begins, is the story of a good and honest man traveling as a passenger on a schooner from Australia to San Francisco. The horrors of these journeys under tyrannical and evil captains have been described before, but Mitchell’s take, with his balance between Ewing’s interior and exterior lives is well worth the read.

As is An Orison of Sonmi-451, a novella set in futuristic Korea, in which a cloned “fabricant” escapes  her slave status and ends up as the goddess worshipped by the simple inhabitants of Sloosha’s world. This narrative is filled with clichés (the planet is being destroyed by corporate greed, clones are deceived into believing they will go to an island paradise when they have completed their service, etc.). It is, however, saved from the cliché dust bin by the wonderfully imaginative setting Mitchell creates: language, technology, myriad Big Brother accessories—all come across as completely believable. This story, done in a series of interviews with the future goddess, lacks the fear factor that made 1984 great, but it is quite an achievement.

The other novellas, one pointless, (or to me, anyway) about a publisher trapped inn a nursing home, and the other–about a reporter in 1975 California trying to expose, a la Jane Fonda in The China Syndrome–the fatal design flaw in an atomic energy plant–is too painfully politically correct to be interesting. God appears out of a machine to save the heroine so often in this story that I thought at first Mitchell was pulling the leg of his readers, but no, he meant it.

I did not find genius in Cloud Atlas. I should not have expected to, knowing that the meaning of the word has been dumbed down, along with almost everything else in our culture. But it does contain brilliance and some great story-telling. For these reasons it is well worth reading.

Reviewed by James LePore , author of A World I Never Made.

Published by Random House - paperback - 978-0375507250 - $14.95

Home Run!

Yesterday I read The Sun Field by Heywood Broun and I just loved it. Broun was a journalist of the early twentieth century, a charter member of the Algonquin Round Table, and the one-time novelist of this straightforward, engaging, and wildly entertaining book. It’s a pity he never wrote a sequel to this fast-moving tale of triangle love but I am grateful that he wrote this one and that RVive books reissued it in 2008 after it had been out of print for eighty-five years.

The Sun Field delivers us into New York City of the early 1920s.  George Wallace, the narrator, is in love with his best pal, Judith Winthrop. She is a feminist before the word became common, strong-willed and smart, insightful and kind, and quite willing to call things exactly as she sees them.  George takes her out to a ball game one day where Judith’s only comment about the fanfare all around her is that “This is sillier than patriotism”.  But when she sees Tiny Tyler perform an incredible and beautiful feat of athleticism out on the sun field (baseball field) she falls in lust at first sight.  She explains to George the difference between love (which must grow over time) and lust (which can happen in an instant) after seeing a performance of Romeo and Juliet with Tiny:  “Juliet knew Romeo simply as a lover and nothing more.  They never discussed or engaged in any enterprise except love.  If they’d begun to talk about music, or the theatre, or free speech or birth control, it’s entirely possible that Juliet would have found that Romeo had a ratty and wholly objectionable mind and that she simply couldn’t stand him except briefly after sundown.”  The novel is full of discussions between George and Judith on all manner of topics, and all with the same wit and verve of this lecture on Romeo and Juliet.  No wonder George is in love but it will do him no good.

George has to stand by while Tyler falls hard for Judith and Judith continues in lust alone: the only solution is marriage but there is no way Judith is giving up her last name in exchange for Tiny’s.  Ups and downs in the marriage abound, with George always close by to offer another set of arms for Judith to fall into. But Judith is not the falling type and anyway she is too good a woman (much as she denies it) to fool around.  She is a stalwart to both her principles and her husband.

The three characters come from Broun’s own life. Judith is modeled after his wife Ruth Hale (herself a journalist and the founder of the Lucy Stone League, named for the nineteenth century activist dedicated to women keeping their maiden names), George is based on Broun himself, and Tiny is a variation on the great Babe Ruth whom Broun had covered closely as a sports writer. The fly ball catch that captivates Judith out on the sun field is based on a real life play of the Bambino and other true scenes from his baseball career are played out again in this novel.

