Tag Archives: book reviews

#35: Start-Up Nation

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In Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, authors Dan Senor and Saul Singer attempt to unravel “where [Israel’s] entrepreneurial energy comes from, where it’s going, how to sustain it, and how other countries can learn from the quintessential start-up nation.” Their goal is a noble one, and bolstered by impressive stats, such as this one: “In 2008, per capita venture capital investments in Israel were 2.5 times greater than in the United States, more than 30 times greater than in Europe, 80 times greater than in China, and 350 times greater than in India.”

The authors, in searching for the values and impulses most influential in producing Israel’s creative instincts, found an unlikely source: the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). “In the Israeli military,” they write, “there is a tendency to treat all performance — both successful and unsuccessful — in training and simulations, and sometimes even in battle, as value-neutral. So long as the risk was taken intelligently, and not recklessly, there is something to be learned.” Throughout their research, Senor and Singer return time and again to this same explanation, or some variant, to elaborate on the unique brand of innovation endemic in Israeli society.

What to internationals smacks of brazen effrontery is, at least according to the authors, merely chutzpah, that term so ubiquitous in descriptions of the Jewish people and so often bewildering to those unfamiliar with its meaning. “An outsider would see chutzpah everywhere in Israel: in the way university students speak with their professors, employees challenge their bosses, sergeants question their generals, and clerks second-guess government ministers.” As an American, this disregard for hierarchy has a certain populist appeal, especially as the much-maligned “24-hour news cycle” has helped the government metastasize into an especially cantankerous form of reality television in which competence plays second fiddle to inflammatory rhetoric.

On the other hand, at times the reasons given for Israel’s high growth look suspiciously more nationalistic than realistic. In one passage, an IDF major boasts, “If a terrorist infiltrates [an] area, there’s a company commander whose name is on it. Tell me how many twenty-three-year-olds elsewhere in the world live with that kind of pressure.” Indeed, he has a point. And yet one cannot help but notice that “the most moral army in the world” (as proclaimed by defense minister, and former prime minister, Ehud Barak) has had numerous recent run-ins leading to international condemnation (and possible criminal prosecution). Is this related to the unusually emphatic devolution of autonomy in the military? Perhaps this cannot be answered; and yet this question is left wholly unaddressed, even as the authors continually cite this very same individuality as a boon to the Israeli economy.

Start-Up Nation is a book worth reading, if for no other reason than the generous access afforded the authors by the likes of Israeli president Shimon Peres, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and even American general David Petraeus. The authors’ perspective is one of nearly-unbridled enthusiasm, owing to the vibrant nature of Israel’s start-up scene and the continuing promulgation of its inventive spirit. In this latter endeavor, Dan Senor and Saul Singer join the chaotic Israeli chorus that so deftly mixes fierce national pride with a heaping helping of chutzpah. If theirs is an accurate prognostication, the best has yet to emerge from Israel.

#34: The Thieves of Manhattan

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It is tempting to those of us lucky enough to live in New York to regard all other terrestrial locations with a healthy measure of disdain, concrete-jungle style. Whether these streets make you feel brand new or merely terrified of the ubiquitous tourists, one is virtually forced to concede, via self-admission or the coercion of one’s provincial fellow dwellers, that there is something special in the Manhattan air.

It was thus endlessly satisfying to read Adam Langer’s incurably readable The Thieves of Manhattan, a brilliant send-up of the publishing industry that eviscerates its corporate villains in the same spirit (and methodology, somewhat) with which Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation once scorned Hollywood. As has been noted elsewhere, Langer’s prose is so hip as to require a glossary (provided in the back): franzens are “the sort of stylish eyeglasses favored by the author Jonathan Franzen;” a hemingway refers to “a particularly well-constructed and honest sentence;” to woolf is “to move as rapidly as the speed of thought.” (No word yet on danbrowning; that is, concocting a novel out of random amalgamations of nouns, verbs, and a mountain of italics so voluminous that one suspects the author has been monetarily incentivized.)

