Up and Coming from Cameroon: Imbolo Mbue

Imbolo Mbue's debut novel, Behold the Dreamers, is both timely and timeless, and compulsively readable.  Mbue confronts head on the challenges of being an immigrant amidst the relentless pace and demands of New York City.  Mbue tells the story of Jende, Neni, and their young son, trying to make a better life for themselves.  Jende works as a driver for Lehman Brothers exec Clark Edwards, and Neni works for Mrs. Edwards.  The more time they spend with the Edwards family, the more they start to see beyond the wealth and privilege that the family exudes, to the more troubling undercurrents.  With the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Jende's job is threatened which puts a significant strain on his family, and even his marriage.   Mbue has written a brilliant first novel - highly recommended! 

The stacks: 818

I had a true "Dewey Decimalist" moment while at the public library the other day.  I found myself wandering the stacks, and stumbled upon the 818 section.  Here, I found lots of old looking somewhat encrusted books, but with very fabulous titles such as Onions in the Stew, My Sister Eileen, Oranges, and, Life Among the Savages.  I wasn't sure what the common thread was (memoirs?  light reportage?), so when I went home I found out that 818 refers to the quite general "American miscellaneous writings in English."  It is very rare for me to pluck books off the shelf with reckless abandon, having no idea what these titles might contain, but I quickly perused them and they all looked like gems.  In just a few hours, I polished off My Sister Eileen, by Ruth McKenney.  Come to find out, McKenney had a fascinating life.  Raised in Ohio and a precocious student (French, debate team, etc.), she was a tomboy with a sardonic wit to boot.  She studied journalism in college and wrote for the student newspaper, the Ohio State Lantern.  She survived one suicide attempt, and eventually moved to a moldy apartment in Greenwich Village with her sister Eileen.  Their real-life experiences were featured in a series of essays published in The New Yorker.  Anthologized in My Sister Eileen, they are highly readable and entertaining, with essay titles such as "No Tears, No Good," "A Loud Sneer for Our Feathered Friends," and "Mr. Spitzer and the Fungus."  Here are a few lines from "The Prince:"

He was handsome enough, if you like that dark, beady type.  Personally, one Georgian prince was enough for me....even Eileen, the belle of the Midwest, hadn't been able to gather in, during her heart-smashing career, so much as a Belgian count.  

So, having told one whopper, I went on, as is my unhappy custom, and told several more.  

NYC: Gangsters in the Guilded Age

If you are looking for a fast-paced, intelligent caper, look no further than Charles Belfoure's House of Thieves, which captures 1886 New York City high society as well as its underworld.  Family secrets, deceptions, crime, glamour, gangsters, heists - it's all contained in this very entertaining novel, centered around John Cross, a successful architect, and his son who finds himself in over his head with gambling debt.  Part historical fiction, literary thriller, and family character study, this is a book you will stay up late at night to finish! 

Rags and Riches

There are many Doctorow books that I really enjoyed (my most favorite being World's Fair), and while Ragtime was filled with interesting characters and sub-plots, it felt overly peopled and without focus.  Doctorow employs an interesting technique of including both real people (Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Harry Houdini, etc.), with fictional characters.  While he captures the excitement of New York City in the early 1900s before WWI and focuses on ideas and events critical to that era in American history, there was no one story line that truly engaged me. 

First novel of 2014: Tartt-astic!

The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt's third novel, is over 700 pages long.  I never once looked at the page number I was on, or flipped forward to see how many pages were left in a particular chapter, and that is one of the highest complements I can give, especially to such a behemoth book.  This is an engrossing, dizzying, rollicking, heartbreaking book.  I felt like I was along for the (roller coaster) ride of Theo Decker's life, as he comes to reconcile his mother's death and his isolation in the world.  This was a great novel!

Call the Doctor(ow)

World's Fair is an engaging, smartly written novel with some beautiful passages.  Set in the Bronx in the 1930s, we meet Edgar when he is 9 years old, and the novel culminates with the World's Fair in 1939.  The book explores Edgar's relationship with his older brother, and also centers around his parents' marriage.  The novel is rich with memorable scenes, such as the one in which Edgar, his brother, and their friends build an igloo in the backyard.  I also loved the simple description of a delicious snack provided by Joe the Sweet Potato Man - "It was not only something to eat but something to warm my hands against as if I had plucked a tiny hearth from an elf's house."  Probably my favorite Doctorow work so far, slightly above Homer and Langley and Billy Bathgate. 

