Lost in the woods

Here's my review of Russell Banks' The Reserve, as it appears in this week's City Link:

THE RESERVE
Russell Banks
(Harper Collins, Harpercollins.com)
(1 star)
As the author of Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter and Continental Drift, among other works, Russell Banks has established himself within the pantheon of living American novelists that rests a tier below the one inhabited by Philip Roth and John Updike. In his novels, particularly The Sweet Hereafter, Banks transports readers to undiscovered countries riven by tragedy yet populated by characters of indomitable will. Banks' prose is economical and effortless, and he shares fellow New Yorker Richard Russo's gift for drawing universal themes from small-town lives.

It comes as no small surprise then that with The Reserve, Banks has produced a work of such staggering banality and predictability that readers will have every right to suspect the appearance of the author's name on the book's dust jacket is some kind of cruel joke, a literary Jackass stunt. In this thoroughly misguided effort — set in 1936 in a dying town high up in the Adirondack Mountains — Banks conducts a frothy soap opera in which nearly every note rings false, from the stock characterizations to the author's attempts to connect his story to actual events (including, most ridiculously, the Hindenburg's ill-fated final voyage and the Spanish Civil War). That Banks claims the novel is based on an actual incident only renders his attempts at realism all the more laughable.

The central character in this mess is Vanessa Cole, a spoiled, impulsive, sexually insatiable and possibly insane daughter of aristocratic New Yorkers whose vanity is like a black hole to all who encounter her. No physical matter can escape her pull, just as no trace of authenticity can elude Banks' storytelling. By the end of the novel's first chapter, the 30-year-old Cole is attempting to seduce Jordan Groves, a married artist of some renown whose sense of fidelity is as shaky as his leftist politics. Groves is visiting Cole and her family at their home in The Reserve, a members-only wilderness retreat for wealthy businessmen, stockbrokers and doctors such as Cole's father. Unfortunately for Groves but conveniently for the book's plot, the artist is on the verge of curtailing his extramarital activities when he falls under the spell of the beautiful Cole, a woman prone to "gazing in dark and lonely Nordic thoughtfulness," a description that seems more apt to appear in a perfume advertisement than in a Russell Banks novel.

It's giving nothing away to say that Cole will eventually bed Groves, the artist's wife will discover the affair, a central character will meet an untimely end and the lives of those who live and work in The Reserve will never be the same. I'll leave you to discover how the Hindenburg factors in here, but suffice to say it — like everything else in this disappointing novel — is a disaster waiting to happen.

Russell Banks will read from The Reserve 8 p.m. Tuesday at Books and Books, 265 Aragon Ave., in Coral Gables. Admission is free. Call 305/ 442-4408 or visit Booksandbooks.com.

Web slingin'

The Internet gods blinked, and now, City Link magazine is back online. This means our books coverage is online, too, so click here for an interview with Florida mystery novelist Tim Dorsey, a 60-second review of Andrew Morton's Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography, and a bestseller showdown between Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto and Eric Weiner's The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World.

60-second book review

Here's my review of Neil Smith's debut story collection, which City Link published Jan. 2:

BANG CRUNCH BY NEIL SMITH
First published last year in Canada and Europe, Smith’s remarkable collection of eight stories and one novella is now available in American bookstores. Setting most of these stories in Quebec, the Canadian Smith tells of everyday characters facing commonplace tragedies (illness, death, alcoholism) given a touch of the fantastic (a glow-in-the-dark guinea pig, a disease that ages the afflicted a month each day). Smith’s prose is taut and often wry, but never without heart. He even manages to pull off a Tom Robbins-esque tale about loyalty and desire told from the points of view of a glove and shoe, the latter of which is attached to an astronaut’s severed foot. Visit Randomhouse.com.

There is a light that never goes out

In his latest Opus, the great Berkeley Breathed sizes up the Kindle and other e-readers, saying in just a few panels what innumerable bloggers, gadget geeks and hyperventilating literary editors have broken precious blood vessels struggling to articulate.

And with that, Maximum Sentences closes out its inaugural year. Time and life permitting, I'll update this blog — and its grandfather — more regularly in 2008. To the three or four people who've kept up with it, thanks for reading and happy new year. Have a Killian's and a can of black-eyed peas on me.

