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leahbobet(Published in accordance with the Tenets of Book Reporting and the support of Viewers Like You.)
By request...
#26 -- Eliot Fintushel, Breakfast With the Ones You Love
Okay, first thing: I'm not sure why I picked this up to read. I've read some of Fintushel's short fiction, which was well-executed but tended to piss me off about halfway through the story, and the cover looks like high-end POD rather than Bantam. Yes, that should be not of consequence in my reading choices; it is sometimes (it's of consequence in the reading public's choices too, and don't fool yourself that it isn't). I suspect I might have been seeking a trainwreck, which I did a few times in books I picked up last month, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it was all that slapfight in the air. Goes to the brain, that stuff. Bad for you.
So I picked this up possibly looking for a trainwreck, and my pleasure in it might be linked to not finding one.
Breakfast With the Ones You Love is a Slipstream novel. Yeah, ignore all that crap about people's middle-class twentysomething artist angst and the cracks between genres that shows up in Slipstream slushpiles across the land. That's not Slipstream, that's what genre readers think mainstream literature looks like*. This is Slipstream: off-the-wall, humourous/serious, drawing its magic from unconventional sources without making a big deal of how innovative it is. This is the thing I point at when I utter that label.
And so, I enjoyed it.
Breakfast avoids a bunch of first-novel traps while falling prey to a few more. It doesn't overexplain either bit of magic, and both are quite inventive: Jack and the minyan's Kabbalist theology or Lea's emotionally-linked ability to play with people's bodies. They just work, but are acknowledged as unusual: one of the other pitfalls I think too much Slipstream fiction suffers from is a little too much Marquez-style pokerface. Is it still magic if it's unacknowledged as wondrous?
Lea's voice itself is also wonderfully, vibrantly alive: sixteen, less tough than she thinks she is, and a little bit crazy. The passages where she's practically planning the wedding with Jack, more and more as time goes on, are hilarious and sorta painfully touching at the same time, because you know when you were sixteen you did this, spun whole futures with someone on the tilt of a head, and it's fond if slightly embarrassing to recall. You don't mind so much that she's an unreliable narrator, because she's genuine, and spins a good yarn, and has lovely metaphors that don't spring out of the text yelling LOOK AT ME I WAS A DARLING DU JOUR but fit right in and flow.
The atmosphere, the city that's implied to be New York but never quite named, the rompy yet serious feel of the whole thing all work very, very well. What works less well for me are the, well, tidiness of the ending (one) and the way the title image is used (two).
The end is very neat and tidy. All strings wrapped up, nothing left to say, nothing that seeds forward and implies that these people will live on to fight another day (I'm not talking setting up a sequel, more...extending the life of the characters beyond the life of the story, which I think is important to enforcing the feeling that these people are real). No mess, no fuss. Considering the engagement the rest of the book has with Real Life (tm), I don't buy it. I wanted there to be some fallout, someone to have a hard feeling, something to act as...well, a reminder that we are not returned to status quo in the world, even if the characters have changed.
Second: the title image, the breakfast, when presented in the text is actually heartbreaking. It's the context that makes it so, one of those pure-light moments of innocence before everything goes to shit. It's that and the line about rewarding people when they behave badly, so they don't stay unhappy and misbehave more that really have the emotional centre of the whole thing**, a bittersweet twist that crunches up the corners of your eyes. So being presented with that button, that tunnel direct into my black reader's heart, one should use it lightly. Touch it once in a while, gently, and evoke that idea on the edges. Don't push it too many times or it starts to go numb. Fintushel pushes it a few too many times, which made me sad, because it's a gorgeous image and gorgeous emotional centre, and doesn't deserve to be worn out.
So. First novel issues, but the general inventiveness of this book makes it worth reading.
Actually, that's a good place to leave this on. There's a line between being inventive, being out-there and unconventional and doing so while looking over your shoulder to see who's watching and noting how inventive you are. One is confident and genuine; the other is a mask for the public. And I think for Slipstream as a whole (and novels in particular) to work, it has to be your own natural, unadulterated weird, from the gut. I read that label as being about the absurd, the wonderful, the magic for good or ill in everyday life, and you can't put that on.
So, recommended. This book is not performance art. It's real.
*Like English students, they are wrong. That is what the surface of mainstream literature is about.***
**I'd quote, but I don't have the book with me at the mo'.
***And why do we call it mainstream lit when it makes up maybe 4% of the market share annually? Really, if anything's "mainstream", it's Romance.
By request...
