The first chapter of this book has the quiet charm and colorful charactors one would expect, but it quickly devolves into a confused meander through side stories, secondary charactors and long passages (pages and chapters) of people sitting and telling the story to someone else - at a wake, a bar, etc, creating a distance between the reader and a flattening of any plot tension. This is heightened by the undefined narrator/lens figure. Yes, she is the daughter of Billy's good friend, but beyond being there as a witness to the conversations and reminiscences, she plays no narrative role, has no stake in the story, no life outside the story, in short, she is flat. Why McDermott chose this way to construct the story is beyond me - the occaisional interjections of the narrator's first person voice every 30 pages are a disruption that contributes nothing to the story.
The main story, of a man who is told by his best friend his fiancee has died, when she (we learn in first chapter) married someone else, could have been interesting, but it is never developed as other charactors' loves and work tales take over. The whole thing feels like listening to someone else's family stories where you don't really know who is who, and after awhile, don't care.

Griffin is happy in his marriage and actually enjoys the routine of his life. He knows his wife is having an affair, but chooses to ignore it rather than respond to it. He is forced into a response when she announces her intent to divorce. Griffin and Zoe are sympathetic charactors trying to cope with what they don't understand, but Berg fails to make us understand Griffin's responses here. Yes he wants his wife back, but why? It is made very clear that she never felt happy together, his friends think she is odd, she has no friends, no outside life until her affair. Rather than sort out the complexities of the human heart, Berg wastes her skills as a writer by simplifying this into a "he learns "he don't know what he's got till its gone" female fantasy". While she sets up the beginning nicely, it turns into a formula that forces the wish-fulfillment ending rather than letting out see the charactors develop their own responses.

Ethan Levin's boss and fellow programmer tells him "Look..Programming starts out like its going to be architecture...theoretical and abstract and spatial and up-in-the-head...then it has this nasty tendency to turn into plumbing." Unfortunately, so does the plot of this book. You think you will get a brilliant and thought-out mystery and wind up with a plodding plot. Ethan's problem is that he needs to be a plumber and fix a bug that arose in one of his codes. But the bug proves so elusive and enduring, showing up at key moments such as sales demonstrations, in front of the VCs, etc and then disappearing again with no "core dump" of information that might help locate it, that it earns the name the Jester. Not just the Jester. Levin's Jester. The pursuit of this bug provides the structure of this novel - Levin's life devolves as his obsession with solving the problem grows, and the bug affects the company's future.

Ellen Ullman comes close to writing a fine novel about the world of computer programmers in the early eighties. Coding becomes a reflection of and a contrast to human thought, a metaphor that is played out in a simulated ecosystem Ethan developed in graduate school that he turns to when "it seems my life has gone from one thing to another without my having much to say about it". Based on a theory called Life: the game, this simplified and controlled simulation is contrasted against Ethan's life that is both simple and complex, willed and spinning out of control, as he maintains his schedule and loses his girl friend. However, this metaphor is most successful in the beginning and end of the novel but seems to lose its literary power in the middle, become a mere plot device.
A bigger problem lies in the structure of the novel, which opens and ends with a first person narrator named Roberta who first discovered the bug when she was Ethan's tester and is looking back almost 20 years. Roberta also shows up in the mainly third person narrated main section, but mostly as a minor character, as she must have seemed to Ethan. But occasionally the first-person voice jumps back in, providing details of her life and loves back then, her own confrontations with the bug. These moments are so few that rather than creating an alternating and enriching viewpoint, they are jarring, and the character of Roberta in these passages seems beside the point of the action, which is what is happening to Ethan. The details of her love life have no reason to be there except perhaps to attempt to make her more authentic, but they slow the novel down. Her training as a linguistic does add some philosophical musings to the book as she contrasts the accretion of meaning to symbols with the world of artificial language. But this musing that establishes her voice occurs quite early in the book. By the end of the book, these references disappear, as does the voice and the Roberta we see could have been any other character.
Still, the biggest complaint with Roberta as narrator is that her jumping to the foreground now and then creates a distance the tale does not need and slows the action. Then, in the end, the voice of Roberta is used to tie up loose ends, but a tighter finer control of the plot could have done that as well.
Still, interesting books about computer programming are few and far between. The book begins as one of the better, and though it falls short of its promise, you will care enough to keep reading to the end.

