You Came Back by Christopher Coake offers a great portrait of grief and the challenge of carrying on with life after a tragedy

You Came Back is everything you want a literary novel to be - a great premise that draws you in, fully realized characters that provide a deep insight into what it means to be human, and a writing style that gives you the feeling you're in the hands of a talent that won't let you down. Here Coake explores the ramifications of parents who suffered the loss of a child and had their marriage crumble as a result. The novel picks up seven years later when their lives have started to pick up again, and the husband, Mark Fife, has made a new love and is ready to get married again. All that gets turned upside down, though, when the owner of the house he used to live in - where his son died falling down steps - finds him to tell him that her son has heard a ghost in the house that seems to be Mark's dead son, calling for his father. The novel offers an amazingly gripping exploration of the personal havoc that news brings. Mark resists at first, trying to stay committed to his new love and trying not to be overcome once again by grief and the guilt he still carries for his imagined responsibility in his son's death. Complicating matters further is that his first wife, before grief soured their relationship, was the great love of his life.

As serious as the topic, this is not a depressing story or one overcome with explaining the mechanics of inhabitants of a ghost world. It's all about living a life when your most precious dreams and loved ones have been taken from you. There are surprises along the way, and I wouldn't say anymore to avoid giving anything away, but Mark Fife is one terrific character and I think any reader would enjoy spending 400 pages inside his minds as he struggles with these issues. I normally enjoy strict realism, and got a little concerned when I heard this was a "ghost" story. But my mind had been opened by reading David Long's brilliant "The Inhabited World." Like that novel, this one is much more about the emotional struggles of living a life full of setbacks and tragedies than it is about ghoulish presences. Coake wrote a brilliant short story collection a few years back and I hope this novel will give him enough success to continue writing plenty more novels and collections.

Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son offers a haunting look inside North Korea

This is an important, brilliantly conceived, though not always pleasant to read novel. At its center is Pak Jun Do, who withstands all sorts of brutality in the absurdly surreal world of North Korea. He goes from being an orphan, to a kidnapper, to a radio man on a fishing ship to a prisoner, and then finally assumes the identity of a national hero/tae kwondo champion who belongs to Kim Jung Il's inner circle and is the husband of the country's greatest national actress. The tales of how human life is so grotesquely devalued - from kidnapping innocent victims off Japanese soil to performing lobotomies on prisoners with nails over their eyeballs - make for difficult reading. But it remains a triumphant story about how this one character attempts to persevere, while everything he could hold precious, including his own identity, is stolen from him. The descriptions of the places he brings his mind to escape the physical torture or the things he must do to avoid starvation in prison camps, like eating moths, are delivered with brilliant prose. I read an interview with Adam Johnson in which he mentioned an upcoming memoir from someone who lived in a Korean gulag that details brutalities far in excess of any of those here. He also said he had to hold back and not match some of the more outlandish things Kim Jung Il actually did because it would have strained readers' credulity. It is hard to believe that a far more sadistic world than the one Orwell describes in 1984 actually exists somewhere, but this novel, in a magnificently literary way, offers a glimpse into just how cruelly distorted the world of North Korea is.

America Dervish a great coming of age story with insights into Muslim family life