Judith is simply a marvelous character.  Whether describing an article she is writing on “Tribal Rites in America”, which “begins with ‘The Golden Bough’ and ends with a discussion of the custom of standing up in the seventh inning” or commenting on Chicagoans, “I have no prejudice against Chicagoans.  Some of my best friends are Chicagoans, but I had never seen so many all together at the same time.  It does make a difference”, or berating Tiny, “I married you because you were beautiful and I thought you’d be gay and joyful.  All the other men I knew were people who sat around and talked about things and never got more than one toe into life.  Then I saw you in the sun field not even squinting at the light, and now you come back fat and moaning and repenting and expect me to like you.  How can I like you?  I don’t like you”, she is always clever and quick and genuine.  Just like George, I hung on her every word, every crazy idea and ideal, and when she presents her final word on marriage, I cheered:  “Smash the idea that two people go into the church and only one comes out.  Naturally that doesn’t really happen, but people keep up the pretense that it does. If the man and woman didn’t try so hard to keep in step they wouldn’t stumble so much…..It’s belittling God to take two divine souls and whittle them down to one.  Two can’t live more cheaply than one, but they can live more fully and more gloriously.”

The Sun Field is witty and cool, optimistically ironic at times and completely honest throughout.  As fresh as the day it was written, this is a definite must-read, a great book for the summer reading ahead.

Reviewed by Nina Sankovitch - originally posted on her blog www.readallday.org.  On the Read All Day website, Nina Sankovitch reviews one new book every day.

The Sun Field is published by Rvive Books - 978-0980190915 - $14.00

Available from Amazon or Barnes & Noble or find a local bookseller through Indie Bound.

Atlas Shrugged is a brick of a book. No publisher would touch it today, for it is too long, too deep, and not written for a 20-something woman with a tenth grade reading level. If you like your literature in advertisement-style sound bites with head banger music in the background, don’t read this book.  But if you want to read a masterpiece written by a woman who could barely control her primal scream under a veneer of exquisite literature, Atlas Shrugged is for you.
Ayn Rand was a citizen of communist Russia who witnessed the economic and social devastation caused by Marxism. After emigrating to the United States, she wrote her bitter masterpiece, Atlas Shrugged, as an homage to freedom and capitalism. The book retains its relevance because the insipid do-gooders in the story who lead the world into darkness are prescient in their use of the same mealy-mouthed vocabulary of altruism that many well-meaning politicians use today. Today, religious conservatives read the Bible, while true economic and amoral conservatives read Atlas Shrugged.
But while the book is a political tour de force, it achieves its influence because it is such a thrilling story, written with great verve. The story focuses on Dagney Taggert, the beautiful and brilliant railroad executive, whose railroad is falling apart due to the lack of qualified employees and equipment. Hardworking people have disappeared, gone to start their own society in a secret corner of the world under the leadership of the mysterious John Galt. As the engineers, teachers, construction workers, and entrepreneurs disappear, civilization is left to nincompoops who believe that the world owes them a living, and who impose increasingly desperate obligations and taxes upon the remaining pillars of industry like Taggert. Finally, Taggert throws in the towel to join Galt, one more victim of the vampire-like authorities in their relentless need for one more source of production to suck dry. Meanwhile, the government also seeks to find Galt and to kill him, for his creed of hard work and honest profit threaten those who would demand that those who work hard support those who don’t.
Ayn Rand was a woman possessed and she wrote like one.  The prose may be a little purple by today’s standards, but the sense of gloom,  the character development, and the mystery of John Galt are rendered with uncommon virtuosity. The ultimate resolution of Galt’s whereabouts and the plot dénouement are a little abrupt, as if Rand realized she had screamed herself out and it was time to wrap it up, but the book nevertheless leaves you exhausted and fulfilled.  Atlas Shrugged will bowl you over like one of Dagney Taggert’s freight trains.

Reviewed by Richard H Dickinson,  author of the excellent novel, Acts of Honor

Published by Signet Books - Mass Market paperback - 978-0451191144 - $8.99

Buy from Amazon,  Barnes and Noble or from your local bookstore via IndieBound