Book Talk: *The Night Swimmer*, by Matt Bondurant (Shelf Awareness review)

The Night Swimmer: A Novel
Matt Bondurant
Scribner (2012), Hardcover (ISBN 1451625294 / 9781451625295)
Fiction, 288 pages

A version of this review was originally published in Shelf Awareness, Readers' Edition (January 24, 2012); SA's editors provided compensation and a galley of the novel. The cover image links to IndieBound.org. I am an IndieBound affiliate.

The narrator and titular character of Matt Bondurant’s third novel, The Night Swimmer, is Elly Bulkington. When her husband Fred is stricken with survivor’s guilt after September 11--he was supposed to be at a meeting at the World Trade Center, but traded places with a coworker--he enters, with Elly’s support, a Irish brewery’s contest to win a pub on the country’s southwestern coast. Their arrival in the small seaside town offers the couple opportunities--a new business and a stab at novel-writing for Fred, and the challenge of a new ocean for Elly, a former competitive swimmer who feels most herself when in the water.

The pursuit of these separate endeavors strains the Bulkingtons’ marriage, as Elly spends increasing amounts of time on the nearby small island of Clear obsessing over making an open-water swim to its lighthouse and Fred becomes more interested in consuming the pub’s inventory than in its business prospects. The couple is viewed with some suspicion by the natives of this remote, clannish small town, but all the same, Elly is increasingly drawn into local conflicts and intrigues, determined to unravel the island’s mysteries.

The mysteries of The Night Swimmer are not laid out or wrapped up neatly, but it doesn’t entirely matter. What stands out about this novel is its atmosphere and the voice of its narrator. Elly is a bit of an oddball herself and, therefore, not entirely out of keeping with the strangeness of her new home. Her struggles with the elements in storms and on the ocean are vividly conveyed, as are her puzzlement over Clear’s secrets and efforts to unravel them...even as what she learns makes her question whether she and Fred should even be in Ireland at all. Matt Bondurant gives The Night Swimmer a pervasive sense of foreboding and a final act that hits with the impact of an Irish gale.

Rating

Book description, from the publisher's website:

In a small town on the southern coast of Ireland, an isolated place only frequented by fishermen and the occasional group of bird-watchers, Fred and Elly Bulkington, newly arrived from Vermont having won a pub in a contest, encounter a wild, strange land shaped by the pounding storms of the North Atlantic, as well as the native resistance to strangers. As Fred revels in the life of a new pubowner, Elly takes the ferry out to a nearby island where anyone not born there is called a “blow-in.” To the disbelief of the locals, Elly devotes herself to open-water swimming, pushing herself to the limit and crossing unseen boundaries that drive her into the heart of the island’s troubles—the mysterious tragedy that shrouds its inhabitants and the dangerous feud between an enigmatic farmer and a powerful clan that has no use for outsiders. 

The poignant unraveling of a marriage, the fierce beauty of the natural world, the mysterious power of Irish lore, and the gripping story of strangers in a strange land rife with intrigue and violence—The Night Swimmer is a novel of myriad enchantments by a writer of extraordinary talent.

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Sunday Salon: Books Bought, Books Read--January 2012

I'd been marveling over the fact that I've made it four weeks into the year without having set foot in a bookstore--not "marveling" in a good way, mind you; it's actually a little distressing to think about!--when I realized that didn't mean I hadn't bought any books this year. They just haven't been printed-on-paper books.

One of my Christmas gifts was a Kindle Touch, and I've been excited to discover that there have been some nice improvements since the 2nd-generation Kindle I got in 2009. The touchscreen is kind of erratic sometimes and not as responsive as I'd like, but the device itself is much more compact and lighter. I don't miss the keyboard, and I really like the fact that it also holds my Audible audiobook files. All of the Kindle content I already had was ready to move onto the Touch, but you won't be surprised that I've downloaded a few more titles since I got it:

• You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon
• Ghosts in the Garden: Reflections on Endings, Beginnings, and the Unearthing of Self by Beth Kephart
• What I Saw And How I Lied by Judy Blundell

I haven't read any books on the new Kindle yet, but I've listened to one Audible book on it so far (Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline), and preferred that experience to the Audible iPhone app.