Finding Caruso is a rare find - a book that carries you with it using both empathy and a clear hard eye on its characters. This book about two brothers, told by the younger brother Buddy, is about things lost along the road to growing up - in this case a literal road out of the shack in Oklahoma where the two brothers lived with a drunken abusive father and a shadowy suffering mother whose only offering is extra sugar in their tea when they suffer a beating, a heartbreak, a loss. Lee's way with a guitar and the ladies may take the brothers to LA and success some day, but this book is about the long stop the two make in a logging and mill town of Idaho. But as the title implies, this book is also about the things one finds even as one is letting things - and people - go. Loss is not simple, nor are the bonds that hold the brothers together - bonds that are at some times too binding and at others too loose and at times, all they have in the world. An older beautiful woman named Irene threatens to come between, as does the potential for Lee to be a big star and move on from the people in Idaho who have given them a start in life - the bar owner and bartender and band. When Irene chooses younger Buddy over Lee, it allows Buddy to see himself for the first time as someone with other options than playing the role of baby brother, of being a nobody son of a drunk farming cotton in the dust, destined to dead end jobs and deadened loves. For the first time he considers not just a limited life in which he must hide but a world in which he can act and grow. But her love is complicated by a hidden past, including an Indian friend accused of murder of a woman in Lee's band.
The progression of the tale is masterly - supple language combines with hard luck to create a story that draws one in. Buddy and Lee are characters we care about and believe in, even when we can see them hurting each other or acting foolish. Even their blindness to their own actions rings true. Minor or side characters are, with a few rare exceptions, fully drawn with a few lines or actions, so that one can almost smell the combination of stale smoke, Jack Daniels and soured dreams on the page. Irene is presented as the most complex character and is a bit more problematic. Her dialogue is far more stylized than the others, which marks her clearly as an outsider, but I often found trying to hear someone speak like that in my head would ring flat and affected. Her beauty and mystery attract Buddy, and provide much of the emotional heart of the story, but some of her actions towards the end feel forced into the plotline. Her character as written is both compelling and incomplete.
This first time novel by memoirist Kim Barnes is a real find!

Unlike many college guides that confuse the quality of student's who get accepted or rejected as a measure of the quality of the education, the Fiske guide attempts to go beyond mere stats and numbers. So, while you will find Median test scores, number of applicatants and percent accepted, you will also find ratings on quality of academics, quality of life, overlaps, etc. Especially helpful are the guides to each school's strongest (as opposed to most popular)departments. Beyond the stats listed for each school, there are fairly long essays on each school, so that you get a real feel for the culture of each school. This is both Fiske's strength and weakness. While it is helpful to learn that at Northwestern "some call the political atomosphere 'apathetic'" - a fact demonstrated during the Iraq War earlier this year, these essays do NOT get "Entirely Updated Every Year" as the cover claims for the guide. The stats for Harvey Mudd are identical in every way in both the 2001 and 2004 edition - down to the number of applicants (1517)and percent of male/female - something I find hard to believe. Further the essay for the school says "the computer science major has been considered weak in the past but students say there have been improvements" That's in both editions as well - and i have no way of knowing whether the 2001 copied 2000, etc - so that information is at best out of date and those students long gone. Fiske needs to flag statements like that where they talk about ongoing changes in the essays and follow-up on them. Still, its a great way to begin narrowing down choices based on what a college offers students, not just what a student offers the college's applicant-ranking numbers game.