Book critics are Americans, too

Salon has posted its list of "the 10 most pleasurable reading experiences of the year." The list offers few surprises -- Tree of Smoke and The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao both made the cut -- though you may immediately wonder why Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games was included, considering it was one of the most buzzed-about books in 2006. Turns out much of that buzz was generated pre-publication; Sacred Games was released Jan. 9, 2007.

The New York Times published its own Top 10 this past Sunday.

Finally, calling out Bill O'Reilly for his blustering inaccuracies and hysterical hypocrisies can be as easy as flipping on a light switch -- or flipping your TV to Fox News --but Alan M. Dershowitz reminds readers just how much fun it can be in his review of Billo's Kids Are Americans Too.

The 10 best books I read this year

In no particular order:
The Quiet American by Graham Greene
The Orient Express by Graham Greene
Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo
Arthur and George by Julian Barnes
The March by E.L. Doctorow
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pesll
The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
The Places in Between by Rory Stewart
Tooth and Claw by T.C. Boyle
Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism by Eric Burns

Western promises

I haven't read Charles Portis' classic Western True Grit since I was in college, which for those of you keeping score was more than 10 years ago but less than 20. On the occasion of the novel's 40th anniversary, Allen Barra explains why it's high time to revisit the book.

Barra's column also planted a seed in my head to post a list of must-read Westerns, which I just may do in the not-too-distant future. Keep reading.

List of sighs

The New York Times Book Review has posted its annual list of the "100 Notable Books of the Year." Expected titles abound — including Philip Roth's Exit Ghost, Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (was a more notable, or more notably disappointing, novel published this year?), Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach and Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke — along with a few strangers to the year's bestseller lists — Jim Shepard's Like You'd Understand, Anyway, Vendela Veda's Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses. The list also will appear in Sunday's print edition of the Book Review.

60-second book review

The Best American Essays 2007, edited by David Foster Wallace*.

In his introduction to the latest edition of this annual series, Wallace admits he isn't "sure what an essay even is. ... I think I personally prefer the term 'literary nonfiction.' " Whatever he wants to call it, Wallace has amassed a formidable collection of pieces he describes as "models -- not templates, but models -- of ways I wish I could think and live in what seems to me this world." It's difficult to not share his admiration and envy, particularly when presented with such immersive essays as Ian Buruma's "Freedom to Offend," in which the writer strongly makes the case that mocking or criticizing a faith is not the same as attacking a believer of that faith, and that "our democratically elected leaders in government are more and more frightened into pandering to this sentiment"; Louis Menand's charming "Name That Tone," about the so-called Mosquito ring tone that only children and adolescents can hear; Edward O. Wilson's "Apocalypse Now," an open letter to evangelical Americans entreating them to realize environmentalism is not some secular, liberal hooey that undermines their faith but a philosophy and practice that is wholly in keeping with it; and Mark Danner's "Iraq: The War of the Imagination," a staggeringly good article about the lifting of the "ideological canopy" the Bush administration used to sell the Iraq War to its constituents and the sad fact that "we seem to know less and less" about how this war is going to end.

* In accordance with the Infinite Jest Act of 1996, I have included this footnote following the mention of the name "David Foster Wallace," a.k.a. D.F.W., a.k.a. The Decider, an acknowledgment of the entropic futility of assigning meaning and enforceability to a law that should not exist, does not exist and will not exist save to those innumerable hideous men -- and approximately 347,696 terminally philological women -- who long to be proscribed from its reach.

** As the above footnote proves, it is nigh impossible to write a funny joke about David Foster Wallace.

Kindle or flameout?

The end of reading as we know it? Or just another overpriced toy everyone wants, nobody needs and relatively few people will buy before it's sent to the failed-product graveyard? Like me, The Machinist is going to wait and see. And does anyone else think Jeff Bezos is beginning to look like that goofball singer from Live?

Mom's gonna be so proud

Where there's Smoke ...

The National Book Awards were handed out last night and, not surprisingly, Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke took the top fiction prize. Click here for the complete list of winners and nominees and here for a blow-by-blow account of the event filed live by Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant.