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- Micro-Review #150: Rough
by Robin Van Eck While Calgary’s Bow River rises with a coming flood, local homeless man Shermeto takes a bad beating and ends up in the hospital. This brings his estranged daughter, Kendra, back into his world. What follows is part murder mystery and part literary meditation on life on the streets in the Stampede City.
Although the story is nominally about homelessness, it’s not overly gritty or socially prescriptive. There’s a gentle, leisurely pace and a main character—the river—that infuses everything with a somber, wistful mood. The mystery is secondary. The father-daughter story, Shermeto’s waning health, Kendra’s attempts to navigate the terrain of broken relationships—a lot goes wrong for the people in this book, but there’s a spark of hope and humanity running through it all. This is a well-told story that’s worth settling into.
- Micro-Review #149: Survivor Song
by Paul Tremblay Here’s a novel about a group of people trying to navigate a Massachusetts suddenly populated with rabies-infected hordes. The premise isn’t new, but the difference here—what makes this story better than most zombie novels—is that the focus is on the characters, without shambling automatons and overdone violence every few pages. The scares are of the old-school variety, borne of a ticking clock and long odds. No one will confuse this with Shakespeare, but well written fiction is well written fiction. For readers who aren’t averse to a few goosebumps, SURVIVOR SONG is sure to satisfy.
- Micro-Review #148: The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
by Bill Bryson What a fun, pleasant memoir. No one does easy reading better than Bryson. This look at his early years in Des Moines, Iowa, focuses on the mundane yet weird naivete and optimism underpinning life in 1950s middle America. Not much happens in Bryson’s childhood, but it happens in glorious fashion. Bryson’s dry wit and self-deprecation make growing up normal an extraordinary thing. For readers of a certain age, the book will awaken the best kind of nostalgia—reminiscences of not only all that was good in the bygone era, but of all that was strange, dumb, insane and (thank God) now gone. This is a good book to read if you’re in need of a breezy pick-me-up.
- Micro-Review #147: The Apprentice
Directed by Ali Abbasi Here’s the movie Donald Trump’s lawyers and campaign team tried to keep out of cinemas. Despite the news stories of gun-shy distributors and threats against the director, this movie isn’t salacious, doesn’t feel like a misrepresentation, and isn’t out to bury the former and (most likely) future president. It’s a straight-forward character study that draws a relatively restrained portrait of a very unrestrained man.
The story focuses on the young Trump’s ascension to the top of the real-estate world in the early 1980s. He learns the ropes from the infamous New York shark Roy Cohn and develops an ethos for business and life that’s familiar to anyone who’s dealt with high-functioning sociopaths. Morality isn’t a weakness; it’s beside the point. Ends justify means. Winning is, as they say, the only thing. All else is failure, worthy of contempt. End story. Roll credits.
This film could easily have piled on the young Trump—could have editorialized—but it doesn’t. Punches do get pulled. Infamous deeds and schemes are either mentioned in passing or ignored altogether. Most of Trump’s onscreen victims are, to a degree, culpable—many of them playing Trump’s game, just not as well. If viewed through the right kind of glasses (such as those worn by your average Trump rally-goer), the young Donald might even come across as laudable—just a big bad dog who bites harder than the other big bad dogs.
There’s not a lot in the movie that isn’t in the public record. There are no real surprises, but the acting is great and the lack of storytelling bombast is admirable. There’s no need for exclamation points when the facts themselves speak volumes.
- Micro-Review #146: The Facts
by Philip Roth Near the end of this autobiography, the author’s fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, says to Roth, “You make a fictional world that is far more exciting than the world it comes out of.” That’s not inaccurate. Roth was a better writer of fiction than of autobiography.
Or, rather, a more believable writer of fiction. This book, though short and readable, feels constrained, a 200-page exercise in too-careful self-analysis.
The writing, as usual with Roth, is brilliant. The half-page sentences, the forays into emotional minutiae, and the love-hate wrestling with Jewish identity are intellectually nutritious, but the sum total of the man’s evidence of himself—and of the women in his early years as a writer—is underwhelming. There’s a sense of a supremely talented wordsmith prosecuting his case without allowing a defense rebuttal. The questions sound truthful and emotionally intelligent, but some of them feel like one-way traffic. The book comes across as part of a larger, ignored whole.