I also got some Christmas cash--partly earmarked for BEA and Book Blogger Con, but partly just for me--and I used some of it to buy myself an iPad. I am liking it very much...but I really wasn't intending to use it as a an e-reader. However, I re-thought it and decided to use some of my iTunes gift card balance (also boosted by Christmas) to buy a few iBooks. I haven't read these yet either:

• Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain
• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
• The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler

I'm interested to see how the e-reading experience compares between the two devices. (I'm afraid I might like the iPad better, to be honest, but we shall see...)

I think that my reading this month may be setting a pattern for 2012:

• a book for Shelf Awareness
• a book for BlogHer Book Club (The Underside of Joy, by Sere Prince Halverson)
• a book for a blog tour (The Western Lit Survival Kit, by Sandra Newman)
• an audiobook for myself (Ready Player One)
• a print book for myself (A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Faith, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown, by Julia Scheeres, which was one of my 2011 also-rans)

I don't think the book club/tour slots will be occupied every month, and that should make more room for "for myself" reading. Having said that...February's priority reading is the Biography/Memoir short list for the Indie Lit Awards! I've read one of the five--Bossypants, by Tina Fey--already, but I still have four more:

• Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua (bought in audio)
• I Pray Hardest When I'm Being Shot At by Kyle Garret (provided by publisher)
• Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal by Conor Grennan (provided by publisher)
• Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading by Nina Sankovitch (bought as Kindle e-book)--I started reading this one last night

And a couple of months down the road, closer to their publication dates, I'm looking forward to cracking open a couple of galleys that popped up in my mail this month:

• The New Republic: A Novel by Lionel Shriver
• Small Damages by Beth Kephart

So have you read--or bought--any good books lately? How has your reading year started off?

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At the movies: *The Artist*

The Artist (official movie site)

Comedy/drama, 2011 (rated PG-13)

Starring: Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo

Written and directed by: Michel Hazanvicius

Synopsis, via RottenTomatoes.com:

Hollywood 1927. George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) is a silent movie superstar. The advent of the talkies will sound the death knell for his career and see him fall into oblivion. For young extra Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo), it seems the sky's the limit - major movie stardom awaits. The Artist tells the story of their interlinked destinies. -- (C) Weinstein

One of the hottest buzzed-about films of the 2011/12 awards season is a black-and-white silent film with an international cast. The Artist snuck up on me, to be honest. A couple of months ago I knew almost nothing about it, but my interest was piqued after seeing Hugo, which shares some themes with it. Both films are valentines to the early days of motion pictures; in Hugo, they’re part of a central character’s history. In The Artist, they’re the central framework of the story.

A silent film really needs to draw on the maxim that “a picture is worth a thousand words” to tell its story. The moviemakers really did their homework, and make outstanding use of the film toolbox. The story is told visually, and the look of the film is perfect. It’s beautifully lit in crisp black-and-white and filmed in the proper scale for its time (that is, not in widescreen). The actors are wonderfully cast and skilled in the expressive balance of face and body that makes film acting unique.

However, the most important element in making this work as a film is using those pretty pictures in a compelling narrative context, and The Artist succeeds there as well. The story itself is fairly simple--a classic tale of fortunes lost and found in late 1920s/Depression-era Hollywood--and to go beyond the synopsis quoted above would stray into spoiler territory, so I won’t. The beauty of it isn’t just in the look, though; it’s in the telling. What’s conveyed through physical performance, some lip reading, and a few title cards is complete, often hilarious, and deeply touching.

The secondary theme of the relationship between a man and his dog grabbed me too, of course.

My husband is a movie buff, and here’s what he said about The Artist on Facebook: ‎”The Artist was amazing! If you love old movies, you have to see it! Beautiful film!” I can’t agree more--this is a wonderful film, suitable for all except the youngest children (who would probably be bored, sadly)--very, very recommended!

