I’ve been reading up a storm:

• Rules for Saying Goodbye by Katherine Taylor (coming in June from FSG)—pretty good first novel about a girl who never quite fits in or grows up. Taylor draws a nice portrait of a character always on the lookout for something but they’re not quite sure what.
• Origin by Diana Abu-Jaber (coming in June from W.W. Norton)—Abu-Jaber’s first mystery, she does a brilliant job of creating both a complex enough plot with real, interesting characters. Lena, a fingerprint expert at a lab in Syracuse, investigates a series of crib deaths that might be cases of SIDS or murders. Meanwhile, she begins to question her own shadowy childhood. The book engaged me completely on this past chilly Sunday.
• After Dark by Haruki Murakami (coming in May from Random House)—Short novel from one of my father authors. Set over the course of an evening, the chapters cut between several interconnected stories: trombonist Tetsuya, entering a Denny’s one evening, runs into Mari Asai. He was once interested in Mari’s beautiful older sister Eri, who has been asleep for a month, trapped in some netherworld. Meanwhile, a Chinese prostitute is beaten badly by an officeworker at a love hotel and the propietor, Kaoru, needs Mari’s Chinese translation skills. The book doesn’t go anywhere. Rather it seems to be more of an observation on coincidences and time.
• The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones (coming in May from Houghton-Mifflin)—While this book is nicely written, I feel like I’m not it’s target. It’s about a woman who has lost her husband in a tragic auto accident. Then she learns that a paternity suit has been filed in China against her husband’s estate. Reeling from this news, she goes to China to investigate the suit and also to write an article on an up and coming chef Sam Liang. She and Liang form an instant bond and each help each other come to terms with major events in their lives. While not a bad book by any means, it just didn’t move me in any particular way. We just weren’t meant to be.

I recently finished two books that one could consider “experimental fiction” even though these two books differ greatly. What is even considered experimental fiction anymore? Is that different from a “novel of ideas”? The terms get thrown around so often. Is it a book that simply plays around with the parameters of the novel? Some people seem to confuse cult fiction with experimental fiction, though cult fiction can be experimental in nature, just because a novel plays with form doesn’t make it cult fiction.

The first book I’ll mention is Scarlett Thomas’s The End of Mr. Y. Others have raved about this book—I really liked it myself. Graduate student Ariel Manto gets a hold of the cursed Victorian novel The End of Mr Y written by Thomas Lumas. She uses the instructions in the book to enter the “Troposphere”, an alternate dimension where human thoughts connect and where visitors can jump from one person’s thoughts to another. It sounds complicated and it is, but Thomas explains it all with ease and it makes sense. I loved Ariel Manto’s brilliance. It’s nice to read a book featuring a strong female lead that doesn’t apologize for her intelligence. Manto is somewhat of a renegade scholar. She jumps from subject to subject rather like the old Renaissance scholars, absorbing science, literature and philiosophy. Despite a few flaws in the book, I think this is a really strong effort for Thomas and I’m looking forward to her future work.

The second book I’ll mention that I finished last week was Matthew Sharpe’s  inventive novel Jamestown. Set sometime in the future, this book chronicles a group of settlers from Manhattan traveling South in a large bus/tank to establish an outpost in southern Virginia. The book features historical figures like John Smith, Pocahantas and others. Each chapter tells the story from a different character’s perspective. The settlers are led by John Ratliff, whose mother’s boyfriend is the CEO of the Manhattan Company, who are enemies of the Brooklyn Company. The Indians, who speak English (which they try to conceal to the visitors), aren’t technically Indians. They just try to live like them and are “red” because they’re not using strong enough sunscreen. Powhatan leads them with the help of his advisor Sidney Feingold. Pocahantas falls in love with greasy haired communications officer Johnny Rolfe and saves the life of Jack Smith. I’m not going to adequately convey how great I think this book is—-it’s hard to explain without sounding like nut. It’s a wonderfully imaginative and Sharpe uses language to play with the future and the past that made me giggle and fall in love with the book.

These two books are so different from one another, yet I would call them both “experimental”. Thomas’s book plays with ideas and Sharpe’s book plays with, well, everything.