#26 -- Eliot Fintushel, Breakfast With the Ones You Love
Okay, first thing: I'm not sure why I picked this up to read. I've read some of Fintushel's short fiction, which was well-executed but tended to piss me off about halfway through the story, and the cover looks like high-end POD rather than Bantam. Yes, that should be not of consequence in my reading choices; it is sometimes (it's of consequence in the reading public's choices too, and don't fool yourself that it isn't). I suspect I might have been seeking a trainwreck, which I did a few times in books I picked up last month, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it was all that slapfight in the air. Goes to the brain, that stuff. Bad for you.
So I picked this up possibly looking for a trainwreck, and my pleasure in it might be linked to not finding one.
Breakfast With the Ones You Love is a Slipstream novel. Yeah, ignore all that crap about people's middle-class twentysomething artist angst and the cracks between genres that shows up in Slipstream slushpiles across the land. That's not Slipstream, that's what genre readers think mainstream literature looks like*. This is Slipstream: off-the-wall, humourous/serious, drawing its magic from unconventional sources without making a big deal of how innovative it is. This is the thing I point at when I utter that label.
And so, I enjoyed it.
Breakfast avoids a bunch of first-novel traps while falling prey to a few more. It doesn't overexplain either bit of magic, and both are quite inventive: Jack and the minyan's Kabbalist theology or Lea's emotionally-linked ability to play with people's bodies. They just work, but are acknowledged as unusual: one of the other pitfalls I think too much Slipstream fiction suffers from is a little too much Marquez-style pokerface. Is it still magic if it's unacknowledged as wondrous?
Lea's voice itself is also wonderfully, vibrantly alive: sixteen, less tough than she thinks she is, and a little bit crazy. The passages where she's practically planning the wedding with Jack, more and more as time goes on, are hilarious and sorta painfully touching at the same time, because you know when you were sixteen you did this, spun whole futures with someone on the tilt of a head, and it's fond if slightly embarrassing to recall. You don't mind so much that she's an unreliable narrator, because she's genuine, and spins a good yarn, and has lovely metaphors that don't spring out of the text yelling LOOK AT ME I WAS A DARLING DU JOUR but fit right in and flow.
The atmosphere, the city that's implied to be New York but never quite named, the rompy yet serious feel of the whole thing all work very, very well. What works less well for me are the, well, tidiness of the ending (one) and the way the title image is used (two).
The end is very neat and tidy. All strings wrapped up, nothing left to say, nothing that seeds forward and implies that these people will live on to fight another day (I'm not talking setting up a sequel, more...extending the life of the characters beyond the life of the story, which I think is important to enforcing the feeling that these people are real). No mess, no fuss. Considering the engagement the rest of the book has with Real Life (tm), I don't buy it. I wanted there to be some fallout, someone to have a hard feeling, something to act as...well, a reminder that we are not returned to status quo in the world, even if the characters have changed.
Second: the title image, the breakfast, when presented in the text is actually heartbreaking. It's the context that makes it so, one of those pure-light moments of innocence before everything goes to shit. It's that and the line about rewarding people when they behave badly, so they don't stay unhappy and misbehave more that really have the emotional centre of the whole thing**, a bittersweet twist that crunches up the corners of your eyes. So being presented with that button, that tunnel direct into my black reader's heart, one should use it lightly. Touch it once in a while, gently, and evoke that idea on the edges. Don't push it too many times or it starts to go numb. Fintushel pushes it a few too many times, which made me sad, because it's a gorgeous image and gorgeous emotional centre, and doesn't deserve to be worn out.
So. First novel issues, but the general inventiveness of this book makes it worth reading.
Actually, that's a good place to leave this on. There's a line between being inventive, being out-there and unconventional and doing so while looking over your shoulder to see who's watching and noting how inventive you are. One is confident and genuine; the other is a mask for the public. And I think for Slipstream as a whole (and novels in particular) to work, it has to be your own natural, unadulterated weird, from the gut. I read that label as being about the absurd, the wonderful, the magic for good or ill in everyday life, and you can't put that on.
So, recommended. This book is not performance art. It's real.
*Like English students, they are wrong. That is what the surface of mainstream literature is about.***
**I'd quote, but I don't have the book with me at the mo'.
***And why do we call it mainstream lit when it makes up maybe 4% of the market share annually? Really, if anything's "mainstream", it's Romance.
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no subject
Date: 2007-04-26 07:49 pm (UTC)(Thanks.)
no subject
Date: 2007-04-26 07:50 pm (UTC)That novel is sitting in my distressingly high pile of must-read books.
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Date: 2007-04-26 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-26 07:52 pm (UTC)