Book #4 Remember Me Like This by Bret Anthony Johnston

Remember Me Like This

In Bret Anthony Johnston's novel Remember Me Like This,  Justin Campbell has been missing for four years, his family have buckled under the strain and are fractured, but are by turns attempting to carry on with their lives. His Mom volunteers in deliberate anonymity at a sea-life centre, his brother hangs out at a skate park and is on his way to getting his first girlfriend, his father is having an affair. As his father departs from his regular rendezvous with his mistress, his phone rings, the police believe they have found Justin.
 
Back in the day, I used to watch a fair bit of Oprah, and as a result came across the story of Shawn Hornbeck, a boy who went missing in 2002. UK readers may not be familiar with the case. He had not been as many thought, murdered, but had been abducted and held captive by a paedophile who police only caught 4 years later when he struck again. 

Justin Campbell's backstory is pretty much that of Hornbeck. In fact, it does not so much echo the case as replicate it. Like Hornbeck, Campbell was living within an easy distance of his family and had seen missing posters and appeals for his whereabouts, though allowed certain freedoms, he remained in the psychological thrall of his captor and was afraid to leave.

I've considered before in reviews how I feel when fiction stories borrow heavily from true life events. In this particular instance it feels a bit grotesque - despite the frankly unmistakeable similarity, no acknowledgement is made towards the Hornbeck case in the Authors Note. Given that the boy spent his adolescence being exploited, this feels like further exploitation by somebody he's probably never met for creative gain and profit. I would definitely like to know if Johnson sat down with Hornbeck or his parents at any stage.    

But then, fiction and the real life inspiration diverge as it is doubtless all fiction bar the backstory itself. Johnson at least has the decency not to focus on what happened to Justin during those years, instead focusing on the period of adjustment his family go through upon his return. Justin's own perspective is silent, leaving him an enigma. The authorial point of view switches between parents, brother and grandfather, and this is a really interesting and worthwhile story.

You last see your son when he is 11, and he returns a 15 year old, you live in the shadow of the perpetrator filled with hatred and devastation - your child is not forthcoming about what happened and you really don't want to ask. He is both the son and brother you remember, and yet a stranger with unfathomable behaviour and secrets.  

In that respect by focusing on the psychology of the family both how they coped with his disappearance and again with his reappearance, it was a really interesting story to read.

It did have a tendency towards a soap opera effect - and whilst the epilogue is there to keep you guessing the prologue is somehow superfluous, containing a frustrating spoiler element about an aspect of plot that didn't need spoiling.  The prose has that "American tone" that I so often dislike, and there were sections that I found quite dry.

Though it has an interesting and unique angle to pose as a novel, can it really be called original? And more than this is it not somehow an insult to give a speculative public narrative to a very real and intense private pain?

Verdict : 7/10

2015 Challenge : Despite the lack of acknowledgement, I'm calling this my book based on a true story. 

Book #47 We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

I think it's fair to say that I have read far less books this year then I would have normally by this time of year. But, it's also pretty fair to say that on the whole I've read very few books I didn't enjoy which is an improvement upon previous years.

'We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves' follows this years pattern. Shortlisted for this years Booker Prize, for my part I was completely seduced by the attention grabbing title, it was always pretty much a certainty I was going to give it a try. And I thought it was great.

Told from the point of view of Rosemary Cooke who begins her story in the middle before concluding it around present day, she once had two siblings : Fern and Lowell. Fern disappeared when she was 5, to be barely spoken of again. Lowell ran away in his teens, and she hasn't seen him since either.

There is so so much I'd like to say about this book, a lot of things I'd like to debate, mostly in reference to their parents and the nearly criminal level of  psychological damage their choices inflicted on their children. Unfortunately, I'm loathe to do so. A twist comes roughly a third of the way in, which makes it near impossible to review without absolutely wrecking the beginning.

This is exactly what happened to me - An Amazon review gave this away, and so I already knew. The thing was, too, that as I read it I knew that far from guessing the twist I would have made (possibly from what life experiences I bring to the book as a reader) entirely different assumptions.

Because I can't really talk about the plot, what I will say is that I found Rosemary as a character incredibly believable, even with the uniqueness of her life and the circumstances, I felt like if I'd had her life I'd be like her too. If anything there is not enough of either Lowell, or the parents, possibly because it's being narrated from Rosemary's viewpoint. If the narrator had been omniscient or if each character had taken a turn this might have been better, but this would have really changed the feel of the book and consequentially made it a different book. It's just there's a lot more I wanted to know, and hoped the mothers' journal would reveal but it didn't.

I think I expected it to be a funny book, indeed it's described as comic, but I thought it was incredibly sad. There were parts of brilliantly observed and astute points about life and family, and being a human in general. In fact, I enjoyed the writing so much, I will certainly seek out her other novels. Though the chronology of the storytelling occasionally feels fractured it wasn't really to its detriment.

