Fiction
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Until now, Coe's novels have been of a particular kind most often practiced by young British men — mild satires of class and manners, told with a slight experimental flair. Coe has always been good at this; he finds precise ratios of humor and gall, and packages his stories carefully. He'll pull out a narrative trick or two but leaven his situations with a touch of absurdity, even while maintaining chilly detachment from even his liveliest characters.
<i>Rain</i>, though, departs from the formula. Instead of angry-young-man satire, Coe takes on a multigenerational mothers-and-daughters tale. After a brief framing chapter or two, Coe sets up a rigidly artificial structure that involves his elderly main character, Rosamond, at the end of her life, narrating memories into a tape recorder. The tape, describing 20 pictures, is intended for a blind great-niece. Instead of seeming mechanical, though, this device provides momentum, and the interplay between writing, spoken monologue and image enriches Rosamond's tone-perfect soliloquies. More surprisingly, Coe's characteristic coldness emerges only in his characters; the writer shows more emotional sensitivity than ever before. Coe even dips, in the last few pages of the frame story, into sentimental mawkishness. Rosamond's voice drowns out that misstep, though, and underscores how far a dependable writer can come when he leaves his comfort zone. </p><p class="signature">—Justin Bauer </p>
Brandon's unlikely organization is headed by Ken Hovan, aka Frog, a brooding ex-bouncer with connections from Florida to Texas. Among his many middlemen are Swin Ruiz, a bodybuilding wannabe academic; and Kyle Ribb, an orphaned drifter with an uncanny knack for survival. Paired by the boss they've never seen, they front as junior park rangers in southern Arkansas, soon finding themselves embroiled in a deal gone bad.
Swin and Kyle are pawns in the legacy of Tom Stoppard's <i>Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead</i>, complete with the banter and existential angst. The Southern underworld they inhabit is at once kooky and familiar, sustained by Big Gulps, pawn shops and the legacy of Bill Clinton. It's a deliciously all-American setting, and Brandon's writing is vivid and patently cool, seeming to speed the reader toward some breathless conclusion. But as the story unfolds, it fails to slow down, mounting detail upon detail, as though each one mattered the same. In the end, even the most attribute-leadened characters meld together. For all the style, and all the fun, there are no Stringer Bells or Omar Littles here, just a bunch of quirky criminal dudes going along for the ride. <p class="signature">—Katherine Hill </p><table style="margin: 5px" align="right" border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" hspace="5" vspace="5" width="180">
New York neighborhoods are seemingly always on the cusp of major change, and the Lower East Side of <i>Lush Life</i> is uncomfortably expanding and contracting one year after the Towers fell. "Pioneering" wannabe doctors, artists, actors, writers and kids from the nearby projects mingle on the narrow, ghost-filled streets below Houston. Six years later, these same streets boast boutique hotels with Japanese soaking tubs and molecular food joints alongside halfway houses and bodega clerks behind bulletproof Plexi. Price nails the historical and social dichotomy at the expense of those who inhabit the changing streets. Price never seems to write heroes; instead he sticks with characters who are mightily but wonderfully flawed. The plot isn't the point with authors like Price and Pelecanos, but character and atmosphere are. Because of that, it's easy to forgive the overlong police interview of the innocent suspect Eric Cash and the detours taken into the lives of police detective Matty Clark's troubled sons. It's equally easy to appreciate the phenomenal two-page, three-sentence internal rant of the exhausted, self-loathing Cash. </p>
What isn't easy to forgive or appreciate is the superficial gloss he paints on project boys Tristan and Little Dap. The story revolves around them, too, but you certainly wouldn't know it. Yes, they're invisible, and it's that very invisibility that sparks their actions; however, it would have been a sharper and nastier and more beautiful novel if only they were more visible to Price. <p class="signature">—Char Vandermeer </p>
This tale of an addict returning home to Haven, Kan., to care for his dying mother, Donna, includes meticulous descriptions of the effects of meth on Scott and the ravages of Donna's cancer on her body, her mind and the friends and family who care for her. With its precision and pathos, Heim's writing consistently breaks your heart. In <i>We Disappear</i>, Scott indulges his mother's morbid obsession with kidnapped children. He listens, dubiously, to her recount an experience of her own temporary abduction. As Scott unravels the mystery, he discovers things about Donna he might prefer not to know. In doing so, he tries to atone for his mistakes as a son. </p>
Heim's poetic repetition of words and themes ultimately builds a poignant, moving crescendo of emotion. But it is the marvelous details — the passage on Cherry Mash candies, or the untangling of Donna's knotty stories — that truly impress. <i>We Disappear</i> is all about extraordinary storytelling, and it is extraordinarily well-told. <p class="signature">—Gary M. Kramer </p><table style="margin: 5px" align="right" border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" hspace="5" vspace="5" width="180">
<i>Written by Mariko Tamaki Illustrated by Jillian Tamaki</i><i>Groundwood Books, 142 pp., $18.95 </i></p><p>Joint teenage suicide might be the best way to preserve true love. It worked for Romeo and Juliet. It could've worked for you and that formerly-special-someone if you had only had the foresight and weren't so scared of commitment. But contrary to what everyone at her Catholic school might think, 16-year-old Wiccan-in-training and ultra-Goth Skim thinks it's a lame escape for losers lacking imagination. Losers like the closet homosexual jock who swallowed his mom's heart pills after his girlfriend dumped him, and whose suicide has the whole school going to depression assemblies holding bake sales to celebrate life. Or losers like Shakespeare, who Skim doesn't think deserves to have tests made about him. Or losers like her eccentric English teacher, Ms. Archer, who left school for an artist colony right after a forbidden hookup with her student in the woods behind school during lunch break. </p>
Skim's diary entries and the novel's accompanying illustrations fuel duel narratives that seem to flirt with each other and at times even merge, like when her diary entries include doodles. Though the wispy sketches swoop the reader/viewer's eyes along, there is at least one occasion where everything stops and color seems to explode from the bleak charcoal scene.
Though there's not enough here to fall in love with, it makes a sweet spring fling: something to enjoy and finish quickly, to remember fondly once you've settled down and are trudging through something more hefty. <p class="signature">—Sam Tremble </p>
The selfish Seede, with his just-say-yes attitude, is eventually done in by his penchant for an irresistible high and sex. His indiscretions land him almost dead in the gutter, hallucinating about — and subsequently battling with — his wife, child in tow, who left him some months ago. It's a nod to the philosophical queries of the book: Do we give in to our urges, despite societal restrictions and possibly losing everything, or do we follow the rules and possibly lose ourselves?
Sager answers those questions without saying a word about them, leaving it up to the reader to decipher what he means. And because of that, despite the skull and the stereotypes, <i>Deviant Behavior</i> is a worthwhile read. <p class="signature">—Annamarya Scaccia</p><table style="margin: 5px" align="right" border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" hspace="5" vspace="5" width="180">
Ecco, 256 pp., $24.95 </div>
Perhaps we overlook the quality of Joyce Carol Oates' incredible output, given its sheer quantity — <i>Wild Nights!</i> is her 21st collection of short stories, in addition to more than 40 novels, eight poetry volumes and about 20 plays.
<i>Wild Nights!</i> not only imagines five American writers' final
<i>Wild Nights!</i> proves a special treat for all who love Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James and Hemingway — as Oates obviously does.
<i>By Jonathan Trigell</i><i>Serpent's Tail, 256 pp., $14.95 </i></p><p>The
Readers immediately get to know Jack as a seemingly good guy who
In every way, this novel is rough — from its doomed characterization
