Table of Contents: On Beauty

Author: Zadie Smith
Publisher/Year: Hamish Hamilton, 2000
Synopsis: Set in contemporary times at an upscale university outside of Boston, her story revolves around two families, the Belseys and the Kippses. Howard Belsey is a white liberal academic and Rembrandt scholar with a black wife. Kiki, and three children. His long-time rival, Sir Montague Kipps, a Caribbean-born conservative, will also now teach at the same university. The oldest of the Belsey children, Jerome, falls in love with Kipps' daughter. Howard's life is further complicated when Kiki learns of an affair he's had with a colleague named Claire, his daughter falls for a young street rapper who takes a poetry course taught by Claire, his youngest son speaks only in gangsta rap, and Kiki strikes up a friendship with Kipps' invalid wife.


What Others Have To Say
The New York Times
"Smith possesses a captivating authorial voice, giving us that rare thing: a novel that is as affecting as it is entertaining, as provocative as it is humane."

San Francisco Chronicle
"It is packed with tangents on the iPod, the seepage of pornography into sex lives, the peculiar fashion imperatives of hip-hop, and glimpses of life in America under Bush.

Seattle Times
"Smith has a grand time hooking up the players in her big cast of characters in every combination possible. Her homage is mainly to Forster, but there are nods to Iris Murdoch, too, whose smarts and flair for farcical drama Smith shares."

The Guardian
"Beautifully observed details of clothing, weather, cityscapes and the bustling human background of drivers, shoppers and passers-by are constantly being folded into the central flow of thought, feeling and action, giving even the most mundane moments - Levi riding a bus into Boston, Howard setting up a projector - a dense, pulsing life."

Table of Contents: My Life On A Plate

Author: India Knight
Publisher/Year: Penguin, 2000
Synopsis: Clara Hutt (known to herself as Jabba The), has put her foxy single days very much behind her (rather like her cellulite), and has Got Her Man.

She has a nice house, adorable children who only annoy her 90% of the time, a large, eccentric and charming family, and an attractive (but increasingly mysterious) husband. And she gets to have regular sex. Well ... she used to. Anyway, what the hell, it's only loins ...

Everyone wants to be married - don't they?

What Others Have To Say
The Times
"Clara [Hutt] is a thoroughly engaging modern heroine who never descends into head-clutching cuteness: she would eat Ally McBeal, on brioche, for breakfast."

The Sunday Herald
"...truly indulgent experience of reading the frothbuster of the year."

The Evening Standard
"The funniest novel of the year...A brilliant take on modern matrimony and a welcome antedote to Bridget Jones"

Extras
Read an excerpt

Book Review: Aimee Bender, An Invisible Sign Of My Own

Author: Aimee Bender
Publisher/Year: Anchor Books, 2000

Review:
Aimee Bender’s first novel (her first book The Girl in the Flammable Skirt was a collection of short stories) An Invisible Sign of My Own is quirky tale of a woman on the edge of compulsive collapse. Given its subject matter, it is not always the easiest novel to wrap your brain around. It holds itself slightly aloft from the reader, as if to underscore the broader theme of incomprehension that weaves its way through story. Regardless, Bender has painted a vivid portrait of psychological disturbance that is as serious and worrisome as it is humorous and enchanting. Not the easiest of combinations to pull off.

The central character of the story is Mona Gray, an obsessive compulsive who has recently retained a job as a math teacher at a local elementary school. She does not appear to have any of the qualifications for this position expect for her neurotic love of math. In her compulsion driven existence, numbers are her greatest comfort and stabilizer. In their absence, she finds herself knocking on wood until her knuckles bleed and washing her mouth out with soap whenever a sexual desire creeps to the surface.

Mona excels in the classroom, despite her lack of experience, thanks in large part to her fanatical attachment to math. She transfers this love to her rambunctious class of second-graders as a means to gain control over their restlessness. Mona charges them with creating numbers out of everyday material, an activity that brings to light numerous emotional foibles of the children. As a result, Mona’s classroom persona begins to give way to her wounded internal world as she becomes entangled in her pupil’s lives to various ends.

Bender’s rendering of Mona’s world is almost like a fairytale—a weird, warped fairytale but a fairytale no less. It is an imaginative tale carried forth by its dark and carefully constructed prose. Bender has created a surreal world wherein her characters drift through compulsions and obsessions with the steps of a professional ballet dancer constantly learning a new routine. You can never quite predict where Bender’s prose is going to lead even though she does not try to hide her character’s motivations and desires. As a result, An Invisible Sign of My Own is a most endearing and idiosyncratic story that creates a heroine and a world like no other.

