The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, J.T. Leroy

I read this book knowing about the scandal behind it. J.T. Leroy, the purported author, is not a real person, and when the book was released, people thought it was autobiographical. For that reason, the book gets a lot of criticism. It is, however, a fantastic book that loses none of its value, in my mind, from the literary scandal surrounding its author.

The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things is a novel or series of short stories that tell the story of the horrific childhood of a boy called Jeremiah. Jeremiah is taken from his adoptive familiar at the age of four and given to his birth mother – a mentally unstable, meth-addicted “lot lizard,” or prostitute.

Throughout the book, Jeremiah suffers all kinds of physical and mental abuse at the hands of his severely damaged mother and her boyfriends/husbands/clients. The story, although famously not true, is a depressingly accurate depiction of child abuse. The life of Jeremiah, who we last see at fifteen years old, is beyond tragic, yet this is the plight of too many children in this awful world.

Although it can be difficult to read due to the subject matter, and though people are put off by the scandal surrounding its authorship, this is a truly great piece of contemporary literature. 

Before the Fall, by Noah Hawley

Noah Hawley, creator of the TV show Fargo, is known for his engaging, complex, thrilling screen-writing, and he has now brought that skill set to a novel.

Before the Fall is an unputdownable book which I wished I had the time to read in one long sitting. It begins with a plane crash. Eleven people are on a small jet which crashes into the Atlantic Ocean. One of them, a down-on-his-luck painter, pulls a small boy to safety. The boy is the son of the wealthy family on board.

Where do we go from here? A huge plane crash and epic escape through icy waters seems more fitting for the end of a book...

But Hawley weaves a fascinating story that cuts to the core of modern life. This novel is set last year - 2015 - which still seems futuristic to me. Yet he paints a vivid picture of our modern society. Yes, the tender story the saviour and the child might be timeless, but for me that wasn't the key theme of the book.

While Hawley blends backstories with twists and turns in the days following the crash, only explaining why the plane crashed at the very end, what made the book interesting to me was the exploration of how we - as a society - deal with tragedies.

One thread of the book explores the fascination we have with celebrity, and comes at it from the conservative stand point. There is a TV channel in the book which clearly represents FOX News, and one of their bombastic hosts. These people doggedly chase our book's hero, trying to sully his name.

If that sounds unfair to conservatives, so be it. It could also have been about Gawker or any number of celebrity-obsessed modern media outlets. Eventually these onlookers come to dominate the story as they bugged phones and hack e-mails, essentially trying to make the news as much as cover it.

I also liked the story of the co-pilot and flight attendant, which unfolds seemingly as an add-on later in the book, but whose importance becomes very clearly towards the end.

I seldom read novels these days but this one made me yearn for more thoughtful yet exciting modern fiction. I highly recommend it, and look forward to more from Noah Hawley. 

The Dark Forest, by Liu Cixin

Last year I was on a Chinese novel kick and read Liu Cixin's (or Cixin Liu, depending on how you want to Anglicize his name) The Three-Body Problem. Whilst not exactly the greatest work of literature, it was very enjoyable. I'm honestly not a science-fiction guy, and I didn't really expect to like it, but it was good. The story barreled along, and I very much enjoyed the fact that Liu really knows physics, making the ideas unique and plausible.


This year, while travelling around Africa (see my other blog for info about the trip), I read the second book in what was Liu's trilogy. The Dark Forest leaves off more or less from where the first book ended, with the Earth stunned by the news that it will be invaded by an alien power in 400 years.

"Four hundred years?!" you may well ask. "That's not exactly moving along at a riveting pace!"

The book covers some of those years, jumping about a bit through the same characters as they engage in hibernation to brace against the passage of time. Primarily we follow Luo Ji, a Wallfacer. Wallfacers are the humans chosen to engage in planning the Earth's defense. Due to the presence of "sophons" on Earth, Trisolaris - the enemy power on its way to the Solar System - is able to monitor human activity but not thought. A few humans are chosen as Wallfacers and granted certain power to secretly plan Earth's resistance.

What's interesting to me is that these books view humanity's future from a very Chinese perspective. Yes, it's a global fight, but when you read books in English, usually the future concern a plucky band of white men... In this case, most - but not all - of the characters are Chinese, and the world's language is a hybrid of Chinese and English.

I also like that Liu is very well-versed in science and makes very detailed and plausible guesses about technology in the future. These are all pretty believable and make it easy to engage with the book as it passes through time.

However, as with the first book, Liu's new one falls down in regards characterization. The characters are all pretty flat and predictable. Some of them seem to be carbon copies of cliches from old movies. His dialogue is dull, too. The women in the book largely exist to be beautiful, while the men go out and solve problems. It makes the book rather frustrating. Some of this might be down to translation - and not just translation of language, but the culture wrapped up in it.

Altogether, the first book in this series was, despite some flaws, a very good book that I highly recommended. The second not so much. I'll give the third a shot when it comes out this summer, but I'm not hugely enthusiastic. 

The Corrections, by Jonathon Franzen

I got this book for free from Amazon last month as some sort of promotion. I never take the free books because I imagine I'll never read them, but this book was something I'd meant for a while to try. Actually, I'd wanted to read it, perversely, because I expected to join the crowd of Franzen haters.
Alas, while I'm not a Franzen fan, I didn't hate the book. My friend had told me I would, but I didn't. It's not a bad book.
The Corrections is the story of a family. It jumps about in place and time but examines their lives in a complex way. It's not the sort of thing I'd usually read but it was pretty wells written, contrary to what I'd been told.
What interested me was that in places it took the point of view of different characters, yet through their eyes we see their flaws, and the good in others. This is the opposite of what one would expected. We seen characters look at others and feel contempt, but the other character's positive attributes, instead emerge.
Yet every character is deeply, irrevocably flawed in this book. They are in need of, as the title tells us, corrections.


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Please excuse typos etc in this and posts in the near future. I'm on holiday and using my iPad to post.