Kenneth Champeon

FictionLiterary Fiction

When the allure of money fades

Review by Kenneth Champeon

“The one percent” has entered the lexicon to describe those lucky and/or greedy few for whom money is literally no object, recalling Fitzgerald’s adage that they are effectively superhuman. Robert Goolrick’s electric third novel, The Fall of Princes, instead points to Hemingway’s rejoinder: The only thing separating the rich from others is that they have more money. 

The novel is set in the 1980s, when greed was declared good and America was “the most heartless country on the planet.” Rooney is a Wall Street trader who buys and sells “the world before lunch” and then spends his evenings in a delirium of booze, coke and women. He consumes conspicuously and competitively, tones his body to Apollonian heights and seeks the company of the similarly well-heeled. But much like the protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, Rooney is empty at the core. A failed artist who thought fulfillment might come instead from wealth, he longs for something simpler: someone to love him, children to dote over. 

He also realizes that he is bisexual at a time when AIDS, still poorly understood, was decimating the gay community in New York. The most passionate parts of the novel concern this scourge and the fear it engendered among the libertines. As Rooney’s substance abuse intensifies, he engages in ever riskier behavior, descending rapidly down the social ladder until a trans streetwalker provides him with something like redemption.

This is no simple clone of The Wolf of Wall Street, despite its brazen celebration of sticking it to the common man. But the novel is not exactly a condemnation of avarice, either. Instead, it is a study in how “a big hoopla of vulgarity and testosterone” conspires to eradicate the better angels of a man’s nature. Rooney is a sheep who dons the wolf’s clothing, only to be devoured by it.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“The one percent” has entered the lexicon to describe those lucky and/or greedy few for whom money is literally no object, recalling Fitzgerald’s adage that they are effectively superhuman. Robert Goolrick’s electric third novel, The Fall of Princes, instead points to Hemingway’s rejoinder: The only thing separating the rich from others is that they have more money.
FictionDebut Fiction

Up on the mountain

Review by Kenneth Champeon

Raymond Chandler once said about writing fiction: “When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.” In his first novel, Bull Mountain, firefighter Brian Panowich seems to have taken Chandler’s advice to heart: His characters brandish weaponry in a way that Charlton Heston might have found disconcerting. The result is a fast-paced and intricate revenge story culminating in a Shakespearean bloodbath.

The novel concerns three generations of a Georgia family, the Burroughs, living on the edge of the law. They run guns, make meth, sell moonshine and are so tough they take their aspirin dry. They drink hard, solicit prostitutes and then beat them up, but the offspring of one such encounter grows up to become a G-man bent on vengeance. The Burroughs’ hatred of the “Feds” hints that the Civil War didn’t end for them at Appomattox; they take freedom very seriously.

Like perhaps too many American male writers, Panowich writes in the shadow of Cormac McCarthy’s almost pornographically violent Blood Meridian. Panowich shows us men being burned alive, heads exploding and more, with a kind of Caligulan relish, or perhaps that of an avid gamer. 

Despite Panowich’s apparent admiration for McCarthy, he does not write in McCarthy’s often ponderous style, or emphasize style over characterization and plot. Some of his characters are monstrous, but they are drawn with conviction and sympathy, and the action proceeds briskly.

By the close of this vivid and gritty journey, does the Burroughs family—as McCarthy’s precursor Faulkner might have asked—prevail, or merely endure? The answer to that comes when someone—you guessed it—pulls out a gun.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Raymond Chandler once said about writing fiction: “When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.” In his first novel, Bull Mountain, firefighter Brian Panowich seems to have taken Chandler’s advice to heart: His characters brandish weaponry in a way that Charlton Heston might have found disconcerting. The result is a fast-paced and intricate revenge story culminating in a Shakespearean bloodbath.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Through the eyes of children

Review by Kenneth Champeon

Of the estimated six million Jews extinguished during the Holocaust, perhaps one-fourth were children. To make this figure somewhat conceivable, imagine if every one of them had, like Anne Frank, left behind a diary—or if that many novelists reconstructed in fiction the horrors these innocents had to face. Something like this imperative motivates National Book Award finalist Jim Shepard’s seventh novel, The Book of Aron, a loosely historical account of the children of the Warsaw ghetto.

The novel begins with the relocation of Aron and his family to Poland’s capital under the pretext of containing a typhus epidemic. Instead, the Germans impoverish the ghetto’s inhabitants via theft and starvation. Shepard deftly shows how the Jews’ accommodating, fatalistic ethos blinds them to the Germans’ monstrosity. An officer assigned to supervise the orphanage in which Aron ends up puts it thus: “The Jews adjust to every situation.” Several pages carry the news that the ghetto has yet again shrunk, like a noose.