Also, in the general scheme of things, the originality in terms of plot here is inarguable and it is genuinely good as a reader to have a book that you can't even slightly accuse of being a tale you might have read something like before. 

10/10
      

Book #30 The Art Of Fielding by Chad Harbach

The Art Of Fielding

In The Art Of Fielding, promising young baseball player Henry Skrimshander is spotted by sporty college kid Mike Schwartz. Somewhat improbably for a person apparently in their second year at university, Mike has the power and influence to make sure Henry gets a scholarship to a minor New England college with a tenuous association to the novel Moby Dick. From there a novel about sports in college ensues.

In terms of the prose it flows well, and feels well written, it's not necessary to know anything much about baseball to know what is going on. The characters are in general likeable and Henry's journey from invincible to tormented can be compared to any number of successful sportsman. Alas, the problem is not prose nor characterization, but plot.

On the one hand you've got Henry's story, and all in all that side of it works well, but the blurb reads something like "when a throw goes wrong, 5 lives are changed" and the idea that they were changed simply by that ball and not by the disastrous choices made by the individuals themselves which aren't particularly related to the foul ball, is silly at best.

The other side of the plot-coin is the Dean, Guert, his fractured relationship with daughter Pella, and his dangerous obsession with one of his students. On the one hand it reminded me in tone of John Williams' Stoner. On the other hand this novel is two different college stories, in which a poor effort has been made to shoehorn them into one and establish tenuous links between Guert and Pella and Henry and Mike. They just don't connect. Even the plot twist that brings this side of the story to crisis point doesn't hold much water and feels quite forced. The denouement, after a character passes away, belongs in a much lesser, much more melodramatic novel

That said, did I enjoy it as I read it? Yes. It was only after I closed the book, and thought about writing a review that it just seemed faulty somehow. And it didn't 'stay with me' as other recommendations assured me it would. I am behind with the blog and read this in August and I had to look up what some of the characters names were because I just didn't remember.

7/10  

Book #72 Legend Of A Suicide by David Vann

Legend Of A Suicide

I'd read a lot of buzz about Legend Of A Suicide prior to reading it, and then fell across it in a second hand bookshop in Camden last weekend. I have a belief in the synchronicity of chance, and, for a book that you intend to read to appear in a second hand shop you happen to visit, makes it seem like its "there for you". Like you're supposed to read it somehow.

There's a lot to be said about 'Legend Of A Suicide'. Not really a novel, more 4 vignettes with a novella in the middle, it is initially difficult to engage with, and is definitely an experiment in form and storytelling, even at the end Roy and his father Jim maintain a kind of impenetrable mystique as characters. The bulk of the story concerns Roy going to live with his father in a remote corner of Alaska, in a kind of survivalist scenario whereby they live self-sufficiently without contact with the outside world.  The beating heart of this story is the crushing weight of responsibility and burden of guilt on Roy, who suddenly finds himself pretty much a caretaker to his increasingly unstable and unpredictable father. The prose has good descriptive passages bleak, stark, conveying well the oppressive solitude of their location and forced togetherness. It reminded me both of Paul Theroux's Mosquito Coast and Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, two other novels concerning fathers who drag their children into ill advised and dangerous territory to suit their own ideals and needs. The scene in which Roy's father begins to relate intimate details of his sex life to his child makes you squirm for the terrible predicament Roy has been placed in and wonder why on earth his mother let him go there. 

I don't want to spoil anything for anyone who might read the book after reading this review and so I can only say, that after I had presumed I knew exactly where this novel was taking me in all respects I had my mind officially blown by this novel in the middle third. What really makes this novel an experience is the knowledge that David Vann's father committed suicide in real life, and as you read this fictionalized story you realize you are reading Vann's "dark night of the soul" laid bare. It is incredibly courageous of him to bring this story to paper, was no doubt hugely difficult to write and whilst doubtless cathartic he has allowed every person who reads this to truly see the inner workings of his psychological reaction, not through fact, "this is what happened and this is how I felt" but subtly, through fictionalised prose. It is no Dave Pelzer or similar story of "my terrible childhood" which populate the shelves of every supermarket. You grieve and ache for Vann, because you realise through your own thought process without being instructed why he is telling you this other story, the place that it has come from within him. It's art, really.

Which isn't to say it is flawless, there are ways that I feel it let itself down, it could be dull in parts and its really all about the middle third with the writing either side lacking the same quality or punch, though the end has some nice lines. It is however totally worth reading for the excellent Sukkwan Island section which has so much to say about so many important things, fatherhood, despair, revenge, legacy, psychology and anger and is both an important addition to literature on the topic and through its experimental style to literature as a whole.  9/10