In Brief: Tom Perrotta

Tom Perrotta writes chick lit for dudes: his novels are smart but not deep, satirical but not bitter. Two of his books, Election and Little Children, have been made into movies, and they work well on the screen, almost better than they do on the page. They read like screenplays for romantic comedies: short scenes made of vivid visuals, snappy dialogue, and sweetly doofy characters. 

His novels focus on the satisfying--and stultifying--aspects of life in suburban New Jersey. The protagonists, usually men, face a choice: should they stay in relationships and lives that, while safe, are gradually growing stale, or should they risk it all for a new love, a new life, or (in some cases) an old dream? Frequently, as in Election, The Wishbones, and Little Children, the question is framed as a clear choice between marriage and infidelity. Thankfully, despite the recurring question, Perrotta does not always settle for the same answer. He alternates between tragic outcomes and happy endings, between settling for the old or risking the new. In fact, I find his books more satisfying the more I read them: he demonstrates an admirable refusal to sell a single answer. 

I just finished The Wishbones, his first novel, and I liked it--probably because I liked his later novels. Try The Abstinence Teacher; try Little Children. If you like those, the others, while less compelling, are worth a go. 

Half Broken Things by Morag Joss

Half Broken Things is advertised as a "novel of suspense." It won an award from the Crime Writers Association, and I picked it up ready to puzzle through an unsolved mystery. But this book is not a whodunit; if there are murders at its center (and, my goodness, there are!), there is never a question of who commits them. Instead, the suspense builds around the fates of the three protagonists, who, throughout the course of the book, commit theft--and grisly murders. What will happen to them? And what should happen to them--what do they deserve? 

For these characters are as sympathetic as they are sinister. They have no money, no friends, and, until they find one another, no hope that their lives can change. Jean is an aging house-sitter who has been given notice; she has no family or home of her own, subsisting entirely in the houses she watches, often for months at a time. Michael is an unsuccessful thief who is deep in debt and paralyzed by chronic depression. As a character, Steph is the most conventional (she is also the least convincing): she's pregnant, and her boyfriend is abusive. Author Morag Joss spends the first half of the book laboring to show us just how lonely these people are. 

This set-up is essential. By a series of fabulous coincidences, à la Charles Dickens, these three loners find one another: they make a home together in Jean's current residence, an idyllic country mansion whose owners are on an extended holiday. For the first time, they see what it is to live a comfortable life. They are not greedy; they do not take more than they need; many would call simple the life they see as luxurious. But it is clearly their togetherness, their devotion to one another, that brings them the most happiness, and it is hard not to share in the sheer joy they feel at alleviating their loneliness. It is almost difficult to remember that they are, in order to maintain this neat little life, committing fraud, theft, and--as time passes--cold-blooded murder. 

It seems clear that their life is unsustainable: the residents will return to their house, eventually, and the secretly killed will be reported missing. But it seems equally clear that they are not going to be arrested like common criminals, put on trial, and thrown in jail. In the world of their new life, there is no room for that kind of mundane reality. Until the last few pages of the book, I genuinely had no idea how it would end (and the ending is surprising in just the right way: you realize what will happen the moment before it actually does). I enjoyed the ambiguity because it also forced the reader into a moral quandary: what possible outcome will serve justice? In the end, of course, there is no justice but the poetic kind--but it is so deliciously rendered that it hardly matters. 

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

I don't consider myself particularly well-versed in French culture: however, even I could tell, from the first few chapters of Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog, that this book was going to be French with a capital F: Nothing really happens, and then one small thing happens, and life is momentarily rescued from its essential meaninglessness. Meanwhile, there are a lot of reflections on the hypocrisy of the upper class (one of the narrators says, without a hint of sarcasm, "Oh, the despicable vacuousness of bourgeois existence!"), the vulgarity of popular culture, and the inability of people to ever really connect with one another. 

