mister nouse

Hasn't anybody

2006-07-12T19:53:00.000-07:00

Hasn't anybody noticed Paul Neilan's slacker masterpiece, Apathy and other small victories. It begins with the funniest paragraph I can remember a book beginning with(if you have favorites please submit) and never gets less funny throughout. Neilan has the magical ability to make fun of everything he touches--rather like Julie Hecht, but he is also naughty in a way Hecht has never been. Shane the slacker hero who is just trying to pass his boring life without attracting trouble, spends a few months in a town working temp jobs, getting by. He gets stuck in a town when he is accused of murdering his deaf dental assistant and is bullied by musclebound female aggessor into pretending to love her and into taking the dullest imaginable office job. It's all funny. Every sentence made me giddy. It is a 17.95 hardcover from Von Holtzbrink. Buy it. Have pleasure. If anyone tries to tell you it's in poor taste, push them down and hurt their feelings.

and Lori Lansens has written what may be the best novel so far this year in The Girls, a novel of conjoint twins stressing the medical condition as a gift of intimacy rather than a freakish mistake. The girls are 29, the longest living of any twins joined at the scull. A secret triumph for the girls. One has an aneurism that could bust at any time, so both know their lives are short. Their lives are eventful for rural Canadians. Lansens has managed to make scenes live with a certain brightness about them. Another brilliant book by a Canadian author. They're better than us. They can't help it. I've been talking to the publicity people at Little Brown and they can't get people, who are happy to plunk down their money for a weak Ann Tyler to try a piece of genuine literature. Breaks my fucking heart.

misternouse

end of the world Rasta style

2005-07-24T11:09:00.000-07:00

Denis Johnson is a wonderful writer, master of the novel, the short story, and all manner of poetry. Jesus' Son is one of the most perfect books of dark, realistic short stories I've ever read. Infinity Lounge is an original slim tome of poetry now sadly out of print. He's an old hippy who's suffer many of the drug and political agonies of old hippiedom. I remember him in Iowa City as a political anti-war in Viet Nam guy who wrote so well he made everyone jealous. He wrote poetry then. Gorgeous stuff.
Fiskadoro(1985) is my favorite of his fiction. It is an end of the world book that takes place on Key West(called Twicetown). The bombs have fallen only shreds of civilization remain amongst the Rasta talking locals. It has something of the magical feel of Riddly Walker. The sense of a pasttoo far gone to retrieve but of a culture consumed with curiosity for the very different world that went before. Cuba is thought to be the cradle of civilization and people catch wisps of music from Cuban Radio on calm nights. They never see any Cubans though and never think to mount an expedition to Havana. People lost in a dream of a distant civilization. No one seems to read this book any more. It would be wise for college kids to read to help them understand the Viet Nam era as there are many, many Viet Nam references. Fiskadoro is the callow young seeker Mr. Cheung is his mentor. Mr Cheung's mother who escaped Viet Nam in the last, terrible days of America's departure from Saigon does not speak, but Johnson allows us into her memory bank and this provides the novel's ballast. Amazingly enough it is still in print. Give it a try.

Mister Nouse

rasta end of the world

2005-07-24T11:08:00.000-07:00

Hiroshima

2005-07-04T14:47:00.000-07:00

In the face-off with happiness suffering often wins, he reflected, ont only by being a necessary hardship but by being chosen. Suffering is chosen over happiness by almost everyone. It is designed, coddled, carressed and persuaded; it is worked over by the brain so that it informs the limits of our freedoms and the shape of our fulfillment. It ties us to other people where happiness does not.
Suffering is embraced.
Lydia Millet Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

Mina

2005-07-03T10:26:00.000-07:00

Scottish crime novelist, Denise Mina, author of the Creasey Award winning Garnethill Trilogy, has published the first of a new series of novels with Field of Blood, introducing the very young Paddy Meehan(a she) working as a copy girl for the Glasgow newspaper. She is Catholic and working class in a way which offers young women of intelligence and talent little to entice them into a rewarding adulthood. Paddy is very bright but inexperienced in the ways of the world when a child is killed and a relative of her conventional boyfriend shows up in the paper as a suspect. The unpleasant Glaswegian winter sets the tone for this bleak, fascinating, and wry novel of a young woman at the beginning of a career which Mina should be following in her next four novels, set to end in 2008 with Paddy's death. I'll read every one of them. Mina is one of the truly fine writers of crime fiction in the English speaking world. I'm grateful for her.