Still talking about Potok

Earlier this year I read several Potok novels, my favorite being My Name is Asher Lev.  Potok has a distinctive writing style that is very consistent throughout all of his books, which I had enjoyed in his other works but found repetitive in In the Beginning, which tells the story of David Lurie's upbringing in the 1920s in the Bronx and follows his young life through the Great Depression, World War II, and the Holocaust.  While Potok's novels are all page-turners, In the Beginning was not one of my favorite of his works, but perhaps only because Potok's dialogue and family scenes are very similar to other novels of his that I already read.  Also, while In the Beginning is more sweeping in scope and slightly less insular than his other works, it lacks the focus and intensity that I appreciated in Potok's other novels.  Regardless, Potok is a wonderful writer and an important voice in American literature, though I would recommend starting with The Chosen or My Name is Asher Lev. 

BB King (of the Bronx)

Billy Bathgate, written by E.L. Doctorow and published in 1989, tells the coming of age story of a teenage boy from a poor neighborhood in the Bronx, who figures out a way into a group of mobsters led by the infamous Dutch Schultz.  Told from Billy's perspective, Doctorow does a brilliant job of capturing a young boy's bravado, vulnerability, ingenuity, desire, and need to belong and be loved.  Having grown up without his father, Billy seeks mentors and father figures, and finds it in the clan-like and familial (as well as brutal and mercurial) Schultz gang. Billy gets in over his head but manages to find a way out.    

Billy Bathgate is one of Doctorow's most acclaimed novels, as it won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was the runner up for the Pulitzer Prize.  

The only other novel I have ready by Doctorow is Homer & Langley, which I also really enjoyed.  Can't wait to read more! 

Potok Prevails!

I devoured Chaim Potok's sequel to My Name is Asher Lev, called The Gift of Asher Lev, as well as his first novel, The Chosen, in just one week.  They were both riveting novels - highly recommended.

The Gift of Asher Lev fast forwards about twenty years in Asher's life, and we now find him a married man with two children, and an internationally known and successful artist. Having been exiled to France after creating art as a young man that was seen as a desecration to his Ladover Hasidic community, Asher is now more at home in France than he is in the neighborhood in which he grew up in Brooklyn.  Asher receives word of a death in the family, and needs to return to Brooklyn for just a few days, which turns into several months.  Torn between the desire to create community for his children and reconcile with his parents, and to live a more free and unrestrained life in France, the book navigates loyalty to family and how this can conflict with one's own self preservation.  There are many touching scenes in the book between the characters, thus making it come to life in a way that My Name is Asher Lev did not achieve.  Overall, I suggest reading the two of them together - you won't be able to put them down!

I read The Chosen probably twenty years ago in high school, and I am happy that I took the time to read it again.  The book follows the friendship between Reuven and Danny as they come of age. Reuven lives with his widowed father, who is supportive of his wish to become a rabbi, and who himself has Zionist beliefs.  Danny's father is a rabbi and a highly religious Hasidic Jew, who has raised his son in silence and only communicates with him about the Talmud.  Despite the fact that Danny is expected through his lineage to become a rabbi, he is more interested in becoming a psychologist.  The two boys share their experiences and hardships together, and form a bond despite their different upbringings.  We see these same two characters again in Potok's The Promise.  Again, these would be a great two books to be read in tandem!

Potok's writing is intellectual yet accessible, and brings the reader into the insular world of growing up Jewish in Brooklyn in WWII and beyond.  Not to be missed!

Re-visiting Potent Potok

 

On a recent visit to the library, I was looking for a copy of Charles Portis' True Grit (see earlier review below)  Finding myself in the "Po..." section, Chaim Potok's novel The Promise caught my eye.  Having remembered enjoying The Chosen many years ago, I thought I would take on another Potok work.  The Promise is a wonderful novel in many ways - the construction of the narrative, the pace, the character development, and the deep exploration of ideas in an intellectual yet accessible manner.  I couldn't put it down, and I was very interested to learn what would happen.  The story centers around Reuven Malter, a young man living in post-WWII Williamsburg, Brooklyn, studying to be a rabbi at a yeshiva.  He has a difficult relationship with one of his teachers, Rav Kalman, who takes great issue with his way of interpreting and questioning sacred Jewish texts.  Meanwhile, Reuven becomes intertwined in the life of a troubled teenage boy, Michael, who is a patient of Reuven's good friend Danny, a newly minted psychologist.  I learned a great deal about Judaism in this novel, and it is written in a highly intriguing way.  This is novel of ideas and of great tenderness.  I will be reading more (and maybe all) of Potok's novels, based on the highly satisfying experience contained in the luminous pages of The Promise.