Read This: American Music & American Taliban

Next week (Tuesday, June 22), I’ll be hosting an evening of “All-American” fiction at the Center for Fiction, with four authors who’ve each recently published an American novel. I’ll be telling you a little bit about the quartet between now and then…

I’ve been friends with Pearl Abraham for a while, and her new novel, American Taliban, actually quotes from my version of the Tao Te Ching on the very first page. But I’d be recommending it to you anyway; it’s a captivating look at how a young, “clean-cut” teenager like John Walker Lindh (but not simply a novelization of Lindh) could gradually become attracted to a philosophy and a way of life so radically opposed to his upbringing.

I’m also looking forward to seeing Jane Mendelsohn for the first time since I interviewed her in 1997; her new novel, American Music, starts with a wounded soldier and a physical therapist in a veteran’s hospital, but quickly expands into a series of interlocking flashbacks which impinge upon the central couple’s lives—even though they have no idea how these other people are connected to them, if at all, and the ongoing experience of these “memories” brings no little amount of trauma. Their conversations about the other stories may well echo your own responses; you may see the final shape of the arc just ahead of them. Either way, once you start, you are likely to see their story through to its end.

15 June 2010 | read this |

Read This: Feed

What would it take for the blogosphere to replace the mainstream media as the average person most trusted news source? Mira Grant’s Feed has a simple answer to that question: The end of the world as we know it. Basically, the cures for cancer and the common cold come with an unintended side effect—an honest-to-God zombie uprising, which old media shrugs off as impossible, leaving frontline bloggers to inform the world about what’s really going on. Flash-forward twenty years, and bloggers across the country are forming loose network alliances and competing for ratings, and one trio, led by a young newshound named Georgia Mason, has been invited to tag along on a presidential campaign.

So Feed is a cross-country tour through a post-apocalyptic America with certain contemporary digital trends blown up to satirical proportions, punctuated regularly by zombie attacks. Some readers may not care for the abundance of world-building background-y passages; one of the reasons Feed is close to 600 pages (and it’s only the first in a trilogy) is that Grant spares very little detail in explaining how her fictional world got to the state it’s in. Others will find that they want to explore this world, that they enjoy seeing how all the pieces fit together. Meanwhile, you’ve got the relationship between Georgia and her reckless brother Shaun, and their growing realization that something is deeply, deeply wrong with this road to the White House—parts of the unfolding narrative are reasonably predictable, but Grant delivers some excellent surprises along the way. Given the completeness of this particular story, it will be interesting to see where she takes the two promised sequels: What else will she have to say about her zombie-ridden society?

9 June 2010 | read this |