Since my last blog I have read five books:

       

        Jonathan Franzen:  “Purity,”

       Andrew Ervin: “Burning Down George Orwell’s House,” 

       Jane Gardam: “The Hollow Land,”  

       T.C. Boyle “The Harder they Come,” and

       Christopher Buckley: “Boomsday.”

         There was considerable variation in style, length, and the pleasure derived from them.

       “Purity” is a long, long book (568 pages in hardcover) and granted that Franzen is a terrific writer, it seemed to me to be far too long, and I found myself skipping. To try to summarize the plot briefly is almost impossible. We have Purity, known as Pip, post-college, living in San Francisco, who grows up with a mother who will not reveal who her father was. She seems to be one of the better-balanced and saner characters in spite of the oddity of her upbringing. There is Andreas growing up in East Germany, before the fall of the Wall: narcissistic, fixated on his mother, serial masturbator and oral sex addict, who eventually becomes a sort of Wikileaks, Assange-type mastermind, operating out of Bolivia.

       We have Tom (with a considerable back story, starting with his mother in Germany, and a post-Berlin Wall encounter with Andreas) and Leila in Denver, where Tom runs an investigative news organization. Leila is his star reporter, following up on a story about a missing nuclear warhead in Texas. Though Tom and Leila are an item, she is still living with a paralyzed husband.  Tom’s back-story includes page after page after page of argument and logic-chopping during a fifteen year marriage to Anabel. And Anabel herself, the daughter of a billionaire who rejects a huge inheritance, is another peculiarly eccentric piece of work, exemplified in part by her extreme feminism, which leads her to insist that Tom sit on the toilet to pee. Both Anabel and Andreas are so completely weird as to be classified as borderline insane.

      I have read one slashing review that accuses Franzen of simply letting himself get totally out of hand.  And another reviewer’s comment reflected how I felt. “But, for every wonderful piece of prose, for every masterful stroke in this novel, there is the stuff that was simply distracting, if not alienating and infuriating. For all its extravagant ambition, the book is full of self-indulgent nonsense.”

      Andrew Ervin’s novel (the first, I think), “Burning Down George Orwell’s House,” has the well-worn scenario we have all seen in other novels. Super advertising executive, living in Chicago, disgusted with what he is doing to promote gas-guzzlers in campaigns that win him awards, and with a failing marriage, decides to get off the grid and exile himself to the island of Jura off the coast of Scotland, where he is able to rent the very house that Orwell lived in when he was writing 1984—which our protagonist, Ray, believes is the greatest book ever written, and that its prophecies of Big Brother have indeed come to pass with the Internet. And, of course, it being Scotland, what better than a cast of highly eccentric characters, some evil and some harmless (including one who is a vampire), with whom poor Ray has to struggle in his effort to “find himself” in exile. The novel has its oddities (including the vampire aspect) and some of Ray’s actions that place him in considerable danger are not very credible. But this was, for me, an entertaining read--funny and philosophically interesting, with its reflections on 1984 and why Orwell went to live on this remote island.

      Jane Gardam’s “Hollow Land” is a collection of nine short to long connected stories centered around the relationship between the Teesdales, a Cumbrian farming family, and the Batemans, a London family, who rent a  farmhouse belonging to the Teesdales as a vacation home over a long period of years, during which the children grow up and the families grow closer.

      Much of the focus is the relationship between two boys, Bell Teesdale and Harry Batemen, who have a number of adventures—one quite dangerous in an abandoned mine and another when visiting a frozen waterfall in arctic weather. The perspectives of the stories vary, but there is a consistent quality of tone reflecting in part the steadily developing relationship between the two boys. And no set of stories involving an English village would be without a few eccentric characters, all of whom are gently portrayed. It’s a very good read that leaves you greatly admiring the writing of Jane Gardam, who is in the long tradition of English female writers from Jane Austen to Penelope Fitzgerald. And if you have not read Gardam’s novel “Old Filth”—then you should.

      T.C. Boyle’s latest novel, “The Harder They Come” (how many has he written? 14?) is a great read, and the first 60 or so pages, something of a prologue to the main story, are particularly gripping. Sten, a retired high school principal, and his wife Carolee, are on an excursion from a cruise ship in Costa Rica, visiting a nature preserve, when they are ambushed and robbed by a group of young men. But Sten—in an instinctive act of retaliation that wins him brief fame and later appearances on television—turns the tables on the leader of the group with a degree of violence that he later regrets, or does he? Perhaps this is supposed to be some sort of a metaphor about American violence: when is it justified by concerns for safety? Certainly, as the novel proceeds, there is a lot of focus on violence and a number of deaths by violence.

      With Sten’s return to Mendocino County in California, the main story begins. He and Carolee are estranged from their son, Adam, now in his twenties, who has been a borderline psychiatric problem from his first day in high school (where Sten was the principal), and he is now living out in the redwood forests cultivating poppies, imagining himself as the mountain man, John Colter, and regarding almost everyone as a ‘hostile,’ or a Chinese, whom he sees as an enemy. Boyle devotes some pages to Colter, a scout for Lewis and Clark, who became an Indian fighter, whose most famous escapade

was running naked for several miles, with bare feet crunching on prickly pears, pursued by Blackfeet Indian braves. Again, we seem to be getting back to the roots of American violence on the frontier.

      The loony, armed Adam meets up with another loony, Sara Jennings, a 40-year-old government-hating farrier and animal groomer who calls herself a "sovereign citizen" and rebels by not registering her car or wearing a seat belt, telling police officers, "You have no authority over me … I have no contract with you." She refers to the US government as the US Illegitimate Government of America the Corporate. It is quite difficult to understand why she is still on the loose at 40: given her behavior, one would have expected her to be serving a long term in prison. Adam comes and goes in Sara’s life—they certainly like sex with each other—but Adam is headed for major trouble, and the well-meaning Sten is dragged into it: is Adam’s behavior his fault as a father?

      There is a lot going on alongside the central story: a vigilante group called Take Back Our Forests is patrolling the woods around Mendocino for Mexican drug gangs: Sten chases armed drug coyotes through the woods in a Toyota Prius: gunshots are fired: drugs are discovered: racial tensions rise: federal agents swarm: and meetings are held in the high school auditorium.

      If there is a problem with the book it is that the characters, Adam and Sara, whose irrational, far-right, un-American ignorance (or outright insanity) make them hard to follow with any sympathy. Nevertheless, this a crackingly good novel—and even if I did not altogether pick up on what critics discern as a book about American nativism and the frontier roots of American violence, I read it with great enjoyment and admiration for the writing.

      And as for Christopher Buckley’s satirical book, “Boomsday,” it is very, very, funny—dealing with politics, a presidential election,  a foul-mouthed president, K-Street PR firms, a proposal to offer tax incentives to older people to commit suicide to help to save Social Security…lots of hilarious stuff that has, unfortunately, a very close resemblance to what actually goes on the political arena. Another satirical novel on political lobbyists was “Thank you for Smoking.” However, his latest book—“The Relic Hunter”-- which came out recently, moves away from political satire, and dives into medieval history. It has been well-reviewed recently.