Book Reviews

Our critics pick their favorite books of 2007.

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Published: Dec 26, 2007

It's the classic question: If money were no object, what would you do? For Tom McCarthy's unnamed protagonist, the answer is simple: whatever it takes to attain inner peace. After the Everyman awakens from a coma to a big cash settlement of corporate hush money, things begin benignly enough. He has little difficulty finding others to assist him with his plans (and relieve him of his wealth), and money becomes the enabler greasing the slopes of eccentricity to the point where those individuals in it for the money realize too late that things have gotten horribly, horribly out of hand. Remainder is a mesmerizing novel, and McCarthy's gripping prose draws the reader into the increasingly off-kilter orbit of a man without conscience or financial obstacles following his unusual desires to their furthest conclusions.

—Jesse Delaney

Every year they give us the "it" book, usually by a comely young writer universally praised by critics and snarked-upon by bloggers. Ferris is this year's Marisha Pessl (the Ben Kunkel of 2006), and his highly anticipated comedic novel is a worthy debut and easy sell. A tale told in first person plural, the "we" is the staff of a struggling Chicago ad agency facing the downside of the '90s boom that reads like a well-developed screenplay for a clever office farce. Nick Hornby described Then We Came to the End as "The Office meets Kafka," and the writing matches its ability to entertain.

—Kristin McGonigle

I'm afraid that it's entirely possible there were better books than Matt Ruff's Bad Monkeys published this year. At the same time, all of those were just that — better — overstuffed 800-page doorstoppers of erudition and deep feeling and lapidary craftsmanship. Bad Monkeys, on the other hand, is fast and absurd, starting with a murder confession in a jail cell and ripping off in all directions from there. Murderer Jane Charlotte's conviction that her crimes came in the cosmic struggle against capital-E Evil only hints at the crazy/sane problems Ruff chases. Even better, he bowls along with equal parts Eric Ambler and Phillip K. Dick, and his monkeys bring enough velocity and vigor with them to make suspension of disbelief more than willing.

—Justin Bauer

"Big as a telephone book" is a cliché, but you don't understand. This is as big as a telephone book. It is not a book to be carried; it is a book to be transported. When you open it somewhere in the middle, the weight falls on your hands and makes you think you're holding two separate books. Fact is, The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps was originally published as three separate books, each of them big and fat and glorious on their own. But Otto Penzler and Black Lizard have done something crazy. They've defied the laws of book binding and time and space and glued these three monsters — more than 1,150 pages of classic pulp stories — into one physical object. This slab of hardboiled noir pulp goodness is thick enough to stop a bullet. (In fact, a 9mm may make it only two-thirds of the way through, stopping somewhere around Laura Lippman's introduction to the "Dames" section.)

And I haven't even told you about the treasures inside: a new, never-before-published Hammett. Three Chandler stories. Three Woolriches. Two complete novels. (Two!) Both Cains (James M. and Paul). Horace McCoy. Steve Fisher. And dozens of unfamiliar names that will thrill you, because even if you've been a serious student of pulps and pulp anthologies and pulp studies, chances are you're going to discover someone/something new.

So yeah, The Big Book of Pulps. I've been gnawing on it like a starving dog with a 76-ounce steak. It makes me happy just knowing this book exists.

—Duane Swierczynski

Nice goin', South Carolina Democrats. These guys are either completely out of touch with the rest of the country, or they didn't read Colbert's book yet. For all of us who had been pulling for Colbert country to become a reality, we still have I Am America (And So Can You!). Structured in a manner not unlike his alma maters The Daily Show and John Stewart-collaborated America (The Book), Colbert takes his tongue-in-cheek conservative alter ego to new lengths with chapters like "Higher Education: Smarties Pantsed" and "Sports: When It's OK to Shower with Men." It's an exclusive read for the smart and smartass set. Bonus incentive to stay until the end: Colbert's ballsy and wildly funny speech at the White House correspondents' dinner. You blew it, South Carolina.

—Aly Semigran

Dishwasher is what a zine looks like when it finally stumbles on the luxury of financial backing and sufficient paper/print/postage to really fulfill its purpose. Believe that a dishdog (his term) whose ambition was to use his pearl-diving skills in each of the 50 states has collected some pretty wry stories. Jordan writes like your buddy who gets a couple beers in him and can't be silenced. You keep the suds coming, 'cause it's just that funny. He speaks of eating from the Bus Tray Buffet while trying his best to resist the bosses' favorite dictum: "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean," shaking his head the whole time over human foibles he witnesses at close hand. Jordan's patience for drama and low pay gave out before he worked all 50. While we regret the loss of stories, we congratulate him on his personal evolution.

