City on Fire

New York State Of Mind

Garth Risk Hallberg’s debut novel, City on Fire is a long, ode to New York, following many strands with characters lost and hopeless in the city, where, like in any megapolis, the rich get richer climbing the scaffolding of the poor. Those who cannot fit in, find ways to self-destruct.

The novel is set between Christmas 1976 and 13 July 1977, when New York suffered a blackout. But before that a whole lot of characters have their lives intersecting without their being aware of it. Though there is no clear protagonist, the man at the core of the sprawling book covering swanky highrises and filthy squats, is William Stuart Althrop Hamilton-Sweeny III, scion of the country’s richest family, who wants none of the wealth or power his clan has accrued, mostly by foul means and spews his rage on canvases in a hidden studio. His father has married a social climber after the death of his wife, and her “Demon Brother” Amory Gould wrenches control of the empire—a small, white-haired man “plugged into every network you can think of, public and private… There’s no manipulation he isn’t capable of.”

The event that loosely binds all the strands together, is the apparently random shooting of a young woman at Central Park. William’s sister Regan, breaking up with her unfaithful husband Keith has problems of the typical single mother. It is Keith’s young girlfriend who is shot,; the victim, Sam, is found by William’s boyfriend, a teacher and aspiring writer, Mercer Goodman. Sam was involved with a punk band and her best friend Charlie (“a timorous weed sprouting from his combat boots” ) is drawn into that drug-fuelled hell of men like Nicky Chaos, Sol Grungy and a female groupie called Sewer Girl, who believe they are revolutionaries in a class war.

A polio-afflicted cop, a Vietnamese girl, her Austrian boss, an Italian fireworks maker, a journalist and many other are tossed into the rich and spicy cauldron of stories that whets the appetite of the reader and keeps at it over 944 pages of often dense prose -- have a dictionary handy, Hallberg never uses a simple word when a difficult one can be found.

It is not easy to describe the plot of this ambitious novel, because it contains many novels in its belly, including that maze-like whodunit – who shot Sam and why. Along with this are pages from a handmade fanzine that Sam brought out, a letter from a father to his son, transcripts of radio broadcasts, and other devices that offer breaks in the bleak narrative.

When the power outage hit New York—and Hallberg describes as frightening orgy of looting, arson and anarchy—it actually became the foundation for many real estate fortunes, when property was snapped up cheap by businessmen who went on to become real estate tycoons.

This book, that took Hallberg seven years to write, brings to mind another definitive New York novel, Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, but this one is humorless and solemn—not a satire, but a meticulous word capture of an age that is recent enough to remind readers familiar with New York of the time of racism, unemployment, urban decay, youthful rebellion; it sounds like any city, today that has grown without any thought for the underprivileged. And rebellions have been doused effectively by consumerism.

City On Fire

By Garth Risk Hallberg

Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Pages: 944

Rogue Lawyer

No Holds Barred

John Grisham’s last book, Grey Mountain was a grim indictment of the coal mining lobby’s destruction of the environment, and the committed lawyers who fight them. His latest, Rogue Lawyer is comparatively a light read, probably written to be picked up by Hollywood.

Grisham has created a rabble-rousing hero, Sebastian Rudd, who takes cases nobody else will touch and enjoys the media attention his notoriety gets him, and, of course, the admiration his courtroom wins fetch. Since he often butts heads with cops as well as mobsters, his office was firebombed and he functions out of a bulletproof van equipped to function as a mobile office. (Probably inspired by Michael Connelly’s Lincoln Lawyer books).

Rudd believes, “A lawyer like me is forced to work in the shadows. My opponents are protected by badges, uniforms, and all the myriad trappings of government power. They are sworn and duty-bound to uphold the law, but since they cheat like hell it forces me to cheat even more.”

The first case that he handles as the book opens, is that of a brain damaged, grimy teenager named Gardy who is accused of the double murder of two girls in a small town called Milo. No lawyer wants to defend him, so Rudd does, because he hates the small town smug righteousness that proclaims a boy guilty in spite of enough evidence of his innocence. Rudd also loves the idea of having to “claw and raise hell in a courtroom where no one is listening.” The townsfolk are so hostile that Rudd and his buddy/bodyguard called Partner, have to keep changing motels to avoid attack.

He wins this case, which is like a prologue to the rest of the hell-raising he does. Gardy does not appear again, but the other cases are linked.  The most moving is that of a senior citizen whose house is mistakenly attacked by cops conducting a narcotics raid. In the melee, his wife is killed and a cop injured. Even though the error is established in no time, the cops won’t admit to it and want to haul the hapless old man over the coals. How Rudd brings the city’s (it is not clear which one) administration to its knees makes one accord to the ‘rogue’ a grudging admiration. Grisham also lays bare the corruption, wheeling-dealing and biases in the US legal system, which people outside the country seem to think is above board.

