September 03, 2010
From the Beach to Tokyo, With Corporate America Between
Dillard and Murakami are back, and Ferris is just getting started.
Two literary heavyweights are back this summer, but the reading feels like a breeze. And one relative newcomer paints the woes of corporate America, reminding us that we all probably need a vacation.
The Maytrees by Annie Dillard
For serious readers, or those who want a more literary bent to their summer reading list, Annie Dillard's new novel is a must. Set on Cape Cod shortly after World War II, two literary types fall in love and settle into a laconic, enduring relationship. The beach becomes a character, too: "Twice a day behind their house the tide boarded the sand," Dillard writes. "Four times a year the seasons flopped over. Clams live like this, but without so much reading as the Maytrees."
The book is quintessential Dillard, who won the Pulitzer for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in 1975 and writes about nature as poetically and unsentimentally as anyone else.
She tells a romance of a different kind, questioning the nature of love and exploring the Maytrees' marriage as they accept each other's betrayals and faults quietly, but without hesitation. – Susan Gray Blue
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
The literary debut of former ad man Joshua Ferris recounts the slow, painful (and painfully funny) downsizing of a Chicago advertising firm during the tail end of the 1990s economic boom.
Told almost entirely in the first-person-plural voice of "we," the novel reads like a marathon water-cooler meeting, as likely to parse the smallest grain of meaning from a team leader's casual aside as tear off a pages-long rant about obnoxious coworkers.
Rife with laugh-out-loud, instantly recognizable details of cubicle life, what finally separates Then We Came to the End from other office-based novels is the compassion that Ferris shows his characters. Especially affecting is the story of 40-something chief executive Lynn, whose belief in self-reliance is challenged when she discovers a lump on her breast. By the last page, the author's use of the "we" perspective feels entirely earned. – Chris Clancy
After Dark by Haruki Murakami
In his absorbing new novel, Haruki Murakami creates a narrator out of an invisible surveillance camera and takes us along as he tracks several characters through one Tokyo night. A musician runs into the sister of a former friend at a Denny's … then we meet the other sister who's perhaps in a coma or an alternate universe … and so on through a chain of connections and coincidences that involve both a desolate office building and a "love hotel."
Murakami's inventive storytelling is no surprise, but how easily and insightfully he distills the mysteries of existence into such a short book certainly is.
His fans will recognize the dreamlike, eerie landscape and quirky characters, and anyone who hasn't read this Japanese novelist yet can catch up here quickly. Despite its novella length, After Dark slows down time itself, thanks to Murakami's beautifully detailed descriptions. – Susan Gray Blue
The Maytrees by Annie Dillard
For serious readers, or those who want a more literary bent to their summer reading list, Annie Dillard's new novel is a must. Set on Cape Cod shortly after World War II, two literary types fall in love and settle into a laconic, enduring relationship. The beach becomes a character, too: "Twice a day behind their house the tide boarded the sand," Dillard writes. "Four times a year the seasons flopped over. Clams live like this, but without so much reading as the Maytrees."
The book is quintessential Dillard, who won the Pulitzer for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in 1975 and writes about nature as poetically and unsentimentally as anyone else.
She tells a romance of a different kind, questioning the nature of love and exploring the Maytrees' marriage as they accept each other's betrayals and faults quietly, but without hesitation. – Susan Gray Blue
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
The literary debut of former ad man Joshua Ferris recounts the slow, painful (and painfully funny) downsizing of a Chicago advertising firm during the tail end of the 1990s economic boom.
Told almost entirely in the first-person-plural voice of "we," the novel reads like a marathon water-cooler meeting, as likely to parse the smallest grain of meaning from a team leader's casual aside as tear off a pages-long rant about obnoxious coworkers.
Rife with laugh-out-loud, instantly recognizable details of cubicle life, what finally separates Then We Came to the End from other office-based novels is the compassion that Ferris shows his characters. Especially affecting is the story of 40-something chief executive Lynn, whose belief in self-reliance is challenged when she discovers a lump on her breast. By the last page, the author's use of the "we" perspective feels entirely earned. – Chris Clancy
After Dark by Haruki Murakami
In his absorbing new novel, Haruki Murakami creates a narrator out of an invisible surveillance camera and takes us along as he tracks several characters through one Tokyo night. A musician runs into the sister of a former friend at a Denny's … then we meet the other sister who's perhaps in a coma or an alternate universe … and so on through a chain of connections and coincidences that involve both a desolate office building and a "love hotel."
Murakami's inventive storytelling is no surprise, but how easily and insightfully he distills the mysteries of existence into such a short book certainly is.
His fans will recognize the dreamlike, eerie landscape and quirky characters, and anyone who hasn't read this Japanese novelist yet can catch up here quickly. Despite its novella length, After Dark slows down time itself, thanks to Murakami's beautifully detailed descriptions. – Susan Gray Blue
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