Books of the Teens: Fiction Stay-Aways

Of the books I read in the teen years, I only really disliked 20%.  These are among that portion, rated in order of dislike.

The teens were the decade when I stopped reading short stories.  The form is broken; it relies too heavily on magic to fit a plot in a short space.  Sorry, emerging authors.

I don't like how yesterday's and today's posts start the decade off with negativity, but, hey, bad books get published, and time is too precious a resource to waste. I promise: sunnier posts are coming.


Worst of the decade: fiction

The Giver, Lois Lowry, 1993, read in 2015

Sometimes, a book disappoints by failing to fulfill expectations.  Other times, a book flat out makes me angry.  Take this steaming pile of misanthropy, for example.

Lois Lowry must hate children, or possibly all people.  Now, that's harsh language for the author of the impeccable A Summer to Die, but to be fair, in that book, there's a dying child.  The Giver's dystopian hell made me angry and confused all at once.  We read this for family bedtime reading, and I soldiered through it because the whole family was reading it.  I also, though, dearly hoped (and expected) that Lowry would eventually explain why the neutered, colorless, feelingless society would have been created in the first place.  Alas, (spoiler alert spoiling an absence of something), it never comes.  Things just happen in the unnamed community, or rather, they happened a long time ago, and the characters we meet inhabit this totally messed up world.  No doubt, The Giver is a comment on something, but God knows what.  Maybe air conditioning.


The Last Boy and Girl in the World, Siobhan Vivian, 2016, read in 2017

This is a young adult novel, that's OK and 25% too long.  That's what I wrote about the book in 2017.  As the decade ends, I can tell you that I'm still angry that I read this awful book.  It was for a team trivia contest sponsored by our library system.  That's the only reason I started it and finished it.  The story unfolds through a mist of vaguery, but basically, it's the story of teenagers in a town that is threatened by an environmental disaster.  It's not entirely clear how preventable the disaster is and to what extent its true cause is mother nature or politics.  In the heightened atmosphere of a looming potential sudden end, friendships are tested.  Relationships are formed and tested.  The possibilities of mass advocacy are tested.  And my patience was tested.  I hate-read the last 100 pages both to find out how an early plot tease resolved itself and to fulfill my duties to my teammates in the Carnegie Library's reading trivia contest.  Siobhan Vivian lives in Pittsburgh; Last Boy and Girl is set in a fictional city and an unnamed state that bear some resemblance to Western PA towns and our commonwealth.  For reasons unknown, the pizza place in the book is named Mineo's, Pittsburgh's most famous pizza shop.  This book is the novel equivalent of Sbarro pizza.  Technically, it checks all the boxes of being a thing in its category, but I wouldn't recommend it to my sworn enemy.


The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, Hannah Tinti, 2017, read in 2018

I don't remember how this book got on my list, but it was on my competent wife's list, too.  I do know that national treasures Meg Wolitzer and Ann Patchett blurbed it.  I don't know why.  It's a good yarn, I suppose, told in a theoretically realist fictional fashion.  The problem is that characters don't behave in a realistic fashion.  There's a level of violence that becomes literally unbelievable.  Literally.  I don't mean it's a lot of violence or more than one might expect.  I mean that I don't believe people actually live lives that are that violent or that if they set out to do so, they wouldn't live as long as the titular protagonist does.  It's not giving away too much to say that the "twelve lives" refer to this character surviving twelve bullets.  Come on.  Also, his dark and murky life of crime stretches credulity.  The family story that gets told in inverted order is somewhat interesting, but there are too many distractions.  Too many characters who emerge from a plot smoke machine.  There's enough plot teasing to keep even a reader who came to hate this book as much as I did reading in order to see where the teases lead.  Begrudgingly, I can give Ms. Tinti that.  But wait! There's more to dislike.  The omniscient narrator turns seriously omniscient - nay, pedantic - on all manner of topics: constellations, whales, dyeing and weaving yarn, fishing, first aid.  This is an author who knows how to do the work of research but lacks either the skill or the will to weave it in without announcing "I did some research!"  Tiresome in the extreme.  Don't waste any of your one life on these twelve.


