Book Review

In Baker’s novel The Anthologist, Paul Chowder believes all poems should rhyme. Also, he’s having some trouble with his girlfriend, smaller troubles with his dog and a mouse, and he has an intro to an anthology he needs to finish. This isn’t “save the earth from a falling satellite” kind of trouble, but enough to keep me reading. I think it was Vonnegut who advised writers to do at least something to keep a reader interested even if it was only jamming a piece of food between the protagonist’s teeth and causing him or her to want to get it out. The good stuff in The Anthologist for me was in the clever and/or funny lines. Here’s a couple of them:

On Tetris, “that computer game where the squares come down relentlessly and overwhelm your mind with their crude geometry and make you peck at the arrow keys like some mindless experimental chicken and hurry and panic and finally you turn your computer off. And you sit there thinking, Why have I just spend an hour watching squares drop down a computer screen?”

Tetris, Torgerson, Baker, The Anthologist

My Tetris is Probably Madden Football

On “poems” that don’t rhyme: “That’s what I call a poem that doesn’t rhyme–it’s a plum. We who write and publish our nonrhyming plums aren’t poets, we’re plummets. Or plummers.”

Torgerson Baker The Anthologist Read Books

Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist

The laws governing romantic breaking up: Paul notes when he sees his ex girlfriend, “If you break up with someone, you get to go out with someone else.”

Except for when my eyes glazed over during the longish explanations about iambic pentameter, I liked this book enough to recommend it. It served as a kind of argument for me that I ought to think about giving up all the Goodreads, WordPress, and tenure track paperwork stuff and maybe move up to Maine or down to North Carolina and stick a lawn chair out in a shallow creek bed. I could send my books out from there via email, except for there’s that thing about needing a paycheck. Paul Chowder, the protagonist, is in sore need of one of those too.

This book had a lot of writing advice in it. I might bother to type it all up and share it if anyone seems to be interested to ask for it via comment. If any of you out there are poets or plummers, I’d like to hear what you think of this book.

In order to win Jane Roper’s novel Eden Lake I had to agree to read the book and participate in the accompanying Goodreads discussion as a part of The Next Best Book Club. I am a finicky reader who has probably put down at least as many books as I’ve begun, and so I wanted to make sure I had a decent chance to like the story okay before I agreed to have it shipped to me. I could already see myself ten pages into 300, not enjoying the read, but having to stay with it because I said I would.

I went to Amazon and checked out the opening pages. I was happy with how things got started: “Just before noon on the morning after Memorial Day, Eric filled the tank of the John Deere, started the engine and rolled out of the barn into broad sunlight.” One of my favorite authors, Richard Ford, often starts books on a holiday (Independence Day, Easter) and there’s a lot competent in Jane’s sentence: it placed me firmly in time and in the sort of setting where there would be a John Deere and a barn. I knew I wasn’t in Queens anymore, and felt like my reading life was safe for the week I put it in Jane’s control.

Jane Roper Eden Lake William Torgerson Maine Summer Camp Relationships 80s Love on the Big Screen

Jane Roper's Eden Lake

Maine, complicated relationships, secrets, and summer camp. These are the primary ingredients of this story that bring together a group of brothers and sisters to run a summer camp that their parents ran when they were growing up. There are surprises here—excellent ones—and they are spaced out nicely that in such a way that just when I got comfortable with how things were going, just when I thought I could see what was going to happen next, there was something that threw me for a good reading loop and reinvigorated my interest in the story.

I’ve heard several writers say that they don’t have one idea for a book, usually the book comes when several ideas seem to collide and this book has a good bit of that going on. There are romantic and familial complications along with the tricky balance that running a camp that’s good for kids must be while at the same time paying attention to the fact that there are bills to be paid. “Materialism is the opiate of the masses,” one character quips in part about all the upgrades to the camp over the years (i.e. a climbing wall). Another remembers how in the old days the camp was supposed to be, “A vision of what the world might be.” That last line, it reminds me of something fiction can accomplish as well. Eden Lake creates a world I was thankful to have visited, enough so that I still haven’t stopped thinking about packing up the car and heading north to see if I could find some version of it.