Most of the novel takes place on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. As a resident of this neighborhood, I found myself nodding with delight over casual mentions of the Hungarian Pastry Shop or 106 Bar (although I have yet to visit the latter). Clearly Langer is a man familiar with his territory.

That territory is only partially geographical. Of greater interest is the author’s irreverent poking and prodding of the esteemed literati. He labels sections with titles such as “A Million Little Pieces” and “Naked Came the Stranger,” allusions to works of literature later exposed as frauds. To Langer, the line separating fact from fiction is prime comedic material, and he clearly relishes the zigzagging trail he weaves endlessly to and fro across it.

What, then, is The Thieves of Manhattan all about? Facially, it involves a failing writer, Ian, whose Romanian girlfriend, Anya Petrescu, begins to garner the attention of publishers with her short-story collection We Never Talked About Ceauşescu. (One can almost picture Langer’s maniacal laughter as he penned that title.) Not only does Anya show literary promise, not only is her compilation “heartbreaking and beautiful and self-effacing and charming and hilarious,” but “most of all, [it was] true.” And so begins Anya’s ascent into the upper echelons of the increasingly pretentious and self-absorbed world of commercial authors, whilst Ian’s career fades ever faster.

It is at this point, near the book’s beginning, that Ian meets Jed Roth, a mysterious stranger whose intimate knowledge of the publishing industry is matched only by his hatred for all aspects of it. Roth begins to regale Ian with tales from his days as a big dog in the world of books. The longer the story continues, the more hilarity ensues as Langer embraces the genres of the cheap and gaudy in his own writing. The end of one section reads: “‘You can’t leave when I’m talking to you, Jed,’ Merrill said. ‘Of course I can,’ Roth responded. ‘Because I don’t work for you anymore.'” This is beautiful, and almost makes me want to reread some of my favorite dime-store fare. (Almost.)

I hesitate to say more, because reading this book is an experience unto itself, replete with ironic winks and over-the-top melodrama. The final section, as others have noted, goes on perhaps a few moments too long, but this hardly spoils the journey. Adam Langer has managed to wring true literature out of a terrible story, or perhaps it is vice versa. Either way, if The Thieves of Manhattan is to follow the path of all commercially successful books, it most assuredly demands a sequel.

#33: The Lovers

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The Lovers is a short book. Perhaps author Vendela Vida intended it that way, or perhaps it just happened naturally given the relatively short period of time that transpires within its pages. Yvonne is a recently widowed woman in her early fifties; her husband, Peter had been killed in a car crash two years earlier. As her solitary lifestyle and dwindling social appearances in Burlington, Vermont begin to capture the attention of curious neighbors, Yvonne recognizes the need for a change of scenery.

As it happened, her now-grown children, Henry and Aurelia, were chartering a boat from Greece to Turkey; Yvonne and Peter had honeymooned in Turkey nearly three decades earlier. And so, after much reluctance, it was decided: Yvonne would travel to Datça, Turkey, to stay by herself for nine days before meeting her offspring midway through their journey.

In the meantime, Yvonne whiles away her time reflecting on her marriage — “she had decided long ago that it had been good…and after his death, it felt unnecessary to question the storyline” — and rediscovering the country she’d enjoyed with her new husband a lifetime before. During the course of her stay, we learn about her relationship with Henry and Aurelia; the former embodied the ideal of a perfect son and was virtually worshiped by his father while the latter stumbled into teenage alcoholism and suffered through her father’s emotional absence. Yvonne’s guilt is split in a million directions; following Peter’s death, “she could not admit that she took a tiny bit of pleasure in the newness of certain things — of eating breakfast food for dinner, of shoveling the snow on the front steps herself, of not having to talk about Aurelia with Peter, of not having to avoid talking about Aurelia with Peter.”

Soon Yvonne is forced to abandon her solitary confinement when she makes the acquaintance of Özlem, a younger, Turkish woman whose tales of romantic entanglements initially bore her older counterpart. This unlikely friendship is complemented by a much different one, with a young boy Yvonne sees collecting shells on the beach. Ahmet, despite being unable to converse with her, manages to bond with his older female friend in an easy manner which even the English-speaking Özlem could never replicate. Yvonne becomes Ahmet’s confidante; he, her friend.

