1) "Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal" by Eric Schlosser
A tale full of sound, fury, and popping grease.
Fattening up a controversial article published in Rolling Stone in 1999, Schlosser considers all the ways in which fast food has lessened the quality of life in America. His chief objection is not that it tastes bad—far from it, he insists, going on to examine, for instance, why McDonald’s fries (lauded by the likes of Julia Child and James Beard) are so irresistible. (The beef extract helps. Don’t tell your vegetarian friends.) Neither is it the fact that fast food, on which Americans will have spent more than $110 billion in 2000 (as against $6 billion in 1970), has resulted in an appallingly obese population in a country where fresh food is scarce but chemical-laden victuals are easily had. Schlosser rightly decries these developments, which he calls the “McDonaldization” of the planet (“wherever America’s fast food chains go, waistlines start expanding”). But what seems to bother him most is the absolute accessibility of fast food here—and, increasingly, throughout the world as well, inasmuch as for every fast-food restaurant that opens in the US, four more open abroad. “Fast food,” Schlosser writes, “is now served at restaurants and drive-throughs, at stadiums, airports, zoos, high schools, elementary schools, and universities, on cruise ships, trains, and airplanes, at K-Marts, Wal-Marts, gas stations, and even at hospital cafeterias.” This ubiquity spreads beyond the eatery: many nonfood businesses, notably The Gap, have thrived by following the fast-food model of simplicity, uniformity, and replicability, so that a storefront in Tuscaloosa is no different from one in Toronto or Taipei. It all ends, Schlosser suggests, in a grim and gray world in which the corporate is triumphant, and quality finds no home.
An exemplary blend of polemic and journalism, guaranteed to put you off your lunch.
2) "Little Bee" by Chris Cleave
Cleave follows up his outstanding debut (Incendiary, 2005) with a psychologically charged story of grief, globalization and an unlikely friendship.
The story opens in a refugee detention center outside of London. As the Nigerian narrator—who got her nickname “Little Bee” as a child—prepares to leave the center, she thinks of her homeland and recalls a horrific memory. “In the immigration detention center, they told us we must be disciplined,” she says. “This is the discipline I learned: whenever I go into a new place, I work out how I would kill myself there. In case the men come suddenly, I make sure I am ready.” After Little Bee’s release, the first-person narration switches to Sarah, a magazine editor in London struggling to come to terms with her husband Andrew’s recent suicide, as well as the stubborn behavior of her four-year-old son, Charlie, who refuses to take off his Batman costume. While negotiating her family troubles, Sarah reflects on “the long summer when Little Bee came to live with us.” Cleave alternates the viewpoints of the two women, patiently revealing the connection between them. A few years prior, Sarah and Andrew took a vacation to the Nigerian coast, not realizing the full extent to which the oil craze had torn the country apart. One night they stumble upon Little Bee and her sister, who are fleeing a group of rapacious soldiers prowling the beach. The frightening confrontation proves life-changing for everyone involved, though in ways they couldn’t have imagined. A few years later Sarah and Little Bee come together again in the suburbs of London, and their friendship—in addition to that between Little Bee and Charlie—provides some salvation for each woman. Though less piercing and urgent than his debut, Cleave’s narrative pulses with portentous, nearly spectral energy, and the author maintains a well-modulated balance between the two narrators.
A solid sophomore effort, and hopefully a sign of even better things to come.
3) "The Ocean at the End of the Lane" by Neil Gaiman
From one of the great masters of modern speculative fiction: Gaiman’s first novel for adults since Anansi Boys (2005).
An unnamed protagonist and narrator returns to his Sussex roots to attend a funeral. Although his boyhood dwelling no longer stands, at the end of the road lies the Hempstock farm, to which he’s drawn without knowing why. Memories begin to flow. The Hempstocks were an odd family, with 11-year-old Lettie’s claim that their duck pond was an ocean, her mother’s miraculous cooking and her grandmother’s reminiscences of the Big Bang; all three seemed much older than their apparent ages. Forty years ago, the family lodger, a South African opal miner, gambled his fortune away, then committed suicide in the Hempstock farmyard. Something dark, deadly and far distant heard his dying lament and swooped closer. As the past becomes the present, Lettie takes the boy’s hand and confidently sets off through unearthly landscapes to deal with the menace; but he’s only 7 years old, and he makes a mistake. Instead of banishing the predator, he brings it back into the familiar world, where it reappears as his family’s new housekeeper, the demonic Ursula Monkton. Terrified, he tries to flee back to the Hempstocks, but Ursula easily keeps him confined as she cruelly manipulates and torments his parents and sister. Despite his determination and well-developed sense of right and wrong, he’s also a scared little boy drawn into adventures beyond his understanding, forced into terrible mistakes through innocence. Yet, guided by a female wisdom beyond his ability to comprehend, he may one day find redemption.
