The Mystery Writer by Sulari Gentill

 The Mystery Writer by Sulari Gentill  286 pp

After dropping out of law school, Theo heads to her brother's house in Lawrence, KS to write a novel. Theo and her brother Gus are originally from Australia. While looking through the town for a good place to write, she finds a combination bar/coffee house called Benders.  While writing there, she meets Dan Murdoch, a fellow author who has already been published, and they become friends. When she finishes her novel, she begs Dan to introduce her to his agent and to submit her novel.  He originally says "no."  Not finding Dan at Benders one day, she heads to his house to look for him.  When she enters, she finds Dan dead.  Of course she touches him and gets blood on her so when the police come and she's washing her hands she looks suspicious.  Enter Gus who is a lawyer and his friend Mac, an investigator (who has a bunch of end-of-the-world preppers as family).  What happens next is a combination spy/assassin/conspiracy theory story including a cult like following of Dan Murdoch who blames Theo for his death.  Each chapter begins with a conversation between conspiracy theorists that is very 1/6.

This is a totally different type of story than The Woman in the Library but still about books.  I really had to take time to think about this before I gave it any type of rating on either Goodreads or in Net Galley.  There were many clever ideas in this story (which I can't talk about or you would be spoiled).  Some might say these were too cute.  In the US where January 6 will be talked about for years, the conspiracy theories will ring true.  While I know "preppers" exist, it is interesting to think of people who are so crazy about an author that they would become violent upon hearing of their death (even in the case of murder).  While I enjoyed this story, I would say there may have been too many weird things piled up on each other for me to love it as much as The Woman in the Library.  3.5 stars rounding up to 4 for creativity.

The Plot

The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz 336 pages

This is one time that I did not pick up a novel based on its cover art; the title was enough to capture my attention. And then I learned that it was a novel-within-a-novel about writers. Just up my alley!

It was fun to journey to a small college and its MFA program, even if said program isn’t that good.  I have an MFA from a great program here in St. Louis.  A quick stroll down memory lane reminded me of the hours and hours I spent with my peers discussing writing and publishing. Or the hours and hours I spent crafting short stories that were just okay. But enough about me,

The protagonist is Jake Bonner; well Jacob Finch Bonner is the name on his first novel that was well accepted with decent reviews. Sales were okay, but not huge. His second novel was a flop. He’s hasn’t published anything in years and cannot seem to find a plot or write anything with any substance. He’s resorted to teaching, consulting with other writers on how to make their work better and editing.

The fall semester is about underway at a small Vermont college. Jake is not looking forward to reading the pages his soon-to-be-students have turned in for his critique. I can see him running his hand through his hair in despair as he begins prepping for the course.

One of the students, Evan Parker, is an obnoxious elitist who believes that his “plot” will take the world by storm. I was never sure why Evan was in the program, as he thought he has “the plot” that would make him rich and successful. Although he is reluctant to divulge his sure-fire hit, he does give Jake a brief synopsis. And Jake is highly impressed.

Jake waits for Evan to finish the novel and dreads the fame that will surely be garnished on him. But as the years go by, Jake never hears anything about Evan Parker, or Parker Evan, as he considers using his inverted names as a pen name. One afternoon, Jake decides to Google Evan. It isn’t too long before he discovers that Evan has died. Jake doesn’t know if the book is finished or if was ever written.

Desperate for a hit, Jake takes Evan’s idea and writes a blockbuster. I feel like author Korelitz tried to pull one over on readers---ideas cannot be copyrighted. In fact there are only four basic plot lines in all of writing. Even is Jake ‘stole’ the idea, he would never be able to write the same story as Evan.

As I read, I kept thinking about Korelitz’s story the same way Jake thought about many of his students’---so what?  This novel is hailed as a thriller, but all I could think was so what?  Oh sure, once Jake hit the big time, he started getting cryptic texts that were supposed to cause fear that someone knew that he had stolen Evan’s “idea.” But Jake’s fear wasn’t worthy of the word.  

I found “The Plot” repetitive and boring. As far as the novel that Jake/Evan wrote, it was also dull. If you like the novel-within-a-novel formats try Margaret Atwood’s “The Blind Assassin.” Unlike “The Plot,” which receives 1 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world, it’s a page turner.