Then there’s a gangster client on death row and Rudd has no scruples about that.  He says in his first person narrative, “My clients are almost always guilty, so I don’t waste a lot of time wringing my hands about whether they get what they deserve.” How the gangster deals with his imprisonment and conviction is hilarious – and very likely to be copied by Bollywood filmmakers (provided they read, of course.)

Rudd also funds a Hispanic cage fighter, who beats a referee to death in full view of an audience and then expects to walk out of jail. Then there’s the sinister flesh trader, who kidnaps the daughter of a cop, and leads Rudd and the entire police force to distraction with his lies and subterfuge. The cops are not exactly spotlessly clean—when they want information from Rudd, they kidnap his son. Rudd’s troubled relationship with his lesbian ex-wife is the weakest part of the book; Grisham makes the mother sound like a harridan because she disapproves of Rudd’s belief that a boy should be manned up by being exposed to violence.

This hitch aside, Rogue Lawyer is a hugely entertaining thriller and it looks like Rudd will star in a series. A character like that can’t be abandoned after just one book.

Rogue Lawyer

By John Grisham

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Pages: 344

All the Single Ladies

The Sisterhood

Dorothea Benton Frank sets her stories in South Carolina and focuses on women. Her last book, The Hurricane Sisters, was a family saga and at the centre of her latest All the Single Ladies is a group of friends—all women over the age of fifty, the demographic that is so often ignored by popular fiction and cinema.

The three single women of the title are Lisa, Suzanne and Carrie; Lisa, who works as a nurse in an assisted living facility, meets the other two at the funeral of their mutual friend Kathy. Their friendship is sealed by their fight against Kathy’s horrid landlady, who wants to steal the dead woman’s belongings.

The women also bond over their single status, and their fondness for Suzanne’s wonderfully eccentric ninety-nine year old grandmother, Miss Trudie.  Lisa and her cute pooch Pickle end up living at Miss Trudie’s sea-side home, when she is unexpectedly ousted from her rented house. The deep friendship that develops between the three, and the romance that enters their lives almost at the same time, are heartwarming. Dorothea Benton Frank’s books are emotional, humorous, have lovely descriptions of places and food. That’s why they are always on the bestseller lists.

All the Single Ladies 

By Dorothea Benton Frank

Publisher: William Morrow.

Page: 368

A Man Called Ove

Grumpy Ol’ Man

When every day brings dark and depressing news, a little bit of sunshine is needed and Frederick Backman’s charming novel A Man Called Ove hits the spot. Backman, a Swedish blogger, wrote about a crotchety man called Ove (pronounced Oover), and the character became so popular that a book resulted, beautifully translated by Henning Koch.

Men like Ove could be found all over the world—widowed, no family, no friends, looking like "a middle-aged man who expects the worthless world outside to disappoint him." He is a meticulous keeper of schedules, a stickler for rules, a creature of habit (he hates everyone who does not drive a Saab), every day being exactly the same. He lived a tough life of struggle and toil, and the death of his wife, Sonja, took away all happiness and desire to live. At 59, all Ove wants is to die in peace.

 His careful preparations to hang himself are disrupted by a noisy, friendly family moving in next door. They first annoy Ove by knocking down his mailbox, and then drag the reluctant grouch out of his self-imposed solitude.

The husband is the mild-mannered and clumsy Patrick, his wife, the very pregnant Parvaneh and they have two daughters, one quiet and studious, the other a complete riot. A mangy cat attaches itself to Ove too, much to his annoyance.

The writing is simple and very funny, moving back and forth in time, alternating Ove’s current state of irritation and helpless surrender to Parvaneh, with his harsh childhood, romance, marriage and life with Sonja.  As the book proceeds and the reader gets to know the true nature of his devotion to his wife, the admiration for Ove grows.

Parvaneh does not let on, but she understands Ove’s state of mind, and has an uncanny knack of interrupting her neighbour’s latest suicide bid.  Ove’s objections and rudeness have no effect on Parvaneh, or on Jimmy, the overweight computer geek next door, who envelop him with the warmth of being needed—whether it is driving to the hospital Patrick who broke his leg falling off a ladder borrowed from Ove, or helping a neighbor fight a nasty care worker who wants to take away her ill husband to an institution, or supporting another gay neighbour against his homophobic father. Early on he saves a man who has fallen on to a railway track (where he had gone to die), and resists the local journalist’s insistence on telling his story and turning him into a hero. The journalist later joins Ove’s fight against heartless bureaucrats “men in white.”

