Chenneville: A Novel of Murder, Loss, and Vengeance
by Paulette Jiles
Another great book from Giles! (9/11/2023)
I loved both News of the World and Simon the Fiddler, so was excited to read Paulette Jiles’ new novel, Chenneville.
If its description as a novel of “murder, loss, and vengeance” makes a reader expect a fast-paced thriller, they’ll be disappointed. Instead, this story is more about the character, John Chenneville, as he doggedly follows a murderer across a vast region of Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.
The Chenneville character is the absolute best thing about this book. Even though he’s bent on a revenge killing for most of the novel (at the beginning, he’s recovering from a major head wound in hospital) he’s still sympathetic.
Perhaps this is because we can all understand wanting revenge on someone who murdered beloved family members. Revenge would be especially appealing given the lawlessness and corruption in the post-Civil War South.
We also love John because he’s a fundamentally kind and decent man, despite not talking much (to the extent of being gruff) and not being afraid to use violence. His kindness extends to horses and dogs, which makes him irresistibly lovable. Even the minor characters come alive on the page and I love the relationships between them and John.
As we read, we’re rooting for John, wanting him to find the murderer, but also not wanting him to ruin his own life by becoming a killer. The ending was crucial. Almost the entire book has been pointing to the end and we’ve imagined how it might go. With this build-up, it would be easy to disappoint. Some readers were disappointed, but I wasn’t. I thought the ending was perfectly suited to the rest of the story.
Many thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for allowing me to read an ARC.
The Lonely Hearts Hotel
by Heather O'Neill
Weird and wonderful (4/23/2023)
Brutal and beautiful. Heartbreaking and romantic. Harsh and tender. Tragic and magical. Painful and delightful.
The story is about two orphans abandoned as babies in a Montreal orphanage in 1910. They grow up together and love each other and, because they both turn out to be talented performers, they end up putting on shows in rich people’s homes and raising funds for the orphanage.
As teens, they’re separated when they leave the orphanage, each left to try to survive poverty as the Great Depression deepens.
This book is one of the weirdest I’ve ever read. (Not weird in a confusing way like Cormac McCarthy’s new books. Nothing in it was confusing.) It’s weird because the main characters/author see the world in such a captivating, unique way that it takes you off guard and make you see the world sideways.
It’s also weird because it’s so EXTREME in many respects — there are clowns, prostitutes, nuns, gangsters… — and it veers into magical realism in parts. It’s violent and awful, but also the love between the two main characters was beautifully captured and brought tears to my eyes.
It needs pretty much every content warning, so I wouldn’t wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone. It’s also one of those books that you know some people are going HATE, and I totally get that. And those people will probably think readers who like this book are weird, even sick.
The writing is sometimes really over the top — SO MANY metaphors and similes! — but it somehow works for me because this book is really over the top, in terms of plot and content. The over-the-top writing is like a beautiful, precisely choreographed, acrobatic… clown show. It’s doesn’t do anything by halves. It is everything all at once.
And, oh my gosh, that ending. Perfect.
The Passenger
by Cormac McCarthy
Brilliant, but way beyond weird (1/29/2023)
Cormac McCarthy’s writing is so good that I enjoyed reading The Passenger, even though much of the time I was confused. There were scenes that were deliciously tense, as you might imagine given that the protagonist, Bobby Western (yes, seriously), is a deep sea salvage diver. There are other parts that were so intriguing that I was pulled along, wanting to understand, wanting to get to the bottom of it all.
I don’t mind putting effort into a novel and I’m happy feeling at sea for a while, as the shapes in the fog gradually become clear and all the parts fit together in a satisfying way. (The absolutely wonderful Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr is like this.) I enjoyed my gradually increasing understanding of Western and his sister. I was looking forward to the ending when I’d finally see the point of that long conversation about Kennedy’s assassination, when I’d finally get the relevance of all those academic digressions, when I’d finally grasp the key to the crime/mystery element of the novel, when I’d finally understand who all the minor characters were and what they were doing in the book.
But, guess what? By the time I got to the end of the novel, I STILL didn’t understand. I felt like I was standing on the edge of a precipice of understanding. So I immediately embarked on the second novel in the duology, Stella Maris, thinking this is where I’d get my reward.
Again, I was drawn along by McCarthy’s writing and finished the second book in less than a day. This second book is ENTIRELY a conversation between Western’s sister and a doctor in the psychiatric hospital she’s checked herself into. There are no quotation marks, no dialogue tags (she said, etc.), no physicality to ground the conversation in a scene (he leaned back in his chair, etc.).
Classic McCarthy. He’s not one to coddle his readers.
The conversation takes long, wandering forays into mathematics, physics, philosophy, etc. I loved reading it. Cormac McCarthy has shown us (again) what a brilliant — and weird — mind he has. What an exceptionally talented writer he is.
However, ultimately, the experience was disappointing, not profound. McCarthy apparently wrote these books for himself and perhaps a small handful of super-fans with mathematics PhDs. Great. Good for him. No piece of art is for everyone. In the end, my disappointment seems irrelevant, even to me.
I was looking for something in the novels that McCarthy wasn’t interested in giving. As a reader of The Passenger and Stella Maris, I was like a Martian trying to discover what a human face looks like by studying Picasso’s Weeping Woman. Even though the experience didn’t give me what I wanted, I nevertheless experienced greatness. And I still want to read every single thing McCarthy has written.
Demon Copperhead: A Novel
by Barbara Kingsolver
A wonderful novel — that's also timely and important to read (11/5/2022)
The first chapter of David Copperfield is titled: "I Am Born."
The opening sentence of Demon Copperhead: "First, I got myself born."
Barbara Kingsolver had wanted to write a novel about the human individuals behind the statistics of the opioid crisis in Appalachia. She'd been thinking for some time about how to do that, and hadn't been satisfied with her ideas. And then she happened to stay in Bleak House, one of the places Charles Dickens had lived in Kent, UK. Dickens inspired her to tell her modern story based on the plot of his old one, David Copperfield.
I've read a handful of Dickens, but not that one. Now it's definitely the next classic I'll read.
In Kingsolver's novel, Demon (nicknames are common in this region, apparently) was born in the caul, and this is what he has to say about that:
"It was a Wednesday this all happened, which supposedly is the bad one. Full of woe etc. Add to that, coming out still inside the fetus ziplock. But. According to Mrs. Peggot there is one good piece of luck that comes with the baggie birth: it's this promise from God that you'll never drown. Specifically. You could still OD, or get pinned to the wheel and charbroiled in your driver's seat, or for that matter blow your own brains out, but the one place where you will not suck your last breath is underwater. Thank you, Jesus."
What a voice! I'm in awe of authors - like Kingsolver, Ruth Ozeki, Ann-Marie MacDonald - who express the voice of their fictional characters so well that it's hard to believe those characters aren't real people.
Here's Demon talking about reading novels: "Likewise the Charles Dickens one, seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat's ass. You'd think he was from around here."
The story follows this wonderful character from his childhood to early adulthood, with highs and lows, love and hate, success and failure, kindness and cruelty (plus neglect).
Along with the wonderful characters, the great story (Dickens knew a thing or two about plot), and the brilliant use of language, I also appreciated learning along the way. I learned about Melungeons, the origins of the term "redneck" (it's badass, by the way), the whisky rebellion, Purdue Pharma, mining companies, dopesickness... But never does anything feel like a lecture. Kingsolver is too good a novelist for that.
I hope you'll read this wonderful and important novel.
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