Book Rate

by Lynn Stegner (Flyover Fiction/University of Nebraska, 286 pages) - Reviewed by Robert Birnbaum

Someone (actually, I don't doubt many people) at the University of Nebraska Press has a sense of humor--the otherwise scurrilous appellation, Fly Over [Fiction, edited by Ron Hansen], designating most of the United States between Philadelphia and Denver and no doubt coined in the center of ambition and greed, is appropriately mocking of that slur. As if to confirm the know-nothingness behind many things coined in Manhattan, this imprint's offering of Lynn Stegner's fifth novel affirms that (which ought be unnecessary) wonderful and creative human beings are doing great work out of sight of the great media gods of New York. Okay, I got that off my chest--

Lynn Stegner, whose bloodline (wife of Page Stegner, daughter-in-law of Wallace Stegner), in horseracing, would make her a prohibitive favorite, presents a story whose title is borrowed from Irish poet William Butler Yeats's "The Song of Wandering Aengus." The main character, Kate Riley, was born on the austere plains of Saskatchewan (for you Americans, that's in western Canada) in 1931. Her beloved father dies of cancer when she is ten and Kate appears to spend the rest of her life attempting to recover the secure warmth of her father's love via countless unsatisfying liaisons, resulting in pregnancies and children (whom she abandons) and havoc in the lives she touches. Stegner's supple prose renders her protagonist with acuity and precision and gives us that pleasurable result that--may I say--readers are in search of, a good story well told.

Read an excerpt from Because a Fire Was in My Head. (pdf)

Purchase at Powell's.

posted by Matt Borondy on 4/30/2007

by Jonathan Eig (Simon and Schuster, 323 pages) - Reviewed by Robert Birnbaum

Though I am a nearly lifetime follower of baseball, I would not argue that most baseball books, including biographies, rise to the level of general interest. Not so those about Jackie Robinson.

Wall Street Journal editor Jonathan Eig's new opus (he has previously written about Lou Gehrig) accounts for Robinson's color-barrier-breaking first season in the Bigs, sixty years ago. Because of Robinson's accomplishments--and an ample dose of white guilt--Robinson's life (forgive the pun) is usually presented as a hagiographic whitewash. Eig makes clear that despite a weak arm, a gimpy ankle, a lack of experience, and being a twenty-eight-year-old rookie, Robinson's characterological gifts helped him to prevail over, if not overwhelming, then at least intimidating odds.

Additionally, Eig updates the Robinson legend/legacy by fleshing out the effect number 42 had on young blacks (and whites): Malcolm X, former Virginia governor Doug Wilder, the NAACP's Gil Jonas, and writer Robert Parker, to name a few.

This a fine and compelling narrative that, given the subject matter, easily doubles as cultural history without the droning didacticism to which such accounts are susceptible.

In Boston, where the Red Sox were the last to team to "integrate," David Ortiz was chosen to wear Robinson's number as a part of Major League baseball 60^th anniversary tribute--and, gee whiz, he has his own book, Big Papi: My Story of Big Dreams and Big Hits (with Boston Herald sportswriter Tony Massarotti). I have been reading it to my 9-year-old son, Cuba, and it does fall into the category I mentioned above. Despite the manufactured hoopla, the irony of a racist metropolis embracing a big, very black Dominican and "Big Papi" endlessly (though not singingly) fall off the tongues of Bostonians, it's impossible to find fault with Senor Ortiz. It's beautiful thing to see character trump bullshit and other societal depredations. Me, I say, "Play ball!"

Purchase Opening Day online.

posted by Matt Borondy on 4/27/2007

Elise Blackwell has a new novel out this month, The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish. It's an elegant, economically written 200-pager that takes place in southern Louisiana on the eve of Hurricane Katrina and in the memory of the main character, 90-year-old Louis Proby, who recalls how his life was ruined by another great flood in 1927.

A true Southerner (in the sense that she grew up in southern Louisiana and teaches at South Carolina), Blackwell is well equipped to tell this very compelling tale, which has earned quite a bit of national praise already. We hope to cover this book more on the site in the near future. For now, here are some links:

Read my 2003 interview with Elise Blackwell about her previous novel, Hunger.

Read an excerpt from The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish.

Purchase The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish at Powell's. posted by Matt Borondy on 4/26/2007

William H. Gass' A Temple of Texts has been named the winner of the 2007 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, the largest cash prize for English-language lit crit.

As noted in the press release announcing the award, Stephen Schenkenberg reviewed A Temple of Texts for Identity Theory last year, saying:

Throughout the book's 25 essays, Gass is the champion -- sometimes joyful, sometimes harsh -- of intellectual fitness. For him, reading is a form of aerobics. It is a demanding, exertive, physical act, and as such it stretches, tones, and conditions those who are turning the pages. . . .

This is one of William H. Gass's greatest skills: articulating, and indeed celebrating how the finest artworks find a physical place in our lives. And in this, his most personal and generous essay collection, he does it so often and so magically that the book almost rattles when I carry it.

Read full Identity Theory review of A Temple of Texts.

Purchase A Temple of Texts online.

posted by Matt Borondy on 4/25/2007

You might recall this clip from Douglas Light's short story "Separate" published on Identity Theory last May:

To blame my parents' divorce on my father's missing hand is to blame a fire on the wood and not the spark that blazed it. True, my folks stopped sleeping together soon after the accident, but that was because my father took to rubbing his stump against my mother's thighs as she slept.

Light's debut novel, East Fifth Bliss (Behler, 220 pages), carries many of the same qualities as that piece (but with more refinement, as you'd expect), and like "Separate," it describes a naive man's abnormal relationship with his father. Here's more info from the book's website:

There are seven defining moments in a person's life. For Morris Bliss, the difficulty is in knowing which moments are defining. At age thirty-five, Morris Bliss is clamped in the jaws of New York City inertia: he wants to travel but has no money; he needs a job but has no prospects; he still shares a walk-up apartment with his father.

Enter Stefani, an eighteen-year-old girl in a catholic school uniform, and Morris's once static life quickly unravels...

Purchase East Fifth Bliss online.

posted by Matt Borondy on 4/24/2007