Mister Nouse

pure radiant

2005-07-02T13:29:00.000-07:00

Lydia Millet has got to be one of my favorite American writers. Her new one from Soft Skull is called Oh Pure and Radiant Heart and must rank as her most ambitious novel yet. It's a rich and marvellous meditation on the atomic bomb from Los Alamos to Japan, as an idea and as 20th century mythos. A very nice Librarian in Santa Fe begins to dream. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and Enrico Fermi come back to life, reconoiter in New Mexico and become Ann(the Librarian)'s focal point for most of the book. Millet is so smart she can cobble such unlikely material into a complex, hysterical and heartbreaking novel. She is extraordinary with her characters(the three physicists are particularly fetching) and the world she presents as Ann's dreams blend nicely with the scarcely believable real world. I've read all of Millet's books and have yet to be disappointed. She is still young and may write some amazing stuff in the future. Soft Skull has issued this new novel in hardcover, a mistake, I think. People who'll love it won't have $25 of disposable income to spend on something they might not like.

Mister Nouse

Dracula

2005-06-29T18:28:00.000-07:00

If you like the myth of the undead and its grizzly trappings you'll love The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. If you never want to read or watch anything ever again that smacks of vampiricism and dracularity, my advice is the same. The Historian follow a bright and sensitive historian(see title) all over Europe researching the myth of Dracula which her father had done before he became a career diplomat. The writing comes alive from the first page. The author is in control for the length of this lengthy novel and even though you have ideas about how things will turn out, she throws enough curve balls the reader's way to keep the reading experience alive and thrilling to the end. I know two people who read it twice in a week. Makes Anne Rice look like a tramp and Bram Stoker a stick in the mud. Read it.

Mister Nouse

paperback

2005-06-26T14:30:00.000-07:00

David Bezmozgis's Natasha and Other Stories
Michelle de Kretser The Hamilton Case
Mary Kay Zuravleff The Frequency of Souls(back in print) a great make fun of engineers novel
Carlos Ruiz Zafon The Shadow of the Wind(Barcelona during wartime)

four paperbacks that should change the quality of anyone's Summer

Mister Nouse

Albahari

2005-06-26T14:19:00.000-07:00

Serb by way of Calgary, David Albahari's novel Gotz and Meyer(sorry I don't do umlauts) is due in December of '05. Probably the best Holocaust novel since Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces, Gotz and Meyer gives you teacher of teenagers in Belgrade trying to explain the Holocaust to his naive bewildered students. Gotz and Meyer are like Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, two nearly identical Nazi functionaries with whom the narrator is in constant contact, as shocked as his students that such boring people could be responsible for killing so many innocents. The narrator of course has lost all but a straggling few members of his family to the war and they are scattered about the globe wanting to do nothing but forget the tragedies of the past. An amazing beautiful novel we should all read.

Mister Nouse

Pelecanos

2005-06-26T14:11:00.000-07:00

George Pelecanos has transformed Washington DC with his noirs featuring the many many kinds of people of all races who live good and not so good lives in all four quadrants of the nations capitol. Detective Derek Strange is his most frequent guide through the city buy Drama City, his new stand alone is touching and tough and as always informative. It's the guy out of jail trying to make a go of it against odds(yes an old theme) that is handled with beautiful prose and a poignant sense of character. Even the bad guys get moments to show their humanity.
Mister Nouse

