Ron Currie Jr, Everything Matters! ** 1/2

Even before Junior Thibodeau is born, he knows that the world is going to come to an end when he is 36 years old, when a comet smashes into Earth. How can he deal with this knowledge? Can he find meaning in his life?

The book got off to a strong start, with an eye for quirky detail and solid character development. However, it wasn't long before wild plot developments overwhelmed the basic realism. Every carefully delineated character underwent an event that transformed him or her into a completely different, more programmatic, person. Junior's brother becomes the best baseball player in the major leagues; Junior becomes the fourth smartest person in the world, who manages to create a world-saving device and cure cancer. I was much more interested in the real family at the start of the book  than the cartoons in the later parts. I'd rather know how a regular person would deal with the awful foreknowledge of impending doom.

The reviews quoted on the cover mention Kurt Vonnegut and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest as Currie's obvious models. That's definitely the company Currie wants to keep, but Everything Matters! is not as comic as Vonnegut nor as insightful as DFW, and the "final triumph that reconfigures the universe" is kinda lame.

Jenn Ashworth, A Kind of Intimacy *** 1/2

The inside flap tells you everything you need to know about this book. The narrator is a delusional woman who is determined to interpret whatever happens to her in a positive light, despite all evidence to the contrary. Annie is making a new start after "losing" her husband and daughter, and she knows that her new neighbor's friendliness means he is infatuated with her. No matter that he has a live-in girlfriend.

The reader's enjoyment comes from the mismatch between what is obviously going on and Annie's interpretation of it. She is a master at building an alternative narrative with herself at the center. When she hears her neighbor making love to his girlfriend, she knows it means he is getting ready to give her the bad news about leaving her for Annie.

Annie's voice is very entertaining, and frequently funny even though you know this has to end badly. The book runs a bit too long, with repetitive incidents clogging up the middle once you've started to see where the story is going.

Shusaku Endo, Silence ****

Silence tells a simple story in a powerful manner. The story takes place in Japan in the early 17th century, during a time when Christianity was banned and Christians subject to fearful persecution. A pair of Portuguese priests sneak into the country to provide solace to the underground Christian community and to discover the true fate of their spiritual mentor, who was reported to have apostatized under torture. The priests witness the cruel tactics of the Japanese authorities first hand, and it leads one of them to question how God could remain silent in the face of the Christians' suffering.

The strength of the book is the way it juxtaposes physical description of the natural world with the theological questions of Father Rodrigues. It reminded me of a Terence Malick film like The Thin Red Line. The story didn't always go where I expected it to, due to the ingenious way in which the Japanese use psychological methods rather than physical torture.

Hilary Putnam, Pragmatism ** 1/2

In this very short book, the philosopher who first got me hooked on modern philosophy (Putnam) considers the philosopher with whom I feel the closest kinship (William James). The book consists of three short speeches, which provide an overview of the reasons James remains relevant to current debates. As Putnam says, it is not a real study but rather "an advertisement for that project." I was disappointed at how cursory the discussion was. I would have had a hard time following it if I hadn't already read more detailed work from both men. Its main benefit for me was to confirm that I properly remembered the key positions of both philosophers.

Ben Marcus, Notable American Women ****

You've never read a book like this one. Do you like reading books that lack many of the crutches you usually rely on when reading — like a clear plot or the assurance that English words mean what you think they do? In its own words:

This book fails the Wixx/Byner comprehension test. This book eludes the Ludlow Plot Distribution Requirement Phase detection, which sleuths linear progression and character continuity in texts purporting to be fiction, of which only a small number actually are. By a wide margin, the book fails to meet the Coherency Requirement for Machinery Manuals as determined by the Ohio Clarity Foundation. The Reader Memory and Nostalgia Club, from Ohio, score this book a six out of a possible twenty-five points, yet this book induced 415 false memories or recollections from members of this club, who were prone to insert events from their own childhood into the plot of the book. The book required seven Simplification Batch Processes on the Language Cleaner Machine in order to render a legally binding one-hundred-word summary of its contents for the Annual Brochure of All Texts. (p 53)

Nonetheless, the book provides a unique perspective on the world and includes innumerable examples of elegant language. The narrator is a boy being raised on a farm in Ohio by a group of Silentists. Silentists are women who believe that the air turbulence created by speech is the cause of larger weather patterns and usually harms people and birds. They have invented their own "women's language" consisting solely of vowels (which are less violent than "the rough consonants and abrupt acoustical stops [of English], which inevitably result in the choppy air so prevalent whenever a man is speaking"). They have also developed techniques for suppressing emotions, which tend to promote the need for speaking and other violent movements. The ultimate goal for Silentists is to take the Promise of Stillness, vowing to stop speaking or moving completely. The narrator might be mentally handicapped, or it may be that he's just not suited to the Silentist regimen (being male as he is).

I enjoyed being constantly surprised by the ideas in the book, and by the creative use of language. I enjoyed the first half more than the second half, perhaps because I did not eat the proper diet for appreciating the later chapters:

Food plays an important role in how words enter the body, and what these words come to mean.... Nuts, when consumed in bulk, create a grammar sympathy that is nearly off the map; almost any idiom can be understood through the regulated intake of these items.... Milk, on the other hand, if properly prepared and consumed, increases sensitivity to unusual locution, dialects, and accents, while flat bread baked in hot salt for a day can aid with problems of believability. (p 72)

I also liked the moments of tenderness than shone through the experimental prose:

If I had to take my thousands of desires and their millions of horribly unquenchable offshoots and digressions and contradictions,... and from these innumerable desires choose only one that I would forever have addressed whenever and wherever I liked, ... an instant satisfaction I could summon with a button, or the clap of my hands, that desire would be to have my head handled, to have it scratched and rubbed and cradled, washed with a soft rag, wiped dry if wet, moistened if dry, kissed, kissed, kissed forever, scratched, covered with fine stuff, the most expensive velvet, rich creams, discussed in discussion groups, analyzed by long-bodied men in coats, whispered about by girls from another country, never forgotten. ... If only my head could no longer suffer a boundary with other people's hands. (p 51)

Amen, brother!

By now you know whether you are interested in reading Notable American Women or would rather that the author "give everyone concerned a needed breather from the exhausting obligation of his existence" (p 12).