Shepard ventures into the delicate subject of how some Jews were complicit in their co-religionists’ destruction. Hannah Arendt argued controversially that the Judenrate, or Jewish councils, helped the Nazis by tabulating Jewish constituents; the Judenrate are shown here stifling rumors about deportation to the gas chambers at Treblinka. Even Aron becomes an informer for the Gestapo. But Shepard underscores how famine makes nonsense of much ordinary morality.

The novel is too grave to admit much stylistic ornamentation. Much of it is dialogue, but not mere patter. There is humor of the blackest sort, jokes about Hitler or the Jewish Police. But the overriding tone is somber and tense and suffocating, like the climate before a storm. Shepard tackles his grim subject without a hint of sentimentality, though it is clear that the subject is not an easy one for him.

Every day’s newspaper shows that children continue to be the tragic pawn in the ideological games of adults, from massacres in Peshawar or Norway to the abduction of schoolgirls in Nigeria. To say “never again” might be wishful thinking, but Shepard’s taut, discomfiting novel at least illuminates what adult atrocities seem to children’s eyes.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Of the estimated six million Jews extinguished during the Holocaust, perhaps one-fourth were children. To make this figure somewhat conceivable, imagine if every one of them had, like Anne Frank, left behind a diary—or if that many novelists reconstructed in fiction the horrors these innocents had to face. Something like this imperative motivates National Book Award finalist Jim Shepard’s seventh novel, The Book of Aron,, a loosely historical account of the children of the Warsaw ghetto.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Beauty in our modern noise

Review by Kenneth Champeon

Reif Larsen waits 200 pages before betraying his literary lineage by using the phrase “gravity’s rainbow.” For in his sprawling, pyrotechnic second novel, I Am Radar, one is never far from Pynchon’s masterpiece, that once-groundbreaking combination of adolescent hilarity and theoretical physics. The authors share a soaring erudition and ambition—evidenced by the length and ostentation of their books. But where Pynchon’s main theme might be a paranoiac fear of annihilation and conspiracy, Larsen’s seems to be an affirmation of the pathetic randomness of life. It’s telling that his previous book, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, was made into a film by the director of Amélie, and his new release resembles the joyful, madcap creations of Wes Anderson.

The “Radar” of the title is Radar Radmanovic, an American boy with Serbian roots. He was born with black skin even though his parents are white, and his mother’s desire that Radar be “normal” leads to their entanglement with an odd group of Norwegians who claim the ability to change skin color by electrochemical means. The Norwegians double as performance artists, offering shows in places as far-flung as Yugoslavia, Cambodia and the Congo, all recently embroiled in appalling wars.

This is maximalism of the maximum order, so the novel also includes dissertations on Nikola Tesla, Morse code, electromagnetic pulses and, perhaps inevitably, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Schrödinger’s hapless cat. I Am Radar aims for nothing less than to encapsulate our “age of extremes” in fictional form, and Larsen rises to the challenge he has set. His prose is angelic, and while the effort to touch on everything threatens to make the book more noise than signal, it’s precisely the noise of modernity that novelists like Larsen are determined to convey. It’s an exhilarating ride.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Reif Larsen waits 200 pages before betraying his literary lineage by using the phrase “gravity’s rainbow.” For in his sprawling, pyrotechnic second novel, I Am Radar, one is never far from Pynchon’s masterpiece, that once-groundbreaking combination of adolescent hilarity and theoretical physics. The authors share a soaring erudition and ambition—evidenced by the length and ostentation of their books. But where Pynchon’s main theme might be a paranoiac fear of annihilation and conspiracy, Larsen’s seems to be an affirmation of the pathetic randomness of life. It’s telling that his previous book, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, was made into a film by the director of Amélie, and his new release resembles the joyful, madcap creations of Wes Anderson.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Discover a vivid voice in fiction

Review by Kenneth Champeon

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, March 2015

It is almost impossible to choose the most memorable thing about James Hannaham’s powerful and daring second novel, Delicious Foods (a title suggestive of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”). It might be that one of its narrators is crack cocaine, or that one of its main characters loses his hands. It might be the evocative African-American slang and dialect. Or it might be the way the novel can be read as an extended metaphor for the situation of blacks in America.

Darlene is a young and talented black woman on her way to a comfortable middle-class existence when her husband Nat disappears in Louisiana. No thinking person will be surprised when the investigation into his death proves feeble. This injustice leads the devastated Darlene down the road of addiction, ultimately to the point of abandoning her 11-year-old son, Eddie. Darlene ends up on the “Delicious Foods” farm, where the payment is partially in crack, harvesting, of all things, watermelons. The farm resembles a plantation or prison, its owners sadistic and criminal, and Darlene struggles to break her addiction and reunite with Eddie.

Delicious Foods does suffer occasionally from a kind of MFA-itis, in which the subject matter takes a backseat to showcase the writing. Hannaham’s frequent references to astronomical phenomena suggest that all human suffering is nugatory in the cosmic scale, allowing for less opportunity to lament or even celebrate his characters. These flaws are, however, far outweighed by its virtues. Delicious Foods is fiercely imaginative and passionate. There are echoes here of Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston, even at times of Zola or Kafka. The investigation of Nat’s disappearance is not the only instance of racism in law enforcement; in that respect, the novel is timely, even prophetic. Few novels leap off the page as this one does. Delicious Foods is a cri de coeur from a very talented and engaging writer.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It is almost impossible to choose the most memorable thing about James Hannaham’s powerful and daring second novel, Delicious Foods (a title suggestive of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”). It might be that one of its narrators is crack cocaine, or that one of its main characters loses his hands. It might be the evocative African-American slang and dialect. Or it might be the way the novel can be read as an extended metaphor for the situation of blacks in America.
FictionWorld FictionDebut Fiction

A mother watches from beyond the grave

Review by Kenneth Champeon

It's post-apartheid South Africa and the bloom is off the rose of liberation, at least for dispossessed whites. The economic inequality between the races inaugurates an epidemic of crime, in particular black raids on white farmsteads, much as in Mugabe's Zimbabwe. Some even call the retributions genocide. A victim of one such attack narrates from beyond the grave in Miranda Sherry's unnerving debut novel Black Dog Summer, named for the "black dog" as an ill omen in local folklore.

The novel begins with the incursion and abruptly shifts to the aftermath. Disembodied Sally, the main victim, reports on her daughter Gigi's reaction, which initially involves an excess of prescription tranquilizers. Gigi is forced to live with Sally's sister Adele and Adele's husband Liam, who incidentally had been Sally's true love. Much of the novel concerns this illicit but never consummated connection. Meanwhile, Gigi had resented Sally's actual partner so much that one day she leaves the admittedly flimsy lock on the farm unfastened.

Sherry makes token efforts to depict the historically more victimized side of the racial divide in the person of Lesedi, a songamo or faith healer, who must counter accusations that she is a "whitey" because she is initially destined for more worldly success. But the story mostly concerns the actual whites for whom life in their adopted country has become tenuous—and, for some, untenable. As Gigi's soon-to-emigrate mentor Simone puts it, "I can't live in a country where people can just march into your home and violate everything you've built."

Black Dog Summer is a rather successful combination of murder mystery, ghost story and marital drama, written rather breezily given the machete attack forming its premise. But it will likely interest anyone with a concern for the fate of a nation now fatefully intermingled after centuries of segregation.

 

A victim of a violent post-apartheid attack narrates from beyond the grave Miranda Sherry's unnerving debut novel Black Dog Summer, named for the "black dog" as an ill omen in local folklore.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Newfoundland blues

Review by Kenneth Champeon

In Michael Crummey’s novel, Sweetland, a Newfoundlander named Queenie offers some literary criticism. Concerning books about her province, she says: “It was a torture to get through them. They were every one depressing. . . . Or nothing happened. Or there was no point to the story.” She adds that they are unrecognizable and probably written by outsiders.

Does Newfoundlander Crummey rise to Queenie’s challenge? Readers may decide for themselves. But what Sweetland lacks in sweetness and light, it makes up for in authenticity.

The title refers to an island and one of its eponymous residents, 70-year-old Moses Sweetland, who makes some of Cormac McCarthy’s surlier characters seem like Holly Golightly. The Canadian government is so convinced of the island’s hopelessness that it will generously pay its inhabitants to relocate. This provokes a battle between Sweetland and the prosperous mainland.

Once, fishing supported the communities along the North Atlantic coast. With the collapse of the cod stocks and fish populations through overfishing and climate change, this support is increasingly tenuous. Sweetland is thus in part a parable of how environmental collapse and social collapse are one. Crummey’s Newfoundland has become, at best, a remittance economy and, at worst, a stopover for Sri Lankan refugees headed to Toronto.

Sweetland is purposeful, and it certainly evokes the rawness and fragility of life in Newfoundland. It is not, however, an advertisement for the place, as Crummey devotes pages of rather self-consciously muscular prose to food preparation or to Sweetland grumbling like King Lear in various squalls— admitting with grave understatement that he “sounded slightly unhinged.”

Sweetland is both a testament to human resilience and a keen study of where that resilience shades into cussedness and derangement.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In Michael Crummey’s novel, Sweetland, a Newfoundlander named Queenie offers some literary criticism. Concerning books about her province, she says: “It was a torture to get through them. They were every one depressing. . . . Or nothing happened. Or there was no point to the story.” She adds that they are unrecognizable and probably written by outsiders.
FictionDebut Fiction

The darker side of Oregon

Review by Kenneth Champeon

One might describe Oregon as a mélange of Haight-Ashbury, Appalachia and Yankee nouveau riche. Valerie Geary’s first novel, Crooked River, follows this interplay between the state’s radicals, rednecks and arrivistes. It begins when a journalist with the WASP-y name of Taylor Bellweather drowns. And the prime suspect is a beekeeper with a beard and a penchant for whiskey.

The beekeeper is father to Sam and Ollie, girls mourning the recent death of their mother. Sam discovers the victim but fears that the police will implicate her father. The police implicate him anyway, because witnesses have him arguing with Taylor in a bar on the night of her disappearance. So Sam sets out like Nancy Drew to prove her father’s innocence.

Given the setting and the crime, Crooked River pays homage to Snow Falling on Cedars. But Geary is not one to labor over language. So while her novel is a swift and beguiling read, it sometimes resembles an episode of “Murder, She Wrote.” Given that two youngsters are its narrators, it even flirts with the young adult genre. Not to say that Sam isn’t a compelling character. She is finely drawn, an update on Harper Lee’s Scout. When the local detective tells Sam that it’s not her job to protect her father, Sam makes a fair bid to join the great orphans of literature.

The problem with the back-to-nature ethos of the 1960s is that nature can be primal and nasty. The Summer of Love begat an Autumn of Discontent. Put another way, it’s all fun and games until a girl named Taylor gets whacked.

Geary isn’t explicit about it, but her novel undoes some of the more recent idealizations of that grand Pacific Northwest state. It may, as the current motto goes, “love dreamers,” but there’s a dark earthiness to it still. Or as Sam says, “trees made better friends than people did.”

 

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

One might describe Oregon as a mélange of Haight-Ashbury, Appalachia and Yankee nouveau riche. Valerie Geary’s first novel, Crooked River, follows this interplay between the state’s radicals, rednecks and arrivistes. It begins when a journalist with the WASP-y name of Taylor Bellweather drowns. And the prime suspect is a beekeeper with a beard and a penchant for whiskey.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A man in a mirage

Review by Kenneth Champeon

In Saul Bellow's Herzog, the eponymous main character expresses his borderline lunacy by writing letters to everyone, including the IRS. The narrator of Joseph O'Neill's fourth novel, The Dog, expresses his unease by mentally composing emails, replete with emoticons and nested parentheses.

The narrator (hereafter "the dog") washes up in Dubai. Taking solace in pornography and Russian prostitutes, he broods on a nasty breakup with a real and respectable woman, yet he is hypersensitive to the gender wars. He uses the title "Mrs." once, followed by a profuse rationale. He is also hypersensitive to the virtual slave labor making Dubai possible and to his ex-girlfriend's closing arguments.

O'Neill begs comparison with other writers: Geoff Dyer for the genteel sourness, or Richard Ford for the heroic elevation of mediocrity to grandeur.  He is as exhilarating as Bellow, as dark and provocative as Houellebecq, as hedonistic as Dyer and as touching as Ford. But O'Neill is funnier.

The Dog is about a man adrift in a "statelet" that's a mirage. It's about the increasing impossibility of real connection in our connected world, about expiation and escapism and exile. It shows the world as it is.

If O'Neill intends to show that this world is unsustainable, Dubai is the ideal setting, a sea of shifting sand atop a sea of fossil fuels, an air-conditioned panopticon where the dog almost gets jailed for errant Web surfing. Joseph Conrad compared humanity to "travelers in a garish, unrestful hotel." Dubai's "undeclared mission," writes O'Neill, "is to make itself indistinguishable from its airport."