Table of Contents

Book Review: Emma Donoghue, Slammerkin

Author: Emma Donoghue
Publisher/Year: Virago, 2000

You may get the impression from one glance at the cover of Slammerkin that it is a bodice-ripping historical romance with more heated sex than one can handle. But first impressions can be wrong, and indeed they are in this case. For sure, there is indeed much sex within Emma Donoghue’s novel but it is anything but heated. And there is some bodice-ripping but not for reasons or exploitive plot points as one may suspect or expect. No, Slammerkin (slang for loose women or loose clothes) is a story that uses sex as the catalyst for demonstrating the damaging impacts of an ego indulged. Such is not the fodder for your typical romance novel.

Emma Donoghue based the novel on the true story of Mary Saunders, a young servant girl who murdered her mistress in 1763. All that is know about Mary’s life comes from snippets of information that Donoghue fastens together with great care. She deftly intertwines the real with the imagined to produce a vibrant, mesmerizing novel that leaves the reader wanting more and simultaneously wanting it to be over.

Slammerkin is staged during the last two years of Mary’s life. It all begins simply enough, with young Mary wishing for a different social station than that provided by her mother and stepfather. Mary’s is a poor existence, circumstances she bitterly notices are in direct opposition to her ambitions and want for the finer things.

Mary becomes fascinated with the local harlots, whose colorful clothing and perceived freedom represent her deepest desires. It is through her romanticized fascination with these ‘slammerkins’ that Mary begins to covet that which is seemingly out of her reach, specifically a shiny red ribbon worn by one of the harlots. Driven by her desire to have her own red ribbon, Mary decides to give into a peddler’s demand for a kiss in order to obtain this ribbon. It is an ultimately disastrous decision, setting into motion Mary’s expulsion from her family home, unqualified disownment and eventually, death.

Once on the streets, Mary is taken in by Doll Higgins, the same prostitute Mary used to watch. Doll teaches Mary how to earn the money necessary to buy whatever she wants. Faced with little prospects, Mary does as Doll instructs and becomes a slammerkin.

It is far from an idyllic life for Mary but she learns to be self-sufficient and learns the value of appearance in getting what one wants and needs. Eventually Mary is taken into a religious home for wayward girls and attempts to restore her life to one of virtue. The life offered by the home is at first welcomed but then disdained as its rules and confinements restrict the freedom Mary had when she was a “Miss”.

Mary escapes from the house and soon conspires to make her way to Monmouth, her mother’s childhood home. Through some deception, Mary becomes a maid and seamstress to Jane Jones. Yet again, Mary finds her attempts at redemption suffocating and she is soon back to her street ways. Her deceptions start to unravel and old desires resurface, trapping Mary with no escape other than murder.

Slammerkin is a strange and compelling read. Donoghue does not romanticize Mary’s life or the events that marked her troubled existence. There is a rawness to Donoghue’s writing, most especially in dealing with Mary’s abortion and subsequent harlot life, that is at times difficult to digest. Though her writing is unforgivingly real, Donoghue also infuses a surprising tenderness that compels the reader to constantly shift their perception of Mary from heroine to victim, transgressor to transgressed and back again.

As such, this is not a novel that one wants to read but rather, one that you want to consume. It is both fascinating and depressing, a testament to Donoghue’s skill as an author and as a storyteller. Slammerkin is an exercise in managing a conflict of emotions that is not unlike that experienced by Mary herself, both in the real and the fictional realms. And this ability to make the reader reflect on their own lives through Mary’s experiences is the defining quality that makes Slammerkin a most rewarding literary encounter.

Table of Contents: An Invisible Sign of My Own

Author: Aimee Bender
Publisher: Anchor Books
Year: 2000
Synopsis: Mona Gray was ten when her father contracted a mysterious illness and she became a quitter, abandoning each of her talents just as pleasure became intense. The only thing she can't stop doing is math: She knocks on wood, adds her steps, and multiplies people in the park against one another. When Mona begins teaching math to second-graders, she finds a ready audience. But the difficult and wonderful facts of life keep intruding. She finds herself drawn to the new science teacher, who has an unnerving way of seeing through her intricately built façade.

What Others Have To Say:

The Washington Post
"This novel is light as a zephyr and unique as a snowflake."

Denver Post
"Aimee Bender is one writer who is shouting clearly and beautifully from the hilltops that our lives are most definitely not ordinary and typical."

Entertainment Weekly
"...the book reads like a Brothers Grimm fairy tale overlaid with the futuristic alienation of Phillip K. Dick."

Extras:
Read Chapter One online.
Movie version coming out in 2010.