Poignant and heartbreaking, eloquent and frightening, impeccably rendered, it’s a fable that reminds us how our lives are shaped by childhood experiences, what we gain from them and the price we pay.
4) "The Art of Racing in the Rain" by Garth Stein
Stein (How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets, 2005, etc.) uses a dog as narrator to clever effect in this tear-jerker about an aspiring race-car driver who suffers more woes than Job but never mistreats his dog.
Lab mix Enzo believes he is different from other dogs, that he has a human soul in a dog body. Enzo is frustrated that he can use only “gestures” to communicate with his beloved owner Denny. Denny works in a Seattle auto-repair shop to earn money to race. Enzo watches racing channels on TV, soaking up facts and lore. Dog and man are happy in their bachelor Eden. Enter Eve. She and Enzo are wary at first. Then she goes into labor while Denny’s away racing and she keeps Enzo beside her. Enzo adores the baby, Zoë, but he soon smells that something is off with Eve. By the time Zoë is a toddler, Eve has increasingly bad headaches but refuses to see a doctor until it’s too late. Now come the travails. During Eve’s painful, lingering death, her parents, who have never approved of Denny, loom increasingly large. When Eve dies, they sue for permanent custody of Zoë. Their case is weak until Denny is charged with rape: After a reunion of Eve’s family shortly before her death, Denny gave a ride home to Eve’s 15-year-old cousin, who attempted to seduce him; he rebuffed her but Enzo was the only witness. Eve’s evil parents are behind the trumped-up charges. Noble Denny keeps fighting for Zoë, living by his mantra, “That which you manifest is before you.” When he almost buckles, Enzo provides some rather unique assistance.
Pointedly inspirational.
5) "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn
Here's the novel that, out of 2500 submissions, won the ecological-minded Turner Tomorrow Award--and caused a mutiny among the judges when it was awarded the $500,000 first prize. Is it that good--or bad? No, but it's certainly unusual, even eccentric, enough to place Quinn (the paperback Dreamer, 1988) on the cult literary map. What's most unusual is that this novel scarcely is one: beneath a thin narrative glaze, it's really a series of Socratic dialogues between man and ape, with the ape as Socrates. The nameless man, who narrates, answers a newspaper ad (``TEACHER seeks pupil...'') that takes him to a shabby office tenanted by a giant gorilla; lo! the ape begins to talk to him telepathically (Quinn's failure to explain this ability is typical of his approach: idea supersedes story). Over several days, the ape, Ishmael, as gruff as his Greek model, drags the man into a new understanding of humanity's place in the world. In a nutshell, Ishmael argues that humanity has evolved two ways of living: There are the ``Leavers,'' or hunter-gatherers (e.g., Bushmen), who live in harmony with the rest of life; and there are the ``Takers'' (our civilization), who arose with the agricultural revolution, aim to conquer the rest of life, and are destroying it in the process. Takers, Ishmael says, have woven a ``story'' to rationalize their conquest; central to this story is the idea that humanity is flawed--e.g., as told in the Bible. But not so, Ishmael proclaims; only the Taker way is flawed: Leavers offer a method for living well in the world. After Ishmael dies of pneumonia, his newly converted pupil can only ponder the ape's parting message: ``WITH GORILLA GONE, WILL THERE BE HOPE FOR MAN?''
6) "The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt
A long-awaited, elegant meditation on love, memory and the haunting power of art.
Tartt (The Little Friend, 2002, etc.) takes a long time, a decade or more, between novels. This one, her third, tells the story of a young man named Theodore Decker who is forced to grapple with the world alone after his mother—brilliant, beautiful and a delight to be around—is felled in what would seem to be an accident, if an explosion inside a museum can be accidental. The terrible wreckage of the building, a talismanic painting half buried in plaster and dust, “the stink of burned clothes, and an occasional soft something pressing in on me that I didn’t want to think about”—young Theo will carry these things forever. Tartt’s narrative is in essence an extended footnote to that horror, with his mother becoming ever more alive in memory even as the time recedes: not sainted, just alive, the kind of person Theo misses because he can’t tell her goofy things (his father taking his mistress to a Bon Jovi concert in Las Vegas, for instance: “It seemed terrible that she would never know this hilarious fact”) as much as for any other reason. The symbolic echoes Tartt employs are occasionally heavy-handed, and it’s a little too neat that Theo discovers the work of the sublime Dutch master Carel Fabritius, killed in a powder blast, just before the fateful event that will carry his mother away. Yet it all works. “All the rest of it is lost—everything he ever did,” his mother quietly laments of the little-known artist, and it is Theo’s mission as he moves through life to see that nothing in his own goes missing. Bookending Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, this is an altogether lovely addition to what might be called the literature of disaster and redemption. The novel is slow to build but eloquent and assured, with memorable characters, not least a Russian cracker-barrel philosopher who delivers a reading of God that Mordecai Richler might applaud.
A standout—and well worth the wait.
7) "Naughts and Crosses" by Malorie Blackman
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