Such Fine Boys: A Novel by Patrick Modiano

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Nobel price winner Patrick Modiano‘s Such Fine Boys: A Novel is essentially a series of sad reminiscences about privileged boys at a boarding school outside Paris and what became of them when they grew up. It’s dripping with melancholy, holding out little hope for these lonely, lost men. Modiano seems more concerned with mood than anything else and skims past these people and their experiences without much insight or involvement. I found myself feeling little sympathy for their plights or their lack of judgment.

The writing itself, at least in this translation, seemed stilted and labored. This approach has been used by other French authors, such as Albert Camus and Alain Robbe-Grillet, to great effect. With this material, however, the awkward detachment simply made the reading experience uninvolving. There was neither a central crisis nor a weighty intellectual idea to grip my attention and interest. Time passes, stuff happens–there’s no real insight in that. Maybe if you grew up in France in the 60’s and wanted to feel nostalgic, this would be a great book for you. Or if you were more familiar than I with the social and political turbulence of 60’s France; that’s mostly an ignored background here, unless that was the point–it’s hard to tell, the way it was written.

Some of these characters appear in other Modiano novels, including a young girl named Little Jewel who made for the most interesting vignette. I might try one of those in the future, but while I thought this was an okay read, I wouldn’t recommend it to the uninitiated.

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Manhattan Beach is the second book I’ve read by Jennifer Egan, after A Visit from the Goon Squad. Having grown up in Manhattan Beach (the one in Brooklyn, not L.A.), I was curious about a novel named after it, but this has little to nothing to do with the actual location aside from a key early scene there.

At heart, this novel reads like a thriller or action story, and I was interested to find out what would happen, but for this kind of book it gets bogged down in an awful lot of descriptive detail. In its favor, it’s a very well researched book. The descriptions of the Brooklyn Naval Yard and learning to become a diver were remarkably vivid. Unfortunately, Egan doesn’t let you forget how much research she did, ever, and I often felt like I was reading a research report rather than a novel.

The characters seem to be created for the purposes of the story, too, and often struck me as unconvincing. Anna, the lead, is naturally a very sympathetic character because of her circumstances, but she acts in ways that sometimes seemed contrived to move the plot along. Other characters are straight from the stock collection: a mobster who’s really not that bad, a very misunderstood father, a Black man who harasses and intimidates a character but then saves his life, etc.

Egan writes some scenes beautifully–I wanted to mark my page to come back to them–but there are others that are just as notable for their wordy obtuseness. Ultimately, I found myself with the same reaction as I had for Egan’s Goon Squad book: impressed with the accomplishment, but not really liking it very much in the end.

The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


When I’m down or stressed, I often turn to P.G. Wodehouse‘s absurd tales of the idle rich for an escape from real life. The Inimitable Jeeves is the first “novel” with Jeeves. I put novel in quotes because this is really more of a series of short stories strung together than a proper novel. The contents were originally published separately as eleven short stories, some of which were split to form the book. The plot is clearly less sophisticated than some of his later comic novels. Still, it’s plenty of fun to breeze along and read about Bertie’s wasted life, as his Aunt Agatha properly calls it. He and his friends from the leisure class get themselves into trouble and are rescued time and again by the clever schemes of Bertie’s valet Jeeves. Most of the stories involve Bertie’s hopeless friend Bingo Little and his ever-changing infatuations with various women. If you want to check your worries at the door and read about utterly ridiculous people doing silly things, this is a great diversion.

My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars


My Man Jeeves is the first P.G. Wodehouse book with Bertie Wooster or his valet Jeeves in the title. Only half of these eight stories, however, feature Jeeves and Wooster. The other half are about Reggie Pepper, an early prototype for Bertie. Two of the Pepper stories were actually later rewritten as Jeeves stories.

It’s fascinating to read these stories together. The Pepper stories are very similar to the Jeeves ones, except without Jeeves there to come up with solutions. The addition of Jeeves makes the stories much more entertaining–he’s an iconic character.

These are all fun to read, though, even if too many are simply about idle young men panicking over losing the streams of money from their rich relatives. Overall, they read like somewhat earlier, undeveloped versions of Wodehouse’s later work. They’re a nice, quick diversion with some funny zingers, but not yet showing the comic brilliance of Wodehouse’s later work.

The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The Queen’s Gambit is a quick, fun read. It’s basically a story about a woman trying to break into a man’s world, jammed into a typical triumphant athlete story framework, except with chess as the sport.