From here, the story twists in strange and sometimes perplexing ways, as Yvonne’s internal turmoil is matched by high drama in the external world. Vida is an intricate storyteller; but even so, I found myself waiting for something to happen more often than not. It is a significant challenge to compose a narrative in which climactic events have already taken place prior to the story’s opening; and while the author makes a valiant attempt, the final product is somewhat disappointing. The Lovers ends on a curious note, leaving me with the same guilty sensation of relief Yvonne had once felt herself.

#32: The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

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Philip Pullman’s provocatively titled The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is but one member of a collection of books known as The Myths Series. According to the blurb at the back of the book, this compilation “brings together some of the world’s finest writers, each of whom has retold a myth in a contemporary and memorable way.” Pullman is the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, which includes Northern Lights, also known as The Golden Compass or the atheist rebuttal to The Chronicles of Narnia. I’m not sure whether this qualifies him as a card-carrying member of the World’s Finest Writers Club; but if The New York Times can laud John Grisham as “about as good a storyteller as we’ve got in the United States these days,” I suppose it is only fair for Pullman to have his moment in the sun too.

Of course, he earns his adulation a bit differently than the author of legal thrillers. Where Grisham imbues his characters with deeply held notions, often religiously invoked, of justice and individual responsibility, Pullman veers instead towards iconoclasm, tolerating Jesus the human while lamenting the Christianity he spawned. If you’re looking for groundbreaking material, you’ve come to the wrong place; this idea has been raised countless times before, not least of all in the thought-provoking (if a bit repetitive) biography Pilgrims of Christ on the Muslim Road, by the estimable clergyman Paul-Gordon Chandler.

It is admittedly a bit rarer to find this emotional juxtaposition expressed in such unabashedly heretical terms. Jesus and Christ as twin brothers? In Pullman’s deftly weaved universe, the former was a natural-born rebel from childhood, “getting into mischief, stealing fruit, shouting out rude names and running away, picking fights, throwing stones, daubing mud on house walls, [and] catching sparrows;” Christ, meanwhile, “clung to his mother’s skirts and spent hours in reading and prayer.”

As he approaches adulthood, Pullman’s Jesus gradually takes the comforting form familiar to Sunday school conceptualizations. However, Christ, who — at the urging of a mysterious Greek stranger — takes on the thankless role of Jesus’ stenographer, soon finds some aspects of Christ’s teachings troubling and others pedestrian. To remedy the first ailment, Christ resorts to historical revisionism, heeding the Orwellian words of his Greek mentor: “History belongs to time, but truth belongs to what is beyond time. In writing of things as they should have been, you are letting truth into history.”

The second problem was a bit thornier. Recognizing the value of organization, Christ attempts to persuade his brother to embrace something resembling a formal movement. Jesus rebuffs him, however, preferring his spontaneous charisma to what he perceives as the stolidity of an intellectual bureaucracy. Fortuitously, the approval of Christ’s enigmatic tutor allows for a bit of creative license. Thus, when Jesus scolds Peter for his belief in him as the Messiah, Christ writes instead that “Jesus had praised [Peter] for seeing something that only his Father in heaven could have revealed, and that he had gone on to make a pun on Peter’s name, saying that he was the rock on which Jesus would build his church.” (The Catholic Church should be duly horrified.)

As Christopher Hitchens notes in his review in The New York Times, Pullman is attempting to make explicit the divorce of Christianity from its roots. But the end result reads a bit like tracing the cause of a marital infidelity back to the couple’s lack of a Foreman grill. Christ, at times, substitutes for the devil, a journalist, and, weirdly, Judas Iscariot; in none of these roles does he truly take on any symbolic meaning. Philip Pullman has found and refashioned his myth of choice, with the primary corollary of further clouding Christ’s position within an already complex historical tradition.