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(Almost) everyone's a critic. Really.

The adage that “everyone’s a critic” may never have been more true than it is these days, thanks to the Internet. We may prefer to call ourselves “reviewers” rather than “critics.” We may take a less formal, more personal approach than traditional criticism, discussing our subjective responses to a work rather than assessing it against objective criteria. And we may prefer not to “criticize” at all, choosing to discuss only works we feel positive about.

But that doesn’t mean that those of us who blog and tweet about product of all kinds--and that means books and movies and music just as much as it does food and fashion and travel, etc.--aren’t performing at least some of the traditional functions of the critic. On a recent Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast, Stephen Thompson identified those functions as “5 C’s:”

Curate
Consume
Cull
Contextualize
Care

As a writer and editor at NPR Music, these attributes factor into the “recommendation-based reviews” Thompson writes for the site. That term seems to describe what many of us are writing for our own sites. We probably do have more freedom than most professional reviewers to review only what we choose, and maybe only what we like, but the job may not be as different as we think it is...and I think those “5 Cs” are just as applicable.

Granted, professional reviewers don’t have to do so much of the job on their own; they usually have editors. I do freelance recommendation-based book reviews outside my blog as well, and I receive several galleys each month to consider for those. My editor has already sorted through many dozens more before sending out her picks to reviewers, and plenty don’t get that far. She has a method to let us know if there are any in the batches we get that she’s really like us to review, but the choices from that point on--further culling--are up to us. Once the reviews are submitted, they may be revised and further edited...and sometimes they may be edited so far they don't run at all, which is a form of curation as well, I suppose.

As non-professional reviewers, we bloggers perform some of those 5-C functions ourselves, and we may give some more weight than others. When we decide which review offers to accept, or galleys to request, or books to buy, we’re culling. Some of us don’t review every book we read, and in choosing which ones we think are worth talking about, we’re curating. Our eventual discussion of the book may include some consideration of its place in a larger context--perhaps within a genre, as part of a series, or in its overall theme. And ultimately, we find the most to say about the things we care about the most.

In the nearly five years I’ve blogged here, there’s only one book that I read for personal reasons that I finished and didn’t post about. (I just didn’t have much to say about it, and I was pressed for time with other commitments--ultimately, I didn’t care enough.) I’ve gotten much better at the culling-and-curating when it comes to accepting personal review copies and blog tours, so I’m less likely to end up with books I really don’t want to talk about, or wouldn’t care to recommend.

A survey of consumer purchasing behavior presented at the 2012 ABA Winter Institute had some interesting findings related to the power of recommendations in getting information about books:

“Readers find out about books mostly through personal recommendations (49.2%), bookstore staff recommendations (30.8%), advertising (24.4%), search engine searches (21.6%) and book reviews (18.9%). Much less important are online algorithms (16%), blogs (12.1%) and social networks (11.8%).”

I question those findings, because I think that in the current climate, there’s far more overlap between “personal recommendations,” “book reviews,” “blogs,” and “social networks” than these divisions reflect. If the Internet has allowed everyone to be a critic and has given rise to the non-professional review, the “personal recommendation” may just take different forms these days. I consider the reviews of just about every book blogger I read--and that’s a lot of book bloggers--as personal recommendations (positive or negative), and that totally mixes up those categories.

And when everyone's a critic, we have an additional job: culling and curating the criticism we consume, so that we end up with the recommendations we care about. It's one more thing to consider from a critical perspective, and personally, I think critical thinking is a critical skill. Maybe we should thank the Internet for giving us all the chance to be critics.

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BEA and WBN: Two book events to talk about!

I've just put one bookish event on my calendar...and will be taking another one off.

Is it too soon to ask about your plans for Book Expo America 2012? 

The annual trade show will take place June 5-7 in New York City, and registration is already open! Bloggers may apply for non-editorial media badges or obtain a pass by registering to attend the Book Blogger Convention on June 4.

For the record, the BBC registration costs less than the three-day BEA pass and allows the same show access, but if it means you’d be in New York City for an extra day, it could end up costing you more overall. You and your personal budget are the only ones who can make that call.

