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Harris, Joanne: Gentlemen & Players

William Morrow © 2006, 422 pages

Joanne Harris's Gentlemen & Players is told in the first person from two dueling perspectives. Roy Straitley is a classics teacher in his 34th year at St. Oswald's Grammar School for Boys, a private establishment steeped in tradition and resented by the locals who could never afford the school's tuition. The second narrator--who for much of the book is known by the alias "Julian Pinchbeck"--is a teacher who's new to the school but who, as a one-time townie, has a score to settle with St. Oswald's. Pinchbeck proves to be intriguingly evil, vengeful and misguided and jealous yet not wholly unsympathetic, a genius at deception. Readers may be reminded as I was of Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, a sociopath and chameleon who is, like Harris' protagonist, self-hating and motivated in part by obsessive love. Pinchbeck, having once haunted the halls of St. Oswald's in youth, now conducts a campaign against the school that culminates on Bonfire Night with a pair of jaw-dropping surprises.

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McDonald, Joe: Lotto

Ovation Books © 2009, 259 pages

Michael Collins isn't in the best place in life when Lotto opens: he's been drinking too much, his wife is divorcing him, and his position at work is tenuous. But when he finds himself holding a winning lottery ticket--good for 23 million--he's sure his luck has changed. It has--unfortunately for the worse. Winning the lottery isn't always all it's cracked up to be: a Google search will turn up lots of examples of big winners losing it all because they didn't handle their money wisely. Mike's story doesn't read quite like these hard-luck cases. He stumbles into trouble even before he's able to collect his winnings, one enormous lapse in judgment on his part leading to the manifold difficulties that subsequently plague him. We watch as Mike tries to cash in, harassed by his soon-to-be-ex among others, including armed thugs on two continents.

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Sunday Salon: Stephenie Meyer's Breaking Dawn

An unconventional--for me--review for this last Sunday Salon of the year:

Little, Brown © 2008, 754 pages

The publication of Breaking Dawn, the fourth book in Stephenie Meyer's vampire saga, was met with a firestorm of protest in some quarters. Disgruntled readers, unhappy with the direction the story takes in book four, tried to organize a campaign against the book, urging others who were unhappy with the novel after reading it to return it. The strategy would effectively rob Meyer and her publisher of royalties that they had earned legitimately from the book's sale. The response, a bit of childish foot-stamping, is ridiculous: readers aren't guaranteed a plot that pleases them or their money back. And the protesters' desire to punish Meyer--an author who has presumably pleased them over the course of the series' first 1800-odd pages--is mean-spirited and distasteful.

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Pedersen, Laura: Beginner's Luck

Ballantine Books © 2003, 336 pages

Hallie Palmer is an unusually clever 16-year-old who applies her formidable math skills to the business of gambling, often riding her bike to the race track during school hours or sneaking out of the house to join a clandestine poker game in the local church basement. Hallie's long-term goal is the acquisitiion of a car, by means of which she hopes to escape the twin discomforts of school and life with her too-large nuclear family--neither of which is a good fit given her tendency to nonconformity. Her life changes when she lands a job working as a groundskeeper for the Stocktons, a mother and son team who embrace noncomformity in general and in particular quickly adopt Hallie as a sort of stray. Olivia Stockton, poet and pornographer and amateur fertility specialist, is a Ruth Gordon-esque, 60-something Bohemian who's never met a liberal cause for which she wasn't eager to man the barricades. Her son Bernard is a slightly more subdued antiques dealer and a passionate chef. Bernard's boyfriend Gil lives in the house as well, as do Olivia's husband--long suffering from Alzheimer's--and Rocky, a near alcoholic--wait for it--chimpanzee trained to work with paraplegics.

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Meyer, Stephenie: Eclipse

Little, Brown © 2007, 629 pages

In the third installment in Stephenie Meyer's vampire tetralogy, Bella Swann confronts a pair of problems that have been building to a head. (Note: possible spoilers follow for those who haven't read books one and two.) The vampire Vicotria, who's still haunting the Pacific Northwest with vengeance in mind, would like nothing better than to rip Bella's throat out. And the two men in Bella's life--her undead paramour Edward and her best friend, werewolf Jacob Black--feel much the same about one another. The awkward trio spends a lot of time in book three negotiating a working relationship.

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Sussman, Paul: The Lost Army of Cambyses

Grove Press © 2002, 288 pages

Paul Sussman's The Lost Army of Cambyses takes as its starting point a brief reference in book three of Herodotus' History. Around 523 B.C. the Persian King Cambyses, having conquered Egypt, sent an army of 50,000 west across the desert against the Ammonians. The army made it halfway there and then was lost, reportedly buried in a sandstorm. They were never heard from again. What would happen, Sussman's novel asks, if the remains of that army were found today, the swords and shields and supply wagons and the men themselves perfectly preserved for two and a half millennia by the desert sands?

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Blachman, Jeremy: Anonymous Lawyer

Picador © 2007, 288 pages

I don't know much about law offices or identify particularly with the people who work in them, and I tend to avoid epistolary novels: there's something about the format that usually annoys me. But Jeremy Blachman's Anonymous Lawyer is a great read. The book--which grew out of the author's blog (apparently no longer updated), at anonymouslawer.blogspot.com--purports to be a series of blog posts by a hiring partner at a big-league law firm. Writing as "Anonymous Lawyer" (AL), Blachman's protagonist blogs about the personalities and politics and the general working conditions at his office, where the over-worked, over-stressed, and over-paid sell their souls for a promotion or a larger office. AL is himself an unrepentant bastard, wont to assign underlings impossible tasks as a means of manifesting his authority--the capricious edicts of a malevolent near deity.

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Meyer, Stephenie: New Moon

Little, Brown © 2006, 608 pages

This sequel to Stephenie Meyer's bestselling teen vampire romance Twilight is less gripping than its predecessor. For most of the book's 600-odd pages Bella's relationship with Edward--the focus of the first book--takes a back seat to other plot developments. Bella's friendship with Jacob deepens--he becomes, arguably, the guy she should have fallen for--and we learn that vampires aren't the only creatures that stalk the woods around Forks, Washington.

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Guilfoile, Kevin: Cast of Shadows

Knopf © 2005, 336 pages

Kevin Guilfoile's superb novel Cast of Shadows explores the consequences of a vicious crime, the rape and murder of seventeen-year-old Anna Kat. The police are unable to solve the case, and AK's father, renowned fertility doctor and cloning expert Dr. Davis Moore, devotes himself to finding the killer himself--poring over the text of police interviews when the information is finally released to him, tracking down potential suspects. Eventually Moore takes an extreme step that, should it ever be discovered, could destroy his career and what's left of his family.

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Desmond, David: The Misadventures of Oliver Booth

Greenleaf Book Group © 2008, 224 pages

Oliver Booth is a pompous and portly antique dealer who is constantly endeavoring to ingratiate himself with the cosmetically-preserved ultra-rich of Palm Beach, thinking it good for business. But Booth inevitably fails, sometimes comically, both in his bids for societal approval and in business because his manner is irritating and he's a fraud: his shop is filled with Mexican knock-offs, and few prospective customers fall for the deceit. In David Desmond's debut novel--the first in what will apparently be a series--Oliver hires a certain Bernard Dauphin as his newest assistant. Bernard, unlike his employer, is both competent and scrupulously honest, and his qualities are recognized and rewarded, much to Oliver's dismay, by Palm Beach's dowager socialite, Margaret Van Buren. Desmond's novel follows the mismatched pair as they travel to France on Mrs. Van Buren's behalf to purchase antiques to furnish her guest house.

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