Faith, reason, morality, progress all come into conflict under the shadow of the launch tower at Cape Canaveral! Kings, magicians, doctors, executioners, all bound to their own arcane rituals. A girl appears just like in a prophecy. And then a new bright light appears in the sky.
I really did not care for this book. Whicker has imagined a world where mad cow disease has led to a societal collapse, and after thousands of years, people in the United States have devolved into followers of mystic religions that believe in blood sacrifice to bring about the return of the space shuttles, which will save the world.
You have to invest a lot in this setting to get anything out of the book–which is another way of saying that the plot, character, and prose style didn’t do much for me–and so much of the setting didn’t make any sense. Whicker clearly loved this idea of a medieval/feudal world that has adopted NASA as its religious symbols, but never quite explains how that could have come about. Yes, there is prion disease and societal breakdown, but how are there artifacts from the 20th century but no city ruins? Given what we know about how tribalism forms in times of scarcity, is it really plausible that no characters notice each others skin colors? For that matter, in Florida of all places, why does everybody speak English?
For that matter, Whicker doesn’t have very much respect for medieval knowledge either. In an interview with The Qwillery, Whicker mentions being inspired by figures like Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe and yet none of that seems to have made it onto the page, except in cutesy character names.
I’d suggest skipping this book and watch Waterworld instead.
Faith, reason, morality, progress all come into conflict under the shadow of the launch tower at Cape Canaveral! Kings, magicians, doctors, executioners, all bound to their own arcane rituals. A girl appears just like in a prophecy. And then a new bright light appears in the sky.
I really did not care for this book. Whicker has imagined a world where mad cow disease has led to a societal collapse, and after thousands of years, people in the United States have devolved into followers of mystic religions that believe in blood sacrifice to bring about the return of the space shuttles, which will save the world.
You have to invest a lot in this setting to get anything out of the book–which is another way of saying that the plot, character, and prose style didn’t do much for me–and so much of the setting didn’t make any sense. Whicker clearly loved this idea of a medieval/feudal world that has adopted NASA as its religious symbols, but never quite explains how that could have come about. Yes, there is prion disease and societal breakdown, but how are there artifacts from the 20th century but no city ruins? Given what we know about how tribalism forms in times of scarcity, is it really plausible that no characters notice each others skin colors? For that matter, in Florida of all places, why does everybody speak English?
For that matter, Whicker doesn’t have very much respect for medieval knowledge either. In an interview with The Qwillery, Whicker mentions being inspired by figures like Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe and yet none of that seems to have made it onto the page, except in cutesy character names.
I’d suggest skipping this book and watch Waterworld instead.
What a sweet little book! I picked it up because I follow Richard Lawson on Twitter, but I guess I wasn’t following him when it was released. Although the novel starts with a dramatic bridge collapse, most of what unfolds are the quotidian dramas of being alive: insights into the self that you try and shove down into the unconscious, trying to be brave enough to make a leap into what you know you have to do, the loneliness and despair of trying to stay connected to someone who is trying like hell to run away.
All We Can Do Is Wait by Richard Lawson book cover.
Now, maybe you watch a lot of
Netflix crime shows and the only thing that seems dramatic now is a race
to decode cryptic clues before a baby rapist detonates explosives
underneath the final match of the world cup. Compared to that, this book
may very well seem plotless and boring to you. I cannot help you there.
I
give it a few extra points for incorporating some teen characters that
are neither the bland upper-middle class that usually peoples YA nor are
they only in the book to edify the white characters. A few points
knocked off for still centering bland upper-middle class teens.
The only reservation to my recommendation is that it never answers why we were looking at these characters. They were all compelling, but they never quite cohered together or interact with each other dramatically because the present-day narrative is packed into a single day. Second, although it has a beautiful message about dealing with uncertainty and taking each day as it comes, it doesn’t quite allows the reader to take it away for their own life, unless your loved one has been trapped in a bridge collapse.
Overall I thought it was a strong debut novel and I’d love for Lawson to get the chance to write another one.
This is, like, a very important and beautiful book to me. Tara Brach takes clear aim at the voices in our heads that tell us that we don’t deserve happiness, that keep us stuck in our wounds, and try and keep us disconnected from our true feelings because we worry that if we open ourselves up to them they might drown us, like one more passenger on a lifeboat that’s barely above water.
Writing about self-help is vulnerable to me because it’s like shouting Hi! I have all these problems. And they are also easy to make fun of, and not even in a mean-spirited way. There is something a little goofy about looking to Buddhism for answers (as an American, given the cultural history of “looking to the East” for enlightenment) or taking in meditations with exercises like saying hello to your pain. There’s a real and sad truth to texts like these: I turn to them when I need to hear them. I allow them in when trying to muddle through endless grey days without compassion for myself is worse than trying to do something about it.
