One Minute Book Reviews

I have been remiss in commenting upon the books I've read the past few months. To wit:

The Fortress of Solitude, by Jonathan Lethem.   Thoroughly enjoyed this. Swore as I read it that Lethem and Michael Chabon must have worked in adjacent cubicles while the latter finished Kavalier and Clay. (It turns out they are friends, along with Dave Eggers, and travel in similar circles...more on that some other time.) Fortress nails the seventies: the music, the culture, the changing times. The language is terrific; the characters compelling; and the pace unhurried (I did not say boring). And honestly, it is a great bookend alongside The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay--one day some careful reader will undoubtedly compose a thesis comparing the two; some are already making the comparison.

A Widow for One Year, by John Irving.   Irving's best since The World According to Garp. It is clear to me now that it was the excesses of A Prayer for Owen Meany that put me off Irving for so many years. But Widow has fewer of those excesses while preserving many of Irving's hallmark traits including black comedy, Dickensian characters, metafictional conceits, uncommon sexual obsessions, undercurrents of grief, and as one Washington Post reviewer points out, "there's hardly a writer alive who can match [Irving's] control of the omniscient point of view." (Which odd as it may seem to select that quote, it should resonate with any reader and would-be author of children's literature.)

Under the Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer.   Krakauer follows Into the Wild (a man's ill-fated pilgrimage into the Alaskan wilderness) and Into Thin Air (a tragic ascent of Mt. Everest) with this disturbing tale of Mormon Fundamentalism and an examination of the 1984 murder of a woman and her baby by brothers who insisted they were acting upon a commandment from God. I found the book ill-organized and repetitive, often difficult to follow, but I couldn't put it down or get it out of my mind. I know of careless-thinking readers who finished it with a condemning view of all Mormons, but it's the still flourishing Morman Fundamentalist sects of which Krakauer is most concerned, and what he reveals is both sad and chilling, and frankly, morally repugnant. I found myself haunted by and sickened at the fate of many unprotected and ignored teenage girls in America who even today are being brain-washed and abused.

Prey, by Michael Crichton.   Michael Crichton still knows the formula for creating a page turner. I ripped through this one in three days, just like Jurassic Park and Congo, and as I have all the way back to The Andromeda Strain which I read in high school. Once again Crichton combines technology, plot, and pacing to create a thriller that has you up late, reading long after your self-prescribed chapter limit. It's an enjoyable diversion--one that ends too quickly as is often the case with this genre--and it doesn't take much imagination to envision the blockbuster movie to follow: in fact, there are one or two blatant examples of artistic license that Crichton arguably employs because he foresees how compelling the special effects will be on a large movie screen. But, hey, the man is a master entertainer, wildly successful with novels, movies, and television shows (notably ER). Who am I to quibble with his formulas for success?