Reviews – Books: Oscar Wao, Winterson, Spook Country, Empathy, Jokes, Gommorah

Book roundup:
1. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz: B-
2. Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson: B+
3. Spook Country by William Gibson: B
4. Empathy by Sarah Schulman: B+
5. Jokes and the Unconscious by Daphne Gottlieb and Diane DiMassa: A
6. Gommorah by Robert Saviano: C

Stuff I’ve acquire recently that I hope turns out to be better reading material than this last crop:
1. Kingdom Come
2. Gravity’s Rainbow
3. The Hikiteia
4. Blood Meridian
5. The Mere Future
6. The Library at Night

Spoilers in the reviews ahead.

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

This book was… disappointing. When I was in New York last year, everyone was reading this book on the train, and I mean everyone. I figured, hey, ten million New Yorkers can’t be wrong, right? So I dutifully picked up a copy at the Strand. I was very much looking forward to it. A blurb telling the tale of a nerdy, outcast boy growing up in Jersey, the Dominican Tolkien? Check. Pulitzer Prize? Check. Interesting writing style? Check. What could go wrong?

The positives first. I liked the integration of Dominican slang and nerd language with the English prose. It had a conversational feel. I liked the inclusion of the footnotes spotlighting oft-ignored Dominican history, and the setting of the story in the period of Trujillo’s dictatorship, which North American tend to forget entirely in favor of Castro. I liked the idea of setting the plot in motion with the fuku, a terrifying and endless Caribbean curse. And finally, I liked that the story didn’t solely focus on Oscar, but explored the lives of his sister and his mother.

And now, the negative. WHY MUST EVERY FUCKING STORY BE ABOUT A BOY WHO CAN’T GET LAID? I was hoping Oscar would be more like Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces, but no. There wasn’t anything particularly compelling or personable about Oscar and there wasn’t anything particularly wondrous about his brief life. Oscar spends most of the book sexually harassing or stalking women, a tendency that Mr. Díaz describes as “love.” The whole story hinges on Oscar’s pathetic virginity and how very tragic it is that no woman will take pity on him and fuck his sorry ass. BOO HOO. I am so sick of these story lines. There are many things in the world more tragic than a man who can’t get his dick sucked. Especially a totally delusional pervert like Oscar, who seems to think that women exist to suck his cock. Well, Oscar, maybe that’s your problem!

In conclusion, I thought the book was pretentious and aspired to way more than it actually achieved. It was full of half-fleshed out ideas and cliched, half-realized magical realism that, to me, was a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. I would be very open to an awesome book about the Dominican diaspora, and I guess this did fill some sort of literary hole so maybe that’s why everyone was all over it, but to me, it was just yet another story about some loser guy obsessed with love stalking women he can sexually harass until they have pity sex with him.

Written on the Body

So I took this book with me on our romantic getaway to Ottawa under the misapprehension that it was Stark’s favorite and it was tres romantic. Well, I quickly learned that Stark actually wasn’t the biggest fan and also that it is not at all romantic. Why does everyone think this book is so great? I feel like every lesbian in the world loves it and gets tattoos of passages on their ribs and quotes it all the time… Am I wrong? It’s not that the book is bad, it’s just about a shitty philanderer who screws up her life and the life of everyone around her. It actually captures that quite well, so go Jeanette. I also enjoyed her trademark funny bits inserted amongst all the drama. There were some quirky little stories about exes, none of which I can remember now, but they made me laugh. Generally though, it’s a book about a very unlikeable character, and as such, it wasn’t something I can say I enjoyed a great deal. Well written though, and it only took, like, two days to get through it, so I can’t complain.

Spook Country

I was really looking forward to this book, as Pattern Recognition was probably my favorite Gibson book and also one of my favorite novels ever. I found the character of Case Pollard so thoroughly cool and thought Gibson really managed to escape the future for the present in quite an interesting way, where everything still seemed sort of cyberpunk while still being grounded in our own world. Spook Country was just a sad echo of everything that made Pattern Recognition awesome.