I’ve been looking for announcements about the BBC programming, and haven’t seen any yet--if you have, please share any links! But I’ve known since I came back from BEA 2011 that I wanted to go again in 2012, so I registered this week.

Registering is the easy part, though--I have travel plans to make now, and that's where it gets interesting! Right now, I’m thinking that I’ll fly into New York on June 2 (the Saturday before) and have a free day on Sunday before BBC on Monday. I haven’t decided whether I’ll stay all the way through BEA or leave before Thursday. I also haven’t booked a hotel yet, and I’d really like to have a roommate this year--so as you make your plans, keep me in mind, and e-mail me if you’d consider that!

It's not too late to ask you about your plans for World Book Night.

You’ve probably heard about this already, but just in case you haven’t, the deadline to apply to be a book giver for World Book Night--to be held in the US and UK on April 23--is just a week away! WBN is looking for 50,000 volunteers to hand out books for the first time in the USA.

I love the idea of World Book Night. Each volunteer book giver will distribute 20 copies of one of 30 specially-selected books within his or her community, ideally to people who don’t read very much. The books are a mix of popular fiction, a few modern literary classics, accessible nonfiction, and young-adult favorites, and in keeping with the event’s mission, givers must have “read and loved” the title they are asking to hand out:

“World Book Night launched in the UK in 2011 and saw passionate readers across that beautiful country, give 1 million books to light or non readers to spread the joy and love of reading. Reading changes lives and at the heart of World Book Night lies the simplest of ideas and acts - that of putting a book into another person’s hand and saying ‘this one’s amazing, you have to read it’.”

Prospective givers list their first, second, and third giveaway choices on the application, and givers will be chosen based on “Where, to whom & why (they) want to give books away.”

And ultimately, those criteria are why I’ve decided not to apply to be a WBN book giver. I’ve started the application two or three times, and I may be overthinking things, but when the organization states that these are their selection criteria, I take them at their word. And it is painful to admit this, but I don’t have good answers for any of those questions. Besides that, the idea of physically handing a book to a non-book-loving stranger and telling him or her that they’ve got to read it is just a bit terrifying to this particular introvert; without solid motivation in the where/whom/why categories, it’s really hard to make a case for my doing this...aside from my aforementioned love of the idea, that is.

I’ll keep loving the idea, but I think it may be best to leave the execution of World Book Night to others. Have you applied to be a WBN book giver? What book do you want to give...and where, to whom, and why?

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(Audio)Book Talk: *Ready Player One*, by Ernest Cline

Ready Player One (book website)
Ernest Cline
Audiobook read by Wil Wheaton
Crown (2011), Hardcover (ISBN 030788743X / 9780307887436)
(Audio edition ISBN 9780307913159)
Fiction, 384 pages (Audio length 15 hours 46 minutes)
Source: Purchased audiobook (Audible.com)
Reason for reading: Personal

Opening lines, Chapter 1: “I was jolted awake by the sound of gunfire in one of the neighboring stacks. The shots were followed by a few minutes of muffled shouting and screaming, then silence.

Gunfire wasn’t uncommon in the stacks, but it still shook me up. I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep, so I decided to kill the remaining hours until dawn by brushing up on a few coin-op classics. Galaga, Defender, Asteroids. These games were outdated digital dinosaurs that had become museum pieces long before I was born. But I was a gunter, so I didn’t think of them as quaint low-res antiques. To me, they were hallowed artifacts. Pillars of the pantheon. When I played the classics, I did so with a determined sort of reverence.”

Book description, from the publisher’s website: It’s the year 2044, and the real world is an ugly place.

Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets.

And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune—and remarkable power—to whoever can unlock them.

For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that Halliday’s riddles are based in the pop culture he loved—that of the late twentieth century. And for years, millions have found in this quest another means of escape, retreating into happy, obsessive study of Halliday’s icons. Like many of his contemporaries, Wade is as comfortable debating the finer points of John Hughes’s oeuvre, playing Pac-Man, or reciting Devo lyrics as he is scrounging power to run his OASIS rig. 