#31: One Day

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Serves me right for taking the existence of a New York Times book review as an affirmation of the author’s grasp on plot. Or, for that matter, the English language. David Nicholls’ One Day was so clearly written with the inevitable feature-film in mind that I’m genuinely perplexed as to why he didn’t save himself some time and pen it in screenplay format from the start.

Never mind. He already did. It hits theaters next year, with Anne Hathaway starring. But back to the Times review. Liesl Schillinger wrote, “You may want to take care where you lay this book down,” ostensibly to avoid being burglarized, although I can hardly imagine why anyone would risk incarceration for such a microscopic reward.

Nicholls’ style of choice is italics, as in, “…and a silence followed while both of them thought oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God.” In this case the exaggerated emotions were owed to the tingling sensation reverberating down Emma Morley’s spine as Dexter Mayhew rubbed suntan lotion onto her back. Fittingly enough, I was spouting similar mental interjections by the time I reached chapter three of One Day — only in agony, not ecstasy. This overt sexual tension, by the way, is a prominent motif in Nicholls’ novel, which is always a bad sign, as are the expository thought-bubbles muddying the action everywhere. It’s as if the author couldn’t formulate a vehicle for conveying his creations’ intentions without spelling them out in their entirety.

Unfortunately for his readers, Nicholls’ characters do quite a lot of thinking — 435 pages of it, in fact, interspersed with the requisite bursts of campy dialogue. Come to think of it, One Day could spawn some terrific drinking games. For example, take a shot every time you read “Dex and Em, Em and Dex” — a tired literary trope that, according to Google Books, David Nicholls trotted out five times. It’s almost as if he is trying to tell us something, that fox.

On the bright side, one need never fear having neglected to catch some symbolism here or conceit there: One Day hardly traffics in ambiguity. It goes without saying — perhaps the only case in which Nicholls recognizes the value of omission — that Dexter and Emma are meant to be together. Consequently, there is a definite sense that their eventual conjoining is a matter of “when,” and not “if.” Subtlety, in One Day, entails merely implying, instead of actually describing, what takes place once two lovers remove some clothing and climb into bed together. Actually — “his hand was on the base of her spine, his leg slipping between hers,” I read on page 7 — even this is a bit generous.

But first, the requisite false hopes, punctured dreams, and the like. As this is a romantic comedy in book form, both Dexter and Emma must date their fair share of red herrings. And thus Chapter Twelve opens: “Then, without quite knowing how it happened, Dexter finds that he has fallen in love, and suddenly life is one long mini-break.” Her name is Sylvie and, in Dexter’s smitten vocabulary, “she is great, just great, just…amazing! She is beautiful of course, but in a different way from the others…” And here I will spare you the rest, for the sake of brevity and the prevention of mental decay.

Of course, Emma needs a worthwhile distraction to pass the time while Dexter dates his procession of disreputable women. To this end, she meets Ian at the restaurant where she works, Loco Caliente, and is beset with the vague notion that his is “a face that made her think of tractors.” No explanation is supplied or, frankly, possible. Nicholls alternates buoyantly between bountiful exclamations on one page and perplexing similes on another; gradually, all words lose their meaning, buried under a cascade of childlike emotion punctuated by frequent bouts of excessive capitalization.

It is said that movies are almost universally poor representations of the books from which they were adapted. For the sake of future moviegoers everywhere, I sincerely hope David Nicholls is a better screenwriter than novelist.

#30: The Ghosts of Martyrs Square

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In my junior year of college, I spent a semester studying in the Middle East. My program was based in Cairo but we traveled throughout the region. By the end of the spring, we’d made it to Turkey, Syria, Jordan, and Israel. Even so, if I could change any one aspect of that semester, it would be to visit Lebanon.

