Winslow in Love isn’t exactly either of those things, but it’s also not exactly neither of those things. But the recommendation for Canty came from such a trusted source that I’d more or less determined to read all his fiction before I started, and Winslow in Love, his third novel, seemed like as good a place to start as any, and it doesn’t at all shake my intention to read more.

Rocketing through Richard Winslow’s moodswings, as he barrels highways in his slightly improbable but thoroughly à propos Lincoln Town Car is a little dizzying, precisely as I’m certain it’s meant to be. “Precise” is a good word for the novel as a whole: incisive dialogue, even more incisive interior monologues, and vivid, but never over-written. But it’s also reckless, like Winslow himself, with jarring narrative elisions and some sharp deviations from the forms it feints at playing with (the academic turf war/infidelity novel, the man-drinks-self-to-death book, etc.).

(The dénouement doesn’t entirely sit easily with me, but it would be very hard to articulate why without damaging the experience of reading the novel.)

needs more demons? no.

An extended battle scene near the end, however, forcibly recalled my issues with the first novel — the descriptions of the participants seemed a little lazy and formulaic, and the confusing, somewhat contradictory, descriptions of the environs interfered with my suspension of disbelief. But if the finale was a little disappointing, it certainly wasn’t enough so to blunt my interest in the concluding volume.

needs more demons? mmmmmmaybe.

And I was right — The Book of Lost Things is vastly better. Its themes are better supported, the protagonist’s character is more developed, and the prose is richer. I still didn’t like it very much, but I don’t think it’s a bad book.

Bookish young David already shows burgeoning signs of mental illness at the onset of the novel. Within the first chapter or two, his mother dies, his father remarries, and he is burdened with a step-brother. David’s progress through the grieving progress is arrested, and his resentment of his step-family is considerable (the ongoing assault of Hitler’s forces on London and its environs only adds to his stress).

After a real-world incident that clearly affords opportunities for head trauma, David hears his mother’s voice calling him to rescue her. He follows the voice and finds — or seems to find — himself in another world, where he has a series of episodic adventures and undertakes a quest to find rescue his mother and return home.

One of my two big issues with the novel is that Connolly tips his hand. Crucially, unlike Oz, Middle Earth, Narnia, Wonderland, or countless other fantasy worlds, the place David finds himself doesn’t even have a name. When David and one of his traveling companions run into a band of harpies, David recognizes them from mythology books, and is aware of the discontinuity of finding them in the standard thinly-drawn, vaguely feudal setting. David had earlier stumbled through Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” (in my favorite scene of the novel, David echoed my own childhood frustration that the darned thing ends just when it seems like it’s about to get good) and so of course he encounters an itinerant knight named Roland.

My other problem is that the book isn’t appropriate for young readers, but not sufficiently deep for adult readers. The Book of Lost Thing’s plot isn’t any more complex or surprising than any of Baum’s Oz books; I found myself growing tired of the episodic sequences and impatient for the resolution of the primary narrative arc. But although the novel is structured like a children’s book (and for the most part uses a vocabulary appropriate to one) it emphatically isn’t. Connolly reworks several standard fairytale plots for his episodes, but out-grims the Brothers Grimm, not only with graphic descriptions of torture and carnage, but also by injecting themes of sexual anxiety, with a special emphasis on child abuse. I found some of Connolly’s fairytale inversions mordantly funny, but many just struck me as unpleasant, without being particularly inventive, or even interesting.

Part of my less than enthusiastic reaction to the novel may be that I don’t care for its message — admittedly an extremely subjective criticism. It looks like a work of escapist fiction, but it’s really almost anti-escapist. Candide’s “We must cultivate our garden,” strikes me as ultimately less bleak and defeatist than The Book of Lost Things.

Sometimes I hear a piece of music and think that it would be more interesting to play the piece than to actually listen to it. The Book of Lost Things leaves me with a similar impression: I’m tempted to wonder if writing it was a more satisfying — maybe even therapeutic — experience than reading it.

needs more demons? Not exactly. Needs a little something.

I’ve mentioned Henry Jenkin’s introduction to Interfictions 2 once already. In it he makes an excellent point about genre: when we read genre fiction, we want it to conform somewhat to our expectations of the genre — but we also want it to somewhat confound our expectations to provide some measure of novelty (”It never happened quite that way before”). My biggest problem with The Gates is that I found precious little novelty in it. I’m not sure I’ve read another novel in which themes of the implications of modern experimental high-energy physics on the existence of elemental evil are juxtaposed with a plot about a plucky lad and his plucky dog who must foil a demonic invasion- — but virtually every individual element of this book seemed so familiar I still had the nagging sense I’d already read it.