Ove, who spent his life building things, has the magical ability to fix anything; what he doesn’t know is that he is capable of repairing broken emotions too, till Parvaneh barges into his misanthropic life.

It’s a sad story too, but uplifted by so much kindness and wit that you wonder why people don’t help others and make the world a better place.  All it takes is will.

A Man Called Ove

By Frederick Back

Translated by Henning Koch

Publisher: Atria

Pages: 352

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

Love & Books

Another heartwarming story with humour and community spirit so lacking today, is Gabrielle Zevin’s The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry.

The novel is meant for book lovers, the protagonist being a lonely, middle-aged widower, A.J. Fikry (of Indian origin), who owns a failing bookshop on an island.  He stocks the books he likes, and manages with his meager earnings, living in small apartment above the bookshop.

Each chapter begins with his notes in books he likes; the book snob that he is, he tells Amelia, a publisher’s representative, whom he later falls in love with, “I do not like postmodernism, post­apocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be — basically gimmicks of any kind. . . . I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and — I imagine this goes without saying — vampires.”

He has no friends, except for the local thriller-loving cop, and his sister-in-law; his life is peaceful if uneventful. Then, his priceless first edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane is stolen, and a precocious child, Maya, is left in his bookshop. The two events have a life-changing impact on him and make for a book worth reading (pardon the needless melodrama that creeps in) ...a book about the transformative power of words. And, of course, love.

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

By Gabrielle Zevin

Publisher: Algonquin

Pages: 258

Career of Evil

Striking Back

By now everyone knows Robert Galbraith is J.K. Rowling’s pseudonym—presumably when she gets sick of writing about her famous boy wizard, she thinks seriously about a one-legged war veteran, who runs a detective agency.

Cormoran Strike is not the garden variety gumshoe—he has an interesting back story and a complicated love life. He is the son of a rock star and a doped out groupie. His hippie mother raised him and his half siblings in a slapdash way and was possibly murdered by her latest toy-boy husband when Strike was a boy. That man, Whittaker makes an appearance to mock and torment, in Career of Evil, the third Cormoran Strike book after The Cuckoo’s Calling and The Silkworm.

In the first book, Strike had hired smart and pretty Robin Ellacott as his assistant; by the end of the book, she was promoted to partner. Their relationship has a strange push-pull quality—they deny the powerful attraction they feel for each other, by trying extra hard to keep it all strictly professional. Robin has a fiancé, Matthew, who hates Strike and is jealous of him. The feeling is reciprocated by Strike. In every book, while mysteries are solved, these complicated matters of the mind and heart are also being coped with.

 When Career of Evil begins (after a grisly prologue), a female leg is delivered to Robin, accompanied by a note quoting Blue Öyster Cult (lyrics by the band begin each chapter) — a reference to Strike’s mother, which only he gets. Robin is understandably horrified, but it is soon clear that a pervert serial killer is on the loose, who enjoys mutilating the women he kills. The reader is made privy to the fact that the killer wants to destroy Strike, by targeting Robin. If the whiff of such fiendish events hovers over Strike business, and he is unable to protect his own partner, who will ever hire him?

Like in the first book, Strike is pushed to the brink of professional and financial disaster and he has to find the killer even as the cops blunder around. He knows that the murderer knows him and has some old revenge motive. Strike and Robin have to trace the possible suspects and investigate the how and why, before more women, and Robin, become victims of the lunatic’s carving knife.

Galbraith has written a chilling book and also gone into the dark world pedophilia and of people with body integrity identity disorder — “the irrational desire for the removal of a healthy body part”—that might give many readers nightmares. To help him, Strike has just a scarred and scary-looking childhood buddy, Shanker, who surfaces from some criminal netherworld when summoned--as loyal as he is mercenary. 

More is revealed about the past of Strike and Robin—she is still fighting demons of an old trauma, that does not allow herself to be as emotionally open with Matthew as would like her to be. She and her sympathetic parents are preparing for Robin’s wedding with Matthew when this horrible case comes up and strains her already problematic relationship with Matthew. 

From idyllic towns to sordid strip joints—the search for the psychopath takes Strike and Robin all over the place, courting danger and risking heartbreak. The big, burly, hairy Cormoran Strike, who refuses to let the loss of his leg handicap him, is one hell of a hero, and Robin a perfect foil. They are made for each other—at least at work.  And the wait will be on for the next part of their story—the cases will get solved anyway.

