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“‘All this talk, this heightened feeling, it’s about more than the Corn Bill,’ he said gently. ‘It’s important because it’s about the future, Miss Julia, when we shall have fellowship among men, and common property, and fair wages. But before that, we must have a cheap loaf. Grub first, then ethics!’”

For all the anachronism jokes — I think my favorite comes toward the end, when the hero explains how circumscribed his actions are as titled aristocracy in the early 19th century by quoting Roger Miller (“I’m a man of means, by no means”), this is the only one that was jarring: a little Brecht in the mouth of a character I don’t think was supposed to be a time-traveler.

May 02, 2013, 11:00am   Comments

» But as the machinery that has enabled what used to be known as “word of mouth” to go online steadily improves and grows, those of us who review books need to stop thinking of ourselves as reporters delivering news and start thinking of ourselves as analysts helping readers make sense of the vast stream of information available about the books our readers want to read.

It may or may not be technology, but I think that we can all agree with Michael Bourne that nobody needs to recap plot for half of a full-page review. Right, NYTBR?

May 01, 2013, 4:28pm  Comments

“Arkady slammed his hands down on his thighs. ‘Why when we talk about time travel do we always have to kill Hitler or not kill Hitler! It is to make Hitler a commonplace! The point is this. You are small and the river is big. Live, love, die, my priest. The river will roll on.’”

And likewise, when Ridgway is able to raise and dismiss the big counterfactual hypothetical question of time travel with aplomb, it’s worth recognizing her deftness. But it also raises the question — without I hope giving very much away — of why the ending of the book ties up so very few strings: if she is able to manage the conventions of historical romance and time-travel with such assurance, why does she only wrap up one of her plots, and leave so many other threads dangling? Is this less of a multi-genre piece than we’re led to expect? Is it a cliffhanger meant to set up a sequel?

May 01, 2013, 11:00am   Comments

“There, just beside him, Mibbs’s face. Mibbs’s breath on his face. Mibbs’s hand on his arm. Mibbs was holding him poised above the pit, as easily as he might hold a spider over a flame, and his eyes burned toward Nick.”

I think that that’s actually “loathsome spider,” right? Ridgway has a lot of fun with anachronism — actually, she seems to have a lot of fun in general, and that makes much of River a lot of fun to read — and it’s very nice to see a writer able to crack jokes like this in a swashbuckling time-travel romance.

Dutton 04.23.13

April 30, 2013, 11:00am   Comments

“‘Don’t you wonder sometimes,’ Ursula said. ‘If one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean. If Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in — I don’t know, say, a Quaker household — surely things would be different.’”

Clearly we have arrived at a corollary of Godwin’s Law.

April 28, 2013, 11:00am   Comments

“And sometimes, too, she knew what someone was about to say before they said it or what mundane incident was about to occur — if a dish was about to be dropped or an apple thrown through a glasshouse, as if these things had happened many times before. Words and phrases echoed themselves, strangers seemed like old acquaintances.”

This is a strange situation: a promising if rather thin concept taken on by a very good writer, who then sticks with it longer than she really should. Ursula Todd is made to / fated to live her life over and over again, maybe improving on her previous assay each time, through change in circumstance; Atkinson gives us some hints, as here, that Ursula may have some degree of awareness of this, an accretion of something, or a strong sense of deja vu, but largely the knowledge of this repetition is between us and the author. So we see one character follow a great number of possible paths, take a great number of choices, and we get to see the differences in outcomes that seemingly small choices can make. On the one hand, this is a pretty positive thing; it emphasizes the role of contingency, encourages or even enforces empathy, in a there-but-for-the-grace-of-god kind of way. And, occasionally, the formal restrictions of the conceit work to amplify the narrative in a very particular, effective way, like when Ursula dies over and over from the Spanish flu: the repetition underlines exactly how inescapable that epidemic was. But this form also makes Ursula’s choices weightless, lacking consequences, precisely because we know that however invested in a particular moment, or however horrified by a particular outcome, death will be an escape rather than an ending, and she will have another chance to do it all over again, another opportunity to get things right.

(An aside: there is actually a review to be written — and I didn’t write this review — about Life After Life and gamification: Ursula’s story resembles really very strongly a difficult, narrative video game, where you start over and over until you master a tricky part of one level, and then have to start over and over to master the tricky part of the next level. Of course, with the video game you’re the one who’s building up a skill; perhaps the problem with a gamified Life After Life is that it’s a little like watching someone play a video game?)

Regan Arthur 04.02.13

April 27, 2013, 11:00am   Comments

“The commonest metaphors became a phantasmagoric horror movie — she caught his eye, he wore his heart on his sleeve, the earth stopped — everything had literal and unpleasantly physical dimensions.”

There’s a strange thing about the way that this character works, too: she has a limited number of rather proud, salient quirks — a taste for pain (there’s a very nice chunk early on where she talks about football, which she enjoys for the hard contact rather than sport or competitiveness; it’s not fully, but is on its way to, a sexual desire for her too), an interest in etymology — that aren’t fully integrated into her self-presentation, but still are but thoroughly and completely done: ungraceful but clearly a part of a whole, like lumps in a gravy.

April 26, 2013, 11:00am   Comments

“At Julie’s Place I found myself asking people questions all the time. How long would you wait in a restaurant for a date? Have you ever been arrested? Would you rather have a bath or a shower? What superhero would you be? If you had to lose one of your senses, what would it be? If you had to lose a limb, which would it be? Do you have any piercings? There are mountains of people in my memory of those semi-drunken evenings, plus an insatiable desire to know what made each one of them happy or sad. The bravado of those conversations scared me, though, because no one told the truth. I don’t think it was their fault, though. I think the truth is actually very difficult to know about.”

The point at which the narrator starts to open up, become more interesting; to this point she had been alone in LA, or at least largely alone, following traces of her estranged, recently-dead mother, as more or less a seventeen-year-old runaway. One of the things Stothard manages best, against a background of more normal stuff — coming of age, searching for a buried familial past, repeating the mistakes of a parent — is this gradual choice against isolation, a growing curiosity about other people and a willingness to become involved with them: dropping adolescent defenses.

Picador 04.23.13

April 25, 2013, 11:00am   Comments