Wilson

2005-06-26T14:07:00.000-07:00

Cintra Wilson's hysterical sendup of America's need for celebrity is finally available in paperback and should be read by everyone who's ever wished vengeance on the rich and the beautiful. Laughing all the way.
Mister Nouse

good things

2005-06-26T12:03:00.000-07:00

coyle

2005-04-09T14:34:00.000-07:00

The other day I picked up a yellowed copy of George Higgins's first and only good novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle. It is Boston noir, mostly dialogue, about a low rent crook just out of the joint, trying to grab a break from the cops on another charge. It is a very short book that wastes nothing in ferrying its reader across the River Styx. It moves with the stark inevitability of a Greek tragedy through Boston's underworld. Characters talk about going to see The Brunes and The Pats and curse them when they fail. I'm giving away nothing to say that Eddie Coyle's friends are not his friends and that his attempts to save himself are like Brer Bear having at the tar-baby. Perfect dialogue reveals characters of surprising depth. There's an excellent film starring Robert Mitchum, playing against type as the vulnerable Coyle and Peter Boyle as the owner of a bar that fronts for many criminal activities, and proves to be his nemesis. Read it and find out what people mean when they say noir.

Misteer Nouse

op

2005-04-07T20:49:00.000-07:00

During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase, one of the great rural novels about a farmer, his wife(The Queen of Persia), and their five daughters drawn with such elegant strokes so as to draw out maximum humor or poignancy from material at hand. About seventy pages in mid-book are devoted the death by cancer of a beloved aunt. Brilliant cryin' stuff. A Christian Scientist aunt appears to wonderful effect. A family neither too wholesome nor too dysfunctional. Chase wrote a couple of disappointing novels after this gem.

Mister Nouse

Oh

2005-04-06T15:39:00.000-07:00

Oh Oh Oh Frank Conroy, for longer than I can remember paterfamilias of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, has died. We all knew he was failing, but the shock of his sudden absence from our world, is hard to take. After losing Don Justice, one of America's finest poets and a deeply bright and original person, the writing community of Iowa City has lost another of its finest. When I first came to Iowa City in 1967 as a student John Casey required his class to read Stop Time a memoir by of all people a young man named Frank Conroy. At the time young writers did not write memoirs. Everybody writes them now but there has never been anything with the energy, the honesty, the feeling for people that Stop Time has. I daresay there won't be either. I was awed by it as an undergraduate and I am still awed by it. Jack Leggett ran the workshop then, to be followed by Frank. I interviewed him once for KRUI(for some reason the interview never ran) and I remember a tall relaxed man who had for some reason decided to be nice to me. He shocked me by treating me as an equal, wanting to know what I thought about this book and that. He said of all the writers in the world he'd most like to bring V. S. Naipaul to Iowa City--remember this was1980 or so, well before he became Nobel Lauriate. We spoke about A House for Mr. Biswas. This I thought was a truly kind man. Our relationship such as it was continued when, working at Prairie Lights, I was able to mark his taste, different from mine but with overlappings that made satisfying recommendations possible. He read mainly literary thrillers and the work of his students. When the daunting task of reading application manuscripts came he read them with the full force of his formidable attention, and could bring himself to read little else until the job was done. Then he'd come down to the book store and nose around for smart thrillers. He loved Alan Furst, Dan Fesperman, Neil Gordon, Michael Connolly, anyone who wrote with heart and wisdom of people under stress. He did not like: funny wise-cracking detectives, anything written in any sort of dialect(I couldn't get him into George Pelecanos), most thrillers by American women, although he liked Ruth Rendell and Frances Fyfield(Brits), gratuitous violence of any sort, gimmickry, things that reminded him too much or certain other things. He frequently got back to me and told me what he'd liked and not liked, and that was what our friendship was made of. It was a friendship I treasured and will miss. "Dynamite book!" he'd say enthusiastically.
He spoke candidly about his cancer, joked about his chemo taste which had to be dumbed down a bit. A month or so ago he called me at home, a first. "Thanks for the books you've been sending home with Maggie" he said " I loved that Tudor one, what was it called?" "Disolution?" "Yeah, that was just really terrific, and all the books, really" I blathered about it's being my job and he stopped me. "No, really. thanks for all the books." It was not till a few hours later that I realized he'd been saying good-bye. A blessing from a sweet and talented man, for which I am grateful. I hope he's somewhere where he can hear Thelonius Monk or Bill Evans. Goodbye Frank.