—Mary Armstrong

Anyone who's visited 28 Barbary Lane has likely been awaiting word from one of Armistead Maupin's eccentric cast of characters. First appearing as a series in the San Francisco Chronicle during the mid-1970s, Tales of the City, with its gender-bending plot twists, became a hallmark of gay writing well into the AIDS era. Michael Tolliver Lives might as well be considered the seventh volume in Maupin's beloved ode to the City by the Bay, as this new novel centers on former resident Michael "Mouse" Tolliver who navigates the new millennium under very different circumstances.

Now in his 50s, Mouse is living with HIV and a lover 21 years his senior. Written in first person (thus hinting the character may be based on Maupin himself), the novel weaves several other familiar faces as this middle-aged gay man confronts age, safe sex and self-consciousness in modern-day San Fran. Tales alum and notorious lady lover Brian Hawkins is now father to a sexually liberated daughter. And Mrs. Madrigal, the famous transsexual landlady, is alive and well at 85.

Michael Tolliver Lives is a welcome return to the fictional escapism offered by the book and DVD series, though in name only. Gone are the mood rings, the underwear contests and the freewheeling sexuality that defined an era. But thankfully, Maupin's lovable, older and wiser cast manages to be just as enigmatic as ever.

—Natalie Hope McDonald

While political discussions about today's teenagers seem perennial, it's worth remembering that the concept of "adolescence" itself is barely a century old. Jon Savage's book is a thorough study of teenage life in America and Europe from 1875 to World War II, a period when experts such as psychologist G. Stanley Hall began seeing people in their teens and early 20s as a discrete sociological and economic class. Savage presents "the conflicting attempts to envisage and define the status of youth" both formally (the modern U.S. high school, the U.K.'s introduction of the Boy Scouts) and informally (the rise of teen idols Rudolph Valentino and Frank Sinatra). Savage, author of the Sex Pistols' history England's Dreaming, draws a clear line connecting 1920s flappers, 1940s zoot-suiters and 1970s punks. He ends by quoting a 1945 Vogue article predicting that "the time is overdue for a teenage revolution in this country. In America, this generation is something to be reckoned with." The tumult of 1950s and '60s youth was huge, but Teenage concludes that it was hardly unprecedented.

—Andrew Milner

I was totally, unashamedly and happily seduced by André Aciman's Call Me By Your Name. This beautiful, emotionally intimate novel simmers with delicious sexual tensions. Oliver, an American stranger, enters an Italian family's household for a summer and causes palpable erotic longing/obsession in their 17-year-old son, Elio. And while a passionate episode in which one character masturbates with an Italian peach was memorable, Call Me By Your Name was about more than sex. This masterfully written novel captured the anxiety of love, and the way people want to control one another. The romanticism of the title and the brilliantly rendered mind-sets of the main characters left me awestruck. In fact, I rushed out and bought Aciman's brilliant memoir, Out of Egypt, looking for clues to how he created such an absorbing novel, and how he could create characters who got under my skin and stayed there all year. Like Elio for Oliver, I remain in Acimen's romantic sway and psychological power. It is a pleasureful place to be.

—Gary M. Kramer

Junot Díaz took 10 years to follow up his critically acclaimed short-story collection Drown, which cemented his place as a short-prose virtuoso and a brash new voice whose English was a second language in a stuffy, predominately white medium. His novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is similar to the tone and themes of Drown. Oscar is a kid trying to navigate the streets of urban North Jersey and dealing with the confusing layers of racial identity both as a Dominican and American while trying not to get his ass kicked. Full of history, mythology, humor, blood and moments of grace, the life of Oscar Wao reads like a Dominican teenager who just discovered Flannery O'Connor and can't stop talking about it.