American Dervish is a terrific coming of age story. What makes it particularly stand out is that the protagonist, Hayat Shah, a 12-year-old Muslim boy isn’t simply the victim of selfish parents or bullying schoolmates. He has a petty and vindictive side, too, and the novel focuses on the lifelong guilt he feels over one particularly cruel act that he’s convinced changed the course of his “auntie’s" life. The auntie, Mina, comes to America to live with Hayat’s family after her arranged marriage in Pakistan fell apart because of her meddlesome and overbearing mother-in-law. But when her husband divorced her, he threatened to take custody of their son when the boy turned seven. To help her escape that fate, Hayat’s mother, who was a childhood friend of Mina’s, lets her and her son come live with them at their home in Milwaukee. Through Mina, a brilliant and religious woman, Hayat learns about Islam and the Quran for the first time. Hayat’s father, Naveed, lost his faith after his sister died when the two were teenagers and he has nothing but contempt for the religious Pakistanis in their town, whom he sees as ignorant, backward, and hypocritical. Mina uses the Quran to teach Hayat how to appreciate every aspect of life and to live with ultimate humility before God’s graces. She makes him want to become a “hafiz,” someone who memorizes many verses of the Quran. Hayat believes that if he does, both he and his parents will get into heaven – a possibility that fills him with great hope because he worries that otherwise his father’s philandering and drinking will make him burn in hell. The beautiful Mina is more than a religious inspiration to the naïve Hayat. At 12, he still does not know what sex is, isn’t even sure if women have different parts than men, and when he starts having wet dreams, he doesn’t know what’s happening to him. Without understanding anything about sex, Mina is his first crush – a situation that becomes all the more complicated when he catches Mina in the middle of the night naked in the bathroom and on the verge of touching herself. As aroused as that image of her makes him, he doesn’t use it for his own masturbatory fantasy, but instead tries to become more devout. But when Mina meets and falls in love with his father’s partner, Nathan, Hayat does all he can to destroy that relationship, out of jealousy and because Nathan is Jewish. When Mina herself realizes the relationship with Nathan won’t work because of their religious differences, her family’s objections, and her son’s desire for a father who isn’t white, she settles for a marriage to a weak and mentally unstable but domineering Muslim man, and Hayat has to deal with years of guilt for sabotaging her one chance at happiness. Hayat’s mother is a particularly strong character. She suffers the constant humiliation of her husband’s affairs and opens up to her son about far more than she should, but when Mina lashes out at Hayat for trying to poison her son’s mind about the prospects of a Jewish stepfather, Hayat’s mother comes to her son defense and lets her best friend know she’ll kill her even she ever touches her son again. Overall, this is a courageous book and one that offers a not very flattering look at the anti-semitism and misogyny of a small group of Muslims who use the Quran to justify their hatred of the Jews and, in some cases, men’s right to beat their women. But this community of Muslims is no different, I suppose, than the Christian right when they use the Bible to justify homophobia. Here, Mina, provides the thoughtful counterbalance, by showing the goodness and humility the Quran can inspire when interpretations of it aren’t use to justify mean-spiritedness and cruelty. There is a lot of wonderful moral complexity to consider here. Is Hayat responsible for Mina’s fate or is Mina the one who set the ball in motion by filling his head with verses from the Quran and leading him to a mosque that would never accept Jews? Did Hayat’s one sabotaging truly alter the course of Mina’s life or did she make free choices along the way? It’s a lot to ponder, and the author deserves considerable accolades for embedding these issues inside a highly entertaining and moving story with so many great, fully-rounded characters.        

Alex Gilvarry's From The Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant is a brilliant, bold & funny novel

Alex Gilvarry has written an absolutely brilliant and entertaining novel. The premise is so outlandish - he combines a humorous satirical look at the fashion industry with eye-opening insights into the way "detainees" are treated at Guantanamo Prison. It doesn't seem possible that these two storylines could be joined together in an interesting and compelling way, but Gilvarry does it. The book is written as the confession of Boy Hernandez, a Filipino immigrant with dreams of becoming a world famous designer. For most of the book, we learn of Boy's journey from a Manila fashion school, where he was the second best student to a rival who hit the big time fast, to the streets of New York, where he arrives nearly penniless but dreams of the day when he'll be able to showcase his own designs during Fashion Week at Bryant Park. When he stumbles upon a neighbor who offers to bankroll his ambitions, he willfully keeps a blind eye to that man's shady business dealings. When his new partner, Ahmed, turns out to be an arms dealer, Boy, gets caught up in the post 911 paranoia and ends up in Guantanamo and has to write this confession to try to prove his innocence. Gilvarry's portrayal of a designer's mind - the way he looks at clothes, the way he brainstorms new ideas, and all the connections he has to leverage to make inroads into the business are fascinatingly portrayed. You learn a lot about how clothing designers think and develop their ideas. And Boy's voice is so wonderfully unique. He has a humorously fragile ego - with all of his petty jealousies with his rivals are right at the forefront - but then he turns into a powerful voice of innocent victims as he describes the brutal and unforgiving ways that prisoners are treated by the government when fear provides them with the justifications to ignore the guidelines for humane treatment set forth by the Constitution and Geneva Convention. This book is so unique and so entertaining, I highly recommend it.