 

Jaws Unmade

Jaws Unmade: The Lost Sequels, Prequels, Remakes, and Rip-offs by John LeMay, 302 pages

Jaws is sometimes regarded as the first summer blockbuster, and, as such, the prototype for all those that followed.  Whatever caveats ought to be attached to that claim, it was certainly wildly successful (indeed, the highest grossing film in unadjusted dollars to that point) and like successful movies before and since it spawned a legion of imitators, some more flattering than others, from its own sequels and major studios' attempts to bottle the same lightning to the inevitable parade of Italian rip-offs.

Jaws Unmade chronicles these more or less misbegotten children of Bruce, both legitimate and illegitimate, not only describing the movies that did get made but, just as intriguingly, all those projects that miscarried.  There are the well-known early versions of Jaws 2, one featuring Quint's son and another angry mobsters.  There's MST3K favorite Devilfish (aka Monster Shark, not to be confused with Bert I Gordon's aborted project Devil Fish, which is also discussed).  There's the legendary unmade spoof Jaws 3, People 0, which Universal spent 2.5 million dollars developing before cancelling the project for fear of alienating Steven Spielberg.  There's Bruno Mattei's 1995 film Cruel Jaws, sometimes marketed as Jaws 5 ("This time it's even more personal than the last time."), which piles on subplot after subplot seemingly without purpose, until, that is, you learn that the main plot rips off 1981's The Last Shark to the point of actually stealing entire sequences of footage.  There's Joe Dante working on Piranha and James Cameron working on Piranha II and John Sayles working on anything that pays the bills.  There's Roger Corman and Dino De Laurentiis and a surprise appearance by John Carpenter.  There's George Clooney and Laura Dern getting eaten by a giant grizzly bear.

If this is your idea of fun, it is tremendous fun.  It isn't clear how extensive or accurate LeMay's research is (his cites sometimes go no further than an IMDB trivia page), and the book is riddled with homophonic errors that suggest the proofreading was limited to a spellcheck, but the author's love of this material, as misplaced as it seems at times, is truly infectious.

First Decadent

The First Decadent: Being the Strange Life of JK Huysmans by James Laver, 267 pages

Nabokov insisted quite rightly that Proust was a novelist rather than a memoirist, and warned that the reader should therefore guard against conflating Marcel the character with Marcel the author.  The same could be said of other authors as well - Dante being the obvious example.  Despite this, when dealing with a novelist as assertively autobiographical as Huysmans a solid biography can be an invaluable aid.  Thankfully, that is exactly what James Laver delivers.

There are two great temptations when dealing with the life of a man like JK Huysmans.  The purely aesthetic literary admirer is unlikely to be sympathetic to Huysmans' spiritual journey, and is likely to imagine that it impoverishes rather than enriches his work.  The pious biographer, on the other hand, is likely to want to sanitize Huysmans' life and work for fear of alienating his intended audience, thus ironically minimizing the importance of the same journey.  Laver somehow manages to avoid both traps, capturing the erotic charge the young Huysmans derived from the scent of a cluster of streetwalkers whose services he was unable to afford as well as the transcendent shock he found in the sound of perfect plainchant.  The result is, however, likely to be disturbing to the sensitive (there are passages here that are as black as any in La Bas), a quality it fittingly shares with its subject.

THE WRITER'S LITTLE HELPER

The Writer's Little Helper by James V Smith  199 pages

https://slpl.bibliocommons.com/item/show/1200677116

Reviewed by Rae C.

I'm going to have to buy this book.  I've been writing for 30 years, and in that time I have not sold anything to a major publisher or publication.  (Or a screenplay to a studio.)  I've written several novels, about 30 short stories, two screenplays, a comic book script (for a series, not just one issue), a lot of poetry, and numerous articles for small magazines.

I've expressed myself and followed my own path. I've watched many stories similar to mine get published. I want to write something that more than 20 people want to read, so I really needed this book!

This book might seem gimmicky, but it's not.  For example, Flesch Kincaid scores. As a secretary I've used this tool for business documents, but after reading this book I'm going to use it on all my future manuscripts.  Best sellers should be easy to read!  And the author has compiled many helpful checklists and outlines for story structure and plotting.

