Review: ‘A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion’ by Ron Hansen

August 21, 2011 Leave a comment

If ever a novel was to be played out in black and white, fogged with cigarette smoke, with images of spinning newspaper headlines, it would be Ron Hansen’s A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion, the writer’s fictional account of a highly publicized 1920s murder in New York City.

Hansen gets to the guts early. In the opening scene, nine-year-old Lorraine Snyder wakes up to find her mother bound in the hallway. Ruth Snyder tells the little girl to forget about untying her, go find a neighbor to help. Her husband Albert is found dead in their bedroom amid a chaotic and nonsensical crime scene and Ruth doesn’t do a very good job of hiding her involvement and that of her dippy married lover Judd Gray.

Flashback to the meeting between Ruth and Judd. The former is a chesty young sex kitten, a real flirt with a soprano purr, a social woman married to a preoccupied man with hobbies she doesn’t share. Judd is a lingerie salesman with tortoise shell glasses, a people person who has fallen into a loveless rut with his wife Isabel. His live-in mother-in-law makes his home life even less satisfying with her cutting remarks about how much he travels and drinks. They meet through a mutual friend and fall into a wild affair, messing up bed sheets in Manhattan hotels as well as those along Judd’s sales route.

Hansen paints Ruth as a master manipulator who easily plays the hapless Judd. She seduces him, stripping down to just her tan lines so he can apply lotion to her body in the moment that ignites the affair. Judd is a mess of guilt in the aftermath and tries in vain to stay away from her, ignoring her letters and burying the flashbacks. Ruth continues her full-court press, snags him hardcore, then wanes a bit to make sure he’s hooked. She tells Judd that her husband treats her like a prostitute. That he’s verbally abusive. She whips Judd into a tizzy about her home life until he’s practically foaming. Then she starts dropping hints about how she wishes her husband would just die. We know from the start of this easy-reader tabloid tale that Judd will eventually comply.

At about the point Ruth reveals the death-wish she has for her husband, this novel shifts into a black comedy. Albert has unknowingly signed on for a huge life insurance policy when the jack used to prop his car gives out while he’s working beneath it. A gas pipe is nicked while he’s napping alone in the house. A whole host of accidents befall the character, and Ruth is always standing beneath the shaky ladder or next to the broken jack when he emerges unscathed.

It’s impossible to tell, though, whether the duo’s love scenes fall into the bodice ripping noir area or whether they are purposely written in a hokey way. Worst love scene of the story:

“Shall I kiss you down there?”
“Oh, that’s all right. I’m ready.”
“Shall I pull out?”
She pouted. “No. I like the seed inside me.”

Judd walked into her and sneered a little as he entered the soft and velvety caress of Ruth. She wryly gasped with false wide eyes as if he were enormous, and he smiled as he jammed himself in and out, holding off as long as he could, and then feeling his semen lash out of him with such force he loudly cried, “Ah!”

Judd is the better-drawn of the two characters. His feelings and intentions and misgivings are all revealed. His knows he is completely under Ruth’s spell. He struggles with confessing their involvement to his wife. He tries to back out even in those final moments before beaning Albert. Ruth is a trickier call. Does she actually love Judd or is he the neon exit sign in front of a door leading to the alley? Ruth’s version of her husband is one of a verbally abusive man who treats her like a prostitute. While he certainly comes across as a bit of a prick in scenes from their home life, definitely inattentive and condescending, but not nearly the monster she has cooked up. Is she smitten? Or is she a sociopath?

Also, the narration is a bit self-conscious. Most notably when Ruth goes on a business trip with Judd and rides along in the car during his sales calls. She waits for him in the car but is bored because, as the narrator says, car radios hadn’t yet been invented. It’s a weird detail that takes a reader out of the 1920s and into the future, looking back on the 1920s.

This story was all the rage and sold zillions of newspapers as the facts came to light and the couple landed in court. While it isn’t surprising or mind-blowing or different from any of the illicit-affair-turns-grizzly stories that crop up all the time, there is a deliciousness to the Prohibition Era setting and overwrought players involved. It’s not going to make anyone’s brain bigger for the effort, but it is a gooey summer treat.

This review was originally posted on Minnesota Reads.

 

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Review: ‘My Sister’s Continent’ by Gina Frangello

August 21, 2011 Leave a comment

The good twin stayed close to her Chicago home. She found a nice, albeit taupe mate named Aris, whom she plans to marry. They live together in a little loft in Chicago. She has a college degree. She makes nice with her parents and is still malleable in their hands.

She’s also got a wicked case of the runs.

It’s chronic. It is billed as being the side effect of pre-wedding jitters. But it is debilitating. Splurge on a few slices of pizza, and Kirby will spend the next few hours on the can. It’s so bad that the idea of coming in contact with her wedding dress is like a scene out of a horror film written by a filmmaker who wonders: “What could be messier than dumping pig’s blood on the prom queen?”

Gina Frangello’s debut novel My Sister’s Continent is an oozing, gooey mess of plop and slop about family and family secrets and memories, bodies, and pain. It’s written as a modern take on Freud’s “Dora” case study, but having just a Wikipedia-sized knowledge of the controversial study doesn’t seem to detract from the story.