Like a game of chess where anonymous pawns are sacrificed, pieces swapped and humble pawns can be made queens, where strategy is all, this novel moves players and identities about on a board incomprehensible to the players/narrators but fascinating to the readers. Told in 4 voices that spread from WWI to the early 1960's and the execution of Eichmann in Jerusulaem, we see that names, identities and futures are swapped by games of chess on board a train to the Eastern front of WWI. But soon we find that all these disparate voices are united in the sense of belonging to one giant chess game whose moves they can not control and - even more - in the interconnectedness and yet shadowy strands that connect them all. The Shadow Without A Name is a book that combines intelligence, strategy and suggestiveness to convey the fluidness of personal identity and yet the way we all quest for a sense of who we are,and for a way to understand our role in the world. The Shadow suggested works on many levels - including the way we cast shadows on other's lives, and how those shadows affect us. The different voices are all distinct characters in tone, and yet the use of these voices is quite well done - there is no sense of choppiness to the novel as it progresses forward and through the past. While some of the action takes place during war, this is not a "war book", nor is it simply a mystery concerned with a simple crime. The structure of self and identity and the need to know what happens as a result of these overt and sublte games of chess will keep the reader following the game to the end of the book. If there is any weakness, it is that places are mentioned, but never fully evoked or felt, but this is minor when the people and plot are so compellingly drawn.

You really don't want to live in this guy's head for 254 pages. The sub-title says that this is "a marine's chronicle of the gulf war and other battles" but the book is really only about the marine - Swofford. Not the Marine Corps, not the war. The incidents portrayed are nothing more than backdrop for Swofford to talk about himself -his self-pity and his sense of superiority to others. No matter what Swofford claims to be talking about, the only thing that he really talks about is himself - Consider these two accounts: the first we hear of his girlfriend while he is in the gulf, is when he suspects she is cheating on him. We have no idea who she is, how they met, what she looks like or even what he thinks of her - he merely mentions that he is sure she is cheating because she works in a hotel and claims to "have a good friend". The incident is not about infidelity but about how easy it is for Swofford to play the victim and feel sorry for himself. This is pretty much true of all people in the book. Second example: a friend from the Marine Corps dies back home after serving his commitment. Swofford creates a chapter not about his friend, or grief or insights or revelations about how those might affect him. All his observations are about how he knew the deceased better than the mother and how pathetic the mother is because she didn't really know her son the way Swofford knew him. Not once does he consider that the mother may have known another side of her son, one not shown to a buddy in the corps. Getting into a rough bar fight after the funeral he observes of the strangers in the bar that "those men had actually shown Troy more respect than his family and friends becasue the family and friends had loved Troy and with their selfishness and love had wanted him to again be a part of their world." This sounds more like territorial posseviness - who gets to claim the memory of the deceased - the mom or the other marine who wants him to belong to his own world instead. Swofford shallowly doesn't even see he is doing just what he blamed the mom for. Though he is quick to let you know he carries around books like "Myth of Sisyphus" or "Portable Nietzche", the books are also mere props - ways to show his superiority but the subtly and refelction required to understand these books never comes out. No woman in the book comes out well - they are either there as "pay for" or as girlfriends or wives who will almost certainly cheat on you. While Swofford is capable of writing a sentance and even portraying anectodotes, the book as a whole lacks cohesiveness or depth and becomes monotonous - sort of like he makes the Marine Corps sound - drinking, womanizing, self-pity and rude behavoir in an endless cycle. The only real war going on in this book is that Swofford can't decide if he hates himself or feels superior to everyone else or both.

