These are characters who are fragile, hilarious, and heartbreaking in their familiarity. The title of Moore’s collection of stories—Like Life—could hardly be more apt. We laugh until it catches in our throats, out of recognition, but never mockery. GT
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1900s
The Buddha of Suburbia
Hanif Kureishi
Lifespan | b. 1954 (England)
First Published | 1990
First Published by | Faber & Faber (London)
Whitbread First Novel Award | 1990
Hanif Kureishi has often courted controversy, spurning both traditional moral stances and the pieties of political correctness.
“Englishman I am . . .”
The Buddha of Suburbia’s comedy often takes political correctness as its target as it follows its seventeen-year-old narrator, Karim Amir, growing up in London’s suburbs in the 1970s. His father Haroon, a civil servant, is encouraged to pursue his less conventional interests by his mistress Eva, and he assumes the status of a New Age guru, a “Buddha” of suburbia. The affair has a devastating effect upon Haroon’s wife, Karim’s mother, Margaret, who becomes marginalized and depressed. The support Margaret receives from her sister proves invaluable, and the attention from her brother-in- law quite unhelpful, but their attitudes throw into relief their patronizing views. Throughout the disintegration of his parents’ marriage, Karim is bolstered by the support of his friends. Jamilla, a strong-willed and confident young woman, challenges many of the traditions of her Asian upbringing and her experimental sexual relationship with Karim continues after her engagement to another man. Eva’s son, Charlie, is also a significant figure. Their sexual relationship opens Karim’s eyes to the uninhibited zeitgeist but does not ultimately lead beyond friendship.
The novel engages with many of the nebulous aspects of identity that are negotiated during the transition into adulthood. Karim experiments with drugs, explores his bisexuality and considers the interrelationship of the two histories that have contributed to his sense of Englishness. To a large extent, the book traces Karim’s attempts to escape conservative social, political, and sexual attitudes by following his movement away from the suburbs to the city. In this sense, it is a novel about Karim’s coming of age, and of his search for an identity separate from that of his family. The novel was adapted into a successful BBC drama. JW
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1900s
The Shadow Lines
Amitav Ghosh
Lifespan | b. 1956 (India)
First Published | 1990
First Published by | Ravi Dayal (New Delhi)
Sahitya Akademi Award | 1989
“But . . . it seems something of a mystery to me now, why they put up with him: he was never one of them . . .”
Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award, India’s most prestigious literary prize, The Shadow Lines is a chronicle of three generations that stretches from Calcutta to Cairo, London to Dhaka. The unnamed narrator jumps back and forth through time and space to explore the intertwined lives of his Bengali family and the British Price family, who have known each other since the time of the Raj. While the mystery at the center of the novel revolves around the fate of the narrator’s second cousin (and mentor) Tridib in the city of Dhaka in 1964 (the date of Bangladesh’s Partition), the details and effect of his tragedy span over twenty years and color the lives of all of the other characters of the novel. Intricately weaving together the memories and stories of various characters, The Shadow Lines acts as a microcosm of a nation rent by politics, exposing the borders (the shadow lines), both physical and metaphorical, that can divide individuals.
Born in Calcutta in 1956, Amitav Ghosh is one of the most highly respected Indian authors writing in English today. He has been awarded the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Pushcart Prize, and France’s Prix Medici Etranger, among other accolades. Although his previous books have also centered on exile, diaspora, and cultural displacement, The Shadow Lines offers an elaborate and highly developed exploration of these themes, rendered in a powerful, yet subtle, prose. Ghosh is also the author of numerous novels, essays, and travelogues. BJ
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1900s
The Midnight Examiner
William Kotzwinkle
Lifespan | b. 1938 (U.S.)
First Published | 1990
First Published by | Houghton Mifflin (Boston)
First UK Edition | 1990, Black Swan (London)
Howard Halliday is an editor at Chameleon Publications, publisher of Bottoms, Knockers, Brides Tell All, and The Midnight Examiner. Fueled by peppermint caffeine tablets and his love for Amber Adams, the beauty editor, he leads his staff on a manic ride through the sleaziest tidepool of publishing.
Howard longs for a proper job. As do his eccentric staff. There is Fernando, the layout artist prone to catatonic seizures and obsessed with drawing his masterpiece, “Big Womans,” on Howard’s kitchen wall. Nathan Feingold shoots pigeons—and staff—with hot-sauce-tipped darts from his blowgun. Forrest Crumpacker is hired against his will to head the new religious magazine and forcibly ordained as a mail-order bishop. Hattie Flyer is disfigured by the beauty products their papers sell. Hip O’Hopp, alcohol-sodden, was once a reporter on real newspapers; now he wants to find some Chinese woman to marry so he won’t wind up alone on the sidewalk with a bottle. They spend their days turning everything into a lurid headline (“UFO Found in Girl’s Uterus”; “I Was A Hooker Until I Met Jesus”). They spend their nights drinking. When erstwhile model Mitzi Mouse “accidentally” shoots a crime lord while filming a porno movie, the forces of Chameleon come to her rescue. Armed with boomerangs, Nathan’s blowgun, and a fishing pole—with invaluable assistance from Madame Veronique’s hoodoo magic—they go to battle. This is an affectionate farce, impossible to put down. GT
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1900s
The Things They Carried
Tim O’Brien
Lifespan | b. 1946 (U.S.)
