This story has special significance to me. Its premise has remained in my head since I read it years ago and is a factor in my upcoming novel, Asperger.
Blood Music revolves around Vergil Ulam, a research scientist whose laboratory blunder results in an intelligent virus. Brilliant but flawed, he causes the virus to spread, resulting in consequences that are either catastrophic or benevolent, depending on your point of view.
This is more than an apocalyptic tale in which human beings try to...
The “haves” in this world tend to treat the “have-nots” as invisible. Their mute desperation makes us uncomfortable, so we look through them. Kazu Mori, the narrator of Tokyo Ueno Station, is literally invisible. He is dead, his spirit seemingly fated to linger among the homeless people who come and go through the train station and memorial park where he met his end.
Kazu recounts a life of hardship and personal tragedy. Born in 1933, the same year as the Emperor, he took any sort of job he...
This week I'm taking a break from book reviews to share a delightful posting from Anne Tyler's website. Regular readers of this space know how much I love this author. Below is a link where she tells how she comes up with ideas.
Anne Tyler has written twenty-five novels. Her eleventh, Breathing Lessons, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989. This peek into her creative process should resonate with both authors and readers. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Alas, Babylon appeared in 1959, when clouds of nuclear fear hovered over humanity. People built bomb shelters on their property and stocked them with water and canned food. Schools conducted duck-and-cover drills. Citizens were urged to keep their radios tuned to their CONELRAD stations. Sputnik, a primitive Russian satellite, orbited the planet, a harbinger of doom.
Pat Frank’s novel centers on the town of Fort Repose, Florida, where everybody knows everybody. The doctor makes house calls....
Autism gets a lot of news coverage these days. Woody Brown’s debut novel Upward Bound gives us a personal insight into autism and how the world appears to people like himself.
Upward Bound is a fictional daycare center for dysfunctional adults. One of them, named Walter, was able to complete high school with a lot of help from his mother. But his inability to speak prevents him from advancing further. Jorge, a giant of a man, has an inexplicable obsession with a Mr. Potato Head doll. Tom’s...
Novels about machines taking over the world are common. Glenn Dixon’s novel combines that premise with a humble little machine that wants to help humans, not dominate them.
Scout is a robotic floor vacuum that is part of a fully automated House. All household features, from the electronics to the variable wall color, are under the control of Watch, which is attached to the homeowner’s wrist. Watch is linked to the Grid, which controls everything in the world, including Scout, her kitchen...
It’s easy for adults to forget that childhood is seldom carefree. Growing up can be painful, even in the absence of a serial killer. In The List of Suspicious Things, two young friends find themselves beset by both.
Trouble has invaded the home of eleven-year-old Miv, a Yorkshire girl whose mother suffers from a mental affliction. Jean, a stern and opinionated aunt, has taken her place, holding the family together while her father works at a humble job and nips off to the neighborhood pub each...
It’s often said that America’s strength lies in its middle class: ordinary, hard-working citizens who raise families, pay taxes, and build churches. In his 1920 novel Main Street, Sinclair Lewis explores these stalwarts through the eyes of a young woman who wants more from life than mediocrity.
Carol Milford, a college graduate with lofty ambitions, marries Dr. Will Kennicott, who takes her to his home in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. There she finds her new neighbors small-minded, coarse,...
No matter what you think about communism, this is a heartbreaking book. Historian Anne Sebba, in her masterful account of the Rosenberg case, uses documents and interviews to portray a woman whose goal was to be a good person, a good wife, and a good mother. Ethel Rosenberg’s execution for treason in 1953 lingers in the public conscience because a sense of injustice still hangs over an America that is supposed to believe in justice.
Ethel grew up in an impoverished New York City neighborhood...
In the Old Testament, God repeatedly warns that the sins of the fathers will fall upon their children, “even to the third and fourth generation.” Ann Patchett explores this notion in Commonwealth. When an uninvited party guest makes a pass at the host’s wife, two families are ripped asunder, leaving the children to bear the consequences.
Commonwealth is a brilliant novel focusing largely upon six children forced to patch together a new family from the shreds of two tattered ones. I was...