Joe Dunthorne offers a funny portait of communal living in his novel Wild Abandon

(Out: 1/3/12, 336p, Random House) Wild Abandon offers a fun, slightly satirical portrait of a commune in contemporary Wales. The commune, Blaen-y-Llyn, has been running for twenty years. But in the timeframe of the novel just about everyone is trying to get out of it. The only one trying to keep everything together is Don, one of the founders and self-appointed leader. He and the rest of his family are the focal characters of the book. Don is a bit pompous, still dedicated to the virtues of home schooling, sustainable housing, and living off the electrical grid, but his wife, Freya, has had just about enough of his bombastic personality. His 17-year-old daughter Kate, is dying for a chance to live in the normal world, and actually runs away from the commune to live with her boyfriend's family in a standard suburban house for a while, and his son Albert is enthralled with the idea, promulgated by one of the commune's residents, that the Mayans were right and that a cataclysmic event will happen in 2012, and that only those prepared for it will be able to survive. Young Albert wants to start preparing for that event, but mostly in ways that let him act out his anger at his sister's departure, which he experiences as an abandonment. We also get to know Patrick, the moneybags of the operation, whose former success in the greeting card business and as a landlord now mostly bankroll the commune's operation. But after years of smoking too much pot, he's become excessively paranoid. In one funny scene, he goes berserk, running through the commune, thinking everyone's about to kill him, and breaking his ankle in an attempt to escape. In the end, he too is trying to get away from Don and put an end to his decades-long pining for a woman, Janet, who's given him mixed signals through the years but never returned his love and devotion. Throughout the book, there are lots of interesting insights about communal living - Freya the wife, for example, takes on the role of the community's butcher because no one else on the farm where they live, including her husband, has the guts to slaughter their livestock. The only drawback, at least initially, is that there are few sympathetic characters with a real dilemma that makes you want to keep turning the pages. At the outset, it's perfectly understandable why everyone wants to escape Don - he's controlling and full of himself. But, ironically, over the pages, Don becomes the most sympathetic character. His wife and daughter's attempts to separate are somewhat cruel and unfeeling, and over the course of the marvelous closing pages, when Don throws a blow-out party, hoping to lure everyone back, his attempts to win everyone over and then control his young son, Albert, who's gone a little crazy over this end-of-the-world idea and the separation from his sister, make Don the character you root for the most.

Stephen Wetta's novel "If Jack's In Love" a powerful portrait of the perils of belonging to a town's outcast family

(Out 9/29/11, 368p, Putnam) A powerful story of a bright, Southern 13-year-old boy dealing with the burdens of being a member of the pariah family in a middle-class Virginian town in the late 1960s. The story is well written, although a little slow in pacing, as young Jack pines over a girl who’s a member of one of the upper-crust families, while having to deal with both his unemployed dad, who wants to rob the jewelry store of a man who’s befriended Jack and with his violent older brother, who abuses and threatens the older brother of young Jack’s crush. Jack pines over Myra, who returns his affection because he is the only one in their class at school who is as smart as she is, and that connection enables her to look past his family’s lower social standing. But when her older brother, Gaylord, goes missing, the whole town suspects if was Jack’s brother who did something to him, and that dooms young Jack’s relationship. The novel offers a wonderful portrait of the dilemmas of being an outcast and the perils of feeling threatened by one’s own family members. If you enjoy this book, I strongly recommend Dallas Hudgens’ Drive Like Hell, which offers a similar portrait of a young teenage boy coping with the challenges of being in a white trash family, although in a more comic vein.

My favorite albums of 2011

 

1.  Outside by Tapes 'n Tapes
(Out: 1/1/11) 
Outstanding album. Standout tracks, for me, are two uptempo, fun songs - "Badaboom" & "Freak Out" -- and also the hauntingly beautiful, "On and On.""

2.  The King Is Dead by The Decemberists
(Out: 1/18/11)
Wonderful range of tunes, from the Springsteen-esque  "Down by the Water" to the Irish rocker "Rox in the Box." As always clever lyrics loaded with all sorts of allusions, historical references.

3.  Kaputt by Destroyer
(Out: 1/25/11)
Dan Bejar has such an interesting, unique voice. Here his whispery, half-talking, half singing style is set into some beautiful jazz arrangments with lots of intersting sax, trumpet flourishes (and even a pan flute prominently played in  1 song). A great female lead back-up vocalist provides a perfect complement to him. Faves: The title track and "Savage Night at the Opera.

4.  Middle Brother by Middle Brother
 (Out: 3/1/11) 
Great songs from the "supergroup" of Taylor Goldsmith (of Dawes), Matt Vasquez (Delta Spirit), and John McCauley (Deer Tick). All great tunes, I esp. like "Middle Brother," "Million Dollar Bill," and "Me, Me, Me.

5.  Departing by The Rural Alberta Advantage
 (Out: 3/1/11) 
Great 2nd album, following up the outstanding "Hometowns." Standout tracks are the uptemp rockers, "Stamp," "Tornado '87," "Muscle Relaxants" and "Barnes Yard," but the slower tempo stuff, "Two Lovers" and "Goodnight" are equally good. Nils Edenloff has a very cool voice, and Amy Cole provides great back-up and occasional counterpoint."

