Summer Books #5: Dance Dance Dance

Everyone has their own set of little anecdotes - cocktail party patter, clever one-liners and quips that can be recycled over and over, to be replaced seasonally. Personal talking points, in a way.

The unnamed protagonist of Haruki Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance has one of these talking points that he’s particularly proud of, which he brings up again and again when asked about his job as a freelance writer.

Well, somebody’s got to write these things. And the same can be said for collecting garbage and shoveling snow. It doesn’t matter whether you like it or not, a job’s a job.

For three and a half years, I’d been making this kind of contribution to society. Shoveling snow. You know, cultural snow.

That the narrator so transparently recycles the “cultural snow” line was terribly endearing to me. It reinforces the down to earth and surprisingly accessible nature of Murakami’s protagonists - despite the often bizarre circumstances they find themselves in, they’re really pretty normal, slightly disaffected, people. Much like Kurt Vonnegut, Murakami excels when it comes to the atmospheric internal monologue.

What happens in the book? The loner narrator is searching for a lost love. More mysteries are uncovered than solved. Odd, supernatural things occur, but are presented as fairly unremarkable. More than anything, it’s about how nice it can be when confused, lonely people fall into serendipitous friendships, and manage to muster the strength to take these relationships at face value and simply enjoy them.

Dance Dance Dance: ****/5

Up next: Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.
Click here for the index of past reviews.

Summer Books #4: Bluebeard

There’s a spectrum that you can use to classify Kurt Vonnegut’s work, with “Plot Heavy” on one end and “Abstract Musings” on the other. His first novel, Player Piano, would be clearly on the Plot Heavy side, while Bluebeard, one of Vonnegut’s final novels, exists entirely on the opposite side.

And that’s a real shame, because Vonnegut’s best books are, naturally, the works that reside somewhere in the gray area. Cat’s Cradle took a thoroughly abstract and bizarre set of circumstances and created real drama and pathos. Slaughterhouse-Five’s primary concerns were grounded solidly in reality, with the added “unstuck in time” elements providing the abstraction.

Bluebeard, however, cannot bridge the gap.  The simultaneous storylines of the old Armenian painter Rabo Karabekian writing his autobiography and the events that took place when he was a young man are flimsy and not particularly engaging.  It’s an enjoyable enough read for a Vonnegut junkie who can get by on loads of whimiscal atmosphere, but Bluebeard can’t be classified as essential.

Bluebeard: **/5

Up next: Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance.
Click here for the index of past reviews.

Summer Books #3: The Good Life

I don’t know if I’ll really ever be able to describe why, but I’ve got a minor fascination with 9/11 literature. There’s Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, there’s DeLillo’s brand new Falling Man, and there’s Jay McInerney’s The Good Life.

Like most people who have read anything by McInerney, all I’d read of his was Bright Lights, Big City, which is an undeniably fantastic, frantic glimpse into 1980’s excess. Written in second person, the book is a scant 200 pages, though it reads more like 60.

You’ve probably been able to guess my problem, then. I went into The Good Life hoping to find the way that Bright Lights‘ unnamed protagonist handled the 9/11 assault on his Manhattan playground.

That’s there, though in a much different way. McInerney recycles characters from his fourth novel, Brightness Falls, where they had originally dealt with infidelity and forced maturity as they reached their thirties (or so Amazon.com tells me). That these were not original characters was unbeknownst to me until after I had finished the novel, but it really doesn’t come up.

But while Bright Lights played fast and loose, The Good Life is, well, plodding. The problems facing the characters are established early, and simply reiterated over and over for the next 300 pages. The illicit romance that the two main characters strike up in the weeks following 9/11 is loosely tied to the tragedy, but as I read on, I grew to question that connection, and the terrorism backdrop begins to feel exploitative (much like the novel’s original cover, pictured here which was replaced with this much better, or at least subtler, version for the paperback).

Honestly, this could have been a killer long New Yorker fiction piece, but alas, it isn’t.

The Good Life: **/5

Up next: Vonnegut’s Bluebeard.
Past reviews: High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, The Road by Cormack McCarthy