First Published | 1990
First Published by | Houghton Mifflin (Boston)
First UK Edition | Collins (London)
Though this Vietnam War text is purportedly a work of fiction, Tim O’Brien, and his first-person narrator “Tim O’Brien,” never stop playing with readers’ assumptions about the possibility of achieving truth through careful description. O’Brien earlier wrote a Vietnam memoir (If I Die in a Combat Zone, 1973), but here he self-consciously probes the conventions that we typically rely on to distinguish fiction from memoir, non-fiction from storytelling, and fact from interpretation. The copyright page states that the book’s “. . . incidents, names, and characters are imaginary,” but it faces O’Brien’s (or is it “O’Brien”’s?) “loving” dedication to “the men of Alpha Company,” a striking juxtaposition once we realize these “men” are the book’s primary characters. This tension permeates the text as “Tim O’Brien” wrestles with how best to convey his experience of Vietnam: must a war story literally be true in order to be a “true war story”? If one mode of narrative cannot satisfactorily evoke an event, should another be called upon?
O’Brien’s narrative goes from profound sorrow to self-mockery to dark humor and back again. This sense of narrative uncertainty creates a feeling of anxiety and mistrust that O’Brien indicates was the existential condition of American soldiers. O’Brien uses various mismatches between experience and description against his readers, who may find themselves longing for the deceptive luxury and easy comfort of uncritical narrative the way “O’Brien” and his fellow soldiers long for home. AF
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1900s
The Music of Chance
Paul Auster
Lifespan | b. 1947 (U.S.)
First Published | 1990
First Published by | Viking Press (New York)
Movie Adaptation | 1993
A sizable inheritance from his ab
sentee father allows Jim Nashe to do his own disappearing act, leaving his daughter in his sister’s care when he abruptly quits his job as a firefighter to drive aimlessly about the country in a brand-new Saab. Though he envisions liberation in living unfettered by any meaningful relation to others, Nashe’s experience of this life leaves him in a curious state of numbness. When Nashe sees a badly beaten kid wandering along the side of a road, he goes against his instincts and offers him a ride. Jack Pozzi is a poker hustler trying to make his way to the mansion of an odd couple of millionaires he is hoping to take for all they are willing to put up. When the unthinkable happens—through study, luck, or cheating, the millionaires emerge victorious—Nashe and Pozzi surrender their freedom to pay back their debts.
Through Nashe and Pozzi’s opposite reactions to their shared fate, and Auster explores the concept of freedom itself and whether self-determination is necessary or sufficient to achieve it. Despite Nashe’s sense of emptiness while he had the luxury of being completely non-responsible, his captivity and forced labor reacquaints him with the value of deliberate action. Physical labor brings him not despair but a new self-possession; rather than deludedly chasing self-realization down the interstate, Nashe creates it himself. Pozzi, however, bristles with resentful rage until he sets off a chain reaction of retribution that eventually destroys both of their worlds. AF
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1900s
Stone Junction
Jim Dodge
Lifespan | b. 1945 (U.S.)
First Published | 1990
First Published by | Atlantic Monthly Press (N. Y.)
Full Title | Stone Junction: An Alchemical Potboiler
Stone Junction chronicles the life and times of one Daniel Pearce, born in 1966 to Analee, a sixteenyear-old runaway. Jim Dodge’s novel is a vibrant, antiauthoritarian romp that combines page-turning urgency with a serious examination of the margins of American society. From a remote shack in the wilderness, Daniel and Analee fall in with an organization known as AMO (an Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws). As Daniel grows up, he is placed into the custody of a series of wonderfully eccentric teachers who provide an unorthodox education. He is taught meditation, outdoor survival, sex, drugs, safe-cracking, impersonation, and poker.
However, a second plotline interrupts Daniel’s learning curve in the form of a whodunit. His mother is suspiciously killed on a mission for AMO when he is aged just fourteen. The two narratives combine when Daniel learns the art of invisibility from the Great Volta (one of the prime suspects in Analee’s death). At the novel’s climax, Daniel is sent to steal a mysterious, six-pound diamond from a maximum security compound. But, like all the best mysteries, things are not as they seem. In Dodge’s own words, Stone Junction is an “alchemical potboiler”—a defiant celebration of magic and the outlaw tradition in an age where living and communicating in the margins becomes increasingly difficult. SamT
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1900s
Amongst Women
John McGahern
Lifespan | b. 1934 (Ireland)
First Published | 1990
First Published by | Faber & Faber (London)
Irish Times Literary Award | 1991
John McGahern’s lyrical, resonant, and subtle meditations on rural Irish life have a long and loving gestation, appearing every ten or twelve years. Amongst Women tells the story of power relations within a rural Irish family, set within the history and the thwarted promise of the independent Irish state.
