A Review of Solar by Ian McEwan

Solar

4 out of 5: Solar, Ian McEwan’s eleventh novel, follows the troubled career and love life of 53-year-old physicist Michael Beard. Beard won the Nobel Prize in physics for work he completed as a young man but, after five failed marriages, is now trapped in a decades-long slump of “no new ideas.” Living the life of an aimless bureaucrat saddled with speech commitments and honorary positions, Beard no longer resembles the “ethereal Beard of planetary renown” he once was: “It sometimes seemed to Beard that he had coasted all his life on an obscure young man’s work, a far cleverer and more devoted theoretical physicist than he could ever hope to be. ... [T]hat twenty-five-year-old physicist was a genius. But where was he now?”

Beard’s story takes a dramatic turn when he discovers a way to revitalize his career as a climate scientist by employing morally questionable tactics. Along the way, Beard’s bumbling antics and social awkwardness provide plenty of humorous set pieces. While laugh-out-loud funny, most of these incidents bear little relation to the primary action of the novel. Additional sidetracks slow the novel’s momentum, including numerous in-depth descriptions of Beard’s work on artificial photosynthesis as a way to save the earth from both global warming and the impending energy crisis. Despite the detours from the main story in Solar’s middle section, McEwan revives the novel’s quick pace in its final third as Beard faces ever increasing physical, mental, and financial dangers. Although Solar’s weak, overly-convenient ending fails to live up to the strength of the rest of the novel, it does deliver to Beard the comeuppance he deserves.

A Review of The Boy with the Cuckoo Clock Heart by Mathias Malzieu (translated by Sarah Ardizzone)

The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart
3 out of 5: Jack, the first-person narrator of Mathias Malzieu’s most recent novel, is born in Edinburgh on an uncommonly cold day in April 1874. A clever midwife saves the newborn from certain death by surgically implanting a cuckoo clock in his chest to regulate his weak heart. Abandoned by his mother and sporting a loudly ticking clock for a heart, Jack is destined to be an outsider. Nevertheless, he falls in love with a beautiful girl and, while still a teenager, embarks on a cross-continental journey to follow his love to Andalusia, where she’s originally from.

The Boy with the Cuckoo Clock Heart is an adult fairy tale. As is typical with such tales, many of the characters are thinly developed and highly stylized. Fantastical events and complicated metaphors abound. The novel’s primary message appears to be that our self-imposed limitations are the only obstacles to achieving what we desire. Unfortunately, this rather hopeful message is diluted in the final pages with a jarring and confusing plot reversal, making for an unsatisfying ending.

Malzieu’s unique prose is the greatest strength of The Boy with the Cuckoo Heart Clock. It’s an elegant combination of fairy-tale whimsy and Dickensian realism. Malzieu excels at combining opposite concepts in startling ways, like this example of the juxtaposition of death and birth: "It is so cold that birds freeze in mid-flight before crashing to the ground. The noise as they drop out of the sky is uncannily soft for a corpse. This is the coldest day on earth, and I'm getting ready to be born." The Boy with a Cuckoo Heart Clock offers an unsatisfactory story packaged in beautiful and unusual prose.

A Review of The Privileges by Jonathan Dee

The Privileges: A Novel

3.5 out of 5: Jonathan Dee’s latest novel follows Cynthia and Adam Morey, a loving couple leading a charmed life ensconced within “a zone of privilege.” Surrounded by friends and family, Adam and Cynthia get married young and quickly produce two beautiful children. Adam’s career in a private equity firm in Manhattan is progressing well while Cynthia stays home with the children. As they get a glimpse of the fairy tale life led by the super wealthy, the Moreys yearn for even more financial success, leading Adam to make riskier and riskier decisions. Eventually, Adam crosses over into illegal territory, supplementing his substantial income from the private equity firm with even more millions stashed in offshore accounts.

