This novel was WINNER of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2010, in addition to being WINNER of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Prize, and the Salon Book Award. Despite the extraordinary literary recognition which this book has garnered, I had not really been very tempted to read it. A “genre-bending,” post-modern novel about the rock music business over the past thirty years seemed so far from my interests that I’d decided to leave it and its reviews to others who are fans of that music. Then I read the Guardian (UK)’s list of the favorite novels of British authors for this 2011 and discovered this novel at or near the top of the list of no fewer than five major British authors, including John Lanchester, David Lodge, and Roddy Doyle. And the book is truly funny and original and brilliant. Lovers of experimental writing will find Jennifer Egan’s approach to story telling, including seventy-five pages of PowerPoint presentations about life in the 2020s, to be unique, and for that alone, the book would be captivating. Fortunately, she also manages to create several fascinating characters who echo and re-echo throughout the short-story-like chapters, even when the narrators change constantly.
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Matt King, who is a descendant of a Hawaiian princess and the haole who married her and inherited her land, could “sit back and watch as the past unfurls millions into [his] lap,” but he prefers to live on his own salary as a lawyer. The primary beneficiary of the family land trust, Matt is now trying to decide what to do with the land on behalf of his cousins and family, since the trust is in debt and the demand for prime land in Hawaii is enormous. His wife lies dying after a boating accident, and his daughters are out of control. The author’s insights into Matt’s conflicts and his self-examination during his long vigil over a wife on life support, along with his daughters’ understandable tumult, provide some emotional resonance, even as moments of dark humor provide some respite from the tension. The subplots are well developed, and the conclusion is satisfying, if thin. Just released as a big film starring George Clooney.
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Pulitzer Prize winning author Jeffrey Eugenides creates a story, set in the 1980s, in which the entire novel incorporates and illustrates the marriage plot, with three main characters all pursuing the goal of marriage. These young students at Brown University are all conscientious, and all have real academic interests, but they also follow their libidos into sometimes new directions with the goal of experiencing a “full” and “satisfying” life. Madeleine Hanna, the English major of the quotation above has just discovered semiotics and the excitement of this esoteric academic subject; Mitchell Grammaticus, who has loved and fantasized about Madeleine since he first met her, is fascinated by religion and philosophy; and Leonard Bankhead, with whom Madeleine is passionately in love, wants most to “become an adjective,” like Joycean, Shakespearean, Faulknerian, Chekhovian or Tolstoyan. Eugenides creates a novel which is fully successful in developing these characters and their interactions, and when, at the end of this year, they separately arrive in New York City and find themselves at the same party, they are quite different from who they were just a year ago. As the party progresses, the reader, too, having had the opportunity to get to know them, their family backgrounds, and their goals from their earlier lives, comes to new appreciation of who they all are. Firmly grounded in the reality of the individual lives of students in the 1980s, the novel concerns itself with the self-absorbed and individual lives of the characters, often at the expense of universal insights.
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On the opening page of this emotionally overwhelming novel, Lilly Bere, age eighty-nine, begins the grand story of her seemingly insignificant life, a story in which she speaks directly from her heart, begging to know “How can I get along without Bill?” her grandson who has just died following the First Gulf War in Kuwait (1990 – 1991). Each of the next sixteen chapters is one more numbered day “without Bill,” and we soon learn through flashbacks that Lilly and her family have suffered deaths connected to three earlier wars – the Great War (1914 – 1918), the Irish War for Independence (1919 – 1921), and Vietnam (ca.1965 – 1975). Though all the men she loved did not necessarily die in combat, their deaths were all inescapably war related, and Lilly becomes, in many ways, the prototypically devastated wife of Tadg Bere (in the Irish Revolution), sister of Willie Dunne (the Great War recruit featured in The Secret Scripture), mother of Ed (in Vietnam), and grandmother of Bill (in Kuwait), a mourner who is equally a victim of the wars that have taken her men. One of the best novels I have read all year.
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Drive, though the most brutal film I have ever seen, is nevertheless very worth seeing for those with the fortitude to deal with the darkness and graphic cruelty. Nicolas Refn, a Dane who won the Cannes Film Festival Award as Best Director for this film, creates a tight and spine-tingling drama of a character known only as Driver (Ryan Gosling), a young man who works as a Hollywood stunt driver by day and as the driver of getaway cars at night. A man who is emotionally scarred from some unspecified trauma in the past, Driver (Ryan Gosling) is cold, unflappable, and just what a career criminal wants in his getaway driver. Opening with a robbery scene followed by a high octane chase scene, as Driver and two robbers avoid the police and two helicopters, the film then shows Driver returning to his almost bare apartment and meeting pretty Irene (Carey Mulligan) in the hallway. A strange love story runs parallel with dramatic scenes, chases, shootings, and all kinds of mayhem, but as the film develops, the viewer comes to see that Driver has his own bizarre sense of ethics, and a real desire to help Benicio, Irene’s young son. Drive is a dark and violent but complex literary novel. As a film, it is also violent but far more earthbound and simplistic, with no real subtlety except in Gosling’s acting.
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