Friday, March 08, 2013

ANOTHER BULLSHIT NIGHT IN SUCK CITY by Nick Flynn (2004) W.W. Norton, 341 pages



Not only is the title beguiling, but so is every story unfurled in this unabashedly direct memoir of a lost father and a son trying to find his way.

Flynn opens with a close-up of his father Jonathan in an ATM, pretending to be banking, “brought to you by the Museum of the Homeless” where he “bends to his deposit slip, Six hundred and seventy thousand cash…puts it in an envelope, licks the envelope shut” then “curls up on the ceramic floor, turns his face to the baseboard, tucked below the window so the fake police won’t see him.”

Flynn-the-younger worked in a Boston homeless shelter from 1984-1990. His father was homeless for five years, beginning in 1987. It was inevitable that their paths would cross. And, you witness both of them struggle with addiction. About his father’s insistence on writing a novel, he discloses: “His novel, such as it is, if it is at all, written in blackout and prison, is his ark, the thing that will save him…His single-mindedness impresses most, his fathomless belief in his own greatness, in his power to transform a failed world, to make it whole again by a word. By a story. That if you stick with your vision long enough you will be redeemed.” And, you hope for redemption for both, a shared redemption that in the end comes in the shape of the book in your hand.

Each sentence in Nick Flynn's memoir is a gasping punch to the solar plexus or a curare dart to the heart.

I will read everything he writes.

Follow @_nick_flynn_ on Twitter or visit his website: http://nickflynn.org

Tuesday, March 05, 2013

WAVE by Sonali Deraniyagala (2013) McClelland & Stewart, 228 pages



Harrowing, heartbreaking and healing, Sonali Deraniyagala unflinchingly recounts her journey since the tsunami that devastated her immediate family on December 26, 2004. That morning her husband Steve, their two young sons Vikram and Malli, and her parents were killed by the 30-foot wave that swallowed the lives of 200K others in Yala, Sri Lanka.

In prose that is spare and precise and a gasping gut-punch, Deraniyagala begins her narrative by admitting, “I thought nothing of it at first…It didn’t seem that remarkable. Or that alarming. It was only the white curl of a big wave.” Yet within moments that stretch into hours and days, the centre of her world falls apart and although she is the only one in her family who survives the disaster with cuts to her face and limbs and stones in her tangled hair she says her “mind could not sort anything out.” And, when a truck arrives at the hospital triage with a load of recovered corpses the “wild, wretched” shrieking crackles “into the numbness” in her head, “blasting the smallest stir of hope” in her heart.

How extraordinarily excruciating it must have been for Deraniyagala to live those personally apocalyptic moments and then relive them as she committed them to paper. What strikes me as most remarkable about WAVE is the generous way in which she so vibrantly recreates her sons and her husband and as in the fiction of Alice Munro and Carol Shields celebrates the ordinariness of daily life. And, in flashes we hear their voices, as when then-five-year-old Malli tells his older brother Vikram, “Don’t be scared. It’s good when it’s all really black. You can see your dreams better.”

Deraniyagala moves from plotting her own death to reconciling herself to yearning for what never will be. She assures that “their voices have doubled in strength now, not faded with time. Their chatter plays with my thoughts no end. And, I am sustained by this, it gives me spark.”

WAVE is simultaneously published today by McClelland & Stewart in Canada, Virago Books in the UK, and A.A.Knopf in the United States. Find the courage to read this extraordinary book. It’s the least you can do since Deraniyagala faced such darkness and summoned the grace and courage to not only write it, but to share such an ultimately redemptive story with the world.

Monday, March 04, 2013

THE DEMONOLOGIST by Andrew Pyper (2013) Simon and Schuster, 285 pages


Pyper's finest yet, THE DEMONOLOGIST has a terrifying, taut, intelligent narrative featuring a Milton scholar who faces an unthinkable darkness that challenges everything he believes about this world and the next.

From the familiarity of paradoxically intimate public spaces in New York City like the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal to the labyrinthine calles of Venice, Pyper will have your heart thudding an impatient tattoo as you feel with each gasping breath what his protagonist David Ullman feels as he attempts to recover his lost daughter Tess. With whiplash-inducing narrative drive, THE DEMONOLOGIST will have you flipping pages through the night.

Already optioned for the big screen and in development at Universal Pictures by Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump, Flight), Pyper’s smartypants storytelling will certainly reach an even wider audience than his already dedicated readers. In my dream casting Michael Shannon—surely one of the finest, most fearless actors of our time—will play the Paradise Lost scholar for whom everything falls apart because of his unwavering paternal love.

THE DEMONOLOGIST deserves all of the superlatives heaped upon it and I hope it firmly establishes Andrew Pyper as a writer with the courage to face deeply human fears in a profoundly human way.


Get your own copy of this remarkable book, available in stores today. Follow @andrewpyper on Twitter and visit his website: www.andrewpyper.com 

Sunday, March 03, 2013

3 Terrific 2012 novels: A LAND MORE KIND THAN HOME, SHINE SHINE SHINE, and WHERE'D YOU GO, BERNADETTE




A LAND MORE KIND THAN HOME by Wiley Cash (Harper Collins)
If you're a fan of Margaret Laurence's style, then you'll love this debut. If you're snake phobic like me, the first 50 pages will be a struggle. Follow @wileycash on Twitter. Visit his website: http://www.wileycash.com


SHINE SHINE SHINE by Lydia Netzer (St. Martin’s Press)
The best book about alopecia, astronauts and autism that you'll ever read. A startling debut novel. I read it in one great gulp. Follow Lydia Netzer as @lostcheerio on Twitter. Visit her website: http://lydianetzer.blogspot.ca



WHERE’D YOU GO, BERNADETTE by Maria Semple (Little, Brown and Company)
Quirky, smart, sly, this novel by Maria Semple (who cut her teeth as a writer for television on ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT) is maddening, joyful and deeply human. Visit her website: http://www.mariasemple.com