Life During Wartime

2005-04-02T17:42:00.000-08:00

Has anybody read Life During Wartime by genre defying Lucius Shepard? An endless war in an underdeveloped country(sound familiar) fought by burnouts with weapons so technologically so fancy you can't tell the warrior from the weapon. Writing dark and thrilling, a surprise on every page. Why this wonderful book is out of print, especially now that its relevance is at its height is beyond me. He's published several books since but none nearly as fresh and exciting as this one. Soldiers wear masks that allow them to track down enemies. They never take them off because the interface twixt hard and soft ware twists and maims the face they cover. I have the feeling Shepard has taken his share of psychedelics over the years. He's best understood by those whose synapses are stretched out extra long from nights of tripping. If you see this book at a used book store pick it up.

Mister Nouse

new things

2005-04-01T17:44:00.000-08:00

Remember the name John Wray. His new book Canaan's Tongue is kind of an anti-Huckleberry Finn about nasty people who steal slaves and sell them to other slave owners selling hope to the slaves and cheating everyone in sight. The prose and the characters are phenomenal. It's due out in a couple of weeks. Unbelievably powerful novel

jukebox

2005-03-13T12:11:00.000-08:00

I've never read a better book about popular music than Geoffrey O'Brien's brilliant, moving Sonata for Jukebox. He gives us a memoir of music. All the sounds he heard as a child. The few moments of silence. Radio. Records. A piano. Theme music from TV shows. The Ice Cream truck jingle. His family's broad and obsessive musical interests. Music is with us always but it has taken Geoffrey O'Brien to teach us how very important it is and how strong a claim it deserves on our attention.
He expresses strong preferences. The first chapter is a spirited defense of Burt Bacharach, a composer so many in my generation loathed without listening to for cultural rather than musical reasons. Know this, O'Brien has heard and listened to just about everything that has passed for music in his lifetime. He has an original take on everything he talks about, and it's probably better than your take. This guy really sends you back to your stereo, listening to your favorites like it was your very first time.

Mister Nouse

Bach/Frederick the Great

2005-03-13T11:49:00.000-08:00

In James R. Gaines' thoughtful, fascinating new book, Evening in the Palace of Reason, the music-obsessed Emperor invites the aging Sebastian Bach to his palace for music. C.P.E., Sebastian's successful son, worked for Frederick, made a different sort of music from his dad and perhaps nursed a grudge against him. Upon reaching Frederick's Palace Bach was challenged to compose multipart fugues and variations on themes so relentlessly peculiar it is said that C.P.E. must have written them to torment his father. You'll have to read the book to find out what happened and to reflect as Mr Gaines reflects so wisely on the relationship of the European Enlightenment to the world that went before. Gaines writes with a smooth easy style frequently allowing amusement to show through his basically serious intent. You'll learn a lot you don't know and you might just happen to spin Bach's immortal A Musical Offering on the old gramaphone. Or if you are younger than I, I'm sure you can download it.

Ackerley

2005-03-13T11:32:00.000-08:00

If you haven't read J. R. Ackerley's masterful memoir of his father, My Father and Myself, find it and read it. It's in print. Ackerly was a fine literary editor in the 30's and 40's and a brilliant gay man before his time. His father was a
Buckingham Palace guard. He also kept two families, each ignorant of the other, for years. Ackerley's writing style strikes the perfect tone of irony, required to keep such a memoir from sensationalism or bathos. We learn that in order to keep two families on his niggardly guard's pension, he had to supplement his income in ways Ackerley only discovered relatively late in his life.

Buckingham Palace guards were underpaid precisely so they'd need to earn "tips" from the gay wealthy folk who would pick them out like pickles from a barrel for dalliances. Ackerley's learning of this practice leads him toward introspection which is always intersting. It is also a very funny book about Edwardian England and it odd customs. His writing is so good, he'd be interesting if he were writing about ground beef.

Mister Nouse

apologia

2005-03-13T11:06:00.000-08:00

Mister Nouse would like to take this opportunity to apologize for his unconcionable absence from and neglect of his blog.

