Match 7: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Larsson) vs Dear American Airlines (Miles)
Reading Judge: Anne Holman
Review and Match Decision:
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO: Blomkvist, a financial reporter with a reputation for being both fairminded and persistent, is convicted of libel for defaming a well-known financier. His reputation virtually destroyed, he is forced to take a year's leave and agrees to investigate an old case involving a disappearance. The young woman Blomkvist subsequently hires to aid in the investigation is odd, to say the least, rebellious, unconventional, manic--and, it turns out, implacable. This unlikely pair embark on twin investigations, one past, one present, following tangled skeins of crime and coverup, secrets past and present, and exposing corruption in the process. The young woman, reminiscent of Smilla in Smilla's Sense of Snow, is intriguing. But it is Blomkvist himself who interested me, maybe because I so wish that a financial reporter possessed of such acumen--and stubbornness--were at work in the world today.
DEAR AMERICAN AIRLINES: Who among us hasn't been wildly inconvenienced by one or more airlines in our lives. Planes and the schedules that rule them seem to be an area in our lives that we absolutely cannot control. Enter Bennie Ford, an average man trying his damndest to get from New York's La Guardia to Los Angeles (LAX) with the added insult of a long layover at Chicago's O'Hare. Injury is quickly added to insult and Bennie's flight never leaves the ground. And so he does what any self-respecting grown up would do when there was nothing else to do: he writes a letter to American Airlines. Oh and it's not just any letter; it becomes the recitation of all of Bennie's trials and tribulations in life; a rage against the machine that has seemingly spun out of control. Alternatingly funny and tender, this story had me rooting for the underdog from the first page.
Winner: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Match 8: Lush Life (Price) vs Babylon Rolling (Boyden)
Reading Judge: Brian Seethaler
Review and Match Decision:
LUSH LIFE: Richard Price, the oft-lauded urban diarist who launched his notable writing career with The Wanderers in 1974, knows a thing or two about cops and robbers, dealers, late-night denizens, and misanthropes. In addition to penning eight novels, the more recent of which have been set in fictional Dempsy, New Jersey, Price has deftly covered the same themes of urban grit, pushers and gangs, and the underbelly of life for television (HBO’s The Wire) and film (The Color of Money, Sea of Love, Ransom and others). Lush Life brings Price back to Manhattan, particularly to the Lower East Side, and finds him spreading the dialog and narrative point of view around a little bit. One of the best writers of dialog working today (Michael Chabon, in his New York Times review of this book, no less, has called him the best), Price offers up the usual front story of a crime and the characters it ensnares on both sides of the subsequent police investigation, a formula he wrote to near perfection in 1992’s Clockers. Where Lush Life soars above that earlier work though, is in the careful deconstruction of the cops, the victim, the wrongly-accused, and the perps in post-Rudy Giuliani Manhattan. Instead of Price’s Dempsy-- a bomb crater, repopulated after the blast with dope fiends, pushers, and gun toting hoods--Lush Life’s gentrifying neighborhoods give us cops talking about property values and immigrants converting old tenements to co-ops just around the corner from the housing projects that everybody would like to shove into the East River to make way for a gentler type of resident and neighbor. Fast-paced and deftly organized, Lush Life is a surprisingly satisfying read.
BABYLON ROLLING: Spring is in the air, and with it love. Amanda Boyden arrived in New Orleans in the early 1990s to study writing at university. She fell in love with the city enough to endure the post-Katrina disaster and is now heavily personally invested in the long process of revival there. Need further evidence? It’s on every page of Babylon Rolling, Boyden’s sophomore novel. A far cry from the overworked debauchery of Pretty Little Dirty, Babylon offers a different kind of voyeuristic experience. Boyden hoists the multi-perspectival lens to see New Orleans from distinctly different points of view and paints at times a dark picture of seething racism and cultural clash. Big whup, right? Jumping narratives and transmigratory and cultural exloration are again in fashion, and a great cast of up and coming authors are trademarking the same narrative tools with considerable success (Junot Díaz and his Oscar Wao, anyone?). But Boyden has stated publicly that her approach to Babylon allowed her to develop, understand, and finally appreciate a multitude of New Orleans inhabitants, many of whom had remained strange to her and some of whom she had feared. As the residents of Orchid Avenue are fleshed out--even Fearius, whose coarse slang and staccato delivery made for the most difficult reading--Boyden takes us with her on a journey from detachment and fear to curiosity and, ultimately, empathy and affinity for her patchwork gang of families, thugs, and retirees. This is Boyden’s final triumph, writing a fully-realized, cathartic tribute to a city and characters that might otherwise seem otherworldly to a broad swath of middle America and putting poetic, heart-wrenching faces on the twin tragedies of Katrina and American racial intolerance. Ms. Boyden, please take a bow.
Winner: Babylon Rolling