And then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle.

Suddenly the whole world is watching, and thousands of competitors join the hunt—among them certain powerful players who are willing to commit very real murder to beat Wade to this prize. Now the only way for Wade to survive and preserve everything he knows is to win. But to do so, he may have to leave behind his oh-so-perfect virtual existence and face up to life—and love—in the real world he’s always been so desperate to escape.

Comments: I was never much of a gamer--unless the game was Trivial Pursuit. The only video game I ever enjoyed was Frogger, but I wasn't good at it. And until just a couple of days ago, when it came up as a plot point in this particular novel, I had no idea that Pac-Man had 256 levels; I don't hink I ever made it any further than the third. Having said that, I did spend a little time in arcades during my college years, and more often than not during the last couple of decades, I've had a videogame system in my house. In addition, there's no question that I'm a pop-culture addict--movies and TV and music--and I consumed plenty of it during my formative years in the 1970s and 1980s. In more ways than not, Ernest Cline's debut novel, Ready Player One, is written in my language.

Cline's deep understanding and affection for nerd culture was evident in his screenplay for the cult-favorite movie Fanboys, and it fully informs his first novel. The plot momentum of Ready Player One--which is a highly plot-driven novel--relies on a slew of geeky details. Set in a not-too-distant future in which the current recession has yet to end and natural resources have been even further depleted, the characters here are just a few of the millions who choose to spend most of their lives in the virtual reality of the OASIS--so much more than a video game--rather than in the difficult and unappealing real world. Some go into the OASIS with a specific purpose, though; they're "gunters"--a contraction of "egg hunters"--searching for the "Easter egg" that its creator, James Halliday, programmed into it. For years, they've been trying to unravel the puzzles that leads to it, because the first person to find that secret will be the sole heir to Halliday’s fortune...and now that 17-year-old Wade Watts, known within the OASIS as Parzival, has become the first gunter to get within reach of the prize, the OASIS exerts a greater, and more dangerous, allure than ever before.

While there's really no profound statement at the heart of Ready Player One, it's an ambitious novel, largely because it has so much packed into it. It can be risky to reach so far, especially with a first novel, and at times it doesn't quite make it. While I found some of the delights of the novel in its details--for the most part, they are well-chosen and effectively deployed--at times it felt like were just too many of those details, and they threatened to weigh things down, particularly in the audio production (I might have just skimmed some of those sections in print, to be honest.) On the other hand, and particularly when considered in light of Cline's background as a screenwriter, the precision of description makes for very effective world-building, and I appreciated how easy he made it to visualize the story. And for the record, this story will make one heck of a movie (yes, the rights have been acquired, although Cline's screenplay will be rewritten by someone else).

I read this in audio, since it’s been awhile since I listened to fiction and wanted to give it another go. Although there were times that I felt that the format unfortunately emphasized some of the weaknesses in the prose and made the novel feel longer than it needed to be, I think it was a good call, and the choice of reader for the audiobook is perfect. Wil Wheaton doesn't just get nerd culture; he's a participant in it, and as a former cast member of a Star Trek series, he's a component of nerd culture. He sounded like he was genuinely enjoying himself, even during some of the less-compelling instances in the story, such as recitations of the the standings in the egg hunt (some of the details I'd have skimmed in a print copy). That enjoyment was contagious. Despite its imperfections, and not just because of the nerdy and period-specific details, I was thoroughly engaged and entertained by Ready Player One--it deserves its place on the Speculative Fiction short list for the 2011 Indie Lit Awards.

Rating: 3.75/5

This book counts for the 2012 Audiobook Challenge (1/6)

Other reviews, via the Book Blogs Search Engine

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links (IndieBound.org)

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Book Talk: *The Underside of Joy*, by Sere Prince Halverson (BlogHer Book Club)

The Underside of Joy
Sere Prince Halverson
Dutton Adult (January 2012), Hardcover (ISBN 0525952594 / 9780525952596)
Fiction, 320 pages
Source: Publisher (ARC)
Reason for reading: BlogHer Book Club

I was compensated by BlogHer.com for writing this review and participating in discussions about the book; all opinions are expressed are my own.