Career Of Evil

By Robert Galbraith

Publisher: Mulholland

Pages: 497

Make Me

Small Town Secrets

Make Me is Lee Child’s twentieth Jack Reacher novel. The six-foot five giant of a man, ex army intelligence, lives like a gypsy. He owns nothing but the clothes on his back and a toothbrush in his pocket.  When his clothes get too filthy he buys a new set and throws away the old. He is constantly on the move, and gets involved in all kinds of adventures he does nothing to seek, but does not avoid either. He has nowhere to go, and nothing to do, except, maybe, kill bad guys when they cross his path. He is a unique hero, which Tom Cruise could not quite nail in the only Jack Reacher movie made in 2012 (based on the 2005 novel One Shot) Still, another Reacher novel,  the terrific Never Go Back is being made into a film to be released next year.

Make Me has more violence than other Reacher books, which are by no means squeamish about bloodshed. It starts harmlessly enough, with Reacher getting off a train at a station called Mother’s Rest, because he is curious about the name. All he wants to do is walk around the wheat-growing town and find out the origin of the town’s peculiar name.

He runs into a woman called Michelle Chang, who is a detective, looking for her partner Keever, who came to Mother’s Rest and disappeared. The reader knows he has been killed, what has to be determined is why and by whom; also how Chang will solve the mystery all on her own.

She won’t be alone, obviously. Reacher offers help, for no reason but that he is the kind of guy who would. He is also intrigued by the sinister goings in the town and the overt hostility of the menfolk. That, and the odd fact that nobody knows why the town is called Mother’s Rest.

When Reacher is threatened with bodily harm, he cannot but fight back and leave some seriously damaged men in his wake. (His actions are justified thus: he is “a craftsman going about his business, calmly, using his natural born gifts.”)

Reacher and Chang (who casually jump into bed soon enough, though there are no steamy antics described), set out to find out what happened to Keever and somehow connect with a journalist, Westwood, who goes along for the ride to get a scoop and book rights for whatever can of worms is opened.

More violence is unleashed as the trio inch towards the truth. What they find is so horrifying, that the book leaves one a bit shaken. The overlong climax is not too interesting to read, but it seems to have been written with a screenplay adaptation in mind.

The plot is complex, the pace is unhurried, the dialogue laconic and the humour wicked. At one point, to test Reacher’s memory that may have been affected by a head injury, Chang makes him recite the Gettyburg Address when the are together in the bathroom. Westwood’s baffled reaction is priceless.

Make Me

By Lee Child

Publisher: Delacorte

Pages: 402

Everything I Never Told You,

Tragedy Foretold

Right at the start of Celeste Ng’s debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, it is revealed that a girl called Lydia is dead.  As her family and the police hunt for the missing girl, whose body is found at the bottom of the lake, the story of her family and Lydia’s tragedy is gently unfolded,

The novel is set in the Seventies, but the issues of race and alienation of the ‘outsider’ never go away. Linda is the beloved daughter of a mixed race family—her father, the quietly courageous James is Chinese, her mother Marilyn is white. Lydia, with her blue eyes and blonde hair, looks like her mother, but that does not spare her the racist cruelty her siblings face.  Worse, the full force of her mother’s thwarted ambition is put on the fragile girl’s shoulders. Her brother Nathan plans on escaping, while her kid sister Hannah skulks around ignored by the family that didn’t want her. Her only friend is the town’s ‘bad boy’ Jack, but he has problems of her own.

As the cops come asking questions, it is revealed to her shocked and grief-stricken family that Lydia had been living a lie and trying to be the over-achieving daughter her parents wanted her to be, even if it killed her. It’s a heartbreaking story, which deftly combines the thrill of suspense with the melancholy of broken hearts. In the novel’s most moving scene, Marilyn finds a bunch of her daughter’s diaries, that she gifted to her each year, sure that Lydia wrote in them. Then, “With one finger, she tugs out the last diary: 1977. It will tell her, she thinks. Everything Lydia no longer can. Who she had been seeing. Why she had lied to them. Why she went down to the lake.

“The key is missing, but Marilyn jams the tip of a ballpoint into the catch and forces the flimsy lock open. The first page she sees, April 10, is blank. She checks May 2, the night Lydia disappeared. Nothing. Nothing for May 1, or anything in April, or anything in March. Every page is blank. She takes down 1976. 1975. 1974. Page after page of visible, obstinate silence. She leafs backward all the way to the very first diary, 1966: not one word. All those years of her daughter’s life, unmarked. Nothing to explain anything.”

The novel was picked as Amazon’s Book of the Year for 2014, beating giants like Hilary Mantel and Stephen King, which is not a minor feat.

Everything I Never Told You

By Celeste Ng

Publisher: Penguin

Pages: 297