Two years after the disappearance of her twin sister, Kendra, Kirby responds to a case study written by her own analyst, in which she believes she was mis-represented. She doubles back to tell about the 10 months, during which she was a  patient-no-client of the doctor, in her own words and alternately in her sister’s words, using old journals to fill in gaps.

Kendra returns to Chicago after a back injury makes it impossible to continue on with the New York City Ballet, where she is a dancer. She is a prickly sort, as prone to tantrums as Kirby is to tears. Her return is a messy mix of starvation, chemical cocktails, diddling with the exboyfriend she originally swiped from Kirby, and an eventual sexual relationship with her father’s partner Michael Kelsey, a man whose taste runs toward ladies who are bound, gagged, splayed, burned, and whipped. Kendra has some ill will toward her parents, which intensifies when it is revealed that her father has AIDS.

Kirby acts as an intermediary between Kendra and the family, but has her own stuff going on. Namely that she has gone gaga for Michael Kelsey’s ex-wife, also a friend of the family, who had an affair with her father and is now making Kirby’s wedding dress.

This book is intense. There were points where my jaw dropped at the raw realness of Frangello’s super complete characters and the detailed descriptions and her total control over the subject. What an honest, unflinching writer.

This was most surprising because I was struggling to get into the book. The “Dora” link kept me from picking it up in the first place, not being familiar with the case study. And the opening bits didn’t grab me, introducing this as a missive to a former analyst. But as soon as Kendra lands at the airport, this novel becomes un-put-down-able.

Frangello writes like the opposite of a person who carries hand sanitizer in her purse. She writes like a person who would dive face-first into a vat of mystery meat to find out what makes it that color. She writes like no one is watching, when really everyone should be.

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Review: ‘The London Train’ by Tessa Hadley

August 21, 2011 Leave a comment

Paul’s mother has just died. She will continue to appear in his dreams. His of-age daughter Pia, from his first marriage, has dropped out of school and has hidden her pregnant self in an apartment in London with her older Polish boyfriend and his sister. Paul’s asshole neighbor is chopping down the trees in a gray area of property line limbo. When he and his wife get into a snit about how to handle the neighbor, Paul uses the argument as an emergency exit. He ditches out on domesticity — his sturdy upper crust wife who works in furniture restoration and their two young daughters — and takes the train into the city with plans to take care of Pia.

He falls face-first into Pia’s boyfriend’s sister’s couch and then wanders. He walks, he hangs in coffee shops, and eventually he is working with Pia’s boyfriend who is trying to build an import business.

Tessa Hadley takes a gamble, introducing readers first to Paul in her novelThe London Train, which starts with Paul’s story, then segues into the story of a much more satisfying character, Cora whose life intersected Paul’s briefly.

Paul isn’t necessarily nice. He meanders. He is the type of person whom his friends reluctantly cover for, whose wife’s friends tolerate. He is a writer, not adverse to a fling, or an unsolicited cupping of a woman’s breast just because he cannot help himself. He’s going through a rough stretch to be sure. But it seems he wouldn’t not do these things if he wasn’t. He’s certainly not interesting. You imagine him walking with his hands in his pockets responding to the pokes and prods of chance.

After Paul’s slice ends, Hadley moves on to Cora’s story. The death of her mother, an inability to get pregnant, and a situation involving a fire for which her government employee husband is taking the heat has her crippled with depression. She leaves her job as an English teacher and returns to her childhood home, first to get it ready to be sold, eventually just moving in and taking a job at the local library. It takes Hadley a bit to pinpoint Cora’s funk. Then the backstory of Paul, a pompous man she had met on a train, emerges and it is clear that she took respite in a short-lived affair with him. Through her eyes, Paul is still self-centered. Dabbling in something that obviously means more to her. Stealing away for a weekend with her, but making sure she knows that if he has to choose, he chooses his wife and daughters.

For about 60 pages this is a gripping story, not a bodice ripper or fate or anything close to romantic. It’s a situation romance, seemingly medicinal for both of them. Curing Paul of the day-to-day prospect of living life, probably, and giving Cora something to look forward to. The rub: Cora is mentioned briefly in Paul’s part of the book. He refers to her generically as one of two women with whom he has had extra maritial daliances. Meanwhile, Cora waxes and wanes and has tear-lettings and rips up letters and stops cold in her tracks when she hears his voice on the radio.

It’s the meaning-of-Paul-to-Cora versus Cora’s-meaning-to-Paul that is the best part of a book that hangs out too long with the minutia, and then deviates into unlikely decisions and finales.

This review was originally posted on Minnesota Reads.

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Review: ‘Atmospheric Disturbances’ by Rivka Galchen

July 3, 2011 Leave a comment

Leo Liebenstein, a middle-aged psychiatrist, believes that his young Argentine wife Rema has been replaced by a doppelganger. She looks like his wife. She’s dressed like his wife. She’s wearing his wife’s shampoo. But it isn’t her, he’s convinced, and the fact that the former dog-hater has picked up a stray and brought it into their home is a clue in his favor. He refers to her as a simulcrum.