As detailed in Michael Young’s The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle, the nation has an irregular heartbeat and constantly appears under threat of cardiac arrest. And yet somehow, democracy, or some semblance of it, insists on habitual self-resurrection in the area of the world seemingly most hostile to the democratizing impulse. History and the present, the liberal and the traditional, even the nation’s dual languages, Arabic and French, serve as constant reminders of democracy’s promise in a culturally diverse populace. Young, in recounting Lebanon’s recent history (2005-present), writes, “What makes Lebanon relatively free in an unfree Middle East is that the country’s sectarian system, its faults notwithstanding, has ensured that the society’s parts are stronger than the state; and where the state is weak, individuals are usually freer to function.”

In this interpretation, the same national character that so infuriates international observers is actually responsible for Lebanon’s fragile peace. As the Sunnis bedevil the Shiites, the Christians ally themselves with the power of the moment, and the Druze follow suit, the collective political incoherence renders centralized governing nearly impossible.

Not that Syria didn’t give it the old college try. On February 14, 2005, former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri was assassinated via a truck-bomb in Beirut. The Syrians were widely viewed as the perpetrators, and thus was launched the Cedar Revolution, a series of protests against Syrian intervention that eventually led to its expulsion from Lebanon.

This is, roughly, where Michael Young’s national history begins. He recounts how, merely one year after the impossible became reality as Syria left Lebanon, the war with Israel threatened to reverse the year of progress; Hezbollah, acting in compliance with its Syrian and Iranian patrons, destabilized a country still reeling in the aftermath of al-Hariri’s untimely death. Interestingly, Young takes this opportunity to chide progressive Western journalists and observers for their embrace, however tentative, of the self-described Party of God: “Lebanon loved the resistance, the statistics proved it, and the good word was beamed out to an unquestioning world,” he writes, sarcastically describing the West’s perception of Hezbollah’s domestic standing during the 2006 war against Israel.

Young can be forgiven his zeal; as a Lebanese citizen he is justifiably nonplussed by incomplete international characterizations of his country. And yet, like many journalists dipping their toes into full-length books, he proffers a smorgasbord of ideas and counterpoints without progressing between themes in a cohesive manner. At times, The Ghosts of Martyrs Square reads like a 254-page op-ed column; I suppose that’s the point. But in regards to this country that defies all description, I was hoping for a little less theorizing and a little more substance.

#29: Tinkers

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Tinkers gave me pause as to judging a book by its awards. My edition of Paul Harding’s short novel, his first, sports a “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize” label on the front cover; I will think twice before purchasing a book based solely on such public acclaim.

This book is a classic example of the type of writing that one either embraces or shrugs at, likely with little gray area comprising the remainder. Harding has a way with words, and particularly with describing intricate details of pedestrian items. “The hair on my neck prickled from nape to crown, as if a current were passing through it, and as the current leapt off of the top of my head and if I had my back to the trees, I would feel the actual wind start up the back of my neck and ruffle my hair and the water and the grass and spin the swallows in its choral voice stirring all of the old unnamable sorrows in our throats, where our voices caught and failed on the scales of the old forgotten songs.”

If you’re thinking this sounds like another recent Pulitzer Prize winner, Cormac McCarthy, it’s because it does. In All the Pretty Horses and The Road, McCarthy takes special delight in the bending of the grass, the hue of the twilight sky, and the trembling manes of all those pretty horses. Harding follows suit here, although to his credit he hasn’t entirely neglected his punctuation or the rules of grammar in the process.

In this case, as in The Road, the central relationship is that between a father and son, although this, for the most part, is where the similarities end. Tinkers is less apocalyptic than introspective, and its setting is as mundane as The Road‘s is grandiose. Beginning with the simple sentence, “George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died,” Harding paints a dreary image of creeping death, interspersed with winding memories of a childhood past. As George drifts in and out of consciousness, it is his father he recalls: Howard, a man tortured by sudden seizures, who, after years of indignity and humiliation, walks away from his family for Philadelphia, and a new start.

Paradoxically, while Harding takes special care to paint elaborate portrayals of material items, it is the conspicuous absence of explicitly denoted thoughts that affords the understated Tinkers its emotive impact. However, the plodding cadence of the writing gradually renders the novel viscerally unappealing. Perhaps this is to be expected of a book whose main character specializes in repairing clocks: the tick-tock of passing time is more celebrated here than dreaded. But as it pertains to reading a novel, award-winning or otherwise, I prefer my time to fly by unnoticed.

