(E)Book Talk: THE SALINGER CONTRACT, by Adam Langer

The Salinger Contract: A Novel

Adam Langer

Open Road Media E-riginal (2013), e-book original (ISBN 1453297944 / 9781453297940)

Fiction, 280 pages

Source: E-galley from publisher, via NetGalley

Reason for reading: Personal interest

Opening lines:

“I never believed a book could save your life. It makes sense that Connor Joyce would be the one who changed my mind about that. The story of how one book saved me while another nearly killed Connor began, appropriately enough, in a bookstore--to be more precise, at Borders in Bloomington, Indiana, where I saw a poster with Connor’s picture on it. By then, I had nearly forgotten Connor. I had figured I was done with books.”

Book description, via the publisher’s websiteAn enthralling literary mystery that connects some of the world’s most famous authors—from Norman Mailer and Truman Capote to B. Traven and J. D. Salinger—to a sinister collector in Chicago. 

Adam Langer, the narrator of this deft and wide-ranging novel by the author of the same name, tells the intertwining tales of two writers navigating a plot neither one of them could have ever imagined. There may be no other escape than to write their way out of it. 

Adam is a writer and stay-at-home dad in Bloomington, Indiana, drawn into an uneasy friendship with the charismatic and bestselling thriller author Connor Joyce. Connor is having trouble writing his next book, and when a menacing stranger approaches him with an odd—and lucrative—proposal, events quickly begin to spiral out of control.

Comments: When I was pitched The Salinger Contract for review last month, the publicist mentioned that its publication coincided with the release of a new documentary and companion biography of J.D. Salinger, noting that it was “very much the ‘season of Salinger’ right now.” That angle did encourage me to read it sooner rather than later--although, since I’d received it as an e-galley, I’m not sure how much “later” I’d have been able to get to it anyway.

That angle turned out to be a bit of a ploy--J.D. Salinger is certainly a presence in Adam Langer’s novel, but doesn’t actually appear as a character or play an active role in what transpires. But since the entire story is a bit of a ploy, I can’t really fault it for misleading marketing.  

Saying too much about the plot of The Salinger Contract would spoil the fun of this smart and fast-paced novel, and so I won’t spill much beyond what’s in the publisher’s description quoted above. Adam Langer has crafted a self-aware metafictional mystery around the writing of crime fiction and publishing-industry skullduggery. Using the device of making his narrator--also named Adam Langer, and sharing some biographical similarities with the author--the receiver and relator of protagonist Connor Joyce’s story applies a layer of skepticism within the novel that effectively offers the reader two unreliable narrators for the price of one.

Plausibility is pretty much beside the point here, and as long as you’re willing to go with it, The Salinger Contract is a great ride. I enjoyed the ways that Langer employed and played with a variety of genre conventions, and appreciated the affection for all sorts of literature that underlies the story. However, I’m not sure that one of the first literary references I spotted in the novel was intentional, although I hope it was. The “Adam Langer” character has two young daughters, Beatrice and Ramona; I’d really like to think that a novel whose title invokes J.D. Salinger was also able to make room for Beverly Cleary. Adam Langer the author has been on my radar for a few years, but I haven’t read any of his work before The Salinger Contract; I’ll have to fix that now.

Rating: 3.75 of 5

Shelf Awareness interview with Adam Langer

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Book Talk: *You Couldn't Ignore Me if You Tried*, by Susannah Gora

You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation
Susannah Gora (book website)
Three Rivers Press (2011), Paperback (ISBN 0307716600 / 9780307716606)
Nonfiction: Entertainment/social history, 384 pages
Source: Purchased e-book (e-ISBN 9780307460066)
Reason for reading: Personal

Opening lines: “The lavender-hued poster of The Breakfast Club has hung on the walls of countless childhood bedrooms and college dorm rooms over the past quarter of a century. To anybody who grew up staring at that poster, with the film’s young cast staring boldly back, the words written there have held the power of a magic spell, a call to arms in the social battle that is adolescence.”

Book description, from the publisher’s website:
You can quote lines from Sixteen Candles (“Last night at the dance my little brother paid a buck to see your underwear”), your iPod playlist includes more than one song by the Psychedelic Furs and Simple Minds, you watch The Breakfast Club every time it comes on cable, and you still wish that Andie had ended up with Duckie in Pretty in Pink. You’re a bonafide Brat Pack devotee—and you’re not alone. 

The films of the Brat Pack—from Sixteen Candles to Say Anything—are some of the most watched, bestselling DVDs of all time. The landscape that the Brat Pack memorialized—where outcasts and prom queens fall in love, preppies and burn-outs become buds, and frosted lip gloss, skinny ties, and exuberant optimism made us feel invincible—is rich with cultural themes and significance, and has influenced an entire generation who still believe that life always turns out the way it is supposed to. 

