I have a review of SPLICE up at Crimespree Cinema.I finished James Hynes' NEXT a few days ago. My husband read it first. We were drawn to it because of its fine reviews, its setting (Ann Arbor, MI-down the road), its milieu (academia-sort of), and because its editor's publishing Megan's next book. (I wanted to see what sort of book interested her.)
NEXT is an unusual and highly original book. Much like in MRS. DALLOWAY (although in NEXT we are only privy to just one person's interior thoughts), we spend a single day inside our narrator's head, watching him go about his often prosaic business. (How many of any of our days are anything but ordinary and yet we find it unusual in a novel)
In this case, Kevin Quinn has traveled from Ann Arbor to Austin on a job interview. He has a prestigious but rather dull-- and sometimes humiliating--job back in Michigan and is interviewing for a similar one. It's the kind of job one finds on the fringes of academia--for people who can't quite cut loose from their college town--underpaid and under-respected.
Kevin's fifty years old but seldom thinks about much other than the women he's loved. He's a bit pathetic, and what happens to him over the course of this half-day in the Texas heat emphasizes this.(And oh, how well Hynes captures Austin in the summer). We pity Kevin, we despair for him, we're bored by him, we're embarrassed for him, but mostly we identify with him. His thoughts are the sort we might have on a day when our future might be about to begin in a new place .
The final quarter of the book makes what has gone before it resonate. It also shatters our idea of what all of it meant. It's a shocking conclusion (although the foreshadowing is there).
At one point, a cab driver tells our hero,"You need to pay attention, man." Kevin does need to pay attention and so do we. Or what happens "next" for all of us might come too early or too late.
Highly recommended.
What's the last book you read that still had you thinking a few days later?
22 comments:
A book that absorbed me for days was one similar in many ways to the one you're describing here, Death and the Dervish by Bosnian writer, Mesa Selimovic. It's a first-person story of a man in something of a constant panic as his political fortunes rise and fall. Takes a while to get through, but you never forget it.
That one sounds great. I managed to get one foot into Bosnia when we were in Croatia a few years ago. I will look for it. And I know my husband would love it.
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO stayed in my mind for a week or two after I read it. I had a problem with the ending of NEXT, but maybe you and Phil can resolve that, Patti.
I think because both of us had read it and we spent a lot of time mulling it over, we finally came to some conclusions about how it fit together.
Hum, I don't know about this. I like to identify with characters but I don't want them to be simple reflections of what I'm like or reflections of perfectly normal types. I guess I like the exotic. Although the ending sounds intersting here.
You describe the main character (dare I call him the protagonist?) as lame and boring. That won't make me want to read this, in spite of the good reviews. I know everyone seems to be reading this now but it's possible it's just the book of the moment. We'll see, I suppose.
I am somewhat patient with a book that reflects life as realistically as possible--maybe not in every book I read--but in some. Also good prose will carry me a long way. My favorite more recent books--outside of crime novels--are often books that would be deemed depressing by a lot of people (DISGRACE,ATONEMENT,NEVER LET ME GO, BEL CANTO). THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO would fall into this category too.
Good blog topic: What do you hope to find in a novel you pick up?
Patti - Thanks! This one sounds really interesting!! I've actually read several books that had me thinking for several days. One I re-read recently was Barbara Vine's A Dark Adapted Eye. Really well-done psychological study...
Ruth Rendell's books as Barbara Vine are among my favorites and that one especially.
I fancy that! Thanks for the tip off.And I'm a fan of Vine , too.
It's a shocking conclusion? Ack. Now I have to read it!
I just read two Tana French books (the second being sort of a sequel to the first), IN THE WOODS and THE LIKENESS. In the first book, a mystery from the 1980s remains unsolved or at least ambiguous. I kept hoping it would somehow be resolved in the second book, but it was not. Both books were very good, but that first mystery really stayed with me for days after.
I hear her third is even better. My daughter recommended the first, which my husband read but the length put me off.
Patti--Please don't be put off by the length--there's a good reason the book is as long as it is. IN THE WOODS uses one of my favorite mystery novel devices: the unsolved crime from the past coming back to prominence because of a new crime in the current day. In many ways, I thought THE LIKENESS was an even better book--the mystery being neatly resolved and not quite as ambiguous as the one in IN THE WOODS. I'm looking forward to the third in the series, which appears to be about a character who was a secondary presence in THE LIKENESS.
Thanks, Deb. I will put it back on the pile.
Speaking of length, I just finished chapter 3 (of 18) in Follett's 1000-page The Pillars of the Earth. I wasn't expecting - don't know why, when I think about it - the overlap with the time period and politics of the Cadfael novels by Peters.
How do you even hold it. See one of my problems is I would have trouble keeping what happened early on in my head. I am not a fast reader.
Well, as a Kevin living in Texas I did have to request this from the library tonight. :)))
Kevin
http://kevintipplescorner.blogspot.com/
Most of the books I enjoy have me thinking about them for a while, in whole or in part (since I read a lot of anthologies).
Part of what was so annoying about MOON and things like it (perhaps including the novel or film THE ROAD) was that they are often treated as if they are somehow breaking anything like new ground in dealing with character and existential crises in sf, when writers ranging from Fritz Leiber to CM Kornbluth to Philip Dick to Thomas Disch to Kate Wilhelm to Joanna Russ to David Marusek do exactly that so often so much better and in a more sophisticated way than weak tea (at best) films(and their overpraised fellow travelers) approach.
I look for a writer who tells me something interesting and does it well. I make no other demands on character or approach. I do appreciate writers who don't lie too much about the nature of humanity, in any direction.
I've read most of his other books, and liked all but King's of.... and am looking forward to Next.
Patti-- I finished Next a couple of days back and while I really was let down by the ending, the rest of the book was like trip through my youth. I recall all of the Ann Arbor stuff Hynes talks about, the feeling like the people that run this town looked down on you if you weren't there in '68, the girls that bought into what ever anti-male theory that was being pushed that day and the lives of far to many who never have grown up. There were things in the book that hit way to close to home for me, and there were point when I wanted to hand the book over to a dozen people who I have argued with about the culture of Ann Arbor and pointed to passages and said 'I told you so'. I think that Next really is the book that has captured a world that people don't see, haven't known and that many want to deny.
So Next is in fact the last book that I read that has me thinking about it days later.
I know several people that didn't care for the ending but I think it was essential to give him a moment when his life really counted, was worth more than his self-absorbed recollections of women, his stalking. For a man of fifty, he was superficial in many ways--as are we all to some extent--but what happens allows him some dignity, and demonstrates how fleeting all of it is. Does that make sense to you?
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