#28: The Lotus Eaters

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The Lotus Eaters is Tatjana Soli’s first novel, but you wouldn’t know that from reading it. Much like her protagonist, the American photojournalist Helen Adams, Soli possesses a rare survival instinct in perhaps the only area as treacherous as Vietnam in the 1970s: the world of publishing in the digital age. For the most part, she even manages to steer clear of the worst authorial minefields — there’s little in the way of deus ex machinas here — a feat made all the more impressive by the pervasive cliches endemic to war novels.

It is not just Soli that deftly avoids danger. Her creations do much the same. Adams, her colleague and lover, Linh, and even, well, her other colleague and lover, Sam Darrow, specialize as much in danger as they do in photography, a fact that hardly goes unnoticed by any of them. “We’re in the business of war,” Darrow boasts at a dinner of photojournalists one night. “The cool thing for us is that when this one’s done, there’s always another one…The war doesn’t ever have to end for us.”

And, mostly, it does not. The country and the war, working in tandem, swallow up countless people; they are all Vietnam’s involuntary subjects, even as they struggle to maintain the rapidly disintegrating notion of self-determination. At the end, as Saigon fell to the Viet Cong, the pungent odor of finality was more terrifying to Adams than the inexorable violence itself: “Ten years ago it had seemed the war would never end, and now all she could think was, More time, give us more time.”

The conflict’s pornographic hold on Adams was but a reflection of the same transformation, years before, in Darrow. “Welcome to our splendid little war,” he had said upon meeting Adams, but by then he had long since forfeited the right to use the possessive to describe a force that so clearly controlled him. His obsession with the perfect shot — shooting for hours in blazing heat, or wandering, seemingly oblivious, into the line of fire with camera in tow — became an all-consuming object. With his biological family back home relegated to a bit role, Darrow found camaraderie and even intimacy in the words and passions of people who, if not inheriting his fate, at least shared his proximity to history.

Helen Adams was just such a person. As a female war correspondent, with each word and action eliciting a close scrutiny to which her male counterparts were never subjected, she found herself simultaneously navigating the darkest recesses of human destruction and repeatedly proving her mettle in a man’s world. Eventually, with the North Vietnamese closing in, these two paths coalesce in increasingly desperate attempts to satisfy the addiction to violence, even as its manifestation spills over the nation’s borders into Cambodia. For Helen, as for Darrow and Linh, war was an end unto itself. “‘The good ol’ days are gone,'” a soldier tells her, just two months after she arrives in Vietnam. But it was not until the war’s waning moments an eternity later, with those “good ol’ days” tucked well into the past, that the wreckage of this incomprehensible human tragedy reached its long-awaited hour of reflection.

#27: The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse

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In The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse, author Steven D. Smith discusses a practice he dubs “smuggling.” He explains the term thusly: “Our modern secular vocabulary purports to render inadmissible notions such as those that animated premodern moral discourse…But if our deepest convictions rely on such notions, and if these convictions lose their sense and substance when divorced from such notions, then perhaps we have little choice except to smuggle such notions in the conversation — to introduce them incognito under some sort of secular disguise.”

Smith then purports to debunk classic modern examples of jurisprudence or governing philosophy as embodying just this sort of intellectual hijacking, or smuggling. Stating that “conversations in the secular cage could not proceed very far without smuggling,” Smith then attempts to display how these logical implications play out in real-life applications.

Shining an inquisitive light on some of our more revered (e.g. the harm principle) and controversial (e.g. end-of-life decisions) principles, Smith works to show the ways in which their public expression has been abbreviated by the conspicuous lack of transcendental foundations (be they religiously based or otherwise). Unfortunately, while these embodiments of his theory are convincing at times, Smith is noticeably reticent to provide any neat solutions. In the book’s last paragraph, he alludes to their absence, writing, “And so, in the end, it seems that the only general prescription that can be offered is, once again, the seemingly bland recommendation of…openness.”