If this sounds depressing, well... it is. But it is also worth reading. Barbery, a professor of philosophy, has done what few writers can: she has written a successful philosophical novel. Normally, this kind of novel suffers, because neither story nor philosophy gets adequate space. In The Elegance of the Hedgehog, however, Barbery wisely chooses to go light on plot and heavy on character development, which lends itself to philosophical musings. We get the sense that these characters are deeply invested in Understanding Life, and that is what takes the book beyond mere pretension. More human than a philosophy textbook, more intellectual than most novels, this book is an engaging examination of some of life's weightiest questions: What is the meaning of existence? What, if anything, makes life worth living? What is the purpose of Art? What is Beauty? And why are rich people so uniformly stupid? 

These are the questions that haunt the book's two protagonists. Renee Michel, the primary narrator, is an aging concierge in a posh Parisian apartment. She plays the part of an ignorant working-class woman, but she is secretly a brilliant autodidact who delights in Russian literature, Japanese films, and Dutch still lives. For most of her life, she has been content to live a double life, quietly gloating over the stupidity of, well, almost everyone except her (the other exceptions include her best friend, Manuela, a Portuguese immigrant with more class than the people whose houses she cleans, and Renee's deceased husband). 

Meanwhile, five floors above her, twelve-year-old Paloma has a secret of her own. Paloma is hyper-articulate and keenly observant: her sections are some of the book's funniest, as she ruthlessly exposes her family's hypocrisy. Anyone who has been an adolescent will recognize the unhappiness behind her intolerance, and indeed, Paloma is the character for whom meaning is truly a life or death issue: if she can't find something to make life worthwhile in the next few months, she is going to commit suicide on her 13th birthday, though not before setting fire to her family's luxury apartment (no one will be there--"after all, I'm not a criminal," she explains). 

There were times when I found myself frustrated by the book's style: it is dense and slow-moving.  Indeed, this is a book that is not afraid to flex its intellectual muscles, another way in which it diverges from many American novels. (Anyone who says they read Hedgehog without looking up at least some of the words or references is almost certainly lying: eructation? phenomenology? William Ockham?) Additionally, the book's protagonists delight in life's finer things in a way that most Americans might find a bit snobby (I did, and most people think I'm a snob). When they are not exploring life's essential questions, they are succumbing to bouts of Proustian ecstasy over a rugby player's pose or the arrangement of a camilla on moss. 

But Barbery's insights, especially in the latter half of the book, when our two heroes finally meet, make the novel worth pursuing for anyone who enjoys a bit of philosophical rumination. It's not plot-driven (I'm honestly not sure the French even have a word for "plot"), and it's not exactly exciting, but it is thought-provoking. And, in the end, life is momentarily rescued from meaninglessness, and best of all, these self-absorbed, defensive characters begin to realize the necessity of compassion. To me, that was the book's saving grace: after a while, I got tired of hearing about how stupid, crass, and cruel humans are. But Renee and Paloma begin to recognize that others besides themselves may have interior lives; that others besides themselves may be sad, or searching. 

It is this injection of the human that saves the book from mere intellectual masturbation. The Elegance of the Hedgehog is, in the end, about people--all of its existential questions derive from genuine human longing. This book may be French, but the loneliness, grief, and love at its core are decidedly universal. 

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

Among English teachers of a certain ilk, the "Where I'm From" poem is a popular creative writing assignment: Students start each line with "I'm from..." and finish it with any number of pieces of their past, their homes, and their families ("I'm from baseball games and touch football/I'm from my grandfather's cologne/and the Bridgewater Mall"). It shows, among other things, the connections between self and place, past and present, family legend and local history (not that the students would EVER use the phrase "family legend and local history"). It's a popular assignment because it's difficult to do poorly: once you get going, you are overwhelmed by the minutia that make you who you are, the local legends, family gatherings, favorite recipes, summer memories... the list is, quite literally, endless, and usually endlessly interesting to the writer, who enjoys meandering through her own life. 

Lauren Groff has written the MFA's version of a "Where I'm From" poem. Templeton, the narrator's hometown in The Monsters of Templeton, is loosely based off Groff's own childhood home, Cooperstown, NY (remember? Baseball Hall of Fame?). In her introduction, Groff calls the book nothing short of "a love song to Cooperstown." Originally, Groff wanted to write a straight history. She researched the town's history and read the work of the writer James Fenimore Cooper, whose father was the town's founder. But as she wrote her history, she found that she kept inserting fiction where fact should be. Cooper's characters became actual people from the town's past, and myths became reality. In the end, she could not in good conscience call the book factual, and she abandoned the task of arriving at Truth: instead, she re-christened her town Templeton and threw herself into creating its fantastic history. Incidentally, the introduction in which Groff explains this process is one of the most interesting parts of the book. 

Not that the story itself lacks intrigue. Willie Upton, the story's narrator and "tour guide", so to speak, through Templeton, is the direct descendent of Templeton's founding family, the Temples. A PhD student in archeology, she is on the verge of a nervous breakdown when she returns to her hometown from Stanford. She has just been dumped by her professor, by whom she may or may not be pregnant, her best friend has lupus, and her academic career has been seriously threatened by the fact that she is guilty of the attempted murder of the dean of her school. Willie's mother, a hippie-turned-Baptist who raised Willie alone, decides this would be a good time to come clean about Willie's father: he was not a hippie from a commune in California, as Willie was always told, but was instead a well-known local man. Which local man? Ah, that's for you to find out, Willie's mother tells her. Start digging, my little archeologist! 

And dig Willie does. Her mother provides a single clue: Willie's father is also a distant descendent of the Temples, through an illegitimate birth at some point in the family's history. Desperate  for a distraction from her messy life, Willie embarks on a quest to discover her father by discovering the source of the illegitimate birth. Due to her family's prominence, she can easily follow its members using books, letters, and journals, all housed at the local museum, a stone's throw from her house.

Like so many contemporary novels, this story is told not from one point of view; rather, it is an amalgam of several narrative voices. Frequently, when a book fluctuates between narrators, one voice stands out as the most powerful, and the others serve as annoying distractions. In this case, Willie's voice is the only consistent strand: her story is interspersed with brief vignettes from her various ancestors. I expected Willie's story to be the driving force in this novel; the ancestors, I thought, would be the distractors. 

Instead, the ancestors--who, as philanderers, arsonists, murderers, and rapists, are almost certainly the "Monsters" of the book's title--continually steal the stage. Whether they are natives, slaves, or colonists, their voices are restrained and authentic; their stories are fascinating, both for their personal drama and for their insight into this particular slice of American history. Willie's story, in contrast, often feels forced. She is surrounded by an insistently eccentric cast of characters: a best friend who is spunky with a capital S; a high school football hero who reads Spinoza in his spare time; a professor, Primus Dwyer, who is precisely as stuffy as his name implies. Even Willie's mother is a bit too "Earth Mother" to be fully believable. Willie herself is a grating narrator. She is supposed to be a near-genius on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but frequently, she sounds more whiny than crazy, more snobby than smart. 

In the end--to be honest--I didn't really care who Willie's father was (though that question was certainly answered, in one of the book's sweetest moments). I cared much more for the glimpses into Templeton's past. In the last book I read, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the mystery at the story's center kept me hooked. Here, the mystery was not the focus of the story, nor was it meant to be. Willie herself seemed more absorbed by her family's history--and, by extension, her town's history--than by the question of her father's identity. Before she could recover from her collapse, she needed to know who she was. And she found what English teachers and students before her have found--that who you are is, frequently, where you're from. Willie is from Templeton, and it is ultimately Templeton--not Willie--that shines as the star of this story. In that sense, the book succeeds as the "love story" Groff set out to write. 

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

This book, originally published in Sweden after Larsson's death, is in many ways an old-fashioned morality tale: Crime, both white-collar and cold-blooded, is at its heart, and it is a scathing indictment of the conscience-shocking behavior of men in power. They embezzle; they rape; they murder. But this idea is not new, and it is not what makes the book so compulsively readable. Rather, it is the murder mystery at the story's center that compels the reader forward: Larsson has, first and foremost, written a heckuva thriller.

The story's protagonist is not a detective but a financial journalist (Larsson himself worked for many years as an editor). Recently (and perhaps wrongly) convicted of libel, Mikael Blomkvist is contacted by Henrik Vanger, an aging former CEO and member of a well-known corporate dynasty, to solve a murder that occurred over 40 years ago: his beloved niece Harriet disappeared without a trace from a small island off the Swedish coast. The murder perplexed family members and police officials alike; nevertheless, Vanger wants Blomkvist to give it a shot.

