BOOKS: OCTOBER

BOOKS WE LOVE: In which we editors gush about the books—new or old—that have knocked our respective socks off.

THE INTERROGATIVE MOOD: A NOVEL?
by Padgett Powell
(Ecco Press, 2009)

An experiment that works. Padgett Powell’s feisty tribute to life is crafted as a series of questions that dismantles genres while evoking them. Internet profiles: Would you prefer to spend a day at a mental hospital or a day at the mall? Self-help: Do you recall the last time that you really had fun? Motivational: Is your life and what you are doing with it important? Philosophical: How did we go so wrong? Not since Virginia Woolf’s THE WAVES has a writer unleashed an ambitious and successful subversion—or liberation—of the rudiments of fiction. Are you capable of reading 164 pages of personal queries that range from the ridiculous to the sublime? Might these questions affect—or even change—you? Is this not a beautiful observation of bats flitting from a wall?: How the soft, friendly things keep pouring silently out of the brick? Powell’s unusual, poetic question mark of a novel may not satisfy the plot-loving crowd, but his main character—you—oozes humanity.

—CAF

JULIET, NAKED
by Nick Hornby
(Riverhead, 2009)

With his latest effort, Nick Hornby has produced another thinking person’s page turner, demonstrating once again (see: HIGH FIDELITY; ABOUT A BOY) his uncanny ability to craft novels that are entertaining and easy to read, yet packed with emotional intimacy. JULIET, NAKED follows a trio of highly imperfect, utterly believable characters—a British couple and a reclusive American singer-songwriter named Tucker Crowe—whose lives are defined—or possessed—by music.
 
Upon their return to England from a Tucker Crowe–themed pilgrimage to the U.S., the two out-of-love lovers post conflicting reviews of Tucker’s newest release. The woman’s honest, unstudied analysis surprisingly elicits an honest response from the musician himself. Their subsequent bonding via e-mail, which culminates in a hilarious encounter among all three characters, becomes a sincere and revealing meditation on love, relationships, and the power of songs.

Girlfriends (and ex-girlfriends) of fanatical music nerds—and perhaps the more honest and self-deprecating of such nerds themselves—will relate to these characters.

Lines we liked: "He began to worry that his ecstatic praise might have done NAKED a disservice; now nobody—none of the real fans, anyway, and it was difficult to imagine that many other people would bother with it—would be able to listen to it without prejudice. Oh, it was a complicated business, loving art. It involved a lot more ill will than one might have suspected."

—SCA

GIRL TROUBLE
by Holly Goddard Jones
(HarperPerennial, 2009)

Despite the title, GIRL TROUBLE, Holly Goddard Jones’s first short story collection confronts mature themes. The eight Kentucky-based tales rarely dip into lighthearted childhood pleasures, focusing instead on a mother’s rage toward her daughter’s murderer, an unraveling bond between longtime friends, and the discovery of what happened to a rapist decades after the act. Just as a father offers his near-blind son a glimpse of a peep show because “there are things you ought to be able to see in a lifetime,” Jones exposes a world that is darkly seductive.

Lines we liked: “He found himself staring, not at her, but at her shadow. There was a beauty to it: the way the legs stretched, impossibly long, to the seam between floor and wall, and the body emerged from the floor as though half-buried, first solid, as the arms folded in, then segmented, a shadow-arm arcing above a shadow-head.” (“Allegory of a Cave”)
 
—CMG