—Kristin McGonigle

The concept seemed a recipe for disaster — an entire book about the Apple Computer options backdating scandal written by someone pretending to be Steve Jobs. That oPtion$ not only isn't a schticky mess, but is actually nuanced, poignant and, far as we can tell, historically accurate, is something like a revelation on top of a relief. In oPtion$, "Fake Steve Jobs," aka Forbes senior editor Daniel Lyons — who also runs a blog (fakesteve.blogspot.com) that Real Steve apparently reads — recounts the stock scandal that nearly sank the Apple CEO from Jobs' point of view. Though Jobs is presented as a giant caricature, Lyons doesn't just play catchphrases like "I invented the friggin iPod, have you heard of it?" and quirks like Jobs' yen for mango smoothies and paradoxical embrace of Zen philosophy for laughs. He uses them to draw a complicated, if parodic, Julius Caesar-esque portrait of a genius nearly done in by his indulgences and his underlings. And it's pretty funny, too.

—Brian Howard

Some things are worth a bit of melancholy and a box of tissues. With its frank, careful tone underlying lushly vibrant storytelling, Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns breathes life to generations of Afghan women's countless struggles: for love, faith, most often survival. Toggling back and forth between the lives of two women — one the bastard child of a wealthy cinema owner, forced to marry a gruesome man who shrouds her freedom with a burqa and regular beatings; the other raised by educated people, only to lose everything when a stray rocket obliterates her home and everyone inside it — and then joining their stories, Hosseini captures their individual desperation, constant fear and, most pointedly, faith amid vast hopelessness. In the end, the women find that their will to endure depends entirely on each other's strength. Using the past 30 years of Afghanistan's political tumult as a backdrop, Hosseini's personal histories become even more palpable. When a husband kicks his wife in the ribs, we feel it in our bones. When long-lost lovers are reunited, we keep our fingers crossed that it won't all come crumbling down.

—Carolyn Huckabay

After what seemed like a ridiculously long wait, the "patron saint of small-town fiction" is back with a new novel, and it's good. As Richard Russo succinctly put it at his Free Library reading in October, Bridge of Sighs is a book about the ones who stay and the ones who leave, and therefore, it's more melancholy than anything Russo's offered before. Deeper and more subtly nuanced than the 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls — and much less dramatically topical, thankfully — Bridge of Sighs splits its time between small-town New York and big-time Venice, detailing exactly the reasons for the staying and going. This doesn't split or water down Russo's narrative focus, though; the book is pointed and poignant, deftly going from present to distant past to more recent and back again without showboating or artifice. It is the work of a sharp and mature novelist — but one with whom it is undoubtedly still loads of fun to share a beer.

—Nancy Armstrong

While 1905 — the year in which the theories of Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud were first published along with James Joyce's Dubliners — hogs the spotlight as the Great Year, there's a lot (perhaps more) to be said for its plucky younger brother, 1908: a year in which, among other notable events, the Wright Brothers flew publicly for the fist time (a later demonstration, that same year, would result in the first airplane fatality); New York City passed a law banning women from smoking in public; bomb-hurling anarchists (the "Islamofascists" of the day) spread panic; and the first Model-T Ford rolled off the assembly line. Jim Rasenberger does an excellent and nearly effortless job walking the reader through the highs (the sense of optimism that pervaded American life), the lows (the wholesale murder of blacks at the hands of lynch mobs), and the retrospective oddities (a Dewer's ad touting the joys of drinking while driving) of a remarkable year.

 

—Rodney Anonymous

Our first glimpse of Cheryl is her mother's last. Like so many disaffected teenagers before her, Cheryl chafes at the conformity and hypocrisy of suburbia and takes off for Minneapolis, where she can reject her parents by squatting, panhandling and loving a damaged boy who doesn't even call her by her name. Her mother, Julia, knows that path well, having trod a similar one back in the '80s, before she was tied down by marriage and meds. Sometimes Julia calls Cheryl and pleads with her voicemail to come home; sometimes she hides what she knows from her well-meaning husband. Mostly, she uses her maternal insight, narrating a present for her daughter that blurs with her own stint as a punk muse.

First-time novelist Joshua Furst knows his emotional and cultural terrain and he keeps up the tension through The Sabotage Café's final haunting twist. (For full effect, program your iPod with his Minnesota-centric playlist, which includes a clutch of songs by Julia's contemporaries, like the Replacements and Hüsker Dü, as well as the Hold Steady's "Your Little Hoodrat Friend" for Cheryl.) If none of the other characters feel as sharp as the alienated mother and child, all the better. Even in a fogged mind, that's a clear view.

—M.J. Fine

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