Self-help/growth books are one of those things where some work for some folks and others work for other folks, so I wouldn’t just blanket recommend it to everyone. The most I can say is that if it seems like it might contain something you’re trying to find, you owe it to yourself to open it up and see if it is.
I
did not love this book. I appreciated its unabashed pulpiness, but the
premise is stated in the title and it doesn’t develop much beyond that.
What
really worked for me is that the story is set in Lagos, and Braithwaite
doesn’t waste much time explaining details in the setting for a reader
like me that is not that familiar with Nigerian culture. Food, clothing,
common phrases are incorporated and the onus on the reader is to learn
or keep up. I really appreciate that because if Ezra Pound can drop in
untranslated Italian, German, French and Sanskrit into poems that high
school students are supposed to give a shit about, I think US reading
audiences can grow up when it comes to non-European settings. I also
loved the grotesquerie of the main character, there’s a slow inversion
in the plot where we realize that a binary that we’ve been presented
with is maybe not all as it seems, and I thought that was great.
What
did not work for me is that the sharpness of the satire of beauty
culture and social media culture kind of trails off, and I did not find
it as clever as folks who loved it. I also think there wasn’t quite
enough conflict, either external conflict in plot or in the internal
conflict of the main character.
Don’t let me turn you off from the book, though. It’s a strong first book, and my rating is way more “this was not for me” rather than “this was bad.”
I am a huuuge fan of the Ask Polly advice column in The Cut. I come back again and again because I feel some kinship with her. She’s got sharper edges than a Dear Sugar, but like Sugar is deeply compassionate. Polly is funny, but not flippant or sarcastic like Choire Sicha’s NYT Styles section advice column.
I guess what I love the most is that she has become the person that people like me—millennial weirdos who feel stuck because all we seem capable of doing is looking around in shock and disappointment asking “oh my god, is this really it?”—send their deepest questions. And we have changed her in turn.
Like any book of essays, there are some that speak right to me, some that don’t speak to me at all, and some that I hope to god speak to some future, more courageous and secure form of myself.
Tommy Pico is incredible, and if you haven’t read him you should run not walk to one of his poetry collections. He writes directly to my sensibility–insecure, introspective, and horny–and the beautiful experience of reading something written for you is like drinking deeply of spring water or breathing in the air after a rain.
This book is for: fans of family saga novels. People interested in contemporary British fiction. Those who love fully-formed characters, and their interactions.
This book is not for: people looking for an uncomplicated look at immigration, racism, generational conflict, and bi-racial issues. People who move their lips when they read.
Although this is Zadie Smith’s first novel, it’s not the first one I’ve read. I first read her novel On Beauty on a whim, not aware of the accolades and praise she has gathered. They are both domestic novels, concerned with large families over long spans of time, as well as the culture clash inherent to interracial relationships, and the way that those clashes are expressed through their children. As the child of mixed-race parents, a lot of her writing rings true to me, although the cultures involved are different.
At the heart of White Teeth is the lifelong relationship between Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Jones and Iqbal, a Bangladeshi, met as young soldiers at the tail end of World War II, then became friends after returning to England. They both married younger wives at the same time: Iqbal to a 25 years younger Bangladeshi through an arranged marriage, Alsana; and Jones to an equally young, second generation Jamaican immigrant, Clara. They both have children at the same time. Samad and Alsana have twin boys, Magid and Millat, and Archie and Clara have a girl, Irie. The plot of the novel is concerned with the different generational conflicts associated with immigration: race, religious identity, education, class, respect and the child-parent relationship.
By focusing on these characters and their interactions with each other, Smith has the opportunity to present not only the conflicts, but the way that different circumstances affect those conflicts. Samad and Alsana both come from the same culture, so their fears are that their children will replace “English” values with their values. Archie and Clara are both English by birth, so they are both comfortable with Irie being a part of the dominant culture, however their is some tension in their relationship because they come from different backgrounds. Magid and Millat respond in different ways to their family’s religion: although Magid is sent back to Bangledesh to become a religious scholar, he becomes an atheistic intellectual that is “more British than the British.” Millat is more troubled, turning to a fundamentalist Islamic group in, however he, too, has a freedom in his spirit that comes from English youth culture.
This is an astoundingly good book. The characters are lively, the emotions are real, and Smith knows how to write her characters such that they are free to be ugly. I’m curious about other people’s responses to the work. Smith doesn’t pass judgment on her characters, and whatever side you sympathize with probably comes down to culture and temperament.
hammer & jack 