You Couldn’t Ignore Me If You Tried takes us back to that era, interviewing key players, such as Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Andrew McCarthy, and John Cusack, and mines all the material from the movies to the music to the way the films were made to show how they helped shape our visions for romance, friendship, society, and success.

Comments: I think I was months was born just a few years too early for John Hughes’ iconic 1980s teen films to resonate fully for me. When the best of them, The Breakfast Club, was released in 1985, I was almost twenty-one, a college student...and married with a baby. Although I wasn’t too far from high school chronologically, my life was clearly in a different stage. That said--although maybe not for that reason--my favorite movie associated with the “Brat Pack” era isn’t one of his. It’s the ensemble piece St. Elmo’s Fire, released just a few months after The Breakfast Club and featuring several of the same actors who had been in day-long high-school detention there as recent college graduates. I realize that it’s probably a lesser film artistically, but that doesn’t dim my affection for it.

In You Couldn’t Ignore Me If You Tried --a quote from The Breakfast Club--entertainment journalist Susannah Gora looks at several movies that, taken as a group, still seem to be held high in the affections of the now thirty- and forty-something adults who experienced them, sometimes in multiple viewings, as youth in the 1980s. They were movies that didn’t talk down to teens and young adults--rather, they spoke to us and like us (although perhaps more articulately than most of us). Their characters were authentic, even if the situations they were placed in weren’t always entirely relatable, and--possibly thanks, at least in part, to the simultaneous emergence and influence of MTV--they made use of music in effective new ways that contributed to the films’ emotional impact on their audience.

Although the period Gora considers is effectively bracketed by two films written by Cameron Crowe--1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High and 1989’s Say Anything (his directorial debut)--its primary focus is on writer/director John Hughes and his tales of contemporary Chicago-are teens, including Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Her research for You Couldn’t Ignore Me... included interviews with many of the participants in the movies it covers--writers, directors, actors, producers, and music directors--and offers a great deal of behind-the-scenes detail while mostly avoiding a gossipy tone.

I read this one pretty quickly, and found it informative and insightful--and it made me want to hunt up a few movies to add to the ol’ Netflix queue. Readers and movie-lovers within a decade or so of my age, and who have maintained a connection and affection for the pop culture that they consumed during their 1980s youth, will likely have a similar response to You Couldn’t Ignore Me if You Tried.

Rating: 3.75 of 5

Other reviews, from the Book Blogs Search Engine

My discussions of books by "Brat Pack" members featured in You Couldn't Ignore Me if You Tried:

Stories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography, by Rob Lowe

The Longest Way Home: One Man's Quest for the Courage to Settle Down, by Andrew McCarthy

When It Happens to You: A Novel in Stories, by Molly Ringwald

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Book Talk: *Gone Girl*, by Gillian Flynn

Gone Girl
Gillian Flynn (Facebook)
Crown (2012), Hardcover (ISBN 030758836X / 9780307588364)
Fiction, 432 pages
Source: purchased e-book (E-ISBN 9780307588388)
Reason for reading: personal, seasonal

Opening lines: “When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to begin with. The very first time I saw her, it was the back of the head I saw, and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it.
Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the
Victorians would call finely shaped head. You could imagine the
skull quite easily.

“I’d know her head anywhere.

“And what’s inside it.”

Book description, from the publisher’s website:
Marriage can be a real killer.
On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick’s clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River. Husband-of-the-Year Nick isn’t doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife’s head, but passages from Amy's diary reveal the alpha-girl perfectionist could have put anyone dangerously on edge. Under mounting pressure from the police and the media—as well as Amy’s fiercely doting parents—the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behavior. Nick is oddly evasive, and he’s definitely bitter—but is he really a killer? 

As the cops close in, every couple in town is soon wondering how well they know the one that they love. With his twin sister, Margo, at his side, Nick stands by his innocence. Trouble is, if Nick didn’t do it, where is that beautiful wife? And what was in that silvery gift box hidden in the back of her bedroom closet?

Comments: Gone Girl has been one of those "everyone's talking about it" books since early this past summer. I don't read a lot of genre fiction--which, as a murder mystery, this technically is--but I wanted to read this one before people stopped talking about it. That said, it's really not that easy to talk about, between the potential spoiler minefield of any plot discussion--it is a murder mystery--and the fact that...yeah, almost everyone's talked about it already.

I haven't read any of Gillian Flynn's fiction before this (although I do remember reading the book reviews she wrote for Entertainment Weekly several years back), but I have seen it praised, and I understand why. In Gone Girl she smartly blends plot-based suspense with psychological intrigue, and does it through the alternating perspectives of two unreliable--and frequently unlikable--narrators. The novel explores some provocative and unsettling questions about marriage: in general, its particular shape for any two people involved in it, and just how much of our real selves we allow into it.