In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Daniyal Mueenuddin, 2009, read in 2011


First of all, who gives a rip about stories in a collection being linked?  This book falls into that rash currently afflicting literary fiction, the linked story collection.  As LitCritHulk tweeted: 

"HULK SMASH TREND OF HIP NOVELISTS WRITE 'LINKED' SHORT STORIES AND CALL IT NOVEL. YOU WANT WRITE SHORT STORIES, FINE. IT NOT A ####ING NOVEL"  

The stories in this collection link together very tenuously with the names of some characters repeating.  They jump around in time so that we're to understand we're reading about a couple of generations of the same family, but the fact that one character is another character's son has so little bearing on a particular story that it doesn't matter.  I fail to see the point.  But that's not the big problem.  The big problem is that more than half of the stories in this collection have the same plot.  No joke.  One story in which a woman of modest means decides to "give herself" sexually to a financially successful older man only to have it end badly when he returns to the wife of his youth might have been interesting.  Six in a row can only be considered bizarre.  It's a shame because the stories at the back end of the collection when he sheds the single plot are actually pretty good.


Follow Her Home, Steph Cha, 2013, read in 2014

Steph Cha graduated from Yale Law School and, as such, got her first novel reviewed in the Yale Alumni Magazine.  She loves Raymond Chandler's novels, and she refers incessantly to him and to his detective hero Philip Marlowe.  I probably shouldn't even review her book without knowing more about Chandler's novels.  I know that LA Noir is a thing, and this is a self-consciously noir novel.  An interesting twist is that Cha, a Korean-American woman, incorporates Korean-American women into her plot as more than femmes fatales or victims.  They play integral roles, including the amateur sleuth protagonist, and relate to others as sisters, daughters, mothers, friends and lovers.  But back to whether I should review a noir debut with little knowledge of the genre.  To my eye untrained by the genre, this book is ridiculously overwritten.  Sentences are jammed with texture.  No simple verb is used when a more descriptive one can be substituted.  This is clearly part of a style tradition into which Cha is determined to fit, but it can make the reader feel starved for air.  An example pulled relatively at random:  

"Her long, dark eyes squinted as her wide red mouth gaped with silver laughter.  Loose curls dyed a toasted honey brown fell past her shoulders, ends trembling on a modest bosom.  She crinkled a nose that could hide behind a penny.  One crooked incisor poked just a couple millimeters ahead of her front teeth - this would be her moneymaker, the Cheshire detail, the bite mark in your memory." 

Oh and the (apparently Chandleresque but reachingly so) similes:  

"My tongue felt like a dead oyster in my mouth and my voice passed through the thick sieve of air around my ears like piano music smothered by a stuck pedal."  

It's a mystery, and it's gripping.  I read it at the beach and despite its overwritten nature, I had no hope of putting it down.  Cha structures two loosely interwoven plots that keep a reader in suspense effectively.  But it's a guilty pleasure; I'm not proud to record that I read it. 


Train Dreams, Dennis Johnson, 2011, read in 2012

What is wrong with the short story form?  Why must all short fiction depend on magical events to drive the plot sooner or later?  I'd heard lots about Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, and right on the front cover, it says "Winner of the National Book Award,"  But that's Johnson, not this book.  He won it in 2007 for Tree of Smoke.  This book starts out normal and interesting, the tale of a small life lived quietly in western Canada.  Then, for no apparent reason, late in the book turns to this dreamlike, magical plotting that just pissed me off.  Don't read it, unless you go in for that sort of thing.



The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty, Vendela Vida, 2015, read in 2019

This book had been on my list for a while, probably from a review on Fresh Air.  It's hard to classify.  I guess second-person thriller is the best description.  It received much fanfare when it was published, and its unusual voice and bent probably explains that.  The plot was propulsive, but I personally found the book unsatisfying.  It's clever, and it's well-written, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.  It's hard to say much without giving away too much, but a story that starts with a woman traveling alone getting her backpack with everything meaningful and important to her stolen in Morocco is just too stressful for my blood.  The stress wrought by her cascading decisions never lets up.  Wanting to know where a story lands is not the same as enjoying the story.

Alice Adams, Booth Tarkington, 1921, read in 2016

Alice Adams is a bleak book that I would never have read absent my goal of reading all of the Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction.  That project sometimes has me dipping back into the deep past for a title like this.  Tarkington won in 1919 for The Magnificent Ambersons, a story that captured the moment when a family's grip on power in its town gets overwhelmed by the growth and progress of the town and the culture.  That story had shadows but not like the delusional shadows of the striving Alice Adams and family in this book.  Reading about people being deceitful can be stressful.  Reading about people deluding themselves while deceiving others is downright squicky.  I will say that it's no wonder Tarkington won the 1922 prize for this novel; it both captures a moment in the culture and feels modern enough now that it must have really appeared ahead of its time when it was originally published.  Unfortunately, a depressing and unsettling book is a depressing an unsettling book. Hollywood liked, it too; it's been made into a movie twice - once in the same year it was published and later in a more well-known version with a young, dewy Katherine Hepburn playing the title role.