For the first time, I really felt like Gibson was out of touch with future tech. I mean, virtual reality googles and holograms, William? Really? That’s soooo 1985. The book was sort of like a sequel to Pattern Recognition in one of those vaguely connected ways that Gibson favors, taking place in a different corner of the same universe with a few overlapping characters and themes, which I think made it seem all the worse by comparison. I’m not sure why Gibson didn’t just reprise the character of Case Pollard, definitely one of his stronger creations. Instead, he created a “new” character that was basically Case Pollard, but with a different back story. Unfortunately, there were too many subplots going on to really get a chance to know this new character and I found her story shortchanged.

I also expected more of the spook country angle. Intriguing spy story, this is not. The central mystery had such a lame conclusion, I couldn’t believe it was the best that Gibson could come up with, which is basically how I felt about all the plot lines of the book. A lot of buildup and then no satisfaction. Too many storylines that ended up going nowhere. And a sense that Gibson has finally fallen out of touch with the zeitgeist.

Empathy

This book was okay. I think I did myself a disservice by reading Schulman’s best novel, Rat Bohemia first. Everything else seems to pale by comparison. But generally, this was a good story. I am a sucker for her portrait of the decay of New York in the Eighties, which is always why I end up unable to say no to one of her novels. The central plot twist was basically an intellectual feminist version of Fight Club. I would rag on Chuck for ripping her off, but really, this major reveal was so underdeveloped that I don’t mind it getting a more strongly realized reprise in Fight Club. A really interesting concept, though.

Jokes and the Unconscious

This book was good, but really, really depressing. It’s really the only reading material that I’ve felt worth my time in awhile though. I’ve been having bad luck with books. But this novel was good, and the scratch, violent, hallucinatory illustrations by Diane DiMassa were perfectly suited to the material. Out of the above list, this was the best. Plus, lesbians.

Gommorah

I’m only halfway through this book right now and I think I’m going to give up on it. I never though I’d say this, but I wish it was written by David Simon. I picked it up because the back promised an insider look at the Camorra crime organization, a work of journalism so revealing that the author had to be placed under police protection. So, y’know, I was expecting Donnie Brasco or The Corner. I was expecting the guy to go undercover, befriend the criminals, really get an in depth picture of their lives. But no. Robert Saviano’s “insider” view of the community seems to consist mostly of him riding around Campania on his Vespa, checking out crime scenes and overhearing conversations at coffee shops. Big fucking deal. The rest of the story consists or recounting trial transcripts and news reports. It’s basically just a timeline that could have been recreated by anyone willing to listen to the police band on the radio and read the newspapers a lot. I expected him to, y’know, talk to someone or do a more in depth portrait of one particular corner of the community. Like how David Simon captured the crack epidemic in inner city America by writing an portrait of one family, really talking to them, following them around, following their lives for a year. NOT RIDING AROUND ON A FUCKING VESPA TO SEE DEAD BODIES AFTER THE FACT. Now, I understand that getting people to talk in a community infested with a secretive criminal organization isn’t exactly easy, but really, you couldn’t find one person to talk to about their experiences? Or maybe focused on one family or the effects of one crime, instead of giving such a broad overview of events that nothing is actually understood?

Also, I don’t know what is going on with books coming out of Italy, but I always find their translations seemed rushed and poorly done. Maybe this Saviano guy is a really great writer, but you wouldn’t know it from this translation. I also thought the North American edition could have used some front matter, introducing topics that may not be familiar to readers whose knowledge of Italian organized crime is limited to The Sopranos. I read half the book before I came to one solitary translator’s note, explaining an acronym. So yeah, boring and confusing. And, well, there’s just something about Saviano that rubs me the wrong way. Like he’s just a teensy bit racist and sexist and is probably one of those uber macho assholes who catcalls women on the street.