But I wouldn't advise taking Nick and Amy Dunne as any sort of models for marriage, even of the cautionary variety. They're one of those couples whose individual dysfunctionalities match up well enough to form an entity with its own unique flavor of screwed-up. Flynn's insights into both of their minds had me questioning, shifting allegiances, and anxious to see how it would all play out. And for me, it was the twists and turns of Amy and Nick's thoughts, even more than the plot in which they're involved, that made Gone Girl riveting reading. It's dark, disturbing, and perfect for this spooky-reading time of year.

Rating: 4 of 5

Other reviews, via the Book Blogs Search Engine

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Book Talk: *Tolstoy and the Purple Chair*, by Nina Sankovitch

This week and next, I'll be posting my reviews of the Indie Lit Awards Biography/Memoir short list, working my way up to the top two.

(Also: Have you entered my Blogiversary Giveaway?)

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading
Nina Sankovitch (Facebook) (Twitter)
Harper Perennial (2012), Paperback (ISBN 0061999857 / 9780061999857)
Nonfiction (memoir/books), 256 pages
Source: Purchased e-book (Kindle) (ASIN B004MMEIWI)
Reason for reading: Indie Lit Awards Short List (Biography/Memoir), E-Book Reading Challenge 2012, Memorable Memoirs Reading Challenge

Opening lines: “In September 2008 my husband, Jack, and I went away for a weekend, leaving our four kids in the care of my parents. We went by car from suburban Connecticut out to the Atlantic beaches of Long Island. We had a Windsurfer lashed to our roof and a bike shoved in the back on top of our few bags filled with clothes and books, enough for three days away. Our vacation weekend was my present to Jack in honor of his fiftieth birthday.”

Book description, from the publisher’s website: Nina Sankovitch has always been a reader. As a child, she discovered that a trip to the local bookmobile with her sisters was more exhilarating than a ride at the carnival. Books were the glue that held her immigrant family together. When Nina's eldest sister died at the age of forty-six, Nina turned to books for comfort, escape, and introspection. In her beloved purple chair, she rediscovered the magic of such writers as Toni Morrison, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ian McEwan, Edith Wharton, and, of course, Leo Tolstoy. Through the connections Nina made with books and authors (and even other readers), her life changed profoundly, and in unexpected ways. Reading, it turns out, can be the ultimate therapy. 

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair also tells the story of the Sankovitch family: Nina's father, who barely escaped death in Belarus during World War II; her four rambunctious children, who offer up their own book recommendations while helping out with the cooking and cleaning; and Anne-Marie, her oldest sister and idol, with whom Nina shared the pleasure of books, even in her last moments of life.

Comments: From books to blog and back again, Nina Sankovitch chronicles her “year of magical reading” in Tolstoy and the Purple Chair. In describing it that way, Sankovitch intentionally references Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking; this is a time of healing from loss, as she turns to books--reading one each day, every day for one year, and writing about it on her blog Read All Day--to help her make sense of life following the death of her beloved sister from an aggressive form of cancer.

If you didn’t know what was motivating Nina to undertake this project, it would be easy to envy this stay-at-home mother of four sons for having the luxury of spending the bulk of her days reading and blogging for an entire year. And once you do know her motivation for it...well, it’s still hard not to be just a little envious, but that’s greatly tempered by compassion. This isn’t a vacation--Nina is not taking a year off from her family or domestic responsibilities to bury herself in books. It’s not a vague, idealistic quest for “self-improvement” either--this is focused, or as she describes it, “intense.” This is reading as therapy--and it seems to have been pretty effective therapy, at that.

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair is an engaging and inspiring read. While it’s a chronicle of an endeavor fueled by sad circumstances, it’s also a record of accomplishment. Nina actually manages to read 365 books in one year, at the rate of one per day, and write about them all, but that’s really all in service of a larger goal; books are her tools. At the end of that year, working with the tools she’s chosen, she’s gained insight and understanding about how to keep living and loving and moving forward. She discusses selected, personally significant books in some detail, but this isn’t so much a “book about books” as it is a book about one particular thoughtful, articulate reader’s personal journey through one transformative year, which has a narrative arc of its own.

While not exactly a book about books, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair is a book about reading, and it’s clearly a book for readers. The idea of using books to help process a significant life event--not strictly looking for information, but seeking emotional truth in stories both real and fictional--makes perfect sense to a reader. It’s something many of us probably have done, or would do under equally personally-challenging conditions, even if we couldn’t devote a full year exclusively to it. However, as readers, we can appreciate that Nina Sankovitch did, and chose to share her story; it’s evidence of the life-changing power of books...literally.

Rating: 3.75/5

Other reviews, via the Book Blogs Search Engine

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links (IndieBound.org)

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