Michael Moran, an old IRA man who fought in the Anglo-Irish War, feels utterly alienated and detached from the independent Ireland that he helped to create. Disdaining a part in the new political or social order, he sits in patriarchal dominance at the center of his big farmhouse, Great Meadow. Luke, the oldest son, flees to England, away from Moran’s overbearing authority. His other children, three daughters and another son, regularly return to Great Meadow. Moran is deeply loved by his daughters and his second wife, Rose, but his mood swings and desperately fragile pride have long impeded them and deflated their aspirations. He holds down his daughters in order to protect the suffocating unity of the family. The struggle between wife, daughters, and patriarch is compellingly recreated, as Moran’s grip on power weakens alongside his grip on life. For all his authoritarianism and implacable surliness, Moran is a tormented, complex, vulnerable man in existential crisis. The story is laced with poetic language and generously humane depictions of frailty. It is at once an expression of a postcolonial condition, generational change, and shifting gender relations in rural Catholic Ireland. RM
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Get Shorty
Elmore Leonard
Lifespan | b. 1925 (U.S.)
First Published | 1990
First Published by | Delacorte Press (New York)
Movie Adaptation | 1995
Hollywood has been a significant influence on Leonard’s writing, not simply because he began his career as a writer of westerns and many of his subsequent novels have been turned into mostly unsuccessful motion pictures. Nor can this influence be measured in terms of the cinematic references that pepper his novels; long before Tarantino, Leonard’s characters discussed movies with passion and humor. Movies pervade Leonard’s novels insofar as his characters see themselves as performing roles—killer, lover, robber, cop—and their relationship to these roles has been shaped by their interaction with the movies.
When Chili Palmer, a debt collector and one in a long line of “no-bullshit” Leonard heroes, follows a dry cleaner who has “scammed” an airline and absconded to Hollywood, he agrees to chase up another bad debt, this time owed by a Hollywood producer. Quickly realizing that everyone is playing a role, Chili reinvents himself as a producer, pitching a version of what has occurred so far in the novel. Above all, the resulting scam, which involves drug dealers, limousine drivers, and movie players, is handled with a comic but assured touch. In an irony worthy of Leonard himself, the movie version of Get Shorty, a story about the stupidity and vacuity of Hollywood filmmakers, became the best and most successful of all Leonard adaptations. AP
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1900s
The Daughter
Pavlos Matesis
Lifespan | b. undisclosed
First Published | 1990
First Published by | Kastaniotis Editions (Athens)
Original Title | I mitera tou skilou
Modern Greek history is not very well known: the Second World War, the famine then the political instability, the Civil War. The Daughter tells a story of two women during these times. The narrator, Rarau, a delusional actress suffering frequent seizures, tells the story of her family during the wartime German occupation of Greece, when her mother sleeps with an Italian officer to save her children from famine. Afterward, with the “so-called Liberation,” such women (“the collaborators”) are publicly punished and humiliated; her mother never speaks again. Rarau takes her to Athens, where initially they become beggars. Rarau does not mind the begging; wanting to be an actress, it helps her to get used to the stage. Later she becomes successful as an extra in the many theatrical productions staged around Greece. In the end, she is happy, she claims.
The Daughter is a unique book inasmuch as it dares to deal with Greece in a blasphemous and unpatriotic way. God is disowned several times in the book: “Where was He when my children were dying from hunger?”; and so is Greece, “the so-called Nation.” Rarau is crazy, an unreliable narrator, but there is a Greek proverb that fits well: one learns the truth only from children and madmen. She tells us the story of her country with a disarming naivety, introducing an almost surreal mosaic of characters and incidents in the process. Matesis does not feel the need to glorify his country or his main character: loving them as he does is sincerity enough. CSe
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1900s
Vertigo
W. G. Sebald
Lifespan | b. 1944 (Germany), d. 2001 (England)
First Published | 1990
First Published by | Eichborn (Frankfurt)
Original Title | Schwindel, Gefühle
This was the first novel published by the now highly acclaimed author W. G. Sebald. Vertigo defies generic conventions, combining elements of fiction, reportage, travel writing, autobiography, and the photographic essay to create a distinctive literary form that is without precedent. Divided into four parts, the novel follows the narrator’s travels through Italy and southern Germany. We accompany the narrator on a spiritual pilgrimage whose purpose is to raise the dead so that the living might interrogate them on the meaning of life.
Although highly discursive and meandering, several key themes emerge over the course of the narrator’s descriptions of the lives, loves, and losses of Marie Henri Beyle (Stendhal), Giacomo Casanova, and Franz Kafka, among many others. Chief among these themes is the chimerical and unreliable nature of memory, its tendency to invent and even obscure the past as much as it recalls it. The mastery of Vertigo is in its skillful interbraiding of multiple narrative strands, its breathtaking revelations of the mysterious coincidences and points of crossover that bind together disparate lives, times, and places. While there is a decidedly sinister ambience evoked by the hallucinatory journeys of the narrator, there are also moments of unmistakable playfulness and humor, an underappreciated facet of Sebald’s prose. Vertigo is further enhanced by the numerous photographs of paintings, diagrams, drawings, and documents that are interspersed throughout. CG-G
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