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Reading Room
Books reviewed by Herizons.
Lullabies for Little Criminals
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Publisher:
Harper PerennialReview by:
Lisa FoadLullabies for Little Criminals has set the publishing industry agog. The winner of the 2007 version of Canada Reads was also hosen for Barnes & Noble’s Holiday 2006 Discover Great New Writers campaign, and People magazine’s book club has elected it prime pickings.
Collective zeal of this magnitude always elicits the skeptic in me, but suffice it to say, the hype is true: Heather O’Neill’s debut novel really is a knockout. Staged within the sparkling grit of downtown Montreal, Lullabies is the walloping story of 13-year-old Baby coming of age amid the red-lit cacophony of impoverishment, addiction and desperation, while her ebullient, madcap, mid-20s father, Jules, routinely shoots heroin and moves the pair from one rundown hotel apartment to the next.
Don’t be deceived by the carefree whimsy depicted on the book’s cover: Baby’s tale is a jawbreaker. While Jules battles health issues and attempts rehab, Baby is shuttled in and out of foster care, where value and security are transients and loneliness is a lump in her throat: “If you want to get a child to love you, then you should just go and hide in the closet for three or four hours. They get down on their knees and pray for you to return. That child will turn you into God. Lonely children probably wrote the Bible.”
Jules aces rehab, habit kicked. However, he comes for Baby hefting an unwieldy volatility, the maddest of love. Left to navigate the complex architectures of age 13 on her own, Baby oscillates between the cupcake dreams of childhood and the darker, more insidious elements of maturity that beckon. As she plots her way through streets peppered with pimps, pedophiles, wildly eccentric junkies and achingly misfit children, Baby’s development moves at breakneck speed. The fallout is both chilling and heart-rending.
O’Neill, who penned coming-of-age flick Saint Jude (2000) and poetry collection two eyes are you sleeping (1998), charts this territory with staggering skill. Shouldering equal parts optimism and melancholy, Baby is a richly imaginative, increasingly self-reflexive gem of a character, whose poetic sensibilities and clever wit make Lullabies necessary reading
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
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VikingReview by:
Lisa FoadAfter disarming heavyweight literary agent Susan Golomb with an unsolicited pitch letter (unheard of!), Marisha Pessl found her debut novel—a 500-page slugger, Special Topics in Calamity Physics—the cynosure of a fevered bidding war. In the end, it fetched Pessl a sixfigure jackpot and heaps of tongue-wagging critical acclaim.
Despite the novel’s vacillations—it begins with a formidable bang, nosedives for a spell, then surges forward explosively— Special Topics is a dazzling thriller, meticulously crafted and audaciously executed. When Gareth van Meer, a blinding swagger of erudition and ego, accepts a bottom-tier professorship in Stockton, North Carolina (to “enlighten America’s unassuming and ordinary,” of course), his brainy daughter, Blue, coolly prepares to wrap up her senior year at pompous private school St. Galloway.
Inside the “gray-topped, heavy brow” building, however, she’s summarily encircled by the bluebloods, a pestilent coterie of sniffy, vainglorious spoiled-rottens who devotedly pirouette around their bewitching film studies teacher, Hannah Schneider. Despite having the resolve of “an implacable nun,” Blue’s also taken with “the lone bombshell slinking into a Norman Rockwell,” and can’t help but feel romanced by “the air of a Chateau Marmont bungalow about [Schneider], a sense of RKO.”
Blue and the gang spend weekends languidly loafing at Schneider’s place, showcasing their spurious wit while attempting to unravel Pessl’s prose is utterly intoxicating—nouns function as verbs, metaphors are fantastically fresh. An unremarkable character is “an extra packet of salt one misses at the bottom of a bag of fast food,” and Blue’s narration is rife with wild literary references and footnotes, many of which Pessl has cooked up herself. Once the initial spell of wizardry wears off, however, the consistent interruptions feel tiresome and vertigo inducing.
Three-quarters of the way in, though, the mystery Blue promised to solve in the novel’s first pages—how it is that Schneider wound up dead during a Bluebloods overnight romp in the woods—finally heats up. Pessl pulls out all the stops. The relentless plot intricacies are arresting, the suspense killer and the final twist dizzying.
Joyland
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Ecw PressReview by:
Tara-Michelle ZiniukIllustrated By Nate Powell
One could become a Toronto lit-culture junkie based on Emily Schultz’s contributions alone.
Though Joyland is her first novel, Schultz has already released a short story collection (Black Coffee Nights, Insomniac), a biography (Michael Moore: a Biography, ECW) and an anthology (Outskirts: Women Writing from Small Places, Sumach), played the part of editor for magazines THIS and Broken Pencil and created The Pocket Cannon series.
Schultz’s Joyland touches on an ignored past—coming of age in the era of Cheez Whiz and Donkey Kong. It is a familiar Grade 8: terrific awkwardness, small-town inescapability. Told in the language of video game, at a time in the protagonists’ lives where the arcade served as the church, Joyland is the story of Player 1 and Player 2, brother and sister Tammy and Chris Lane. Joyland is thick and quick in the story it tells, turning the reader through mazes and scoring points in secret chambers, slowing down only to pick up coins and cherries. But it’s no mindless princess-saving, beginning-middle-game-over kind of game. Schultz has carefully selected her words and pours obvious intellect into her pages.
The references are precise, perfectly timed and colourful (Space Invaders, Christie Brinkley, Hulk Hogan). Schultz sets the bar high, attempting what may have been too much for a book so laden with themes. But Joyland is not a concept book and Schultz pulls off all she sets out to achieve without seeming contrived.
And one cannot comment on Schultz’s work without mentioning what it is most recognized for—humour, humility and unconventional girl heroines. Read it once if you love a good story; read it a second time if you love words. It’s articulate, rich with the good, the bad and the very bad of the 1980s, and beautifully illustrated. Simply put, Joyland is a joy.
For more on this book, check out: http://www.ecwpress.com/books/joyland.htm
The Inheritance of Loss: A novel
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PenguinReview by:
Irene D’souzaIn this illuminating and luminous novel, Kiran Desai assumes the literary baton from her mother, novelist Anita Desai. Kiran won the 2006 Man Booker Prize.
Set in the late 20th century at the foothills of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, and in New York, this evocative novel intersperses, in measured bursts of humour and compassion, what happens to an orphan girl, Sai, as she comes of age. The 16-year-old Sai is sent from her convent school to live with her anglophile grandfather, who has shut himself off from all human contact, giving all his love to his dog, Mutt. He has no time for Sai, who must rely on others for emotional fulfillment and soon falls in love with her Nepali tutor, Gyan.
Globalization, fundamentalism and sectarian and terrorist violence unravel Sai’s passion for Gyan. Her adolescent passion is intertwined with a sense of danger and tinged with both wonder and darkness. Sai learns that class envy and jealousy always trump love.
Desai acknowledges the fragile yet complex nature of everyday living, deftly showing how the ties that bind a community can unravel instantly. When Nepalese insurgents take over the town, the aftermath creates a chaos that pits lovers against each other. Desai’s portrayal of all the imaginary differences humans extol is devastating and insightful.
Lest the Western reader feel gleeful about the Third World maelstrom, Desai offers a parallel story of Biju, an illegal immigrant whose bewildering and humiliating journey in the underbelly of New York’s kitchens gives an unflattering view of the First World. This portrayal will not cheer you up, but there is no denying that Desai conjures a compelling and memorable story. Desai’s elegiac prose makes for a compelling read.