As Adam’s decisions descend into ethical ambiguity, Dee maintains a nonjudgmental perspective. Rather than a novel preaching against financial malfeasance, The Privileges is a sympathetic portrait of a family that slowly becomes comfortable crossing the line. Throughout, Adam and Cynthia remain completely in love. Even their troubled son Jonas recognizes his parents’ strong connection: “They are just really in love with each other, in this kind of epic way. … That’s the real context of everything they do—each other. The other stuff is just kind of outside the walls.”

Dee tells the Morey’s story in four sections, separated from each other by large gaps in time. This technique allows Dee to focus intently on specific incidents in the family’s life while still managing to cover a large expanse of time in relatively few pages. In the novel’s fourth and final section, the children’s incidental dramas and Cynthia’s final interactions with her father draw the attention away from the prior focus on Adam’s career and its associated ethical dilemmas. This ending, while anticlimactic, is interesting enough not to taint the more compelling story of the prior sections. Overall, The Privileges is an intelligent portrayal of the intoxication of wealth.

A Review of The Salt Smugglers by Gérard de Nerval (translated by Richard Sieburth)

The Salt Smugglers
3.5 out of 5: The Riancey Amendment passed into law in France on July 16, 1850 and imposed a serial novel tax on newspapers, charging one centime per copy of any newspaper that included an installment of a serial novel. The law was based on the belief that serial novels had been responsible for fomenting subversive ideas. Gérard de Nerval’s The Salt Smugglers is, in large part, a response to this law.

Awarded with a commission for a historical serial novel, Nerval’s plans were thwarted by the new law. Instead of a novel, he undertakes to write a history of the life of the abbé de Bucquoy, a historical figure of questionable authenticity. This endeavor proves to be difficult, and the work devolves into the story of a quest for information as Nerval visits numerous libraries and historical sites in and around Paris, encountering many adventures and colorful characters along the way (though all the while insisting “Have no fear,—this is not a novel.”) Nerval’s “history” is mostly composed of diversions, including the story of the failed romance of one of the abbé’s relatives. Other diversions have even less connection to the abbé, like Nerval’s examination of “the musical possibilities of unrhymed verse” or his quotation of the eviction notice he receives when his apartment is expropriated for public purposes.

Not until three-fourths of the way through the book does Nerval get to the story of the abbé that he initially set out to tell. Although this delay is frustrating at times, the abbé’s story is not the real point of The Salt Smugglers. Nerval’s true purpose is to reveal the undefined the border between fact and fiction. Throughout his “history,” Nerval scrupulously relies on actual sources, but he undermines those sources by exposing their questionable accuracy. Nerval also relates numerous anecdotes that are indistinguishable from fiction, always being careful to follow each one with a tongue-in-cheek avowal of its truth: “I don’t know whether this simple story of a young lady and a pork butcher’s son will prove to be entertaining for my readers. It at least has one thing going for it: it is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, entirely true.” The overall effect is one of humorous, if distracted, subversion. The book’s design—double columns of text recalling the newspaper columns in which The Salt Smugglers originally appeared—adds authenticity to the reading experience.

A Review of The Confessions of Edward Day by Valerie Martin

The Confessions of Edward Day: A Novel
4 out of 5: Written in the style of an intimate memoir, The Confessions of Edward Day delves into the daily lives of a group of struggling stage actors living in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s. Edward Day is the first person narrator and the undeniable star of this novel. As his career unfolds, we follow Ed through acting school, numerous auditions and call-backs, conflicts with friends and family, and even a summer season spent in a Vermont theater company. Throughout it all, Ed makes the most of the insignificant parts he lands, always hoping for the next big break and waiting tables between shows to pay his rent.

Through the engaging and honest voice of Ed Day, Valerie Martin writes with authority about the uncertain and stressful world of stage actors. Indeed, Martin so successfully inhabits the life and voice of Ed Day that she all but disappears from view. Ed’s charisma and motivation drive the action, most of which centers around a complicated love triangle and Ed’s ongoing power struggle with a rival actor. With this quick-paced and intelligent novel, Martin delivers a riveting look inside the psyche of an actor.