Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York

Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York
By Roz Chast
Bloomsbury, 2017. 176 pgs. Graphic Novel

Cartoonist Roz Chast takes a break from designing front page comic spreads of The New Yorker to create this guide to the city that stole her heart. A short but absolutely delightful read, Chast's book is divided into sections like "The Subway," "Food," and "Stuff to Do" to help readers get a feel for New York City as she sees it. As a guide, it is wildly informative and full of great advice; as a cartoon, it's hilarious and will make you laugh (if you're endowed with a good sense of humor of course).

I've loved Roz Chast for a long time--I've cited her in academic papers and read Theories of Everything dozens of times. Her cartoons are typically quirky observations of mundane everyday life: what silly thing the lady on the bus might be daydreaming about, which human objects are "proof of life on Earth," and what nature's budget might be for each season. Chast always feels like a friend who's not so much letting you in on an inside joke as creating one with you. But something about Going into Town feels even more personal and personable. Perhaps it's that it started out as a booklet for her daughter who was moving to the Big Apple for university. Perhaps it's that you can sense a real sincerity behind the words, a real love and optimism that sees the flaws and idiosyncrasies of her favorite city, and forgives and loves it all the more.

I'm moving to New York this week, and I'm both thrilled and terrified. I'm a creature of routine and I love having my things in place: my piano in the kitchen corner, my separate closets for shirts and dresses, my cats watching doves out the window or purring on my lap as I read from the stack of books on my nightstand, my friends a few streets and a text away. I am giving all these things up, and what scares me the most is the last one, being alone in the busiest city in America. But Chast's New York City is a friend itself, an enigmatic, volatile, fantastic figure that I can't wait to get to know over time. Seeing it through her eyes, in illustrated format and themed "chapters" make my upcoming move there feel less scary, more fun, and more full of discovery and possibility.

DMR

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
by Dave Eggers
Vintage, 2001, 437 pgs. Biography

What happens when you become an orphan and a parent all at once in your early twenties? If you're Dave Eggers, you migrate around California with your kid brother, live large like two irresponsible teenage runaways, found three literary magazines, and take advantage of the sugary sympathies of neighbors, family friends, and strangers. Then, ten years later, you write all about it. In this account of the years after his parents died, Eggers gets into the nitty-gritty of how he and his brother live, giving a comprehensive list of eleven-year-old Toph's ultimate frisbee maneuvers, drawing diagrams of his apartment's layout to acquaint the reader with the spaces he inhabits, and describing in detail his various daydreams about various pretty girls.

The resulting memoir is like a night sky: full of separate dazzling bits and pieces that constellate together beautifully like a connect-the-dots, and gradually form a grand tableau that invites the reader's gaze. But don't get me or Eggers wrong--the very title of this book hints at Eggers' sense of irony which gently negates and pokes fun at his project and prevents bathos from leaking in. The narrator and his characters are, after all, funny, honest, and thus so charismatic. While it's clear Eggers' creative impulses sometimes compromise the pure truth of his story, the whole thing exudes a feeling of authenticity to life and human beings. Besides, what is nonfiction anyway but a history conditioned by subjectivity? The postmodern period that this book came out of proved that--more or less.

If you like Jonathan Safran Foer and David Foster Wallace, or other genre-bending memoir-novels like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, check out A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

DMR

Bird Box

Bird Box
By Josh Malerman
Ecco Press, 2014. 262 pgs. Fiction

Life for Malorie is looking a little more complicated when her pregnancy test comes back positive after a one-night stand. But just as she and her sister start to plan for Malorie's new future, the world is thrown into utter chaos by the so-called "Problem"--something strange and sinister has come to Earth, which, if looked at directly, drives its witness to violent suicide by any means. You must close your eyes if you want to survive. Weaving three narratives together from different moments in Malorie's story, Bird Box explores how survivors navigate the new world, banding together, using the resources around them, and staving off hunger, thirst, and perhaps most importantly, paranoia. As it turns out, it's an Olympian task to stay sane in an environment that drives people mad. Malorie must do not only that, but also bring a child into this world where it seems even animals are not exempt from the effects of the hostile presence.

Just when you thought the post-apocalyptic genre's moment was over, Bird Box bursts onto the scene with several awards and a Netflix adaptation starring Sandra Bullock and John Malkovich. If you want in on the buzz without having to watch something violent, the book is a great place to go; the print medium lends itself well to the phenomenon of blindness and you'll feel just like Malorie, stumbling suspensefully into the twists and surprises of the book. The psychological development of the characters is just as thrilling as the dangerous presence and will have you questioning who the real threat is. Bird Box is Malerman's debut novel, and I must admit at times I struggled to suspend my disbelief--it doesn't quite make sense when Malorie decides to risk opening her eyes to drive three miles just after another character is offed nearby. Moreover, the novel takes on more than four years and such an enormous "Problem" that I wish Malerman had devoted a little more time to, especially after reading Justin Cronin's beautiful and thoroughly-written book, The Passage. But the premise of Bird Box is so terrifying and so compelling that you'll be hooked, and the characters' instincts and wills to survive so universal that I believe the story inside will outlast its momentary trendiness.

DMR

Pachinko

Pachinko
By Min Jin Lee
Grand Central Publishing, 2017. 496 pgs. Fiction

Sunja's life is forever altered after a fling with a charming man near the markets of her home in the small fishing village of Yeongdo, Korea. Pregnant and with few options, Sunja is given an opportunity for a hopeful future--with the caveat that she must move to Japan, long considered Korea's oppressor. This multigenerational story begins with Sunja's emigration in the 1930s and extends up to the late 1980s through the plights of her sons, her grandchildren, and their friends and lovers, with all the ethnicity, class, and gender-related tensions those relationships abide.

If, like me, you are captivated by stories that take place in Asia or have Asian protagonists (The Good Earth, anything by Lisa See or Haruki Murakami), this National Book Award finalist is a must-read. The novel has some of the trappings of an epic tale, with a mysteriously compelling hero(ine), a journey from home to a foreign land, and a narrator that feels at times distant, simply there to relate the story and only rarely comment on the progress. This last quality, too, makes the novel feel incredibly modern, allowing the reader to interpret tragedy or happy ending out of the story, which, depending on the reader, could be frustrating or freeing. My favorite parts of the book were the tangents into the quiet lives of minor characters--alighting briefly on their histories, their vulnerabilities, their memories of their parents, sisters, brothers. When it was finally time to leave Sunja, Mozasu, Solomon, and Hana at the end of the 496 pages, I wasn't ready.

DMR