It’s not a good idea to write a review of a book when your eyes are still wet with the tears it caused you to shed. So I waited an entire day to see if the raw emotion evoked by David Small’s graphic memoir Stitches would abate a little before I told you about this book.

I had to wait two days.

Holy shit does this book pack an emotional punch. It’s the first buzzed about graphic novel that actually surpassed the hype (see Asterios Polyp and Watchmen for the disappointments).

In Stitches David Small shows and tells us what it was like to grow up in his family. Ruled by an angry, unhappy mother who communicates in slammed cupboards, coughs, and silence. A father who is a radiologist and subjects young, sickly David to all kinds of radiation treatments in order to clear up some sinus problems. And an older brother who takes out all the stress of living with this family on his drums.

David grows up an imaginative, subdued kid with who walks with a hunch, as though the burden of the dysfunction and abuse is just too much for him to bear. He loves Alice in Wonderland and often parades around the neighborhood sporting a yellow towel reminiscent of Alice’s hair.

When David’s 11, one of his dad’s doctor friends notices a growth on David’s neck. The friend advises them to get it checked out, but they wait claiming there isn’t enough money. Meanwhile, David’s parents buy new cars, furniture, and a host of material goods. It isn’t until he’s 14 that they finally get the growth checked out. It’s cancer. Only they never tell David that. They don’t even tell him after he lives through two operations, and awakens to find a railroad of stitches leading from his ear to his collarbone. When he awakens after having a vocal chord removed and his voice is gone.

Man.

This story is so sad and so tragic, and yet somehow beauty can be found in the emotional honesty with which Small renders his story. We learn about his family’s history his crazy grandma, his mother’s secrets, and while it does not excuse their abuse it does make it understandable.

Small illustrates his harrowing story beautifully, the drawings are a watery, smokey gray infused with tension and fear — adults are masked behind opaque glasses, anger rendered in the two lines of a furrowed brow.

I can’t say that I actually enjoyed reading Stitches. It’s not a pleasurable experience, no. Reading it made me so sad, which sounds kind of weak. But there you have it. The book is sad and tragic, and heartbreaking. Some of it hits a little too close to home and the idea that Small experienced it too and rendered it so perfectly literally takes my breath away.

Even now as I write about the book, my eyes fill up with tears. Oh, who am I kidding, I’m bawling my head off here. I’m going to believe it’s because what Small has done is turned tragedy into beauty and that is something joyful and wonderful and worth crying about.

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Even before he’s born, Junior is told exactly when the world is gonna end. He’s told, in utero that the world will end June 15, 2010 when he is just 36 years old after a giant comet smashes into Earth and obliterates life on the planet.

Heavy.

That’s how Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr. opens and it just gets better from there. It starts with this unknown, omniscient “we” telling Junior all about the future and his family. Then we jump into sections narrated by Junior’s mom, dad, and older brother. Here we learn of the mom’s horrific childhood and how anxiety-ridden she is, the dad’s time in Vietnam and how he gave up playing pro-baseball to fight eventually losing part of his finger to prostitute; and his older brother who becomes an adolescent cokehead because he can’t cope with the birth of Junior.

Junior grows up to be a freakishly smart kid who is prone to anxiety. He carries his secret with him, until he falls in love and tells his girlfriend who has a peculiar dislike of “crazy people” what he knows. Things get pretty bad for Junior and he spends a good portion of the limited time on earth in a drunken haze with less than savory characters.

For the most part this fantastical tale about the apocalypse is damn entertaining it veers off a bit in the third act with a sort of 24esque terrorism plot twist which would make Jack Bauer proud and then there’s that whole thing with Junior finding a cure for cancer. In a book that asks the reader to suspend quite a bit of belief, it has its eyebrow raising “really? really?” moments.

Despite that, Everything Matters! is really thought-provoking and oftentimes I’d find myself having to put the book down just to think. I won’t give too much away but Junior fights pretty hard to save a few characters and despite his efforts they die anyway. Makes a reader ponder things like free will, fate, and determinism. Big things for a book.

Even though a lot of Junior and his family’s antics border on farcical, and the main theme of the novel is impending doom, there is such a thread of hope that flows through the pages it very nearly takes your breath away. Or, if you’re kind of a crybaby like me, brings tears to your eyes. There’s a paragraph at the end of the novel that makes me cry every time I read it. It’s one of those paragraphs that will inspire the faithless and probably enrage the faithful. See what I mean by thought-provoking?

While this might be a sort of philosophical spoiler, it doesn’t reveal anything about the story, really. So reader beware:

Everything matters not in spite of the end of you and all that you love, but because of it. everything all you’ve got — your wife’s lips, your daughter’s eyes, your brother’s heart, your father’s bones and your own grief — and after Everything is nothing. So you were wise to welcome Everything, the good and bad alike, and cling to it all. Gather it in. Seek the meaning in sorrow and don’t ever ever turn away, not once, from here until the end. Because it is all the same, it is all unfathomable, and it is all infinitely preferable to the one dreadful alternative.

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Nick Hornby is at his best when he writes about music. He has that inexplicable ability to convey what music means in a way that seems incredibly personal to him and yet universal at the same time. He’s so good when he writes about music that it often seems like he’s the first one to express that thought in such a wonderful way. He’s not so good at writing about relationships, which is why Juliet, Naked is about 50% great, 50% total crap, and 100% frustrating.

First of all, if this book were written by Nicolette Hornby it’d have a pink cover and there’d be some shoes and probably a shopping bag featured prominently. This is what I like to call “dick lit” which is really just chick lit written by a man. Instead of being about shopping, fucked up women who want a man, and the men they chase, it?s about rock & roll, fucked up men with commitment problems, and the women who want them despite all that.

So yeah, I’ve basically just summed up the plot of Juliet, Naked for you. If the book were just that, I’d say avoid it like the plague. But then there’s the music, the rock and roll that Hornby does so well. Even better this is rock and roll on the Internet! As the proprietor of a Paul Westerberg fansite I have to say this book often hit a little too close to home for comfort.

Duncan, one of the main characters, is an expert on the reclusive 80s rock & roller Tucker Crowe. He’s a big deal expert on Crowe on the Internet. Duncan who lives in a small town on the English seaside even makes a pilgrimage to the US to tour some famous Crowe sites — the Minneapolis bathroom where Crowe decided to walk away from his career, the site of the Memphis recording studio where Crowe recorded his famous record (Juliet), etc. (if you’re a Westerberg or Replacements fan, some of this is probably making you uncomfortable too). Duncan drags his girlfriend Annie along on the journey. Once they return home Annie realizes she’s wasted fifteen years of her life and all her prime babymaking years with Duncan. Nobody’s happy.

Then a mysterious CD arrives in the mail, Juliet, Naked. It’s a stripped down acoustic version of Crowe’s seminal album. Annie listens to it before Duncan and thus the demise of their relationship begins. They write dueling reviews on the website — Duncan praising and Annie dissing. This leads to Annie getting an e-mail from the mysterious Tucker Crowe. The story then proceeds exactly as you would expect it too. Is it original? Not in the least. Plus, the cast of characters is pretty deplorable.

Duncan is a self-involved, pompous asshole. Annie is a baby-hungry woman who needs to jump into a new relationship about 10 seconds after ending her last relationship. And Tucker is a woe-is-me, I’m too damaged to be loved whiner. Not a likable crew.

And yet, somehow, reading this book is not a hellacious experience. While I was reading it I didn’t want to poke my eyes out, except for when Hornby introduces another unnecessary character and gives us more background on the bit player than we really need. Coming in at over 400 pages Juliet, Naked could have done without a few of those needless characters.

What saves this is Hornby’s brilliant music writing. Take this morsel of deliciousness for instance:

The first time Duncan had watched his computer fill in the track names of the CD he’d put into it, he simply didn’t believe it. It was as if he were watching a magician who actually possessed magic powers: there was no point in looking for the explanation, for the trick, because there wasn’t one — or rather, there wasn’t one that he’d ever understand. Shortly after that, people from the message board started sending him songs attached to e-mails, and that was every bit as mysterious, because it meant that recorded music wasn’t, as he’d previously always understood, a thing at all — a CD, a piece of plastic, a spool of tape. You could reduce it to its essence, and its essence was literally intangible. This made music better, more beautiful, more mysterious, as far as he was concerned. People who knew of his relationship with Tucker expected him to be a vinyl nostalgic, but the new technology had made passions more romantic, not less.

And there is just enough of this kind of writing that saves Juliet, Naked from being a predictable, pointless waste of time.

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Note: If you want to see some discussion with the author of Totally Killer, head on over to this post on MN Reads

I picked up Totally Killer by Greg Olear because of the cassette on the cover, which I spied on his Largehearted Boy Book Notes essay. There’s something in my genetic makeup that makes it nearly impossible for me to pass up any book with a cassette tape on the cover. Somewhere buried deep in my subconscious is the girl who spend all Sunday taping her favorite songs off America’s Top 40 countdown, and apparently she’s the on in charge of book selections.

I stuck with the book despite my extreme annoyance because it’s the November pick for Rock & Roll Bookclub.

As a reader, I rarely question an author’s Point of View (POV) choices. I figure it’s their story they can tell it how they want to. However, this is not the case with Totally Killer. In fact, I spent the first half of the book so annoyed by Olear’s POV choice that I nearly abandoned it. I’m kind of glad that I didn’t.

Totally Killer, set in New York in 1991, tells the story of the last few months of Taylor Schmidt’s life as told by her roommate Todd. We know from the beginning that Taylor is dead. Ostensibly, Todd is retelling Taylor’s story based on her diaries. Diaries he read in 1991 when they were roommates.

The novel is told like a close third person, Taylor’s point of view with random first person interjections from Todd. It is distracting at best, bullshit at worst. To truly enjoy the first part of this novel you have to believe that Todd has a photographic memory and that Taylor kept the most detailed diaries in the history of diary-writing. Todd often mentions that he no longer has the diaries (the reason is made clear in the end). At one point, very late in the book, Todd tells us he is making up the next little bit because it wasn’t written about in Taylor’s diaries. If we had such a disclaimer at the beginning of the book, it would have been a much easier read. Sadly, we’re supposed to buy the whole ‘recalling from memory/diary entries’ crap.

It’s tough to swallow, and I couldn’t do it. The POV drove me nuts. It’s an odd choice and while I gotta hand it to Olear for making a different choice, the writing often got in the way of the story. It doesn’t help that the POV would randomly shift into minor characters for a paragraph (or two) and then slip back into the Todd/Taylor POV.

This is the dominant POV in the first half of the novel, with Todd telling us Taylor’s story (Midwestern college girl, come to the city, can’t find a job, and she has the kind of sexiness that drives men wild), and interjecting his random opinions and pop culture knowledge so we are consistently reminded the story takes place in 1991.

The first half of the book chronicles the trouble Taylor has finding a job in the stagnant 1991 economy and how she happens upon a mysterious employment agency, Quid Pro Quo (the name is subtle as a jackhammer). This place is unreal with swanky, decadent offices in Manhattan, and it offers 20something, Gen-X job hunters their dream job for a hefty price. Not only do you have to give them twenty-percent of your yearly salary as a finders fee, you have to kill a babyboomer too. There’s a lot of anti-babyboomerism going on here and it’s pretty funny.

Taylor lands a job as an editor at a publishing house that pumps out murder-mysteries, and things start to go a little weird when she has to pay the piper. There’s a lot of intrigue and murder and mystery men and women.

The second half of the novel is infinitely better than the first half, mostly because we spend a lot of time in Todd’s POV. It’s much more interesting and the writing is less distracting. Here the story gets cooking and it’s fun. There are all kind of babyboomer conspiracy theories and cameos by Dick Cheney, Osama Bin Laden, and Robert Maxwell. The ending is one of those that either wraps everything in a nice bow, or blows apart everything you thought you knew. It’s kind of delicious and makes me glad I persevered through the annoying first half of the book.

In many ways, Totally Killer feels like a tender, love-filled homage to Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. If you like that one (I didn’t), you’ll totally dig this one.

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I finished reading Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply two weeks ago, and it wrecked me. I haven’t been able to read more than ten pages in any book since, which kind of makes sense considering Chaon’s novel is so fucking good it blew my mind.

This is the kind of novel that when I sit back and think about it (and I do it a lot lately since everything else I read makes me think, gee whiz, this isn’t Await Your Reply) my heart beats a little differently in my chest and I sigh dreamily.

To say Await Your Reply is a novel about the Internet or Identity feels a little dismissive, even though those descriptors are accurate. The book is also about family and how you define your family; brotherhood; sisterhood; self-definition; and trust.

Chaon illustrates his ideas through the interweaving stories of three people, Miles Chesire who has traveled to the upper reaches of Canada searching for his schizophrenic genius twin brother Hayden; Ryan Schuyler a twenty-year-old college-dropout living with the biological father he just met in the backwoods of Michigan and running identify theft scams; and Lucy Lattimore, a just-graduated high schooler who is skipping her small Ohio town with her Maserati-driving history teacher.

While each segment carries its own weight in the over-arching story, the Miles/Hayden twin brothers arc is by far the most intriguing. It’s here where Chaon seems to have the most fun playing with language and our minds. Miles’ quest to find his brother is the strongest, most readable because he seems to be the only character with any direction. Plus, Hayden, the estranged brother is one of those characters who intermittently seems like an evil genius and a poor victim and is probably a little bit of both.

Lucy and Ryan, are both incredibly young and do stupid things because they’re young. Their struggle to find themselves, come of age so to speak, in the shifty sands of increasingly harder to define identity is interesting, but it still feels like the sort of thing all late-teens and early twentysomethings go through. It’s only when Lucy and Ryan’s story dovetails into Miles’ story that their plight seems to take on real significance.

There’s a lot of writerly hijinks going on here to make this suspense novel work, and Chaon makes it work in a way that not only makes sense, but doesn’t make the reader feel like they’ve had the wool pulled over their eyes. The fact that he’s pulled this off in a way that is so satisfying is amazing.

This is one of those books, kind of like Philip Roth’s Everyman that sticks with you long after you’ve finished it. Chaon makes you question what it is you use to define yourself and how ephemeral so many of the things we think of as making up our identity are.

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