I don’t know much about chess, but that didn’t really matter. Walter Tevis keeps you turning the pages with a fast-moving yarn. There’s not a whole lot of depth to the characters, but Beth Harmon is a fascinating creation, and the sparse writing style fits the elusive nature of her personality well.

This is great for reading on the beach or while traveling. The Netflix series that’s based on it is very well done, too. It made some different story choices, but both versions work well.

The Facts of Life by Graham Joyce

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I loved Graham Joyce‘s The Limits of Enchantment and was looking forward to reading more by him. This has a similar touch of supernatural grounded in what is essentially a literary novel about a family coping with the aftermath of World War II. Symbolically, the family’s struggles parallel and reflect those of the city they live in, Coventry.

The general approach of the novel is interesting, and there are some key scenes that are stellar, just beautifully written. But while I enjoyed the novel overall, the narrative focus is spread thin across a large cast of characters, and, as a result, I never found myself getting very involved. It comes across as a bit Dickensian at times, with some of the characters becoming almost cartoonish caricatures. I was particularly turned off by one with some sort of speech impediment who is depicted for much of the novel as just saying “Eeeeeeee…” and “Aeeeeee.” He eventually becomes an interesting character, so the undue stress on his inability to get through his sentences seemed incongruous with the rest of the novel. Maybe it was supposed to be a comic touch, but it just didn’t work for me.

If you have more of an affinity for large family sagas than I do, you might love the novel. I thought it was an interesting story with some creative supernatural elements. It called to mind Stella Benson’s classic “Living Alone” at one point, which I really enjoyed. But I just never got very involved with the characters and, in the end, although I was curious to see where it was all going, I never came to care all that much.

Also, this is a poor title, really describing nothing about the book, but it’s especially awful for Americans, as it plants the earworm of the theme song from the old TV show every time you look at it.

Solar by Ian McEwan

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


I’ve enjoyed past novels I’ve read by Ian McEwan. I particularly loved Atonement and Saturday. But I just couldn’t get through Solar. In it, McEwan indulges his worst instincts, with utterly despicable characters that he moves around on a chess board to teach readers the desired lesson. I could write more about it, but I found a review that perfectly summarized my thoughts. Here is Walter Kirn, writing in the New York Times:

“McEwan’s novel of Decline and Fall becomes a case study in Decline and Stall, lapsing into a display of his finesse as a spinner of silken sentences and composer of sonatalike paragraphs. The performance is an exquisite bore, with all the overchoreographed dullness of a touring ice ballet cast with off-season Olympic skaters.”

The review is actually pretty amusing overall. You can read it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/books/review/Kirn-t.html.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I’m a writer and runner much like Haruki Murakami. As I recently read and enjoyed Kafka on the Shore, I thought this book would be right up my alley. It’s essentially an edited journal of his thoughts as he participates in various marathons and triathlons. He’s most vivid at describing how running can be painful, although he notes that it’s also good for you in many ways, and says it has played an integral part in his life.

I found this a pleasant read, but there’s probably little here for a non-runner. I was expecting more insight into Murakami’s writing and how running affects his process, but it stayed fairly distant. In the end, while there were some interesting thoughts about running and aging, I didn’t feel there was much to it.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars


To the Lighthouse is such a radical book, it’s hard to capture how it left me feeling in a brief review. In the first section, Virginia Woolf glides through the thoughts of various characters, painting a portrait of those gathered at the Ramsey’s seaside vacation home. These include an aging poet, a painter struggling with her art, a young couple in love, and the Ramseys themselves with their eight children. The novel focuses in large part on the relations between people and how we all try to understand each other. But it also touches on the brutal effects of time, the meaning of life, and the role of art. Much of the last is reflected in the very way the novel is written and put together, and I found this aspect of it fascinating.

Altogether, this is a masterpiece of modern writing. I did something I’ve never done before: I read it once and then immediately went back to the beginning to read it through again, both because I didn’t quite absorb everything I’d read and because I didn’t want to leave this world quite yet. This novel needs to be read slowly, with full concentration, to be fully appreciated.

In the end, though, I didn’t quite love it. It’s so intellectually rigorous, I found its method somewhat cold and detached even as it detailed the inner thoughts of its characters. It prods you to think deeply about the issues it raises but at the same time calls much attention to its method by its very nature. As a reading experience, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I admired it, marveling at the technique as I tried to decode its rich layers of meaning. But this is a great book, no doubt, and well worth putting the time and effort into.