Year in (Book) Review: The Book of Joe

Jonathan Tropper makes me wish I was a dude. Or, at least, he makes me wish I could, sometimes, write like one.

The Book of Joe is actually my second Tropper book of the year, the first being This Is Where I Leave You, which made me fall a little bit in love with him. The Book of Joe confirmed, if it's not love, it's at least a pretty serious crush.

This was actually an earlier book, and it felt like it. He has my propensity for sometimes being just thiiiis much too clever with his turns of phrase. For using eighteen words where six might work, as it were. But, the thing is, he is clever. He writes some really funny, really biting, occasionally unexpected stuff.

Quick synopsis (by request, since apparently I rarely ever actually say much about what the book is about, and some of you would like the elevator pitch): Joe is a guy in his mid-thirties who has recently hit the big time with his debut novel. He's rolling in money, driving a great car, and sort of a little bit miserable. When his father falls ill, he heads out of New York and back to the small New England town he's not returned to in nearly seventeen years. Because, teensy weensy detail, the book he wrote was about said small New England town, and most of the people in it, and it was ... let's say, unflattering. Chaos inevitably ensues. There you have it.

Every once in a while throughout his novel Tropper sounds a little bit like a guy trying not to write a guys' book, and gives in to a sort of sappy tone of predictability. Still, it's nice to hear a guy writing about a guy and not being afraid to include some fear, some serious self-doubt, and some true, childhood love that has (almost) nothing to do with sex. His characters are well thought out and lovable, even the idiots, and he lets you care about them all. I don't know what the male equivalent of chick lit is called, but this is a shining example of it.

Year in (Book) Review: Olive Kitteridge

Continuing in my summer long style of reading some really beautiful, and sometimes somewhat slow, narratives, I stepped up to the big leagues with Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer Prize-winning novelistic collection of short stories, Olive Kitteridge.

At last month's Antioch Writers' Workshop, Strout's name hung in the air; she'd been one of the guests in attendance two years ago -- the same year she published Olive Kitteridge -- and people seemed to speak her name in rather reverent, hushed tones. People say my name loudly and often as the butt of a joke, so I was intrigued.

Olive is a quiet book, centering around -- wait for it -- an aging small town retired teacher named Olive Kitteridge. Some of the stories are about Olive and her family -- her kind husband and her troubled only child son -- and in others, she's merely a background player for the folks who come and go in and out of her little world.

I have a tremendous respect for the art of the short story; it's a deceptively difficult thing to create an entire, complex story in a limited number of pages. Strout handles it beautifully, weaving together a really lovely tale from a lot of different lives and stories. I just love Strout's approach to voice and language -- it's something I've been concentrating on a lot lately ... since all my characters sound suspiciously just like me.

Perhaps the only negative I might assign to Strout's book is, well, just that -- it's a little negative, for a complete lack of a more interesting or inspired word. I feel a little about Olive the way I would about Angela Lansbury -- my mom used to watch Murder She Wrote and, without fail, would comment that if she ever saw that woman ambling into town, she'd hightail it out -- you can be pretty certain that once she shows up, something bad is going to happen. Within the hour. I just wish Ms. Strout had given us a little more of the positive side of the Kitteridges and their neighbors -- I don't think the nostalgic, almost melancholy tone would have been lost.