Recommended to any writer in a slump, that is aiming for a bestseller- or at least a sale with a major publisher.

The Girls in the Picture

The Girls in the Picture by Melanie Benjamin    448  pages

I love books about Old Hollywood. Just love them. Bestselling author, and one of my favorites, Melanie Benjamin, takes on America’s Sweetheart, Mary Pickford, and her best friend, actress/writer Frances Marion in what is sure to be another big hit. The new novel won’t be released until January 16, 2018, but I was lucky enough to get my hands on an Advanced Reader’s Copy (yeah).

The story is framed by what appears to be Mary and Frances’ last meeting that ends, again what appears to be, a long-standing feud between the two women. Then the story moves back in time to 1914 and their first meeting.

So sit back and enjoy a look about the early movie industry and two of its most famous pioneers.  Funny, that one of the things that is predominant in this work is that women had a much (much) more active role in the industry than they seem to today. Female directors back then were more prevalent than they seem to be today. For her scripts, Frances was the first woman to win an Academy and the first writer to win two Oscars.

We see how the two women shared a duplex, how Frances helped ease the stress of being Mary Pickford. Not only did America feel that they owned the child-like women, but that Mary, whose real name was Gladys Smith, was the sole support of her mother and her sister and brother for most of the rest of their lives.

Mary and Frances had complicated lives. Several marriages between them, drive, ambition, determination and perfection. Benjamin had to gloss over most of the marriages and only concentrate on the ones that were the most meaningful and significant. Heck, they even had a double honeymoon with the loves of their live. The chronological story ends with their estrangement in 1932.

I enjoyed watching them grow in their craft and their friendship. Mary and her hubby, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Frances and hubby (the almost forgotten cowboy star), Fred Thompson’s war bond (WWI) trip was eye-awakening for me. I didn’t realize how the crowds went bananas for the couples, more so than anything like it I’ve seem today. They were the first true movies stars.

They built mansions unlike anything seen today. Most movie buffs are familiar with Mary and Doug’s over-the-top palace, Pickfair. Fran and Fred also had an elegant home, The Enchanted Hill.

The book alternates between Mary and Frances’ point of view. I did find it strange that Frances’ sections are in first person, but Mary’s are told in third person.

I felt like I had been transported back in time and was witnessing these events as they happened. Benjamin’s novels do that to me.  The Girls in the Picture  receives 6 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

My Name is Lucy Barton

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout, 193 pages 

As the title suggests, this book is from Lucy's perspective. She is looking back on her life. She focuses on a time in her life when she had to stay in the hospital for an extended period of time because of complications from surgery.

Her mother comes to visit. Through conversations with her mother and reminiscences we learn about her childhood, her distant relationship with her parents and siblings, and how she became a writer.

Growing up, her family was very poor. Her parents loved her but they abused her when she was young. In some ways it was a hard book to read. Strout is fantastic at saying a lot with a little. Overall, I was very pleased with the book.

Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited by Philip Eade, 336 pages

A friend once described Evelyn Waugh as possessing "an odious, indeed a psychopathic character".  Waugh listed his own faults in a letter to his eventual wife - "I am restless & moody & misanthropic & lazy & have no money except what I earn and if I got ill you would starve" - on his suitability for marriage, "I can't advise you in my favour because I think it would be beastly for you, but think how nice it would be for me."  Yet Graham Greene declared the author of Brideshead Revisited, the Sword of Honour trilogy, and Decline and Fall "the greatest novelist of my generation", an opinion echoed by Robert Henriques, who called Waugh "the best writer of our generation, both morally and in ways I can't define."  Waugh himself understood the complementarity of his famously difficult personality and his craft: "Humility is not a virtue propitious to the artist.  It is often pride, emulation, avarice, malice - all the odious qualities - which drive a man to complete, elaborate, refine, destroy, renew, his work until he has made something that gratifies his pride and envy and greed.  And in doing so he enriches the world more than the generous and good, though he may lose his own soul in the process.  That is the paradox of artistic achievement."