Yet the dog loves his utopian dystopia. Grungy, crumbling New York depresses him.  Compared to Dubai's Burj Khalifa, New York's Freedom Tower seemed "dumb—a meathead tower. It's not even that tall." But to the U.S. Constitution he gives mad props. 

Herzog stopped writing letters, and the dog likewise seems to quiet down.  This, of course, is what writing is often for. In this extraordinary novel, O'Neill has extended the boundaries of what writing can do, even (and perhaps especially) in this digital age. 

In Saul Bellow's Herzog, the eponymous main character expresses his borderline lunacy by writing letters to everyone, including the IRS. The narrator of Joseph O'Neill's fourth novel, The Dog, expresses his unease by mentally composing emails, replete with emoticons and nested parentheses.

FictionWorld Fiction

The Vietnamese-American dream

Review by Kenneth Champeon

“Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we’ve all been there.” So says war correspondent Michael Herr on the persistent reality of a war curiously prone to re-examination. In The Lotus and the Storm, by Vietnamese-American author Lan Cao, this revisiting takes the form of a dialogue of sorts between a daughter and a father, lotuses swept to America’s shores by the storm of the American intervention.

The father, Mr. Minh, is a soldier in the South Vietnamese army. At first appreciative of the assistance the Americans provide, he is disillusioned by the U.S.-backed assassination of the republic’s leader Diem. Minh doesn’t switch sides, but when the Americans retreat in ignominy, his sense of betrayal becomes complete.

Mai, the daughter, becomes enamored at a young age with a typically green and generous American, who appears to be killed in an attack that also slays her sister. Much like the author, Mai nevertheless attains with great ambivalence a portion of the American Dream.

Now that most Americans view the war as a mistake if not an atrocity, the author is keen to remind us that, whatever the Americans’ broader strategic goals, saving South Vietnam was to its loyal citizens a dire matter indeed. Moreover, the civil strife didn’t end when the war did, with Vietnamese-Americans on both sides still holding grudges and nursing resentments. But this is also a novel about reconciliation, and about that generation of Vietnamese for whom the future supersedes the past.

This isn’t the best novel about the conflict—that honor goes to Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War. Cao’s dense language and her seeming indecision between embittered history and sentimentality belie the novel’s therapeutic character. But, like Cao’s acclaimed debut, Monkey Bridge, it is an impassioned and powerful attempt to understand a chapter of history that, as Herr says, we’ve all in a sense inhabited.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we’ve all been there.” So says war correspondent Michael Herr on the persistent reality of a war curiously prone to re-examination. In The Lotus and the Storm, by Vietnamese-American author Lan Cao, this revisiting takes the form of a dialogue of sorts between a daughter and a father, lotuses swept to America’s shores by the storm of the American intervention.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Death Railway through Australian eyes

Review by Kenneth Champeon

A notable tourist attraction in Thailand is the bridge “over the River Kwai”—part of the Death Railway built during World War II by the Japanese using the labor of Allied POWs under atrocious conditions. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Australian Richard Flanagan, follows the Australian contributors to this grandiose project, as well as its Japanese administrators, many of whom were destined to become prisoners themselves.

Dorrigo Evans is a hard-drinking and philandering Aussie military doctor. His resemblance to Errol Flynn fails to prevent his capture by the Japanese. (An unintended irony: the Khmer Rouge most likely captured and killed Errol's son, Sean.) Torn from Amy, the love of his life, Evans ministers to fellow POWs suffering from cholera and similar ills. Acclaimed a war hero upon his release, he finds, like many veterans, that life after war seems tepid.

Evans’ foil is Tenji Nakamura, who was part of the Japanese plan to conquer India via rail—dreams which went up in atomic vapor. Nakamura scrapes together a life in the aftermath, all the while fearful of the noose meant for war criminals.

The Death Railway story has already been told several times over (including in a novel that inspired the award-winning film The Bridge Over the River Kwai). So The Narrow Road to the Deep North is light on plot and even historical detail, instead becoming a winding eulogy to Australia's servicemen and the war era—a topic personal to Flanagan since his own father was one of those Australian POWs. It is also literary in a self-referential way. The novel's title is taken from Basho, and Tennyson's "Ulysses" serves as a motif, as does Kipling's "Recessional.” The result can be exhilarating, but it can also trivialize the grim historical reality behind it.

Even so, Flanagan is to be lauded for the empathy he shows to both prisoners and wardens. Their handiwork can be seen to this day in the land then known as Siam. "Lest we forget," as Kipling put it.