This premise is one of several moments in the book in which Larsson demands that the reader suspend her disbelief. Blomkvist drops everything to live on an island with Vanger for an entire year; he attracts and beds women with unrelenting ease; his hacker accomplice can gather literally any information he needs within 24 hours. More central to the story's progress is the improbable circumstances under which the teenage Harriet was murdered: Because a fire occurred on the island's only bridge to the mainland that same day, the case is a so-called "locked room mystery." Only about 15 people, all of them members of the Vanger clan, could have actually committed the crime.

I initially balked at what struck me as obvious plot devices. However, this book is not necessarily attempting realism. It is a thriller, and thrillers do not operate under the same rules as realistic fiction, my normal domain as a reader. Harriet's murder is an engaging puzzle precisely because it can be logically investigated and neatly analyzed.

In many ways, though, the murder itself is a plot device, meant to support Larsson's central thesis: power corrupts. Corporate and government officials, both those involved in the murder and those featured in related subplots, are guilty of financial corruption and sadistic personal habits. Yet Larsson's accusatory finger points inward, as well. Even the story's heroes are frequently morally degenerate. Obvious underdogs, righteous journalists, victimized women--they are sympathetic, but they also lie, cheat, and commit violent crimes of their own.

Incidentally, that fact is probably what saves the novel from slipping into self-important moralism: it raises questions even as it indicts. When is violence wrong, and when is it necessary? When should then truth be concealed? When does an end justify the means? These questions are interesting, if not always smoothly or subtly executed, and they have remained with me now that the book is done. But while I read, I read for one reason: What really happened to Harriet that day? The answer, and the manner in which it unfolds, is enough to make the book worth reading.

American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

Curtis Sittenfeld has done something that many young writers with smash-hit first novels are unable to do: she's gotten better. Prep was a socially conscious and deliciously catty look at an elite boarding school: Gossip Girls for the literate. Following Prep, she quietly released the even lighter The Man of My Dreams, which, I admit, I didn't even pick up. Sittenfeld struck me as a "French-fry" writer: you know there's a real potato in there somewhere, but it's buried under a heck of a lot of grease.

American Wife retains all of Prep's best qualities--class analysis, vivid characterization, and a gut-wrenching lesbian subplot--while avoiding its major pitfall: an irksome narrator. Lee Fiora was articulate and intelligent, but she was also cowardly and conniving; while I was able to stomach her, several readers I know found her grating. But Alice Blackwell, whose life we follow in American Wife, is even-tempered and compassionate. She is also somewhat timid and passive, but her flaws don't make her unbearable; they make her human.

And human is exactly what Sittenfeld is shooting for. American Wife has been widely publicized as a fictionalized account of the life of Laura Bush. From early tragedy to presidential paramour, Mrs. Bush's life is mapped out in exquisite, often painful detail, and it includes the intrigues of several thinly veiled public figures. The strength of this book lies in Sittenfeld's ability to render ambiguous even the most apparently monolithic characters: the feisty grandmother has a repressed, conventional side; the shy librarian has her secrets; and Charlie Blackwell, future president of the United Sates, is by turns drunken, sweet, ignorant, goofy, and well-meaning (though in all cases he is decidedly out of his element once in the Oval Office).

By the end of the book, I felt--gulp--compassion for some of the world's best-known Republicans (and I lean pretty far to the left). To me, this ability to make sympathetic people who are usually reduced to caricature was the book's biggest feat. But it is also the quality that might turn others off: in some ways, the book is a traditional "apology," providing explanations, even excuses, where perhaps there should be none. If a president makes huge mistakes and costs thousands of lives, does it really matter whether he was basically well-intentioned?

(Of course, it is also helpful--but oddly difficult--to remember that these are characters, not the men themselves. Sittenfeld is not writing biography, however closely her "fictional" situations mirror reality.)

The book is a quick read, if not quite as easy as Prep, and it satisfies as an intellectual's version of "beach book." In American Wife, Sittenfeld proves she doesn't want to be a "French fry" or any kind of tasty side dish: she's aiming for the main course. With few missteps, she makes it.