Another major problem I have with The Gates is that the previous times I encountered its individual components, they were better. Connolly has a penchant, for instance, for writing longish clumps of unattributed humorous dialogue that recalls (among others) Terry Pratchett and Donald Westlake. But Pratchett and Westlake are much funnier. Connolly seems to be striving for punnish name-based humor and an outlandishly omniscient narrative point of view in the mode of Pratchett or Douglas Adams — but locales like “666 Crowley Road” strike me as goofy, not funny. I can forgive Samuel Johnson (the plucky lad) having a pooch named Boswell — blame for that bit of cutsie-poo could be laid at Samuel’s parents’ feet — but giving a present-day researcher at CERN the surname Planck just seems baffling.

My last big problem with The Gates is that it felt sloppily constructed to the point of insulting its audience. It bumps along its rollercoaster track of conflicts and resolutions without the slightest regard as to whether it all makes any sense. Members of Connolly’s demonic horde are invincible when he needs to notch up the body count, but otherwise generally susceptible to any random utensil that comes to hand.

I think I would have been disappointed by this book even if I’d encountered it when I was fourteen.

In an odd twist, the thing I enjoyed best about The Gates is that it references the universe’s reaction to the Large Hadron Collider, and I read it while stories about papers published (by Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan) asserting more-or-less that the universe is sabotaging the LHC in order to maintain its own integrity were making their way into the popular press.

needs more demons? More demons wouldn’t really help.

• I read every word within a 24-hour span
• I’ve already purchased some Merge recordings I hadn’t previously heard
• The palpable enthusiasm of Ryan Adam’s (slightly incoherent) intro almost makes me want to hear what he’s been up to lately

The structure of Our Noise is pretty genius: there’s a little bit of connective text to provide context and occasional fact-correction, but mostly the story is told in interview snippets. Mac and Laura’s voices are augmented by those of other Merge recording artists, associates (like Touch & Go’s Cory Rusk), friends, and peers. Alternating chapters switch between advancing the overall Merge (and Superchunk) timeline and highlighting some of Merge’s more prominent bands, like Spoon, Neutral Milk Hotel, and The Arcade Fire. Sometimes this is slightly confusing, as when the money The Magnetic Field’s Sixty-Nine Love Songs eventually makes discussed much earlier than its place in the overall chronology. It perhaps shortchanges the bands not selected for the individual chapter profiles, with Archers of Loaf arguably the most significant. But it effectively breaks up the potential monotony of “then we did another tour. then we put out some more records,” and enlivens the book by letting different voices ascend and recede in prominence.

Our Noise is richly illustrated, not only with photos of band members on- and off-stage, but also with flyers, album art, set lists and correspondence, and no less than 4 pictures of “The Magnetic Fields” misspelled in various ways on marquees and such.

Quibbles: A complete list of Merge releases through April 2009 is the sole appendix. It’s handy, but a short bio of each interviewee would have been very useful, as would an index. (Interviewees are often described in a parenthetical note the first time they appear: “Aaron Stauffer (Seaweed).” But if you forget which band Stauffer was in and he has another comment a few chapters later, it can take some flipping around to find the first reference.) I noticed a handful of copy-editing errors, but none that were confusing and not enough to detract from my enjoyment.

Our Noise is much more narrowly focused than Azerrad’s Our Band Could be Your Life, Option magazine’s (terribly titled) We Rock So You Don’t Have To or Punk Planet’s We Owe You Nothing (what is it with the third-person plural, anyway?). Andersen and Jenkin’s Dance of Days is largely, but not entirely the story of DisChord, Minor Threat and Fugazi; it’s also the story of Positive Force. So perhaps it’s not fair to compare Our Noise to those books, but I think it may be the most satisfying of them to read cover-to-cover uninterrupted. It makes me want to stand up and cheer. And read a similarly structured book about DisChord, Simple Machines, SST, or TeenBeat, for a start. And go back in time and get serious about playing music much earlier.

needs more demons? nuh-uh.

