Nancy Pearl Book Reviews for 1/5/2009

01/05/2009

There's nothing like discovering a great new writer and Nancy Pearl says Nick Harkaway's first novel marks the debut of an outstanding literary talent. Also, a grim novel about a woman's fight with brain cancer — a story that Nancy admires for its unflinching honesty.

There are some books that I recommend on "Sound Focus" that are relatively easy to talk about: I tell a bit of the plot, describe a character or two, maybe compare it to another book, and voila! There you have it. With Nick Harkaway's "The Gone–Away World," though, I can't do any of those things because I want readers (and I hope there will be many many of them) to discover the joys of this outstanding first novel for themselves, without prejudice, as it were. I don't want to tell you any plot details because they're so cleverly laid out, except to say that you'll probably find the book in the science fiction section of the library, since it's a post–apocalyptic novel (it's okay to tell you that). I don't want to mention the characters in anything but the most general way, so I'll just say that they're mostly sympathetic and always three–dimensional, and the narrative voice should capture you from the very first paragraph. It's also occasionally a very funny book, especially the scenes that include a troupe of mimes. And without giving anything away, I'm pretty sure that I can tell you that there's a spectacular plot twist that totally changes the way you read the book. (As a result of that, I suspect that you'll want to go back to the beginning and reread it, just as I did, looking for the clues that Harkaway helpfully planted for us along the way, but that we didn't understand were clues at the time.) I can also let you know that in "The Gone–Away World" you'll find some echoes of other books and authors, including the narratively complex fiction by his father, John Le Carre (although Harkaway's novel is of another genre, entirely); Neal Stephenson; a lot of military science fiction, including Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War"; Sylvia Nasaw's "A Beautiful Mind" (or perhaps the movie made from it); Robert Heinlein; Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass"; and Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles." (I'm sure there were other influences I simply didn't catch.) Now, I've never met Nick Harkaway (though we are friends on Facebook), so I don't know if in fact he's read (or enjoyed) any of the books or authors I've mentioned, but as I was reading "The Gone–Away World," these came to mind. What I can say is that if you're looking for an inventive, intelligent, rousing, and simply all–around terrific novel, just read Nick Harkaway's "The Gone–Away World." And hope it's the beginning of a long career.

I had forgotten just how much I loved Elisa Albert's "The Book of Dahlia" (Free Press, 2008). When I sat down to write this review, and started looking over the many passages I had marked in the book, I couldn't resist leaving my computer, going to sit down on my couch, and starting to reread it, just because I was immediately sucked into Dahlia's story once again. Given its subject matter, you might think that "The Book of Dahlia" would be just too darn depressing to even think about reading, let alone rereading. And, to be entirely honest, a novel about a 29–year–old woman who gets a diagnosis of terminal brain cancer is not going to offer you a laugh a minute. But trust me on this, give it a try; it's certainly one of my favorite books of 2008. In describing Dahlia's life, the narrative voice (told from the third–person limited point of view) is mocking, tender, tough, humorous, and heartbreakingly honest. For example, Dahlia doesn't mind playing the cancer card to get sympathy and attention; she keeps up with her daily flossing even in the face of her certain demise; and she reads self–help books in order to learn to deal with the future with equanimity. When she contemplates her own death, she worries that people might not care. When they hear the news, she fears they might just ask, "Dahlia who?" The narrator continues, "What if no one was talking about her? What if no one knew? What if she was to die and cause hardly a ripple in the lives of everyone she'd ever known? What if what she'd assumed were semi–meaningful associations ... were really just indifferent non–relationships after all?" And isn't that, in the end, if we're as honest as Dahlia, what we're all contemplating at that utterly lonely hour of 3:00 a.m. on those nights when we can't sleep?