High-Rise

J.G. Ballard

First Sentence:     Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building the previous three months.

Back of the book:

From the author of Crash and Cocaine Nights comes an unnerving tale of life in a modern tower block running out of control.

Within the concealing walls of an elegant forty-storey tower block, the affluent tenants are hell-bent on an orgy of destruction. Cocktail parties degenerate into marauding attacks on ‘enemy’ floors and the once-luxurious amenities become an arena for riots and technological mayhem.

In this visionary tale of urban disillusionment society slips into a violent reverse as the isolated inhabitants of the high-rise, driven by primal urges, create a dystopian world ruled by the laws of the jungle.

 

Quote from the book:

The internal time of the high-rise, like any artificial psychological climate, operated to its own rhythms generated by a combination of alcohol and insomnia.

* *

The Yips

Nicola Barker

First Sentence:     Stuart Ransom, professional golfer, is drunkenly reeling off an interminable series of stats about the women’s game in Korea (or the Ladies Game, as he is determined to have it): ‘Don’t scowl at me, beautiful…!’ – directed, with his trademark Yorkshire twinkle, at Jen, who lounges, sullenly, behind the hotel bar.

Back of the book:

2006 is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Tiger Woods’s reputation is entirely untarnished and the English Defense League does not yet exist. Storm clouds of a different kind are gathering above the bar of Luton’s less than exclusive Thistle Hotel. Among those caught up in the unfolding drama are a man who’s had cancer seven times, a woman priest with an unruly fringe, the troubled family of a notorious local fascist, an interfering barmaid with three E’s at A-level but a PhD in bullshit, and a free-thinking Muslim sex therapist with his considerably more pious wife. But at the centre of every intrigue and the bottom of every mystery is the repugnantly charismatic figure of Stuart Ransom – a golfer in free-fall.

Nicola Barker’s The Yips is at once an historical novel of the pre-Twitter moment and the most flamboyant piece of comic fiction ever to be set in Luton.

Quotes from the book:

Her mother gazes at Valentine in much the same way a slightly tipsy shepherd might gaze at the eviscerated corpse of a stray sheep on a neighbouring farmer’s land (a gentle, watercolour wash of concern, querulousness and supreme indifference).

“Even the word is ridiculous – like a cat vomiting up a giant hair-ball: GOLLUFF!”

* * *

The Art of Fileding

Chad Harbach

First Sentence:     Schwartz didn’t notice the kid during the game.

Back of the book:    

At Westish College, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for the big leagues until a routine throw goes disastrously off course. His error will upend the fates of five people.

Henry’s fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne becomes caught up in a dangerous affair. Mike Schwartz realizes he has guided Henry’s career at the expense of his own. And Pella Affenlight returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life.

As the season counts down to its climactic final game, all five are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties and secrets.

Quotes from the book:

[…] but even as the pages accumulated, despair set in. It was easy enough to write a sentence, but if you were going to create a work of art, the way Melville had, each sentence needed to fit perfectly with the one that preceded it, and the unwritten one that would follow. And each of those needed to square with the ones on either side, so that three became five and five became seven, seven became nine, and whichever sentence he was writing became the slender fulcrum on which the whole precarious edifice depended. That sentence could contain anything, anything, and so it promised the kind of absolute freedom that, to Affenlight’s mind, belonged to the artist and the artist alone. And yet that sentence was also beholden to the book’s very first one, and its last unwritten one, and every sentence in between. Every phrase, every word, exhausted him.

“The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.”

A tear ran down her cheek, pushed forward by the one behind it, and the one behind that, and who knew how many more.

“The dew twinkled in the buttery Florida sunlight.”

Talking was like throwing a baseball. You couldn’t plan it out beforehand. You just had to let go and see what happened. You had to throw out words without knowing whether anyone would catch them – you had to throw out words you knew no one would catch. You had to send your words out where they weren’t yours anymore. It felt better to talk with a ball in your hand, it felt better to let the ball do the talking. But the world, the nonbaseball world, the world of love and sex and jobs and friends, was made of words.

* * * *

Freedom

Jonathan Franzen

First Sentence: The news about Walter Berglund wasn’t picked up locally -he and Patty had moved away to Washington two years earlier and meant nothing to St. Paul now- but the urban gentry of Ramsey Hill were not so loyal to their city as not to read the New York Times.

The Berglund family unit is the main focus of this novel. It is almost a Revolutionary Road for modern times. Walter, his wife Patty and their two children, Jessica and Joey are living the suburban dream. Or so it seems at the beginning of the book when we are given a brief introduction to the Berglunds by their neighbours. The second part of the book focuses on Patty and is presented as a journal she wrote (composed at her therapist’s suggestion) entitled “Mistakes Were Made”. After learning about Patty’s early life we are then brought up to 2004 where we watch the Berglund’s lives begin to crumble before our eyes. Richard Katz, Walter’s college room-mate and now alt-country hero, and Lalitha, Walter’s attractive assistant, are both catalysts for the inevitable demise of the Berglund family unit. I did enjoy this novel but I do not believe that it deserved the hype it received on publication. Definitely a clarion call for our times and, in particular, for modern America, but ultimately a little overlong and sometimes bloated. I’d rather re-read Revolutionary Road. Again.

* * *