6.  Angles by The Strokes
(Out: 3/22/11)
Music critics weren't entirely kind, but it's a good return to form. "Under Cover of Darkness" and "Taken for a Fool" and "Gratisfaction" sound like classic Strokes tunes. Julian still a very cool singer.

7.  Loverboy by Brett Dennen
 (Out: 4/12/11) 
Okay more folk than alt, but a great album. Fantastic voice that he modulates in lots of interesting ways, clever lyrics, lots of interesting tempo shifts. Faves: "Make you fall in love with me" & "Little Cosmic Girl," but all tracks standouts."

8.  Helplessness Blues by Fleet Foxes
 (Out: 5/3/11)
Beautiful folk music. Robin Pecknold has a fabulous high-pitched voice. It's supported by gorgeous harmonizing and guitar, mandolin & violin work, delivered in that Appalachian style with some contemporary production flourishes. Fave: "Tbe Shrine/An Argument," which keeps shifting mood and tempo to brilliant effect."

9.  Smother by Wild Beasts
(Out: 5/3/11) 
Baritone Tom Fleming and tenor, but mostly falsetto-singing Hayden Thorpe, have two of the most interesting voices you could listen to. Bold lyrics and daring love songs are built with lush, synthesizer, guitar and piano accompaniment. Faves: "Reach a Bit Further" that juxtaposes Tom & Hayden's singing in a marvelous way, and "Loop the Loop" about the difficulties of forgiving.

10.  Suck It and See by Arctic Monkeys
 (Out: 6/7/2011)
Not the hard-rushing, punk-edged tunes of their early days getting disrepected at Manchester night clubs, nor the grating, tempo-shifting stuff of Humbug. Just some great love songs with Alex's typical clever lyrics. Faves include: "Hellcat Spangled Shalala," "Reckless Serenade" and "That's Where You're Wrong.

11.  lenses alien by Cymbals Eat Guitars
 (Out: 8/30/11) 
Very different style -- no chorus with hook then verse song structure. Densely packed lyrics like Craig Finn of Hold Steady. Just amazing, mind-bending stuff when you're in the mood for something different. Joseph D'Agostino has a cool voice."

12.  American Goldwing by Blitzen Trapper
(Out: 9/13/11)
From country to hard-rocker, such a a mix of styles. Eric Earley is such a talent, and his bandmates back him expertly. Like the others here, they are a great live show show, too. Just sample "Love the Way You Walk Away" and you'll be eager for more."

13.  Hysterical by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
 (Out: 9/20/11) 
One great song after the next. Love the upbeat stuff like "Maniac" and "Hysterical" but the slower tempo tunes like "In a Motel" are great and the 7-plus minute "Adam's Plane" is a mini-epic. (Just wished they'd offer lyrics, Alec's vocals often hard to understand!)"

14.  In the Pit of the Stomach by We Were Promised Jetpacks
 (Out: 10/4/11) 
A great album from this Scottish post-punk band. Great hard-rocking tunes, like "Circles and Squares," "Through the Dirt and the Gravel" with insightful, literate lyrics, and then some great work when they slow things down a bit, like "Pear Tree." Adam Thompson has a great voice, and not so heavily accented that it would be hard (for an American like me) to make out the lyrics."

15.  Great Escape of Leslie Magnafuzz by Radio Moscow
(Out: 10/11/11)
Much as I admire Hendrix, heavy blues guitar in the 70s psychedlic style isn't normally my top preference but there's some very infectious about the sound these guys put out. It'll get your adrenaline pumping.

16.  Divine Providence by Deer Tick
(Out: 10/24/11)
Band tries to create the raucous atmosphere of their live shows and they do with songs like "Let's All Go to the Bar" and "Mr. Bump," but there are also a few, sweet slower songs like "Miss K" and "Love is a Funny Word." Big surprise is how great drummer Dennis sounds on "Clownin' Around" and Ian's 2 songs are nice & bluesy.

17.  Long Live the King by The Decemberists
(Out: 11/1/11)
Great follow-up EP to the King Is Dead

18.  El Camino by The Black Keys
(Out: 12/6/11)
 Different from Brothers -- a little less bluesy, less falsetto singing from Dan (which I liked), but a great album in its own right. Standout tracks for me: "Dead and Gone," "Run Right Back," "Hell of a Season" and "Nova Baby," but they're all good!