Eade's biography of Waugh charts this paradox as it follows him from his troubled childhood to his schooldays when he first "declared war on dullness", through to Oxford with the Aesthetes and London with the Bright Young Things, his initial literary success, disastrous first marriage, and subsequent conversion to Catholicism, his happy second marriage and service as a commando in World War II, the writing of his later masterpieces, struggles with alcohol, mental breakdown, semi-retirement and death.  Eade is less interested in Waugh's literary output than in the people and personalities that surrounded him, although given the extent to which Waugh used (and often abused) friends and acquaintances as models for characters in his work this is understandable - even moreso if considered in the light of Waugh's notorious contempt for critics.

Bardwell's Folly

Bardwell’s Folly by Sandra Hutchison   342 pages

I’ve read Sandra Hutchison’s first two novels (The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire and The Awful Mess) and loved them both. Now there is a third novel for me to love and tell all my reader friends to grab a copy.

In this story, Eudora “Dori” Bardwell and her stoner brother, Salinger, are living in a small town in upper Massachusetts. The house is a replica of a southern plantation home her father, Bedford Bardwell, built as a living legacy to himself and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Tea and Slavery, which was considered the most important work of fiction about slavery since Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The house, known as Bardwell House, is a historical landmark in town, and the townspeople are very, very fond of it. A board of trustees runs the house, but thanks to her father’s will, Dori and Salinger are allowed to live there. Unfortunately they aren’t allowed to make any changes, so the summer heat is stifling. In other words, no air conditioning.

The air conditioning is only one symbol of how out-of-touch Dori is with the modern world. She doesn’t have an answering machine, a computer, or a mobile phone. Now 26, Dori had to leave college when her father flew his plane with her mother and four other siblings into the ocean (aka John Kennedy, Jr.) years earlier. She barely makes ends meet working at as a nursing home aide and a part-time grocery clerk. She may live in what seems like a mansion, but the cupboards are bare. Many nights she goes to bed hungry.

When the trustees decide to hire a service to keep up the lawn, to keep up appearances, Dori comes face-to-face with her high school sweetheart, a man whose marriage proposal she refused in front of the whole high school. Sparks fly.

Thanks to an insensitive racial joke, which blew up on social media, Dori’s family in once again in the spotlight. For years, there had been rumors of an unfinished manuscript that her father left behind. When a reporter comes snooping around, interest in finding the manuscript becomes important to the board and leads Dori’s to uncover deep family secrets.

A mixture of romance, intrigue, family secrets, past lives, and a house that is as much a character as Tara was in Gone With the Wind, create a spell-binding read that you won’t want to put down. I give Bardwell’s Folly 6 out of 5 stars.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography by Gregory Wolfe, 423 pages

From an early age, Thomas Malcolm Muggeridge - the "Thomas" was apparently dropped even by family members early on - combined an appreciation for the power of language with an keen understanding of the difference between appearance and reality.  A long career in journalism, in print, radio, and finally television, only affirmed the importance of these perceptions, and their entanglement - for language can be used to disguise or unmask reality.  Muggeridge spent much of his career as an unhappy iconoclast, bouncing between jobs, trying and failing to become appreciated as a novelist or dramatist.  He worked as a correspondent in India, Egypt, Moscow, and Washington DC, forming friendships with the likes of George Orwell and Graham Greene.  Predicting the dissolution of the British Empire, reporting on the murderous famines in the Soviet Union, and criticizing the soap opera atmosphere surrounding Britain's Royal Family earned him a remarkably diverse set of detractors, however nothing brought more sustained criticism than his gradual conversion to Christianity, first to a Lewisian "mere Christianity" and eventually to the fullness of Catholicism.  To those who had admired Muggeridge as the quintessential outsider and slaughterer of sacred cows, such a surrender seemed a treasonous betrayal so wholly out of character with the man as to suggest a nervous breakdown or senility.

It is the major theme of Gregory Wolfe's excellent biography that Muggeridge's conversion, far from an uncharacteristic aberration, was in fact the product of a lifelong struggle to answer the question Christ posed to His disciples - "Who do you say that I am?"  "St Muggs" the septuagenarian apologist is, in Wolfe's narrative, the same child who read the Bible in secret so as not to scandalize his socialist father, the same college student who spent time at the Oratory of the Good Shepherd in the company of Wilfred Knox, and the same young man whose first overseas adventure was as a teacher hired by a missionary group.  In Muggeridge's case, at least, the eye so adept at detecting the flaws of others was not blind when turned inward, and the seeker after truth could not be satisfied, in the end, with anything less than Truth Himself.