It is hard to imagine these stories being printed if the author hadn't won a Pulitzer Prize for earlier work. The charactors are flat, quickly drawn by highlighting eccentricities and hick-speech patterns. They do not develop, learn, or even make you care because they remain hollow figures devoid of inner life, finely shaded emotions or anything two diminsional. The treatment of the landscape is about the same - while The West and ranching figure in plots, you can not once envision a place from her descriptions or feel its prescence. The only thing that works is a few plots that amble along - but even that only sometimes works: consider the flat drone of a plot such as Job History, which is nothing but a list of jobs held and what was on tv at the time. If you are looking for a book to capture "the west" - whatever your idea of that might be - tough, romantic, whatever - this is not it. If you are looking for a book that is literary and a good read, this is also not it - it is a book that finally is all about the author's own voice - a rather flat and dull voice when you get too close, with no range at all.

This book is astonishingly beautiful. I'll admit I never heard of this book or the author Kertesz until he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I will also admit I only picked it up because of the prize, and that the subject matter - concentration camps of World War II meant it sat around for several weeks while I debated whether there really was any reason to read one more account of the horrors of WWII - hasn't it all been said. But then I began to read and I was enchanted by the voice of the narrator - a young, bright non-religious Jew who precisely because he doesn't understand what is going on, presents us all with an authentic sense of his world. The chapter where he first arrives and ses all the convicts and wonders what they did to arrive there then follows him through the showers and shavings of his body and the clothing he is handed and his suddens realization that he too is now a convict is presented without editorilizing on identity, so that when he is transformed you feel it, not think it. There is no attempt to manipulate your feelings with pathos or self-pity, nor is there the bitterness of regret that comes from looking back. This book is written as it was experienced, so that there is no attempt to editoralize the situations or fit them into what shoudl be said. Thus we get both moments of horror and humor, of beauty even as the crematoriums smoke, of total selfishness and stubborn selflessness. Consider this passage when the very ill narrator is almost tossed in with the corpses and soon to be corpses arriving at Buchenwald, and is hoping for death's release: "Here and there suspicious smoke mixed with the more friendly vapors and from somewhere the sound of a familiar clanging reached out to me lke the ringing of bells in one's dreams... in spite of any other consideration, rational thought..I couldn't mistake the furtive words of some kind of quiet desire rising from within myself, as if embarrassed by their senselessness...I would so like to live a little longer in this beautiful concentration camp!" This is an extraordinaryly honest book of - not the concentration camps - but of a fellow human being - and that is why one should read it.

First, let me state that all that keeps this book from being a 5 star is the sudden shift into evasiveness at the end. Until then, we are presented with a great stories about the pain (and pleasure) of growing up isolated on a ranch in Montana. Judy Blunt, living up to her name, writes with an eye to detail that brings to life the difficult times and draws you in - ... BR>Though a natural storyteller, the first few chapters show well-written paragraphs that don't quite hold together, but she quickly hits her stride as she relates her stories with a compellingly clear voice. With economy of words, she writes "Already most of what we knew went unsaid" and in that one sentance we get the silence, the isolation of the family and within the family, the yearning for dialogue she does not find. A growing subtext is her realization that tho she loves the land her family and later her husband work, she will never "own" an acre, never be fully herself there. Aside from the relentless work and isolation is the subservient position of most women on ranches (in fairness to ranchers, her mother seems to have had more power and respect than she later has as a wife). ... Blunt is not afraid to present her own faults to death, which is why the shift away from honesty to evasiveness at the end is all the more disappointing. I did not read this because I wanted to hear an account of her marriage breaking up, but after so much honesty and hundreds of pages of her growing unhappiness, the book skips from being unhappy to being divorced in Missoula. What made her finally leave? What did she think when she had the ranch in her rear view mirror? How did she come to the decision to take the kids and was that part of it - getting them out? Did she leave a man or the land? The memoir could easily suggest the land was at fault as much as the man. In a memoir named Breaking Clean, we need to see that break, not just her unhappiness - the title is like an unfullfilled promise. Perhaps it was respect for others' (her kids, her ex-husband's) privacy - or maybe she just chickened out. But she chose to write the memoir, not a novel. What we expect is a book about breaking away, not just the years that explain why she broke away.