Rivka Galchen is no joke. For my $5.99, the best short story from The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 Fiction series was a comedic piece by her, “The Entire North Side Was Covered With Fire.” With Atmospheric Disturbances, her debut novel, she’s written a witty and complicated story starring an unreliable narrator who is trying to solve this missing-Rema riddle in a convoluted way, using exactly the kind of reasoning that has landed his paranoid schizophrenic patient Harvey in his care.

Speaking of Harvey: This all kind of starts with him. This patient believes that he is able to control weather and that he is a secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology. He specializes in local weather patterns and receives orders through Page Six of the New York Post. It’s Rema who suggests to the doctor that rather than bringing Harvey back to reality, why not join in his unreality and play the part of his handler. That way Leo can keep Harvey from disappearing for days while he handles various missions.

Leo snags the name of an actual member of the Royal Academy of Meteorology, opting for Tzvi Gal-Chen, and this name becomes the one he uses to refer to as a liaison.

Harvey goes missing again around the same time that the Simulcrum replaces Rema, which sets off a series of events in which Leo travels to Argentina, develops an email correspondence with Tzvi Gal-Chen — who turns out to be dead, takes on the identity of a young ice climber and joins forces with Harvey to fine Rema. Meanwhile, “Fake Rema” follows him around the world.

Leo Liebenstein is no dummy. He begins considering his case from both the perspective of patient and doctor and considering the validity of what he believes to be true. He decides in favor of the patient. Psychosis, afterall, is the patient’s narrative and reflects his fears and desires. Since Leo never imagined his wife would be replaced by a double or that he would become involved with weather controllers, this was all borne externally and is likely true. If, for instance, he had instead imagined that Rema was seeing other men or thinking of killing him, that would be psychosis.

This book is tricky. It gets hard to follow the chain of associations Leo makes that link different facets of the Rema case, but it is well-worth hanging in there and wading through it. Any sort of plot disinterest I had was more than made up for by what Galchen is doing and how she is doing it. There are some really lovely parts, usually starring Rema. And there are some interesting ideas about the way the mind works.

This review was originally posted by June 11, 2011 on Minnesota Reads.

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Review: ‘Twins’ by Marcy Dermansky

July 3, 2011 Leave a comment

What if instead of the smart and practical Elizabeth Wakefield girl reporter, there was a Chloe, a hardworking, soon-to-be popular teenager stunted by her enabling? And instead of that rowdy, boy-crazy Jessica Wakefield there was a Sue with the tendencies of a low-level sociopath, crippling co-dependency and a lack of self control?

And what if, when you were introduced to them, instead of giddy hopefulness about getting into the elite high school sorority, these twins were worried about the sterilization practices of a tattoo artist at the local strip mall?

This is where Marcy Dermansky has taken her pretty blonde protagonists in her wonderfully awful novel Twins. It’s like she took Sweet Valley High, plopped it in New Jersey and broke Lila Fowler’s nose with a tennis ball.

Sue strong arms her twin into getting a tattoo that says “Sue,” while she plans to get one that says “Chloe.” This is a 13th birthday marker, funded by money Sue has been stealing from their father’s wallet. She wants a permanent record of their togetherness. Chloe is reluctant, but it is nothing that some waterworks from Sue — the drama queen, prone to tantrums — can’t fix.

The story opens at a point in their relationship when Chloe is eager to shed her sister weight and forge her own identity. She’s snagged the interest of the popular crowd with her fluffy princess hair and lip gloss. At 13, she is already dreaming about going off to college, a different college than her sister.

Sue is jealous about sharing Chloe with this popular posse. And frankly, the posse isn’t really feeling her, either. She’s a little bit violent and a lot bit unstable. She breaks the ringleader’s nose with a tennis ball. She’s always waving her middle finger. She is also anti-authority and anti soap and dabbling in the art of bulimia.

Their parents, lawyers who work in New York City, are rarely home and throw hundred dollar bills at problems. Sometimes they pull out legal pads and tape recorders before not solving anything. Their older brother Daniel is a social misfit who also has his eye on the front door. He’s a Sue loyalist, though, although she fails to see that he has her back.

The twins go through a lifetime of changes in a four-year span. They are together, they aren’t together. They’re grudgingly together, Sue holding tight like a jealous boyfriend. Then Chloe finds a way out of this obsessive relationship by discovering she’s got a talent beyond conjugating verbs to get ahead in her French class.

Sue hitches her star to a sexy stranger’s pig-tailed art wagon and finds a new path — and hairstyle — of her own.

The story is told in alternating voices as the twins race to find new and specially tailored routes to rock bottom.

Dermansky likes her characters flawed. She likes to roll them in muck. And like I said after lapping up her other novel, Bad Marie, she likes to rip the wings off of them. And so far she is 2-for-2 in writing the sort of stories that make one cackle with evil glee.

This review was originally posted on June 6, 2011 on Minnesota Reads.

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