Havel

Havel: A Life by Michael Zantovsky, 517 pages

Vaclav Havel was born into a wealthy, culturally active Czech family in 1936.  After the Second World War, his family background resulted in him being actively discriminated against by the Communist government installed by the victorious Soviets, and the marginalized young man naturally gravitated to the bohemian scene in Bohemia.  A successful career as a playwright developed in tandem with a role as one of the most visible and eloquent dissidents in the Warsaw Pact, a role which repeatedly landed him in prison, but ultimately helped produce the Velvet Revolution by which the Czechoslovakian Communist regime was overthrown.  Reinventing himself as a politician as much out of necessity as choice, Havel became President of the newly free Czechoslovakia, only to have the country split into Czech and Slovak halves beneath him.

Biographer Zantovsky was Havel's friend and sometime spokesman, and his intimate knowledge of his subject is an important asset in dealing with such a complex, and sometimes contradictory, figure.  He does not conceal, although he does try to explain, his friend's shortcomings as a statesman and as a man.  Zantovsky's greatest revelation is the extent to which Havel's philosophy of "living in truth" was the result of his experience as a dissident, rather than the cause, as was his non-dogmatic experiential approach to that truth.  Indeed, in Zantovsky's telling, much of Havel's approach to politics was shaped, not so much by the hubris of the Communist regime, but by his own experiences of humiliation at the hands of that regime, both large and small.  Nothing shines through as clearly as Havel's humility - his awareness, based partially on bitter experience but also on a playwright's instincts, that nothing worthwhile could be accomplished alone.

The Thirteenth Tale

The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield, 406 pages

This is a very lovely work of fiction that I can see especially appealing for book clubs.  Vida Winter is England's most beloved writer- but also its most secretive.  No one knows her history and everyone wants to know what her "thirteenth tale" was- a story allegedly left out of a volume published with only 12 stories.  So it's surprising when Margaret Lea is approached about writing Ms. Winter's biography- why now?  And will the renowned story teller and weaver of fiction actually tell the truth?  I had some trouble getting drawn in, but once there, I had trouble putting it down. 

The Other Story

The Other Story by Tatiana De Rosnay
307 Pages

When Nicolas Duhamel wrote his first novel he never expected it to be the huge hit it has turned out to be.  He was basically writing his experience of exposing a family secret.  Now a few years later everyone is awaiting his next work,  only problem is, he hasn't started it.  All his friends will no longer speak to him as he has been caught up in the world of celebrity and everything is starting to fall apart.

I couldn't help but think that this book was semi-autobiographical.  De Rosnay's herself had a tremendous hit with Sarah's Key.  This book was good, but fans of Sarah's key will be sorely disappointed.  

The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman, 242 pages


After years of struggling as a freelance writer and book reviewer, Nate is on the cusp of success. He's got a book coming out in a few months, and his essays have been published, and for the most part favorably received, in various literary journals. Where he isn't so successful is in the romance department. As an intellectual, Nate keeps telling himself that he's above superficially judging potential girlfriends; he does, after all, define himself as pro-woman and pro-choice, and generally appreciates a well-read woman who can hold her own in an intellectual argument. But when he starts a relationship with Hannah, another writer-on-the-brink who fits his "type" pretty well, Nate begins to question his motives. Is he just another superficial, moody jerk?

To this reader, the answer to that question is a resounding yes. I honestly didn't like this character a bit. He's judgmental and narrow-minded, yet keeps up this facade of being the exact opposite. Waldman's writing of a man's thought processes are wholly believable (at least it is from my female perspective). The problem I found, however, is that I honestly didn't want to know that much about a man's thought process. There may be some women who do (or at least say they do), but I'm not one of them. Another problem I had with this book was that the blurbs on the cover and in some reviews refer to it as genuinely funny. It's not. I don't think I laughed a single time while reading it, though that could be because I hated Nate SO. MUCH.

I guess this is supposed to be the flip-side of a chick lit book, as seen from the jerky guy who never calls the heroine back. I can see that, but I can also see fans of Nick Hornby enjoying this. Too bad I didn't.