Openness in the lexicon of Smith means to allow those “inadmissible notions” to join their logical conclusions in the realm of public dialogue. However, even as he argues for their inclusion, he appears reluctant to embrace this broader conversation wholeheartedly. “There is a risk that a more open conversation may be acrimonious,” Smith acknowledges. “Even so, that sort of conversation is ultimately more respectful of the participants. More respectful and also, potentially, more productive and substantial: that is because we will be talking about what we really believe.”

Whether Smith is right remains to be seen. The left and the right appear to be diverging more quickly now than ever before, and this political dichotomy is only one of many fault lines dotting the mottled landscape of public conversation. Openness as a societal antibiotic, or as an unnecessarily opened can of worms? Let the debate begin, Smith would say, but at the very least let us be honest about how we choose our sides.

#26: If You Follow Me

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There’s plenty of internalizing taking place within the pages of Malena Watrous’ If You Follow Me. Some of it is explicit, and at other times implied. But it’s always there, lurking beneath the placid surface. If this is already starting to sound like a lifeless addition to the all-is-not-bliss-in-domestic-paradise genre, take a deeper look. In fact, all is not bliss here either — the rare worthwhile novel is — but the cast, a twenty-something lesbian couple, and the setting, rural Japan, help Watrous avoid fiction’s most egregious cliches.

Marina is a twenty-something recent wanderer who, on something suspiciously like a lark, decided to follow her lover to East Asia for a year of teaching abroad. Her father’s suicide, looming like an omnipresent monster in her recent past, was the catalyst that brought her and Carolyn together: they met in a bereavement group during senior year in college, where Marina mentally characterized her soon-to-be girlfriend as “tough and spiky, with a rod in her tongue and buzzed hair that moved through a Kool-Aid spectrum.” Carolyn, for her part, was still grieving her loss, at age twelve, of her mother to cancer, and had been attending the bereavement group since freshman year.

The two were an unlikely pair to begin with; a year of living abroad together, then, was a monumental risk. And yet, Marina remembers, “when she asked if I’d consider moving to Japan with her, I didn’t hesitate before saying yes…I couldn’t go back to San Francisco,” with all its childhood memories of her fading father and the stark reality of a mother trying desperately to move on.

Marina’s sojourn in Japan is kicked off with a letter from her mentor, Hiroshi Miyoshi, a native son who has been handed the unfortunate task of keeping a close eye on the two Americans and facilitating their acclimation to Japanese social mores. Succumbing to bouts of self-consciousness, Miyoshi prefers to communicate disapproval of Marina’s (frequent and unintentional) breaches of etiquette through handwritten letters written in rudimentary English; these missives provide the bulk of the laughs in what is often a deeply introspective story.

Miyoshi’s inaugural letter scolds Marina on her ignorance of “gomi law,” that maddeningly esoteric set of rules governing trash disposal. “Dear Miss Marina how are you? I’m fine thank you. A reason for this letter is: recently you attempt to throw away battery and jar and some kind of mushroom spaghetti and so forth, all together in one bin. Please don’t try ‘it wasn’t me.’ We Japanese seldom eat  Gorgonzola cheese!”

Time passes. The clock ticks and tocks. First, there is Marina and Carolyn fighting. Then there is Joe, a cheeky British fellow and the only person in Japan who knows that his two female acquaintances are not just friends, but intimate as well. Throw in a minor television celebrity, a unique cast of small-town Japanese friends (notably Noriko and Keiko), and a shifting relationship with Miyoshi, and one can see that Marina is due for some noticeable life changes.

What those changes entail impacts different people in different ways. Some of these changes are gradual, and others more sudden. Frustratingly, many of them fail to grab the reader’s attention (at least mine) and hold it for the time necessary to make these metamorphoses feel significant. It is not so much that If You Follow Me is not a tale worth reading, but one gets the sense that it could have been shortened without much loss. Malena Watrous hits high marks for complexity, but mostly forgets the value of brevity.