A notable tourist attraction in Thailand is the bridge “over the River Kwai”—part of the Death Railway built during World War II by the Japanese using the labor of Allied POWs under atrocious conditions. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Australian Richard Flanagan, follows the Australian contributors to this grandiose project, as well as its Japanese administrators, many of whom were destined to become prisoners themselves.
FictionDebut Fiction

What makes a work of art?

Review by Kenneth Champeon

If you've ever wondered whether modern art is trash disguised by critical theory or whether critical theory is trashy modern art, Will Chancellor's debut novel, A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall, may settle the wager. It is a spirited sendup of the frauds found in art, academia and their "liminal" intersections.

Owen is a precocious student destined for Olympic fame in water polo when he is blinded in one eye. Instead, he heads to Berlin to try his hand as an artist. There he falls under the sway of a brash amalgam of Damien Hirst and Ai Weiwei, whose work is as lucrative as it is shameless. Increasingly drug-addled, Owen becomes the involuntary subject of a project simulating the Abu Ghraib photos during its American tenure.

Meanwhile Owen's father, Joseph, a traditional but unknown scholar, seizes an opportunity to travel to Athens to be the opening act for the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. Chancellor offers a "formula for the new public intellectual,” which includes "say something outlandish seemingly at random” especially "against global capitalism.”  Joseph rises well above the occasion when a rumination on the film Scarface and its lessons for anti-capitalists culminates in a vast riot that puts Joseph on a terrorist watch list.

Chancellor writes in the established tradition of the American absurd, from Pynchon and Gaddis (who mocked Art in V and The Recognitions) to DeLillo and Foster Wallace (who mocked the ivory tower in White Noise and Infinite Jest). Chancellor may be swinging for the former pair, but lands firmly, and thereby accessibly, in the latter. His language is often bracing and his references to "late Heidegger" et al. will please aspiring or ashamed philosophy students.  But he is rarely esoteric for esoterica's sake, eschewing the obfuscating "cult of the difficult" he otherwise lampoons.

But is it art? Or Art? Marcel Duchamp suggested that art is whatever appears in a gallery. So is this a novel or something in a "novel"? Liminalism suggests it may be somewhere in between.

If you've ever wondered whether modern art is trash disguised by critical theory or whether critical theory is trashy modern art, Will Chancellor's debut novel, A Brave Man Seven Stories Tall, may settle the wager. It is a spirited sendup of the frauds found in art, academia and their "liminal" intersections.

FictionPopular Fiction

Mambo in Chinatown

Review by Kenneth Champeon

A liberated Asian at odds with her conservative family or homeland is not a new story. Literature abounds with such declarations of independence in prose, doggedly demolishing superstitions and customs. This is especially true when it comes to an Asian woman’s “proper” role in courtship and marriage, or non-role in the workplace. Jean Kwok’s entertaining second novel, Mambo in Chinatown, thus breaks no new ground, except perhaps that it is her father, not her mother, who proves the protagonist’s foil. Also: ballroom dancing!

Charlie Wong is a shabby dishwasher barely into her 20s when she applies for a job as a receptionist at a dance studio. A serial receiver of pink slips, incompetent and possibly dyslexic, Charlie braces for the worst. It comes, but not before the dancers recruit her to train with them. Charlie has dance in her blood, since her late mother had been a performer for the prestigious Beijing Ballet. At first scornful of Charlie’s calloused hands and appalling fashion-sense, the dancers soon make Charlie one of their flamboyant own.

She keeps her bourgeoning career a secret from her father, who despite his late wife’s occupation would shudder to see his daughter on display, not least because it would confound his intention to see Charlie married to a Chinese. Despite warnings from her fellow dancers, who frown on student-teacher fraternization, Charlie is (wait for it) swept off her feet by an earnest Caucasian pupil. Ooh la la!

The story here may reach escape velocity from Chinatown into Harlequin town, but you wouldn’t know it from the language, which is admirably even-keeled. Charlie’s wide-eyed persona conceals a shrewd and determined woman; her father ends up seeming less like a chauvinist than a straw man, consulting healers and slurping noodles while his daughter waltzes into the American Dream.

It was everywhere and always thus that children have rebelled against elders, from Cain to Holden Caulfield, so it’s perhaps unfair to suggest that this is a hackneyed theme in Asian literature. But even if it is, Cain and Caulfield couldn’t dance.

A liberated Asian at odds with her conservative family or homeland is not a new story. Literature abounds with such declarations of independence in prose, doggedly demolishing superstitions and customs. This is especially true when it comes to an Asian woman's "proper" role in courtship…

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