Saturday
By Ian McEwan
2005, Published by Doubleday/Random House
You can only be startled by an Ian McEwan book a few times--whether it's the gut punch in Atonement's epilogue, or the twist of violence that takes over The Innocent midway through what had been a quiet parable about security--eventually you'll start to grasp that while McEwan's books start off with a culture of solemnity, they'll eventually envelop the reader with a shock. Whether it's an almost uncomfortably cruel lie or an explosive cafe murder, McEwan's books embrace the twist, and after you've learned of his love, you'll spend the rest of his books waiting for its arrival. While Saturday's is more intense than some, it's one you can see coming. What makes Saturday worth reading isn't the tension though, as with any McEwan, tension is window dressing. Saturday succeeds on the brilliant success of another of McEwan's classic loves--that of hollowing out the mind of men to study, in as intimate fashion as possible, the way the mind works when dealing with everything it comes across, from the trivial to the blood-soaked.
Speak, Commentary
By Jeff Alexander & Tom Bissell
2003, Published by McSweeney's Books
Not a book worth owning, not even a book worth reading more than once, Speak, Commentary is little more than what it's back cover dictates--it's fake movie commentaries about science-fiction films by people like Noam Chomsky, Ann Coulter & Dick Cheney, with some Star Trek freaks for a bonus. While some of it is pretty hilarious, it's the type of hilarious that never plays well for a crowd, and the type that won't produce laughs on the retread. On the positive tip, it is far less navel-gazing than most of what the McSweeney's contingent currently puts out, and it's almost completely devoid of precociousness. (Excepting the idea behind it, that is.)
Amsterdam
By Ian McEwan
1998, Published by Doubleday/Random House
Amsterdam is one of Ian's award winners, and it's easy to grasp why--not as uncomfortably dark as his earlier work, and any reading of the Booker Prize winners displays their lack of interest in blood-theatrics. Where Amsterdam fails isn't in its lack of nastiness--no, the problem here is in the inability of it's main characters to outshine the ones on the sideline. The highest of praise can go to the passages of the book that explore the morning a wife decides to risk humiliation to protect a cross-dressing husband--it's a masterpiece of dining room drama that also serves to make the near constant complaints of the two men in Amsterdam's leads that much more irritating. Still, Amsterdam helped to pave the way for Atonement & Saturday, and for that at least, the book is worth a gander. Remember gandering?
Strangers on a Train
By Patricia Highsmith
There's quite a bit of Strangers on a Train that doesn't need to be there--huge paragraphs of spastic descriptions of rooms and clothes, hair and smells that only serve to showcase the nervousness of a first time writer. Still, Strangers on a Train is an excellent piece of genre work, and it's obvious why Hitchcock found such success with his film version--this is a story that's impossible not to finish, and the overblown descriptions aside, it's a frighteningly good book from someone who was rarely acknowledged for her massive talent. (While she was alive, that is. Now her various publishers behave as if everybody was reading her.) While Highsmith is too dead now to enjoy the benefits of the beautiful paperback editions of her work, one hopes that she at least enjoyed these stories when she wrote them. After everything is done here, people will still be reading about Bruno and Guy for the next hundred years.
-Tucker Stone, 2008
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