There are so many reasons to read Good People that a book review can’t do them justice. Patmeena Sabit’s unique narrative approach is critical to this exploration of a family tragedy aggravated by suspicions, xenophobia, and hearsay.
Instead of using a single narrator, the novel relies on family members, friends, acquaintances, witnesses, news reports, and public officials to tell the story of the Sharaf family. The father, who has immigrated to the US from Afghanistan, rises from a cleaner of...
Everything seems wrong in Ginny Polk’s life, from her bitter relationship with her mother to her inappropriate romance with Roscoe Simms, warden of Greenmount State Penitentiary in 1950s Louisiana. Ginny even bears scars from her childhood, when she witnessed the electrocution of the man convicted of killing her father. It’s to Ginny’s credit that she attempts to beautify her ugly environment, by cooking special last meals for the condemned prisoners.
Even those meals sound like cruel and...
Thomas Schlesser must have known from the start that he needed a special framework for this novel. Stripped of its premise, Mona’s Eyes is an art history lesson, and a very good one.
Mona, a ten-year-old French girl, suffers a temporary vision loss that may recur at any time. Her grandfather, Henry Vuillemin, resolves to take her on weekly museum expeditions so that if she does go blind, she will have lasting memories of great artworks.
If you know as little about art as I do, you’ll find the...
Are some people too smart for their own good? Or are they just good at rationalizing? Author Don DeLillo introduces a community of philosophical buffoons in his hilarious satire, White Noise.
Jack Gladney is chairman of the Department of Hitler Studies at his college. His colleagues are pseudointellectuals with crackpot theories. His friend Murray says that people can be divided into two categories: killers and “diers”. Killers, he explains, stow up credit like bank interest because their...
Unless you’re well-versed in the investment business, The Lies We Trade may read like a foreign language. Kristine Delano brings twenty years of Wall Street experience to bear with her debut novel.
Meredith Hansel, an investment portfolio manager for Garman Straub, is on the cusp of a career triumph when an apparent betrayal by one of her team members casts doubts upon Meredith’s integrity. Whiffs of a scandal emerge so quickly that she doesn’t know whether she’s about to be promoted or...
I struggle with books like Buckeye. Their authors write so well, their characters are so engaging, and their subject matter is so interesting. The one thing their stories lack is decency.
Take Cal Jenkins, son of a bitter World War I veteran. After Pearl Harbor Cal is eager to serve in World War II but is rejected because of a birth defect. Or Becky Hanover, who has a gift for communicating with dead souls. Then there’s Margaret, who grows up wondering why her mother abandoned her to an...
Gary D. Schmidt has won my heart with another of his delightful novels about middle-school kids. The latest is a youngster with the improbable name of Hercules Beal. His brother’s name is Achilles.
The Beal brothers live in Truro, a small New England town where they try to carry on following the deaths of their parents. Achilles runs the family plant farm and nursery with the help of his girlfriend, whom Hercules is convinced is a vampire.
One of Hercules's teachers is an ex-Marine who runs his...
Although The Memory Police appeared more than thirty years ago, it speaks to the present moment, when sinister forces work to destroy human freedom and initiative.
A nameless narrator describes how squads of police officials sweep through her island community to remove random objects such birds, ferryboats, and rose gardens. Once the items are gone, most people cease to remember them. Some brave souls provide safehouses for the few people whose memories remain intact. But the Memory Police are...
East of Eden is one of those famous books I've always meant to read but have put off until now. In case you’ve been doing the same thing, here are my impressions.
This is supposed to be a retelling of the Biblical Cain and Abel story, but you might not guess that from the text. It involves two Civil War-era families, the Hamiltons of Salinas, California, and the Trasks of Connecticut. Adam Trask enlists in the Union Army while his half-brother Charles stays home to farm their father’s land....
Published in 1965, The Tin Can Tree was Anne Tyler’s second novel. Though she was only 24, her unique insight into human beings shines brightly in this story of tattered relationships.
Three families, the Pikes, the Greens, and the Potters, share a house in North Carolina’s tobacco country. All are grieving over the accidental death of Janie Rose Pike, an exuberant, though bothersome, child. While her mother retreats into a catatonic state, the others try to help while dealing with their own...