Opening lines: “I recently read a study that said that happy people aren’t made. They’re born. Happiness, the report pointed out, is all about genetics--a cheerful gene passed merrily, merrily down from one smiling generation to the next. I know enough about life to understand the old adage that one person can’t make you happy, or that money can’t buy happiness. But I’m not buying this theory that your bliss can only be as deep as your gene pool.”

Book description, via the publisher’s website: To Ella Beene, happiness means living in the northern California river town of Elbow with her husband, Joe, and his two young children. Yet one summer day Joe breaks his own rule-never turn your back on the ocean-and a sleeper wave strikes him down, drowning not only the man but his many secrets. 

For three years, Ella has been the only mother the kids have known and has believed that their biological mother, Paige, abandoned them. But when Paige shows up at the funeral, intent on reclaiming the children, Ella soon realizes there may be more to Paige and Joe's story. "Ella's the best thing that's happened to this family," say her close-knit Italian-American in-laws, for generations the proprietors of a local market. But their devotion quickly falters when the custody fight between mother and stepmother urgently and powerfully collides with Ella's quest for truth.

Comments: I’ve been a stepparent for several years, and in my experience, it’s a relationship without all that many hard-and-fast rules; it can vary as much as stepparents and stepchildren do themselves. In the best cases--and I hope that mine is one of them--genuine love and familial bonds develop. However, in many cases, no legal bonds are formed, especially when the children’s other parent is still a major presence in their lives. My legal relationship is with my husband, my stepchildren’s father. There’s a shared-custody agreement between him and their mother. If something should happen to him, I would technically have no relationship with these kids--with whom I’ve lived, traveled, and shared major life events for over half a decade--other than one based on goodwill. That might not be enough.

Sere Prince Halverson’s debut novel, The Underside of Joy, explores a family where it’s nowhere near enough. Having arrived on the scene just a few months after Joe Capozzi’s wife left him and their two small children--one just a baby--Ella Beene falls very easily into their lives, and a near-instant family is born. Three years later, that family is almost as instantly broken when Joe is suddenly swept into the ocean and drowned. Ella’s struggles with her own grief, and that of the daughter and son who feel like her own, are complicated by the unexpected discoveries she’s making about things Joe never told her...especially the ones about the family business that’s barely surviving and the children’s mother who wants to re-establish her relationship with them. Paige Capozzi left her kids while in the depths of major postpartum depression, fearful for their safety with her; she’s recovered now and rebuilding her life, and wants them back in it. The fact that her children have just lost their father and have little recollection of her as their mother isn’t going to deter her from pursuing that goal.

One dead parent and a custody conflict would be enough domestic drama on their own, but Halverson adds in a history of family secrets and Things Not Discussed to raise the stakes. Some of the Things Not Discussed were between Ella and Joe, and as she starts digging into them after his death, she’s forced to recognize her own complacency and willingness not to know. Willful denial plays at least as much of a role in this family’s lives as does deliberate secret-keeping, and things don’t begin to change until Ella pushes herself past her own denial and begins to dig for the truth.

There is a lot of story packed into The Underside of Joy, but little of it feels extraneous. Having said that, there were a few plot points that felt a bit contrived and Lifetime-movie-ish to me, most notably one dramatic episode near the end of the novel; I was invested enough in this family’s story by then that I found it unnecessary. Author Halverson is both a mother and a stepmother, and although she chooses to narrate the story through stepmother Ella’s first-person perspective, she deals with the complex nuances of the relationships here with great empathy and effectiveness, and I was very impressed by that. The Underside of Joy looks at the blended-family relationship under fairly extreme conditions, but within that framework, it explores some broader truths, both factual and emotional.

Rating: 3.75/5

The BlogHer Book Club will be discussing The Underside of Joy for the next few weeks--please join us, and check out some of the other reviews!

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links (IndieBound.org)

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