Three little gripes:

1. The author’s name is Cassandra Clare. The main character’s name is Clary (short for Clarissa). The similarity contributes to my sense of calculation; seems too much like a brand identification ploy.
2. The blocking of several of the fight scenes was unconvincing. I often had no clear sense of exactly how close the protagonists and antagonists were, and worse, I feel like Clare didn’t either.
3. Mostly the novel is limited third-person omniscient from Clary’s point-of-view. I found the handful of omniscient from other point of view segments distracting.

On the bright side, there’s more moral ambiguity than one often gets in these stories, I was genuinely surprised by at least one plot twist, and the set up for the further volumes is promising. I’ll read at least one more.

needs more demons? mmmaybe.

Although the novel is named for its narrator, John Stocking, Charyn is principally interested in exploring George Washington in the Revolutionary War through a fictional device (although Stocking is literally missing an eye, perhaps the title is also meant to suggest that he views the war from a vantage that does not afford depth perception). Charyn attempts to humanize Washington by inventing peccadillos like an ongoing dalliance with a notorious Manhattan madam, but Washington is already in the process of being mythologized. Stocking, who believes he may be Washington’s illegitimate son, is in almost religious awe of him, whereas the British mockingly refer to him as the “farmer in chief.”

My main problem is just that I didn’t find Stocking a very congenial character with whom to spend a book. Charyn plays fair by historical rules, so fictional Stocking can’t really do anything that would leave an indelible mark on real history. He spends much of the book vacillating between sympathy with the British and with the colonists. This is rather novel in my experience, and probably not at all unrealistic, but it doesn’t stop it from becoming somewhat tiresome. Aside from his efforts to be executed by neither army, Stocking spends most of his time yearning for a beautiful prostitute, and in this venue he is similarly indecisive.

Charyn’s portrayal of war-torn Manhattan has an impressive authenticity, and that was my favorite aspect of this book.

needs more demons? I suspect people who spend more time reading American military history than I do might find this more intriguing than I did.

Positives first: This is a fantasy novel that owes virtually no debt to Tolkien (or for that matter, to Harry Potter). Clarke portrays faeries as quite inhuman entities. As a reader of a smattering of the darker and less-Disneyfied legends and folk-tales of such things, her rendition of them struck a very pleasing note with me. Also happily, her early 19th-century men and women will also be somewhat alien to modern readers; Clarke makes no effort to sugarcoat the English class system. Clarke’s prose demonstrates careful attention to detail throughout, and displays flashes of wit and occasional melancholy beauty.

Throughout Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Clarke has adopted some conventions of 19th-century prose, chief of them outmoded spellings (”sopha” for “sofa,” “shew” for “show”), and a reserved narrative presence with a fondness for the passive voice. This blends jarringly with much more modern literary devices, like fragmentary sentences and frequent, dramatic shifts of setting (including some of the “here’s what the villains are up to” variety, which also undermine the narrative tension).
There are also several unmistakable allusions to Jane Austen (although it’s her contemporary Anne Radcliffe who draws namechecks). It’s an unfelicitous comparison to invoke. Clarke fails to create a rich inner life for characters; most are at best two-dimensional. Clarke’s antiquated stylistic choices result in prose that’s often flat and sometimes repetitive. Clarke may not be interested in fully realizing her people or in constructing graceful and elaborate sentences — but if not, Austen is a bad name to conjure. At worst it makes Clarke’s authorial voice seem a little less like style and a little more like gimmickry.

I also have serious quibbles with the structure of the book. Essentially, it braids several stories of ensorcellment which follow the classic template. Although the novel stands on its own, not all of its conflicts are resolved, and the finale distinctly implies a continuation of the story. The conflicts that are resolved find their resolution through a sort of deus ex machina. It’s a well-supported and amply telegraphed deus ex machina, but a deus ex machina nonetheless. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell also teases quite a bit (and flouts a Chekovian rule of drama): if a fantasy novel repeatedly mentions “a strange country on the far side of Hell,” I damned well want it to take me there! But that will have to wait, I suspect, for a later volume.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell failed to satisfy me on a thematic level as well. Its alternate history of the Napoleonic wars doesn’t appear to comment on our own. The magic performed by the titular characters is sometimes impacted by their internal states, but Clarke seems uninterested in exploring the metaphorical opportunities this could provide. I have nothing against purely escapist fiction, but when a novel arrives with such high praise, and demanding so much of the readers time, I expect to get a little more back in return. I enjoyed Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but it didn’t deliver as much as it seemed to promise.

Needs More Demons? Kinda sorta, I’m afraid