Mister Nouse

pelecanos

2005-03-05T16:01:00.000-08:00

George Pelecanos is the only ethnic white person born and bred in Washington D. C. ever to have made himself known to the literary world. I grew up in suburban Virginia, where DC meant big white buildings and Negroes. We visited the big white buildings and steered clear of the Negroes. George Pelecanos has made a career out of proving me and millions of other suburbanites to be idiots. In his Derek Strange detective novels the action happens in NE, SE, SW, Anacostia, Naylor Gardens, and other parts of DC where all kinds of people, mostly black live a dizzying variety of complex lives. Many sweat in the torid DC Summer without air conditioning. Many work hard to support families and grieve that their neighborhoods are going to seed. There are drug dealers who love their mothers and make sacrifices for those they care about. Their are dangerous criminals living side by side with introspective loners. Pelecanos does not allow us the luxury of a glib stereotype in his thoughtfull morality plays that take place inside the world inside the beltway.
His new novel is Drama City, a stand alone without Mr. Strange, about a guy out of the joint trying to make a life for himself and pulling down a paycheck working for the DC Humane Society. This is a tough and dangerous job in a town where pit bulls and Rottweilers(rotties) are bread for combat and gang members put aside differences for the pleasure of bloodsport. His hard-working Latina parole officer, is struggling with alcoholism, but does her often thankless job
with a toughlove attitude that gives her only the occasional satisfaction. She is the female equivalent of a mensch. Every character is uniquely human, likeable or unlikeable.
Pelecanos is out to show his often misunderstood city in a bright and searching light and his novels are novels though they sell out of the Mystery sections of book stores. We owe him tremendous gratitude for this.

Mister Nouse

salinger

2005-01-25T19:39:00.001-08:00

The girls read the Salinger stories and I think generally loved them but were hard put to say why. It's an important reading lesson to discover that understanding and enjoyment are not the same. That Kafka is the greater for his mystery rather than the less. I'm not certain whether it's important to know why we feel deep emotions, but our species wants an explanation.

salinger

2005-01-25T19:39:00.000-08:00

Hay II

2005-01-15T16:07:00.000-08:00

Just read The Student of Weather. Two sisters in dried out 30s Saskatchewan, a land of dust and snow. One charismatic male. Hay finds just the right pitch to make this old-fashioned sounding plot flash alive. Anyone who loves language will be pulled into this carefully made world, will he helpless in the face of Hay's prose.

misternouse

Hay

2005-01-15T15:45:00.000-08:00

Canadian novelist Elizabeth Hay Has published two novels in the US, The Student of Weather and Garbo Laughs. They could not be more different. If they were movies they'd be Hud and Some Like it Hot. I compare them to movies because they are both complexly allusive to movies, The Student of Weather in its language and imagery and Garbo Laughs in its very essence.
Garbo Laughs slipped in under the misternouse radar a couple of years ago and is now available as a trade paperback. It's a very funny book about Harriett Browning, a film-obsessed Ottawa writer, for whom an enviable life has become bland next to her need for the immediate excitement of life in the movies. Great characters and wonderful plot surprises. Harriett is a gloomy sort who is played by Hay for subtlest kind of laughs. She and her 10 year old son, Kenny, have a running debate about the comparitive merits of Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra. Her interesting and sweet husband Lew cannot match Cary Grant and is kept at a poignant distance by Harriett's obsessions.

pleasure

2004-12-26T18:22:00.000-08:00

Read a good half of the nice new Modern Library edition of Truman Capote's magic first book, Other Voices, Other Rooms. "It is pure readin' pleasure from that little sissy boy."--Tex Ritter. Truly a remarkable novel, one of my favorites in openning up the possibilities of medium-fancy prose. I read it my Freshman year at UVA and it had such an impact on me. Reading it now it loses nothing. The very definition of Southern Gothic. Absolutely weird. Beautiful from the very first sentence. Published it at 23. Wrote it at 22? I think of Cocteau, Young, Gay brilliant yet produced nothing so perfect as OVOR. The Complete Stories is now available. I favor his early spookier stories over his sentimental little old lady stories, which I admit he does better than anyone. They just tend to wear thin on me. The early stories from Tree of Night are simply amazing. Take my word for it. A list of novel titles containing a punctuation mark. A Novel doesn't count.

