Amazon.ca Books Best of the Month: March 2009

*Spotlight Title: Lowboy* by John Wray**
I'm not the first and certainly won't be the last reader to herald Lowboy for the subtle homage it pays to one of the best-known heroes in 20th-century fiction, or to envy and delight in its masterful vision of New York City as seen from its darkest, most primal places. What's most seductive for me about John Wray's third novel--and arguably the one that puts him squarely on the map alongside contemporary luminaries like Joseph O'Neill, Jonathan Lethem, and Junot Diaz--is how skillfully it maps the mind's mysterious terrain. This isn't exactly uncharted land: John Wray's Will Heller--a.k.a. Lowboy--is a paranoid schizophrenic who, certain of both his own dysfunction and of the world's imminent collapse by way of global warming, could easily remind you of Ken Kesey, but Wray handles that subtext delicately and is careful to make Will's mission to "cool down" and save the world feel single-minded without being moralistic. Wray invokes all the classic elements of a mystery in the telling, and that's what makes this novel such a searing read. As Will rides the subway in pursuit of a final solution to the crisis at hand, we meet (among others) Will's mother Violet, an Austrian by birth with an inscrutable intensity that gives the story a decidedly noir feel; Ali Lateef, the unflappable detective investigating Will's disappearance whose touch of brilliance always seems in danger of being snuffed out; and Emily Wallace, the young woman at the heart of Will's tragic odyssey. The novel moves seamlessly between Will's fits and starts below ground and Violet and Ali's equally staccato investigation of each other above. This kind of pacing is the stuff we crave (and we think you will, too)--the kind that draws you in so unawares that before you know it, it's past midnight and you're down to the last page. --Anne Bartholomew
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Cheever: A Life by Alan Bradley		The Glister by John Burnside
In this monumental, masterful, and, at nearly 800 pages, mammoth biography, Blake Bailey (author of A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates) turns his attention to John Cheever, "the Chekhov of the suburbs," and his storied, celebrated, and deeply tortured life. Written with compassion and the full cooperation of Cheever's widow and their three children, Cheever chronicles the mournful arc of a lifetime struggling with a duplicity that ached throughout his writing life--despite a 41-year marriage, Cheever was a closeted bisexual who simmered with self-loathing. With full access to Cheever's journals, Bailey covers the author's childhood, his time in the army, his life as a writer and his literary rivals, his alcoholism, and his struggle to play the role of suburban family man. The book is peppered with literary cameos: Updike, Bellow, and Roth are there, along with his Iowa Writers' Workshop students T.C. Boyle, Ron Hansen, and Allan Gurganus. Bailey also edited two new editions of Cheever's stories and novels, a literary hat trick that's about to spark a well-deserved Cheever renaissance.		Lister's secretive chemical plant fueled Innertown's economy for decades, but since its closure, its legacies are poverty, clusters of rare cancers, and a local wilderness populated with rumors of an unnatural selection of misshapen wildlife. When Mark Wilkinson--the first of several teen-aged boys to disappear every 12-18 in the coming years--is found hanged in the "poison woods" over a bizarre shrine of boughs, glass, and tinsel, the town constable chooses to cover up the atrocity (to the pleasure of Innertown's corrupt string-pullers), leaving the town's long-abandoned youth to take responsibility themselves. The Glister is a strange and affecting book, working as both simmering horror and a Dennis Lehane-style thriller: think The Blair Witch Project meets Mystic River meets It. Burnside's deliberate prose strikes a pitch-perfect balance between the insidious banalities of industrial society and the unacknowledged horrors lurking in the varicose network of cracks in its crumbling foundations, the spaces where institutionalized cowardice and naïve accountability meet to settle the fates of a damaged society's innocents. It's a story that will stay with you long after its last harrowing pages.
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Don't Cry by Mary Gaitskill		Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven by Susan Jane Gilman
Mary Gaitskill has a reputation as the chronicler of bad relationships, but that doesn't do justice to the stories she tells. Her relationships turn bad, or turn good, or just turn (and turn and turn). In every exploitation there's an attraction, or at least an accommodation; in every hostility there's a yearning for, or at least a memory of, connection. You see the intensity of people--friends and family as well as lovers--drawn together, and the often equally intense emptiness when the magnet flips and repels. Gaitskill is one of our best short story writers (and the prickly, sad brilliance of her last book, Veronica, confirmed her as a master of the novel, too). Don't Cry is just her third story collection in 20 years, and it reminds you immediately of why you've been longing to read her again. Once more, there are former lovers and ex-friends, and parents and children who have not quite made a hash of things, but there's also a broadening in this collection, especially in the title story, which looks at the ties of family and friendship when they are stretched across the global distance of privilege and poverty.		While the latest memoir from Susan Jane Gilman (former Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress) appears to be a saucy account of international sexcapades, it quickly reveals its whip-smarts, sucking you into a story that brilliantly captures the "ecstatic terror" of gleefully leaping from your comfort zone--and finding yourself in freefall. It's 1986, and newly minted ivy league grads Susy and her friend Claire have never left the U.S. when (inspired by a "Pancakes of Many Nations" promotion during a drunken night at IHOP) they hatch a plan to circle the world, starting in China, which has just opened to tourists. From the moment of arrival, they're out of their depth, perpetually hungry, foolish, and paranoid from relentless observation. Claire, who carries the complete works of Nietzsche "like a Gideon Bible," seems more capable than Susy until encounters with military police, hallucinatory fevers, and a frantic escape from a squalid hospital expose cracks in her psyche that utterly derail their plans. Rich with insight, dead-on dialogue, and canny characterization, Gilman's personal tale nails that cataclysmic collision of idealism and reality that so often characterizes young adulthood. Be prepared to wolf down the final hundred pages in one sitting.
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The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell		Sea Sick by Alanna Mitchell
Littell cuts into the heart of European darkness with his vast, audacious fictional memoir of Dr. Max Aue, a former Nazi officer who has reinvented himself years later as a middle-class entrepreneur and family man in northern France. An intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music, Max is also an assassin and consummate bureaucrat. Through the eyes of this cultivated monster, we experience the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of the Jews in disturbingly precise detail. During the period from June 1941 through April 1945, Max is posted to Poland, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus. He is present at the Battle of Stalingrad, at Auschwitz and Cracow, visits occupied Paris, and lives through the chaos of the final days of the Nazi regime in Berlin. Although Max is a totally imagined character, his world is peopled by real historical figures, including Eichmann, Himmler, Göring, Speer, Heydrich, Höss, and Hitler himself. Littell's massive masterpiece is intense, utterly original, and morally challenging. Critics abroad have compared this provocative and controversial work to Tolstoy's War and Peace--with good reason.		All life on Earth depends on the oceans for two things: oxygen and climate control. One-celled, sea-dwelling organisms called phytoplankton (more so than rain forests) are our planet’s lungs. And our climate is regulated by ocean currents, winds, and water cycles. In this riveting account, Alanna Mitchell examines the current state of the world's oceans--the planet's greatest unexamined ecological crisis--and how we're altering everything about them, from temperature, salinity, and acidity to ice cover, volume, circulation, and the life within. Joining crews of leading scientists in nine of the global ocean's hotspots, Mitchell reports firsthand on what's really happening around the world. Whether it's the impact of coral reef bleaching, the puzzle of the oxygenless dead zones such as the expanding "dessert" in the Gulf of Mexico, or the shocking implications of the changing Ph balance of the sea, she lays out the science behind the story to create an accessible, authoritative account. In the words of Farley Mowat, "Death is running amok on the earth, but especially in the sea. If you would know how and why, read Sea Sick... although it may make you heartsick."
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