Mister Nouse

26th

2004-12-26T08:41:00.001-08:00

Merry Christmas to bloggers, readers, booksellers everywhere. Those in retail are greatful for two days of sleep after serving panic-stricken shoppers on Christmas Eve Day. I'm going to settle in to the NYT for a while. God Bless us, every one.

mister nouse

26th

2004-12-26T08:41:00.000-08:00

hedwig

2004-12-22T19:40:00.000-08:00

Yet America will be even more foreign in it's ways than England, and even farther off. She knows from the way both Harry and Berti look when she sometimes thinks of Charlottenberg in her natural conversations,how they perhaps think she still lives in the ashes of the past, but it is not so. Who can cut, like with scissors, such an important tie? In any case, she knows, they will in a few years return to Germany, when the madness will be over.--Frieda Arkin in Hedwig and Berti

Hedwig and Berti

2004-12-22T19:18:00.000-08:00

This novel from St. Martins set in 1940s London and involving a refugee couple; Hedwig and Dagobert, havin left Germany only when things got ridiculously bad for Jews. They seem to have survived on the bnasis of Hedwig's massive braids of white hair. The author is Frieda Arkin who is 86(!) and a simply astounding writer as though writers just got better as they got older. I don't want to tell you about it because there is such a pleasue about allowing this book to unfold like a flower for you. Who is she like? Nobody. Malamud maybe but he wrote stories best and Hedwig and Berti is a nice-sized novel. For decades this lady been writing cookbooks. COOKBOOKS! Maybe she has other treasures stored somewhere. It will be out very soon. Worth buying in Hardback.

mister nouse

brooks

2004-12-11T18:38:00.000-08:00

Brooks Landon put me in mind of the fact that Lucius Shepard's Life During
Wartime needs to be in print now that Uncle Sam has smart bombs. It's such a beautiful political novel and what works for one exotic locale will work as well for another. I'll try to find out who his agent is.
The girls are hard at work on Salinger and I am having a fine old time rereading the master.

Tired,
Mister Nouse

gilead again

2004-12-08T18:04:00.000-08:00

You heard it here first gang. Gilead is the literary teflon wonder. Those who don't like it are few and speak in whispers to themselves. A beautiful book by all but a few standards, it has captured America's reading public in huge numbers. FSG is about to have that rarest of things, a truly literary best-seller, and they are going wild. An intellectual religious book set in Iowa, it hums along at it's intense but steady pace, bringing a bit of religious relief to a nation bamboozled by religious hucksterism.
Rejoice!

Mister Nouse

season

2004-12-08T17:54:00.000-08:00

It is Christmas and misternouse is weary. This weekend he turned to the stories of J. D. Salinger for solace and found it. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters features Buddy Glass at his self-deprecatory best, the spirit of Seymour hovering over the story like an angel. No one has ever given the religious life as it converges with our own lives a better, sweeter treatment. I read some from Nine Stories and wondered if there might be more somewhere in Vermont. The girls reading group has undertaken to read the Salinger oeuvre sans Holden Caulfield. There may soon be a boys reading group.
Have you read the marvellous Man Walks Into a Room by Nicole Kraus(s?), a very nearly perfect book, intelligent and finely written.

Mister Nouse

chabon

2004-11-27T17:29:00.000-08:00

Michael Chabon's Final Solution is a nearly perfect homage to Conan Doyle and his marvellous creation Sherlocke Holmes. The Old Man as Holmes is referred to has retired to his apiary in the country, well into his nineties and England well into the Second World War. A mute boy with a number-reciting parrot and a murder are the elements the Old Man must unscramble. Chabon clearly loves Sir ACD and the pleasure that went into the production of The Final Solution is obvious. 120 pages, often funny, poignant when it needs to be. Chabon proves himself an elegant miniaturist.

Mister Nouse

chabon

2004-11-13T18:32:00.000-08:00

wax god

2004-11-02T20:02:00.004-08:00